Lincoln Caverns

This door leads to the cave.

Imagine all the things you could be right now if Lincoln Caverns was your mother.

The discovery of both of these caverns was remarkable. The first cavern was discovered in 1931 by road workers dynamiting a hill to build a highway. Pushing a stick of dynamite into a hole drilled in a rock face, they were surprised when the stick fell through the hole. Rather than proceed with caution, they dropped a lit stick of dynamite in and blew the side off a large hillside cavern. The blast revealed a quaint little cave, easily traversed in a half an hour. Opened by the land's owner as "Hi-Way-May" Caverns, the property was soon sold to as Myron Dunleavy, a small time vaudeville, circus and amusement park operator. Dunleavy saw the potential of a roadside attraction that was more than "roadside", it was practically part of the road.

The second cave's 1941 discovery was even darker. Sixteen years old and experiencing the sort of frustration that could not yet be slaked by punk rock and heavy petting, neither of which had yet been invented, teenage caveman Myron Dunleavy Jr., the son of Lincoln Cavern's owner, starts digging into the hills above the original cave. After two solid years of shoveling out a sinkhole, he uncovers the second cavern at the site, naming it "Whispering Rocks". Two years of digging a sinkhole. At age sixteen. And then spending the rest of one's life marketing the hole he had dug into the ground. I heard the rocks whispering "get away while you still can."

Charles Mingus's "All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother" shows the opposite end of the burdens of lineage. In his radical reworking of the standard "All The Things That You Are", Mingus propels his jazz combo out to the fringes.

Charles Mingus - All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother

Rockhill Trolley Museum, PA

Rio #1875 built by CTC (Companhia de Transportes Coletivos), Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in situ Rockhill, PA

Is it exotic to be ferried through the center of rural Rockhill, Pennsylvania in a lovingly restored 1912 Brazilian open sided trolley car running along a track previously only serving a pig iron factory? Is it displacing to ride said trolley from an old railway station, through backyards, past a factory floor plan, along side a creek, ending at a state highway, a route no trolley would ever take. On a trolley that would never have run there.

Because no one here seems to blink an eye. For all the cultural noise about placing treasures from foreign lands in context, nothing seems to better than good old stupidifyingly unexplained contrast. When someone says historically accurate or local materials, yawn and scratch at the ground with your foot. What would be worse than riding a trolley on its actual route? Where is the charm of the unfamiliar? Where is the electric jolt of the unfamiliar intruding on the tedious realities of the familiar?
So why all the words on the walls, museums? Why all the "didactics" as my professor used to say? Isn't everything a little out of context anyway? The only art in museums that is "in context" would be the art made for museums. If we are looking at the plundered treasure of an ancient civilization from strong off lands, why not just label it "pirate booty" and leave it at that. Those who care will figure out what it once was and the rest will not be puzzled by what it is.


Robert Smithson cunningly pointed out the displacing effect of museums with his mirror and displaced object works in the late 1960's. This is a piece made for a museum, that incorparates the museum, shows the obects in the museum, includes the viewer in the reflection.

Robert Smithson. (American, 1938-1973). Corner Mirror with Coral. 1969. Mirrors and coral

Giant Slide at Smith Memorial Playground

Deeply tucked into Philadelphia's Fairmont Park there is a forty five foot long waxed wooden slide. Built in 1904, the slide is the last remnant of the old attractions at the recently revamped playground next to the Smith Memorial Playhouse.

People have probably broken a lot of bones on this thing. Riding down it on your burlap sack is like sliding down a bowling alley with children at the bottom instead of pins.

Bushkill Falls

Bushkill Falls postcard showing catwalks

Bushkill Falls (the Niagara of Pennsylvania) (not to be confused with the Niagara of New Jersey)was crawling with people on an August Sunday. Crowded like no roadside attraction has a right to be.

The eight waterfalls of that make up the Bushkill Falls attraction are scaffolded with catwalks. Encased in trails. Stairs disappear into impossible gorges. Streams are spanned by bridges that dead end into walls of rock. No vantage point or vista is unreachable from this elaborate set of rustic, log hewn walkways. A family, lost on the labyrinthine trails for "over an hour" asks me for directions but I can see in their eyes that they have lost all hope of finding the exit ramp.

Contained, edited, sublime. This is nature perfected by man.

Penn's Cave

Penn's Cave: Rocks, Underground

The quality of a "tourist cave" (a term I swear I am not making up) depends up its quality of the morphization of its rocks by the tour guides. The proper guide can conjure up all manner of fairies, demons and food from the minerals. Penn's Cave is home to piles of rock looking vaguely like the Statue of Liberty, a Nittany Lion, bacon (a pereniel favorite), the Pope, and other tasty morsels. Or so said the tour guide. To me, they looked like rocks. Can't they just be rocks? All representation is morphic. You have to see the duck in flat line shape and color to "get" a picture of a duck. It's magical.

Did Clyfford Still's abstract paintings, often characterized as "cave-like" suffer through double morphization? Is that brushstroke a dog represented by rock formation?

Penn's cave is navigated in a long narrow boat, six of which are floating through the cave at any given time. The boat goes through the narrow, winding series of rooms and passages, then out a hole blasted through the hillside, into a man made lake. You edge by some ducks and the dam, which backs up the natural stream that fills the cave half full of water. Penn's cave, when discovered, had a stream flowing through it. Now it has a lake in it, thus making it : "Penn's Cave - America's Only All Water Cavern and Wildlife Park".