Maddy Frank | Longreads | June 27, 2023 | 15 minutes (3,981 words)

The caves of Missouri are bleeding. I had forgotten that—the way the rocks under the earth constantly drip, the water coming from places I cannot see. There is no singular source. It filters through the limestone like blood through lungs. 

I write it down in my notes app so I remember: the caves of Missouri are bleeding. I don’t usually like metaphors like that. They feel scientifically false, a romanticization of something that is already astounding and beautiful enough without poetry. But I can’t help it. I feel inside. 

I am inside—inside Meramec Caverns—a privately owned system of caves in the backwoods of Stanton, Missouri. It toes the line between natural wonder and tourist trap: At 400 million years old, this place has earned its awe, but there is also an extensive gift shop selling artificially dyed stones and nameplate necklaces. Lester Dill bought the cave in 1933 to turn it into a “show cave,” a place for tours and spectacles and entertainment. His picture is up on the Meramec Caverns website—he stands in a leopard print jacket, pointing up to something out of frame, smiling wide at the camera. A quintessentially American opportunist, he reportedly invented an early version of the bumper sticker to promote the caves, and this land has been in his descendants’ possession ever since.

Missouri, specifically the Ozark region spanning the southern half of the state, is prime real estate for caves. That’s why Missouri is called “The Cave State.” It has what is known as karst topography—soluble limestone and dolomite landscapes riddled with caverns and sinkholes. Swiss cheese, right under our feet. Acidic water moves through the ground, slowly dissolving the rocks, a process called dissolution. There was something, and then, unbearably slowly, there is nothing. A cave is an absence.  

There are only three of us on today’s tour of Meramec Caverns. That leads me to believe the extensive advertising isn’t working, bumper stickers or otherwise. I drove past dozens of billboards during my hour-long drive down Route 44 from St. Louis. Some of the billboards, posted between anti-abortion and adult video store signs, just read, Cave. Others say, Cave Ice Cream and Cave 60˚ All Year. One reads, Meramec Caverns Salutes Veterans. as if these rocks are a human entity. My favorite asserts, Kids Love It. At 26 years old, I am the youngest person in this hole in the ground by a few decades, though I don’t have much competition. The middle-aged couple from Oklahoma on the tour with me are the only non-employees I’ve seen since I arrived at the almost empty parking lot.   

Our guide is a man in his late seventies named Arthur. He’s dressed in a state park ranger sort of uniform. His hair is mostly gone, the perfect set-up for a joke: “Be careful, if the water from the cave drips on your head, it’ll burn your hair off.” He points to his own scalp. There’s even a fresh wound on his forehead, still red and the length of a thumb. The woman next to me looks concerned. He clarifies, “I’m just joking. It’s a very weak acid. It’s like, you guessed it, carbonated soda.” Despite telling us he’s from California, he talks in a thick Missouri accent, all the words running together uninhibited by consonants. 

I can’t hear him very well over the sound of the running water anyway. I’m relying on my own observations to take notes: cave pearls and yellow icicles and smells like ROCK. If I don’t write this stuff down, I don’t know how long it will last in my brain. I have a terrible memory. I have lost large swathes of time—family vacations and childhood birthdays, months in high school and college when my mental health was especially bad, classes I took and presents I received. Even the recent past eludes me. I can remember crying last week, for example, but not what the crying was about. I can remember around a memory, but rarely the memory itself. Nothing is medically wrong with me, at least not as far as I can tell. It has always been this way. My brain is constantly leaking acidic water, and these facts are just being dissolved away, leaving a karst life behind. It doesn’t matter if the thing was traumatic or not. It is simply gone. So, I’m trying to take note of everything.

Everything is wet. The limestone looks rounded and glossy. The rock formations are drips and dollops, pillars of melted cream-colored candle wax and inorganic limbs. We weave and duck between these rooms of calcium carbonate and even with the path, I am aware of how one could get lost in here. Arthur keeps turning out the lights behind us so we exist only in the current space. It makes it hard to have any situational awareness. I can’t figure out which point of darkness we walked out of or which one we’re walking into next. He shines the flashlight on the floor where he wants us to go and the three of us follow it like moths.

Part of my disorientation is due to lack of information. I tried to research Meramec Caverns before I came here today, but because this place has been privately owned for so long, the largest source on these caverns is the cave’s own website. Buried among pages about panning for fake gold and purchasing tour tickets is a simplistic history page, nary a citation in sight. Fifty percent of the timeline is dedicated to Lester Dill’s feats of promotion.

Meramec Caverns seems to be operating almost entirely on lore. There’s science too, but they sell this experience through tales. The infamous outlaw Jesse James is plastered all over this place—his name, his likeness—but there is little evidence to confirm that he ever used this cave as a hideout like they claim. They call it a local legend, but it feels more like a rumor, a guess, a padding of the timeline. 

There wasn’t much left behind here by Jesse James or the people who came before him, though it’s said that the Osage people di