Bellevue Train Museum

We were driving around on our way to the caverns, which took us miraculously through Downtown Bellevue. Anytime I head west, I end up in Bellevue. It is a magnet to the secret rural desires of my martini stained soul. We found the church that was on sale last year for 70,000. It was a haunted house the first time I saw it. It's a daycare now. But it's still next to the Mad River & NKP Railroad Museum. I haven't been inside the museum yet. Instead we pulled over and I wandered around the empty railway cars. It was a rainy Sunday, and no one was around, though there was a muted light coming from inside one of the offices. Inside was probably some middle aged volunteer, playing Bejeweled and drinking Diet Coke, waiting for anyone in rustbelt Ohio who might still be interested in the trains that have crisscrossed their towns for a hundred years.

In an alternate world, I would have bought that church, and lived in it, with the engines and cabooses in my backyard.

I have no bent to engineering or mechanics. I have no idea how these things work. But I love the sounds they make, and I love the motion of them. If it is big and metal and moves, I want to be around it. Remember Richard Scarry's Cars, Trucks, and Things That Go? And the pickle truck accident? Remember seeing the impossible giant tankers waiting on the Cuyahoga river, filling up with salt and gravel and mountains of unknown rock? Remember the engine they have at COSI, which moves back and forth on a track in a room, while kids (you, me) sit in the engine room full of power?



One day when I was very young, pre-teen, I took the train from my grandmother's house in Philadelphia to New York. And I took it back. It was the best part of the day, rocking back and forth on the dirty beige upholstery, watching generic landscape swish by. It's best to move very fast, wherever you are going. Its best to be sealed up in steel, careening through air, untouchable.



Remember The Boxcar children?


I'm in a funny kind of mood. I want to be safe wherever I am, and the only things that make me feel that way these days are monoliths of rock, brick, metal, wood. I want to be in structured large spaces, alone. It's like autumn starts to sniff around and the bear in me starts looking for a flat cold floor to stretch out on, where the weather becomes only a muted noise banging on the walls. Old things that have proven their stamina already. It's hard to be lonely in places like that, for me anyway.

Once upon a time people and children and farm animals and clothing and coal and liquor and tin cans and guns and tractors and radios and vegetables and letters traveled in these boxes across the plains and mountains, on slick steel rails, bouncing back and forth and up and down. And they came to Ohio, where they stopped. Then someone stuck them in a park, where local kids could love them when they were little and throw rocks at them when they grew up.

More trains here.

Seneca Caverns: The Caviest Cave in the USA!

What terrors lurk beneath these green (alright, dark scary green) fields?

First of all, I am not joking, that is their slogan. I first saw the sign during my awesome Find the Secret Missile Testing Site in Sandusky road trip, on my way back from the Sorrowful Mother Shrine. That was last summer, and I was determined to go spelunking Ohio Style before this summer's end. That style would be, by the way, walking in comfortable shoes with railings at opportune spots, and smoking copious cigarettes before going down.


Ohio is full of hidden treasures, like the dinosaur petting zoo. And Mystery Hill. I assume there is a cemetery next to Mystery Hill, since there is a cemetery next to everything in Ohio. This sign, for instance, is next to a cemetery. Which was in the parking lot of the gift shop for Seneca Caverns.

And everyone in those cemeteries died from not being able to figure these damn nail puzzles out.

There are certain things you can expect to find at every rural tourist trap: shot glasses, painted sea shells, and fucking nail puzzles. The cave tours leave every 20 minutes, and we got there just as the other tour was going down. So we had plenty of time to wander around trying to get those damn nails apart, and I almost convinced myself to buy a unicorn icon on painted wood, but settled instead for pocket gemstones. They also had these gorgeous geode bookends and slabs, which weren't badly priced, but luckily our tour started before I folded.

Somewhere in China, a village of small children is adept as hell at putting those nails together.

The group coming up the staircase at the end of their tour was composed of a few families, with young kids. They looked exhilarated as they emerged, breathless and smiling. It was a good sign. We were the only ones on the last tour of the day, so they showed us into this room that no doubt would have been improved by some anxious kids.

The Waiting Room.

Cave entrance - complete with creepy iron gate.

The tour guide we had still went through all the stories, even though it was apparent all we cared about was running around and being snide city kids. Here's a few "facts" (I'm not vouching for the truthiness of any of this)

- The caves were discovered by some boys in 1872 when their dog and the rabbit it was chasing fell down a sinkhole. We asked. No one died.

- Mr. Bell bought the cave in 1931, inspired by a visit to Mammoth Caves. According to our tour guide, during the Great Depression when a bunch of people owed his law practice money, he had them pay off their debt by shoveling the layers of mud and glacial slime filling up the cave, to develop it for tourism. For 6 months. At .35 an hour.

- The humidity in the caves is so high, when Mr. Bell left a bag of cement down there overnight, the next day it had already hardened. The bag shaped cement is still there. I saw it.

-Nobody has ever really hurt themselves going down. Which I find surprising because the tour was actually more strenuous than I was anticipating. It's 110 ft down and then back up, and it's not super hard, but you have to be careful where you step. I knocked my head like five times stooping under the tunnels. My expression when I finally emerged was more like slave worker in coal mine, less excited breathlessness.

-The cave is still operated by Mr. Bell's son. He was behind the little wooden ticket grate smoking. Don't you wish your family operated a cave? Mom, Dad, where was your foresight? It's the only business that never has recessions. You never run out of supply, there's always demand. And I could have been up to my ears in nail puzzles my entire childhood.

Above is a picture of the underground river, quaintly named Ol'Mystry. It's the same water that flows through to the Blue Hole , completely clear and devoid of oxygen. The State oxygenates it for their trout hatchery in Castalia, which by the way is the place to go if you ever want to see a really clear stream teeming with very large healthy fish. That's kind of a natural wonder on it's own now. Just look along the right edge of the picture, you can barely see the water line. No one has been to the bottom of the river, so no one knows how far down it goes, but it has flooded to the top of the cave before, and in droughts has gone at least another 200 feet down. How cool is that? I mean, really. Aquifers are awesome. That right there is why Ohio is farmland. That is actual meaningful cause and effect.

Of course, our guide also pointed out the flip flop some girl lost over the edge. A flip flop bouncing against dark cave walls in a nonexistent underground current for the rest of the millenia.

It's an hour tour, but I think we were down there for a good 45 minutes extra. Which made me stand up a few friends for drinks. But luckily, everyone likes rocks as presents, right? Right guys? Guys?

For more badly lit pictures of rocks, go here.