The wonders of the Lehman Caves

When I first read Pigeon Feathers by John Updike, I thought it was lame. A lover of birds, I didn’t like the boy slaughtering pigeons in a barn where they couldn’t escape.
Fourteen-year-old David moves with his mom, dad, and demented grandmother to a Pennsylvania farm.
While orienting himself to this strange environment, David shelves books in their new office. He’s scanning a book from The Outline of History by H. G. Wells when the author asserts a theory that topples David’s faith in the Divine and sends him into a nosedive about his own mortality.
However, David, his pigeons, and his faith were the last things on my mind as we left Parowan Gap and headed toward Nevada. Our destination? The Great Basin Desert and Lehman Caves.
We arrived at the Great Basin National Park in plenty of time to honor our reservations. After we picked up our tickets for the caves and disinfected ourselves in case our clothing carried the white-nose disease, which might infect their bat population, we went outside and waited for our guide along with others in our group.
Our guide was a no-nonsense, articulate, and ridiculously young ranger whom we followed into the underworld. Lehman Caves, like Carlsbad Caverns, are carved out of limestone and marble, but significantly smaller.
They were formed thousands of years ago when tension from the Pacific Ocean broke the earth into blocks along fault lines. The Snake Range tilted upward, the inland sea dried, and water and snow eroded the limestone to create the caves. After water carved out the caves, ancient peoples accessed them although no evidence shows they traveled very far into the interior. In 1938 and again in 1964, archaeologists found between 12 and 26 human skeletons and numerous animal bones as well as burn scars and pottery inside the original entrance. Deeper exploration of the caves came much later.
In 1849, Absalom Lehman left Ohio for the California goldfields, but didn’t have any luck. Later, he moved to Australia, still pursuing the god of gold, but when his wife and one of his daughters died, he moved back to California and then to Nevada where miners had discovered a rich silver vein.
This time, though, Lehman wanted a steadier income. He homesteaded a ranch where Baker, NV, population 36, now exists, and somehow stumbled on the nearby caves in 1885.
Sensing a different kind of goldmine, he began his exploration immediately. A local newspaper reported, “The cave was explored for about 200 feet when the points of the stalactites and stalagmites came so close together as to offer a bar to their further progress. They will again explore the cave armed with sledgehammers and break their way into what appears to be another chamber.”
After mapping out the rooms and creating a wooden staircase, Lehman charged a dollar per person for entry, a candle, and the promise to look for the tourists if they didn’t return.
Hundreds came and entered the caves through a hole and descended the makeshift staircase. As they walked deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, their way lit only by flickering candlelight, they sometimes squeezed sideways through narrow openings or crawled when the ceilings were too low to stand, relieved, I’m sure, when they entered more spacious chambers. Our ranger showed us where some of those early visitors wrote their names on the ceiling with soot.
Our path was much easier with some of the formations subtly lit by electric lights, but like those tourists, the cave’s intricate “decorations” entranced me: Soda straws, stalactites, stalagmites, “Pearly Gates,” a parachute, helictites that grew in crazy directions, shields, draperies, popcorn, columns beautiful enough to vie with any Grecian temple, and a pool of water which our guide pointed out was rare since it had been dry for years, filling now only because of the heavy snows.
Most amazing of all, the exquisite formations continue to grow, created by water, carbon dioxide, and calcite, one drop at a time, ever so slowly.
Not until much later, as I was contemplating the intricate, ongoing creation inside Lehman Caves, did Updike’s story come to mind with new appreciation. After David reluctantly kills the pigeons at his grandmother’s request, he gathers them up for burial and examines their feathers.
Updike writes, “Each filament was shaped within the shape of the feather, and the feathers in turn were trimmed to fit a pattern that flowed without error across the bird’s body. . .. And across the surface of the infinitely adjusted yet somehow effortless mechanics of the feathers played idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture, with a joy that hung level in the air above and behind him.”
With evidence in his hands of “the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds,” David’s faith in the Divine is restored, and his fear of death vanishes. For me, Lehman Caves, like those pigeon feathers, indeed like everything in nature, evidences the genius, joy, and “lavish” love of our Creator.