Long after I had crossed the Kimbell Ranch with its vast open sky, stretching and swelling with enormous oceanic depths, the experience stayed with me.
After I had seen the expanse of the Rhea Brush, and visited the graves of the Rhea family in Kalida cemetery, the feeling lingered.
For days afterward, even, every time I closed my eyes, the image of Dry Creek Cave pulled mercilessly at my thoughts, that geological black hole and singularity opening onto another space-time.
I would be miles away from that paleolithic gate near the northwestern corner of the county, yet I could feel it all the same: some primordial sense for that ancient Thing, that entrance into a disquieting zone before history as we know it began.
Yes, Robert Daly, Esq., stumbled across the cave in 1858 while on a hunting trip and recorded his findings shortly thereafter, and Alfred Andreas told the world of its existence in his 1883 tome “History of the State of Kansas.”
There is even an oblique sandstone memorial hidden nearby to the south, dedicated to a pioneer hunter-trader, that reads: “In Memory of James Jenne 1858.”
But this is “mere” history, when perhaps what we’re aiming for is mythology, metaphysics without mysticism yet with unquenchable mystery, a prehistory that perhaps only the earth itself can tell.
When Andreas wrote of the cave and its indigenous petroglyphs, for example, he interpreted the native writings on his own terms, seeing a man with a hat, a bird’s foot and a capital letter “A.”
Yet as I stood in the cave-mouth bathed in effervescent evening light a mere two months ago, I sensed that I was no longer in our present historical moment.
I felt the sandstone breakages tremble, their cleavages deepen, as the soil near me warmed, growing hotter and hotter as the campfires began to burn.
Not one fire. Not one flame in the darkening evening. But innumerable.
Not one face. Not one name that was sung within the folds of the coming pointillist starfield. But multitudes.
The portal had been opened, invited me into a place where the eons were stacked impossibly in layers like compressed translucent rock.
Something over and above me had offered up an irrefusable hospitality, invited me in, and in return, there was acceptance.
IN 1957, prior to the flooding of the Verdigris Valley that gave birth to Toronto Lake, James Howard, Ph.D., along with graduate students from the University of Kansas, set out to archaeologically survey the area.
