Dear journal,
It started with a truck part.
My brother and I were headed to Springfield today, the kind of trip that usually ends in receipts and repair manuals. But somewhere along Highway 13, a weathered billboard caught his eye—Fantastic Caverns. Without prompting, he turned toward it. “Let’s go,” he said. “Today’s the day.” And just like that, the wait was over.
I’ve been saying for years that I wanted to go. Not with urgency, but with that peculiar ache reserved for childhood things we never quite got to finish. When I was in fourth grade, our school field trips rotated: one year to Wilson’s Creek Battlefield, the next to Fantastic Caverns. I got the battlefield. Cannons, monuments, troop lines—I remember the dust and the heat. But it was the cave I didn’t see that stayed with me. It lingered like a forgotten dream, one that grew heavier with time.
Today, I finally stepped into it.
The cave was first discovered in 1862 by a farmer’s dog chasing a rabbit. The farmer, John Knox, kept it hidden—Missouri was a battleground in the Civil War, and a cave like that could easily have become a lair for bushwhackers or worse. In 1867, twelve women—members of the Springfield Women’s Athletic Club—became its first public explorers. Their names are carved into the cave wall, preserved in stone. That detail struck me. The symbolic descent—by women, no less, in a century that discouraged such boldness—was more than historic. It was mythic.
The tram tour is quiet and reverent. America’s only ride-through cave, they say, and while that sounds like a gimmick, the experience felt almost sacred. We passed through vast stone chambers, along columns and flowstone and silent mineral curtains. Our guide spoke of time in drops—how stalactites form at a rate so slow, it makes centuries feel like dust.
But what I felt wasn’t just geological.
Carl Jung wrote that caves are archetypal symbols of the unconscious. To descend into a cave is to turn inward—to confront what lies beneath the surface of the self. In Man and His Symbols, Jung notes that dreams of caves often signal a return to the origin, a womb-like chamber of memory and hidden truth. “The cave is not just a shelter,” he wrote, “but a return to the maternal, to the depths, to that which precedes the known.” I thought about that as we rode, as the light shifted and the earth closed in. This wasn’t just a cave. It was a confrontation with the long-buried boy inside me who never got to come here. The boy who waited.
At the gift shop, I bought a magnet. Just your basic acrylic square—clear plastic, mass-produced, not especially elegant. But when I pressed it onto my memory wall, it clicked into place like a final puzzle piece. Not a souvenir, but a symbol. A token of integration. A part of me—longed for, forgotten, neglected—reclaimed.
And it mattered even more because it was my brother’s idea. He saw the sign, made the turn, and gave me the kind of gift no one knows how to ask for: the fulfillment of an old desire, offered with quiet recognition.
Jung built his Bollingen Tower as a place of solitude, reflection, and symbolic wholeness. In its lowest chamber, he painted mandalas and strange inner maps. He once wrote, “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” Fantastic Caverns isn’t my Bollingen, but it was a moment of clarity. A descent. And, perhaps, a small awakening.
Some things are worth waiting for. Some caves are more than rock and dripstone—they are mirrors. Fantastic Caverns waited. And today, I answered.
Always,
Dave