Park naturalists take you and up to 19 other visitors into the Lehman Cave complex at Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, 300 miles northeast of Vegas. The 60- to 90-minute tours ($8, $10) take place every day of the year except holidays and let me tell you, this is an excursion to the inside — inside the studio of a sculptor who knows a thing or two after 20 million years (or thereabouts) in the business.
It’s also a tour of the inside of your own head — where the most dramatic macros and the most intricate micros take their weird effects.
Don’t bother with the prosaic public names of the rooms: West Room, Lake Room, Inscription Room, Palace and Talus rooms. Instead, let the formations trigger whatever’s in the mind’s eye.
Me? At first I saw the usual root crops — carrots, parsnips, turnips, rutabagas. But then they all changed to every kind of fang known to horror-movie set designers enclosed by every kind of gaping twisted dripping kisser.
Then everything started looking like a nose or a tongue or a, well, different element of male anatomy.
Or skeletons, with the proper anatomical jointing and articulation.
O-or my own neurological reflection — nerves, dendrites, synapses.
Then it was clubs clobbering and points piercing. Haunted houses after a few hundred years. Spiked New Guinean torture racks. Jonah in the whale. Fingers, chopped off.
Suddenly, everything struck me as funny — caricature snake faces, cartoon zoo animals, Fantasia flowers.
What finally got to me were the eyes … and this was all before the hallucinogenics kicked in.
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