Mark Twain Cave

Hannibal, Missouri

By Avery Gregurich

It was said that one might wander days and nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never find the end of the cave; and that he might go down, and down, and still down, into the Earth, and it was just the same labyrinth underneath labyrinth, and no end to any of them. No man “knew” the cave. That was an impossible thing.

– Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Dear Mark,

I haven’t written in a while. By now it’s August in Missouri, and I’m driving on the Avenue of the Saints, destination: Hannibal. I’m told this highway runs from St. Paul to St. Louis, eventually. You had to take the river between, but I’m able to take this avenue through the land of the Park-N-Ride. It’s mid-morning, and the first leg of the commutes are already done, measured in time out from the country roads into the cities which hold the jobs and back again into the country which hold a lot of anger, as they always have. Also, melons. The painted cardboard signs turned towards the highway announce that melon season is here. They’re all thump-ripe, I’m sure of it. At least that much is the same from both of our formative years spent here along the Mississippi.

Here are my credentials: I’m from Pike County, just south of here on the Illinois side of the river. Like you, I too had the sandbagging summers and the mayfly hatchings and the infinite boredom watching the river pass, knowing it was going somewhere and I wasn’t. In the introduction to Huck Finn, you warned that you had written the text employing a number of dialects, including “the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect, and four modified varieties of the last.” I suppose that I have used this dialect by default, confounding the rich suburban kids at college when my vowels all came out the same. I never could feign their language, so I sat real still, mostly with my mouth shut.

At the gas station, we fill up behind a hearse flanked by bare-faced men in suits that have become well-worn by this point in the pandemic. Back on the highway, we are passed by a car careful to merge, as its back window is covered with conspiracy theory paraphernalia. (There’s too much to tell, Mark. I’m sorry. Suffice to say people are now as they always have been: vain and afraid to apologize.) Just outside the highway hunting camp with tall fences penning in the game, a truck hauling a grain auger had an elk head propped up in its truck bed. It was just the head, and a blue tarp covered its face, but the antlers couldn’t be corralled. Past all this, the speed trap towns and firework stands and corn mazes and the round bales wrapped in red-white-and-blue plastic along the edges of the fields, we finally make it, announced by your face on the welcome sign. Hannibal: America’s Hometown™.

By now, all the remaining river towns look like one another. That is, if there’s any money left in them. If there is, then the train depots downtown are always turned into history museums, the former factories get big murals painted on their brick that make the locals cry foul, and the habitable real estate still left down by the water can be had at worrisome prices. In the time since I grew up, Hannibal opened up a brewery with your name on it, and they turned the Wonder Hostess Discount Bakery Outlet into a vape shop. That pretty much brings us up to speed.

At the entrance to the Mark Twain Cave Complex, which holds both “America’s oldest and newest show caves,” I spotted our teenage tour guide sitting behind the ticket counter, brushing up on her presentation with a copy of Tom Sawyer that they sold right there in the gift shop. (You won’t be surprised to learn that only the heartland hits have really survived. No copies of The Mysterious Stranger or The Private Life of Adam and Eve are available for purchase. I’m still not sure Hannibal is ready for either of them.) I was tempted to buy a bobblehead barely intimating your likeness. You could sit on the dashboard of my car, passing judgement on all passing things. I settled instead for a souvenir dime my father couldn’t believe cost 50 cents to smash.

My parents have joined Sara and I here at the cave. Due to ongoing circumstances, we had to skip last year’s Christmas and Thanksgiving, which our pre-tour conversation reflects. After a short video introduction, we are ushered into the mouth of the cave. The air in there is cool and surely the same as when you wandered through as a kid, only today it is mixed intermittently with my father’s picnic belches emanating from immediately over my shoulder. I recognize it even through the mask I wear, one of only two seen on the entire tour, the other covering my love’s face. We are clearly the real tourists here. I have to forgive my mother, who says she just forgot her mask in the car.

As you are aware, the cave is unique in its almost complete lack of speleothems, those stalagmites and stalactites that make caves desirable these days. Instead, hundreds of thousands of signatures cover the limestone walls around us, lots written in black paint or candle ash or berry juice, as our tour guide tells us. The signatures all around us confirm that for as long as we’ve been stumbling into caves, we’ve wanted to leave some kind of mark. Someone from St. Louis even drew a caricature of you about a century ago, a white outline cut into a patch of black paint.

Would you believe that they finally found your signature on the bicentennial of the “discovery” of the cave? They had it authenticated and everything, put up a wooden box with a screen on it to protect it from smudges. My father points to it, his indication that I should take a picture. Photographing in the cave is futile, but still I try to capture whatever he points at. I don’t think he’s ever read one of your sentences.

While we follow the path you made Tom and Becky traverse, we learn about the cave’s various lives as a one-time hideout for Jesse James, as a secret storeroom for Confederate weapons, and as a mausoleum for a doctor’s deceased teenage daughter. None of this is particularly surprising: most of what has been “discovered” over the last few centuries here in the river basin are grisly—bones left by things once chased or killed or both. No matter how we’ve tried to dress them up, we still played a role in the burial, if only by coming here now to attend the funeral.

At one point, our tour guide leads us in an exercise in which she turns out the accessory lights and we experience total darkness, something she says with teenage gravity is “really rare.” “So dark that you can’t see the hand in front of your nose,” tempting us to try. The punchline comes when she flips the lights, and we all stand there waving at one another. (Of course, we stop immediately when the lights come back on). The tour continues, more signatures are found, formations pointed out, and a prop treasure chest is revealed at the bottom of a crevice, but I keep thinking about that moment of total darkness.

Not only was there the absence of light, it was finally quiet for a moment, even the kids in the group awed by something outside of the algorithms’ reach. We shared there for a moment the realization of how much of our lives are consumed in light. This shared, quiet darkness felt elemental and deeply human, full of something communal, maybe grief, or fear. It might have been more commonplace in your time, but as our tour guide said, it’s rare these days.

I truly think the price of admission was for that one brief moment of total obscurity. I regret to admit that I really wanted to take that time to add my name to the thousands covering the cave walls. I wish I knew why. Instead, we walked out into August, said our goodbyes and drove back home beneath clouds of black gnats that seemed to follow the highway.

Let’s do it again next summer. I’ll bring a permanent marker. You bring a light.

Avery Gregurich is a writer living and working in Marengo, Iowa. He was raised next to the Mississippi River and has never strayed too far from it.

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