For all that I praised the lovely countryside on my drive from St. Louis to Rolla, that wasn't actually what triggered the memory of having been through that way before. That honor belongs to Meramec Caverns, heavily advertised all along the interstate for miles in each direction. The first time I drove past all of these signs, four or five years ago, I ended up with the first of a few pages of notes towards a possible research project on roadside attractions and their role in science education. (Timothy Burke wrote something last year about using a draft syllabus as a way of working through a complicated issue--I do a lot of that, but I also channel a lot of that energy into these notes towards future projects.) The idea isn't that roadside attractions are viewing (or marketing) themselves as venues for science education, but rather that there might be something interesting in the ways in which they implicitly teach about science. I don't know that there -is- anything interesting there, I just think that there -might- be.
So that was one of the motivations for my trip to Meramec Caverns last week. (I'm not even sure it was a primary motivation--I found myself with the better part of a day free, in central Missouri, and while I could have spent it sequestered in my hotel room, that seemed like a waste. Why not go touristing?)
The whole cave complex at Meramec runs to about twenty-three miles, but the tour, which lasts an hour and a half, only covers about a mile and a half. It's a fairly stage-managed experience; they've wired the caves for electricity (how? I meant to ask, and never had a chance) and some of the major stops on the tour have particularly dramatic lighting. The tour concludes at a massive drapery formation, upon which is projected a flashing multi-colored light show to patriotic musical accompaniment. The music is, we're told, historical as well as patriotic; one of the songs is a recording of Kate Smith singing "God Bless America", and according to our tour guide, she performed that song right in that very room, with the Stage Curtain limestone as a backdrop and the Missouri State Legislature as her audience. There's also a little production moment at an anvil-shaped formation called Loot Rock, where (the story goes) artifacts belonging to the James Gang were found, lending support to the idea that Jesse and Frank James used Meramec Caverns as a hideout for many years.
Someone I talked to later in the trip, a Rolla local, told me that he'd heard that other caves in the area were actually more impressive, in terms of limestone formations and stuff. Onondaga Cavern was the name that came up a lot. I can easily imagine that a less tourist-friendly and less theatrically-produced cave experience might be more impressive, but it's not as though Meramec was -all- flashing lights and music shows. Enough of the tour is in near-darkness and low-hanging caves that you can almost feel like you're in a more wild environment. All in all, though, Meramec Caverns is a tourist experience, not a hiking or spelunking experience. (Which is, it should be noted, exactly what I was looking for.)
My tourist experience at Meramec Caverns was entirely satisfying--some local legend, some really cool cave formations, a nice way to spend the afternoon. (Excellent peppermint ice cream in the snack bar, too.) The science-studies angle was useful as well, although only in small ways. The thing I was most curious about, at this location, was how they presented the question of the age of the earth. The young-earth/old-earth controversy is (and has been from the beginning) at the heart of debates about evolution, and it's recently surfaced as a major factor in other disputes, such as the one over global climate change. As a result, your beliefs about the age of the earth act as a signal for your position on other debates. I wanted to know where Meramec Caverns, a major tourist attraction in the nation's heartland, came down. As it turns out, my tour guide didn't pull any punches on this--he told us that the drapery formation (home of the patriotic light show) was estimated to be 75 million years old, that the largest stalagmite in the cave has been growing for 33 million years, and that geologists believe the cave complex as a whole to be about 400 million years old. So that's one datapoint down. (I do wonder if the other tour guides say the same thing--I mean, I have trouble understanding how one would describe the history of a cavern complex like this one without relying on old-earth numbers, but it's a strange world out there.)
Recent Comments