Sometimes I am amazed at how our idea of entertainment has changed through the years. We depend on others to amuse us: movies, plays, music, TV, the list goes on. What would we do if we had to resort to our own ingenuity for diversion? It was a question that didn’t arise for my mother and her Latty family. They had themselves and each other. Below is an excerpt from the book on Mom’s childhood, Remembering Etta Bend. The words are not mine; they are my mother’s words, Susie Latty Day. The time is probably around 1915, just about a hundred years ago.
“Our farm at Etta was a gentle, peaceful place of river, fields, springs, and trees, but other sights, invisible to the casual observer, waited below the ground: caves! Sometimes on a lazy Sunday afternoon, usually in the wintertime, a group of us would decide to go exploring.
Mama and Papa would not allow us children to go into a cave alone, so one or both of them went with us. Sometimes other adults and children from the community came too. Dressed in heavy shoes, old clothes and coats, we crossed muddy fields and climbed the rough, rocky hillsides. When at last we reached our destination,the men lit lanterns and led the way inside.
No need to caution the children to stay close to their parents. We stuck like burrs to Mama and Papa as we gazed at another world. Our voices echoed off wet, glistening walls. The lanterns cast small, wavering ripples of light in this pool of vast darkness. Stalactites dripped in rocky icicles from the ceiling and clung with knobby fingers to the cave wall. Broken bits lay scattered about the floor. I picked up a few fragments to take back home.
“Sh-h,” cautioned a grownup as he pointed upward. Furry bats hung from the ceiling. No one wanted to wake them. Bats, so rumor went, sometimes bit people or got tangled in someone’s hair.
Images of bats, snakes that might call this dark world their home, possibly a black bear, invaded my mind. Why had I ever thought that cave exploring might be fun?
“Up ahead, the cave narrows into a tunnel just about the right size for you to crawl through,” Papa said. “Nobody knows what is beyond that.”
I felt no burning desire to find out. As we turned to leave, I could hardly wait to reach that welcome circle of daylight at the mouth of the cave. The cold, winter day had never looked so good. In later years, I wondered about that small opening Papa had mentioned. Did it lead into a large, underground room? Did streams of water splash through that dark chamber?”
So far as I know, nobody ever found out. I don’t know exactly which cave this was. When Tenkiller Dam went in, was the cave covered in water? Or was it high enough on a hillside to escape being inundated? What really did lie beyond that small opening Pappy Latty mentioned? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I’ll just put it down as one of the mysteries of Etta Bend.
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