Photographs by Matt Niemiller Ph.D. and Amata Hinkle
Text by Bill Finch
The light at the end of the tunnel can sometimes be a bit disappointing, particularly if you spend much time in an Alabama cave.
We are the children of photosynthesis. Light defines our world, nourishes us and most of the life we know. Green plants have become the planet’s primary energy producers, and none of us, not even grunting old carnivores, would survive for a minute without our leafy protein factories.
But for a billion years, life developed without regard for sunlight. Early creatures were content to chew on sulfurous minerals for sustenance, until some of them started a revolution by using sunlight to manufacture their own food. Their new photosynthetic business model spread so fast, they polluted the world with a byproduct that wiped out much that came before. We call that dangerous chemical oxygen.
We’re born and bred into this chlorophyllic cartel, so it’s hard to imagine the world being otherwise. We’re in love with the productions of sunlight and how it has transformed the planet, how photosynthesis has framed our houses, spun out our clothes and prepared our evening meals, as it creates a dazzling display of wildflowers and insects, birds and toads, forests and meadows, mammoths and mice.
But even for those of us who have a particular appreciation for plants, there’s something about caves that is glowing, enticing, comforting. That’s hard to explain to people who shudder at the thought of a cave’s utter darkness, its OTHER darkness, as if it represented some sort of oblivion, the end of life.
It’s only the end of life as we have come to know it. The obliviousness to leaves and flowers and the handiwork of green, the cave’s near total ignorance of sunlight, is simply another path to life.
And in Alabama, cave life is abundant, like few other places on earth. Virtually every corner of Alabama has an unusually rich complement of caves, and unusual and extraordinary creatures living there. In northeast Alabama, Jackson County alone has more than 1500 known caves – a greater density of caves than any other county in the United States.
It also has more cave dwelling creatures than any other county, and is one of the two great centers of cave diversity in the temperate world. There are perhaps hundreds of creatures who use these caves, and close to a hundred that spend most or all their lives there.
Bats and birds check in only for a snooze or to nest, but many are fully dependent on the caves for survival. Leopard frogs and golden pack rats the size of squirrels live much of their lives on the dim edges.
Eyeless cave fish and cave crawfish and cave shrimp thrive in sunless streams and waterfalls, salamanders of many forms and colors slink along sandy or gravelly beaches, over islands they have no need to see. Portly hump-backed cave crickets and creatures with a thousand legs climb the walls and mine the crevices with no hope or desire for dawn. Flies and beetles, many of them never before described, find their fortune in forests of stalagmites and thunderheads of stalagtites that drip continuously, as if the cave was producing its own rain. Elegant long-legged spiders of many types set invisible traps to catch them all.
Impaired by our vision, we need light to take it in. But if you want to understand caves, don’t shine your lights here for too long, and don’t fall for the psychedelic light shows and piped in music that we’ve deployed in some Alabama caverns to distract us from our darkest fears. These destroy the life of caves, and any chance you’ll ever have of appreciating why caves and cave life have been so important to Alabamians for thousands of years.
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Our luciferous habits blind us to much of life.
So I have followed cave experts Matt Niemiller and Amata Hinkle into one of Paint Rock’s caves, and sit, lightless, watching their headlamps disappear into the absolute darkness ahead.
Matt, a professor at University of Alabama Huntsville, is earning a national reputation for using novel techniques to find creatures so deeply embedded in cave environments, we never knew they were there. He and Amata have been collecting and cataloguing cave life for decades, and it seems with each trip they’re adding to Alabama’s reputation as the center for cave life in North America.
But it’s not just the salamanders and bats and cave crickets that occupy these caves. The people of Alabama have a long relationship with their caves. In the thousands of caves in the greater Paint Rock ecosystem, there’s evidence of our last devastating encounters with the native horses and bison that used to roam our grasslands. There are cave rooms so blackened with soot they seem to have served as kitchens for thousands of years. We’re just beginning to understand how important and deep that relationship is.
Seeing it sometimes requires more than just sight.
I dropped my flashlight once while guiding an Ecuadorian guest through an Alabama cave. It slipped into the bottom of the underground stream we had followed for an hour as it splashed over waterfalls and around beaches, gathering in deep pools. We couldn’t even see the panic on each other’s face. I fumbled around in the cold water until I could feel the metal, yanked it out, flipped the switch back on, and the cave was once again safely polluted with our light. But there was something compelling in that moment of utter darkness, something I might have discovered had I not so quickly grasped for the familiar.
Is this what the shamans felt when they entered the caves?
As you might expect from a state that is one of the global centers of cave diversity, Alabama also has one of the world’s richest and most extensive collections of cave art. It’s a tradition that dates back thousands of years, to some of the first people to discover Alabama. The largest piece of cave art in North America – as big as a basketball court, painstakingly etched on the ceiling – was recently documented in a northeast Alabama cave. Oddly, it’s not in a room where it’s easily viewed, but deep in a hard-to-access portion of the cave, where the ceilings are so low the makers had to lie on their backs to draw the elaborate figures. Their illumination was a torch of native bamboo that must have sputtered and dimmed in the exhausted air.
I’m not sure our modern concept of art quite captures what’s going on here. This wasn’t art to complement the sofa, to attract gawking tourists. This was communication with something neither we nor the shamans who made it could see. Maybe it was supplication, appeasement, or just questions about what lies on the other side of seeing. But it’s a communication that happens only in the dangerous depths of the cave, where you at last understand that life isn’t tethered to light and the world as we know it.
That’s the vision I’m looking for when the lights disappear in the cave, when the darkness is so deep it’s almost soothing, and the walls start to pulse with a way of life the photosynthetic world has abandoned.
The lights return. We ultimately can’t survive in here without them. Matt and Amata are slathered with mud, coated with the squealing odor of cave millipedes. They bring stories and photos from corners of the cave I wouldn’t want to traverse, and new documentation of rare life.
We walk back out of the cave mouth into the world of our trees and sunflowers, the world we love, the world we were born to, the world we’ve devoted our lives to. Another step, and the cool air of the cave falls from our shoulders. Our hearts sink as the warm humid air and sunlight swallow us.
