Reporters gathered near the entrance as I walked down the stone pathway. I was not on the schedule and not in a vest, and nobody stopped me, because nobody down there was going to stop me.
They had a problem in the Grand Room and it was about to be on television.
The millionth visitor was a woman from Bardstown with two kids. The plan was a photograph under the signature ceiling, and a reporter had asked the young guide to point out the oldest name and say something about it.
He pointed his light at the wrong wall.
That ceiling has better than four hundred names on it, written in candle smoke by visitors between 1849 and 1908, and they are not obvious, and you have to know the angle to bring them up out of the rock.
The oldest one that is legible is not the one everybody points at. It is nine feet to the left, low, half behind a flowstone, and it says ELIZA and a date in June of 1851.
I found the rest in 1998 in a box at the county historical society. A Louisville man named Josiah Kemper kept an account of a trip down here. Four pages about the cave, and one paragraph about that name.
My wife did not live to see this place, which she wanted more than she wanted the house. I have written her name on the roof of it with the candle. If anybody ever asks who Eliza was, she was thirty-one years old and she was better company than I have been since.
I have told that on every tour I ever ran. Twenty-three years, three tours a day in season, and I have watched a whole lot of people go quiet under nine feet of limestone.
I stepped up and asked the reporter if she wanted the story, and I told it, and I put the light on Eliza at the angle that brings her up.
The woman from Bardstown cried. Her boy asked me eleven questions and I answered all of them.
The operations manager stood at the back with his hands in his pockets the whole time and did not say a word to me until the press cleared out.
They brought me back in November. Not as a guide. The title is cave historian, which the marketing girl thought up, and it means I train the young ones and take the school groups.
There are six guides on that staff now and every one of them can find Eliza and tell it right. I made them learn it in the dark and I made them practice the light.
Kemper’s account is copied and framed in the visitor center by the ticket window. The original went back in the box where it lives.
Visitors do want energy. The manager was not wrong and I have never argued it, and the young guides are better than I am at the stairs and the jokes.
But there is one thing a cave has that nothing else has, which is a name a man wrote on a ceiling in 1851 because his wife never got to see it, and somebody has to know exactly where to point the light.