THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT (10 page)

I
am a rube who reads guidebooks. That is how I learned that the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone National Park is the world’s largest log structure, and that one may sit on its balcony and sip a gin and tonic while watching Old Faithful spout off. Another guidebook tipped me off that visitors to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota may partake in the nearby town’s “Pitchfork Fondue,” in which rib eye steaks are speared on the ends of pitchforks and dunked in barrels of boiling oil—crispy, theatrical meat as the sun goes down over the Badlands.

In this fondness for these things, I am not alone. For I have sat on picnic tables among my countrymen, some of whom stood down the Nazis, and we’ve smiled at the landscape and at one another, the grease trickling onto our souvenir T-shirts.

As I was paging through a guidebook entry on New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns National Park, the words “Underground Lunchroom” caught my eye. The lunchroom is smack-dab in the middle of the caverns, 750 feet underground. The guidebook warned, “To modern eyes, this strange installation seems absurd, but moves to close it down have been stymied by its place in popular affections.” As I would come to find out, it is a restaurant so oddly placed that it requires an act of Congress repeated every year to keep going.

If the geological marvels of Carlsbad Caverns came into being in the time before history, the Underground Lunchroom represents the time before arugula. Established in 1926, the lunchroom was renovated in the 1970s, and it shows. The food and souvenir stations are housed in sandy brown booths that remind me of the drive-through bank architecture of my childhood. The food—box lunches of cold chicken or ham sandwiches, wedges of pie in plastic, wedge-shaped containers—is the sort of fare my grade school washed down with Shasta cola on the Freedom Train field trip in ’76. Not long after the Bicentennial, middle Americans started eating better and dressing better and calling nature “the environment,” but the Underground Lunchroom is a throwback to our unpretentious if unenlightened past.

The National Park Service wanted to get rid of it. In 1991 they began an environmental assessment of the lunchroom. Money was spent. Scientists conferred. It took two years. And, sadly for them, they were unable to find any evidence that food particles, Freon gas in the refrigerators, or the use of microwave ovens was harming the ecosystem and climate of the cave. In fact, all sorts of things pose a bigger ecological threat to the cave than the lunchroom does, like the existence of lights, of an elevator, of actual, bacteria-carrying tourists with their lint-covered clothing.

In the end, the reason the Park Service wants to close the lunchroom is not thanks to science. It has to do with aesthetics. In the years since the lunchroom was built, we as a people have gone through a grand tectonic shift in the way we think about national parks. Basically, we don’t believe in putting crap in the middle of nature anymore. And not only that, we believe in taking out as much of the old crap as possible. This was codified in a 1991 Park Service policy called the Vail Agenda, which clearly states, “The National Park Service should use existing authority to remove, wherever possible, unnecessary facilities.”

It’s the aesthetics of all this that Ed Greene talks about when we walk through the cavern and he makes the case for the removal of the lunchroom. Greene is in charge of visitor services at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, He contributed to that environmental study. And he spends so much time underground amidst the marvels of the cavern that he has a separate name for the world that you and I inhabit. He calls that world the “surface world.”

“It’s hard to describe this for someone who can’t see it because there’s nothing in the surface world experience that prepares people to see something like this,” Greene tells me. “It is just unlike anything else on earth. There will be times that I will intentionally, if I’m having a rough day or something is getting under my skin a little bit, I’ll just intentionally come down in the cave and find a place just to sit and soak this up. This resource and this kind of beauty keep me humbled and keep me on the right path to do the things that I need to be doing here. Nobody created Carlsbad Caverns so that they could have lunch 750 feet underground. If you walk down through the natural entrance, what you are experiencing is this natural creation, and then as you exit out of that area and you walk into this area there’s this stark contrast. That’s the first thing you see when you walk out. You are coming to one of the world’s great natural attractions, one of the greatest attractions in all creation, and what do you see? Something not unlike maybe a mall somewhere.”

If the Park Service reasoning for removing the Underground Lunchroom is essentially an aesthetic argument, the main reason to save the lunchroom is equally aesthetic. Namely, it’s cool to eat lunch in a cave. You can also mail a postcard from the lunchroom and stamp it “Mailed 750 Feet Underground.” It’s entertaining to mail a postcard in a cave. The lunchroom even has a bank of pay phones. Why would you
need
to make a telephone call from the cave? Well, you wouldn’t need to. You might do it because it’s fun, and you’re on vacation, and you’re at a place with the word
park
in its name.

The Carlsbad business community partly depends on vacationers for their livelihood. A local Carlsbad company called Cavern Supply has operated the lunchroom since the 1920s and employs around sixty people in the summer. In a town of 25,000 people, this is significant.

Frank Hodnett is the president of Cavern Supply. He runs the lunchroom. His view, which is not entirely self-serving, is shared by many in the Carlsbad community, who believe that the concessions associated with the cave are part of the cave’s history. He worked in the cave as a little boy, standing on top of Coke cases to make change. He was accompanying his father, who was also an employee of Cavern Supply. Hodnett’s father started working at the lunchroom in the twenties. Back before the elevators, Hodnett senior carried the food in and out of the cave every day on his back, acquiring the nickname Yo Yo. For Frank Hodnett, his own family history here is intertwined with the thousands of families he’s fed at the lunchroom’s tables.

“Hundreds and thousands of people have eaten here,” Hodnett says, “and every one of them has said that that was one of their memorable things that happened in the cave. You talk to people now that are fifty, sixty years old and they will say, ‘I remember when we went through the caverns and we stopped and had one of those sandwiches.’”

So when the National Park Service announced their plans to remove the Underground Lunchroom, the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce opposed them.

Gary Perkowski is the mayor of Carlsbad. Like a lot of locals, he also worked in the Underground Lunchroom as a teenager. He was one of the people from Carlsbad who argued the lunchroom’s merits before one of New Mexico’s congressmen, Representative Joe Skeen.

“I think Representative Skeen has always been on our side,” Mayor Perkowski asserts. “He works closely with the leaders of Carlsbad on numerous projects, and we just went to Washington, explained our position and what we thought. And he agreed with us.”

“That’s it?” I wondered.

“That’s basically it. He agreed with our position and did everything he could to make sure that was implemented.”

I’ll say. Consider the following legislation prepared by Representative Skeen’s committee. According to H.R. 2217, the Department of Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2002, Section 307, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be obligated or expended by the National Park Service to enter into or implement a concession contract which permits or requires the removal of the underground lunchroom at the Carlsbad Caverns National Park.” That is the same language that has appeared in every Department of Interior appropriations bill since 1994, and what it means is that the National Park Service is barred from using federal funds to close down the Underground Lunchroom. (Calls to Representative Skeen’s office for comment were not returned.)

The National Park Service is obeying the will of Congress, but you don’t get the feeling they’re all that happy about it. If the Park Service were a person, the Underground Lunchroom would be one of the dumb mistakes it made as a kid. It’s like Congress is telling it that not only can it not remove the tattoo it got one drunken night in the twenties but it has to invite 300,000 people a year to look at it. And that’s how a lot of employees think about it too, as a youthful gaffe.

Cave specialist Ron Kerbo, who was one of the authors of the study calling for the lunchroom’s abolition, remembers going there when he was little: “Like any eight-year-old, I thought it was pretty interesting to be able to eat in the cave. And I particularly remember the pickles. They used to have these shelves with these small paper cups with pickles in them and you could eat as many of those as you wanted. So I was always fond of eating the pickles in the Underground Lunchroom.”

Still, he says, there’s no reason for the lunchroom today. Food is available to tourists in a restaurant that’s just fifty-seven seconds away by elevator. And for all the visitors who enter the cavern through the elevator, the lunchroom is the first and last thing they see.

“In that environment,” Kerbo says, “it seems to me, eating in the lunchroom mars the visitor’s experience in the cave.”

“When you were eight years old, did you feel marred?” I ask him.

“While, yes, as a child, I ate in there and I enjoyed it and I did remember it. But I have moved on. And the great thing that the national parks teach us is that if we are attuned to these natural processes, then we can move on. If your only memory of Carlsbad Caverns is eating in the lunchroom, then you have missed the essence of the experience.”

Everything he says is true. But I found his reasoning frustrating because my only available counterargument is that the Underground Lunchroom is a lark. And what’s the dignity in that? I’m jealous of Kerbo’s certainty, which is both idealistic and logical. My small life in the surface world is a contradictory, hypocritical mess in which I scowl through newspaper articles about the abuses of the timber industry while sitting in my maple chair next to my maple bookcase. Isn’t that how most of us live in this country?

I spent a couple of hours walking down through the caverns, and this is what I saw. I saw fourteen football fields of treasures—things with names like Witch’s Finger, Totem Pole, and Mirror Lake, formations described as popcorn and soda straws in places called the Boneyard, the Hall of Giants, the Big Room. How very human to measure nature in sports arenas, describe it as snack food, map its contours as if we’re drawing rectangles on the blueprint of an office building. I can’t do any better. I don’t know how to describe the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns without making it sound like a cartoon or a drug trip or a cartoon of a drug trip. The only thing I can say is that it is one of those dear places that make you love the world.

So when I came to the end of the last trail, I wasn’t quite ready to say good-bye to the cave. I felt all dreamy, and I didn’t want the feeling to end. If only there were some way station, some transitional zone between this world and the surface world above, a place to sit and ponder my own insignificance.

I sleepwalk to a picnic table in the Underground Lunchroom. When I first read about the lunchroom in the guidebook, I’d never suspected it could feel so contemplative. Then I rip open a bag of barbecue potato chips and listen to the sound of my own teeth crunching. I am capable of chewing and pondering at the same time.

Since the lunchroom does no significant harm to the caverns’ ecology, I’d like to believe that this is one of those lucky places where we don’t have to choose between doing the right thing and enjoying a goof. I look up at the ceiling of the lunchroom, which is, of course, the ceiling of the cave. It looks so lunar I can’t help but think of a certain astronaut. In 1971,
Apollo
14’
s Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the moon. Gearing up to face the profundity of the universe, this man brought sporting goods with him into space. Who can blame him? That’s what we Americans do when we find a place that’s really special. We go there and act exactly like ourselves. And we are a bunch of fun-loving dopes.

I
n December 1999, the Associated Press released a photograph of Luther and Johnny Htoo, twelve-year-old twin brothers commanding a ragtag guerrilla army in the rain forest of Myanmar (formerly Burma). In the picture, the little boys are side by side. Johnny’s the serene one with the angel eyes. Luther, forehead shaved, is the smirking devil sucking down a cigar. For several weeks, I couldn’t open a magazine without seeing that photo of the twins, without reading of their bizarre cult of soldiers called God’s Army, of their attack on a Thai hospital in which they held some five hundred people hostage. Every time I saw the picture the first thing that popped into my head was this: I miss my sister.

I am a twin. And to be a twin child is to always have another person in the picture. My mother made a halfhearted stab at keeping separate photo albums for each of us. But the distinctions are arbitrary. Amy is in most of the faded black-and-white snapshots in mine, and vice versa.

Once I saw Luther and Johnny sharing the same frame, it hit me how much they have in common with my sister and me. The similarities are uncanny. Luther and Johnny were illiterate, Baptist, messianic insurgents struggling against the government of Myanmar, and my sister Amy and I shared a locker all through junior high.

Some of my friends couldn’t stop talking about the Htoo twins. They would speak of them in a single breath—LutherandJohnny. “Did you see the photo of LutherandJohnny?” or “I’m obsessed with LutherandJohnny.” And I pine for that, that single name, especially now that my sister and I live so far apart. I miss the way I was never Sarah and my sister was never Amy, but we were together AmyandSarah. Unlike the identicals, who act as photocopies of each other, we’re fraternal. Which means that we’re not doubles so much as halves. We’re split down the middle. I’m a single careerist with a walk-up apartment in New York City; she’s a married, dog-owning mother in Montana with a, swear to God, white picket fence. People love that about us, love that I can’t sew on a button but she makes quilts. That’s why people respond to the Luther and Johnny picture. They adore the contrast between the pretty, girlish Johnny and the hyena-faced Luther. Meet Joan of Arc and her brother Genghis Khan.

Will Luther and Johnny’s memories meld? Up until around the age of ten, my sister and I often cannot remember who was doing what and who was watching, who got thrown from what horse, who got spanked for what trespass, who committed the trespass that led to the spanking. (Well, it was usually Amy, so ill-behaved. When I called her to talk about Luther and Johnny, she had seen the photo and knew what I was thinking. “I’m Luther!” she screamed into the phone.) So years from now, when Luther and Johnny look back on the exciting terrorist period of their lives, will Johnny ask Luther, “Was it you who threw that hand grenade on the government sniper or was it me?” Maybe Luther will say to Johnny, “Help me out here, but I can’t remember which one of us shot the papaya off that dumb orphan’s head.”

In January 2001, the Htoo twins turned themselves in to Thai border guards, admitted they had no magical powers, and asked for their mommy. But while they still lived out there in the killing fields, Luther and Johnny had it easy twin-wise. In the bush, they didn’t have to deal with the aftermath of those periodic cable TV documentaries on twins. They’ve probably never been cornered at some dinner party with an HBO subscriber who quizzes them on “like the weirdest show I’ve ever seen about these freaks, I mean twins, who were separated at birth and everything and still held their cigarettes at the same angle even though they didn’t meet until adulthood and I was just wondering if when your sister feels pain you feel it too?” So Luther or Johnny will never have to hover over the lukewarm hummus and inform some only child that just because you’re a twin it doesn’t mean you’re some kind of life-size voodoo doll and that if you have some kind of psychic powers at all they have nothing to do with your twin but rather with peculiar celebrities, like when you dreamed you said hi to Kevin Spacey on the street and the next morning he received an Oscar nomination or the fact that you happened to be talking about the Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry the night he died.

(Another dignified plus of being a twin without television is that Luther and Johnny have probably never watched the cartoon
Superfriends
, the one in which Aquaman and Superman and Wonder Woman teamed up to fight global crime. And thus, Luther and Johnny, unlike my sister and me, will never have to cringe at the memory of imitating the goody-goody, tights-wearing minor characters known as the Wonder Twins. Thus they’ll escape the embarrassment of having said the words “Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of … a straight-A student.”)

The advantage of being a twelve-year-old guerrilla warrior in terms of twin self-esteem is not unlike the advantage of attending a private school—the uniforms. As American public school graduates, my sister and I know the trappings, the symbolism, of clothes. When we were toddlers, our mother dressed us alike. And if we weren’t wearing the same dress, we wore the same style in different colors. If she wore baby blue, I wore pink. If she wore navy blue, I wore red. Until the moment when we were maybe five and Amy informed our mother, “Mama, I don’t want my dress to be like Sarah’s.” In high school, she wore blue, I wore black. She wore pink and I wore black. Luther and Johnny, in their makeshift camo, will never go through that, the stereotyping, never know what it’s like to be labeled the gloomy, plain Jane or the girlie-girl blonde. Then again, they won’t crack themselves up by being the gloomy plain Jane and buying a red satin dress in front of Mom, just to see the look on her face. On the other hand, Amy and Sarah will never know the satisfaction of a job well done that comes with leading an army of children to their death.

Someday, when Luther and Johnny are older—perhaps in exile—they’ll flip through their photo albums as my sister and I do at Christmas. Will they look fondly on the smoker-non-smoker snapshot the way we giggle over the Polaroid from 1974 in which Amy has thrown up on me in bed but I slept right through it and she thought it so hilarious she woke up my parents to get the camera and there she is, in color with the light on, smiling and pointing as I lie there peacefully, my Snoopy pajamas soaked in puke? Or the Sears portrait when we’re not yet two and I am blank and placid on the shag carpet fondling a plastic football and Amy’s a fidgeting glare, the light bouncing off her hot tears? Or perhaps Luther and Johnny, who reportedly cannot read, have never seen the photo and never will and so they’ll be less inclined to typecast each other the way everyone else does, the way I was the dark one and she was the blue-eyed blonde, the way I was the “smart” one and she was the “fun” one even though she’s really sharp and I’d like to think I’m not a total drag. Maybe, unlike someone who shall remain Amy, Luther is too caught up with training his blindfolded child followers in disassembling rifles to taunt Johnny with the fact that he was almost eight and still had training wheels on his banana-seat pink bike even though he, Luther, had been riding in the driveway solo since he was four.

At twelve, Luther and Johnny probably already suspected twindom’s secret lesson. Namely, that no matter what they accomplished—who they trained, inspired, or killed—their greatest allure might be the circumstances of their birth. That to be a twin and to distinguish oneself besides is a bit of overkill. My sister and I were about their age when our family moved north. At our new school, we lived the preteen girl’s nightmare: we stuck out. We were not just new kids, and we were not just new kids with funny Okie accents. We were new kids with funny Okie accents and twins besides. It was more than our classmates could bear. The famous photo of Luther and Johnny catches them on the cusp of this twinly dread—of being too famous for too much too fast.