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kammartinez · 11 months

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By Sue Halpern

Five years ago, Tamara and Cirt Yancy moved to Nixa, Missouri, for the schools. The town sits on the Ozark Plateau, a dozen miles from Springfield, in the southwest corner of the state. In the past thirty years, its population has more than quadrupled, from five thousand to more than twenty thousand, turning a small agricultural community into a manicured enclave of recently constructed town houses set amid rolling hills. Twice in the past decade, its high school was designated a “blue-ribbon school” by the U.S. Department of Education; U.S. News & World Report rated it as the top high school in the area.

The Yancys, who have three children, were living in a Seattle suburb, which had become prohibitively expensive; Missouri, where Cirt had gone to high school, seemed a better bet. Culturally and politically, though, Nixa was a shock. It’s in the middle of the Bible Belt, with large Pentecostal and Baptist congregations. In 2020, Donald Trump received nearly seventy-five per cent of the vote in Christian County, where Nixa is the largest city. “It’s a nice area, but I did not know the political climate at all,” Tamara, who had grown up in the Pacific Northwest, told me. “It’s hard to be vocal about your beliefs in Nixa unless it’s straight, white, Christian, conservative, Republican.”

The Yancys first heard rumblings about a book ban in early 2022. On Facebook, people were saying that a small group of women in Nixa had begun filing official removal requests for books they considered to be pornographic, including Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” (The complaint against “The Bluest Eye” reads, “Children of any age don’t need to be ‘educated’ on their mother’s sexual fantasies, incestual rape or unapologetic pedophilia.”) “The book bans came out of the blue,” Tamara told me. “I didn’t even know that in this day and age that was a thing, or that anyone would consider banning a book for any reason.”

By mid-April, the women had officially objected to sixteen books. It was the first time in more than fifteen years that anyone had requested a book be removed from the school’s library shelves. The Yancys and their Facebook friends, most of whom had never met in person, began talking about how to push back. “We created this book-warriors group,” Cirt said. “We’re going to fight to keep the books in the library.”

They called their group U-Turn in Education, to mirror the name of No Left Turn in Education, a national right-wing organization that, in 2020, began a crusade to insure that critical race theory was not taught in schools. The warriors were optimistic, Cirt told me. They built a Web site, in part to inform parents in the community that there was already a policy in place to restrict access to books they did not want their children reading.

To evaluate the books in question, the school administration appointed a set of committees, which eventually recommended that four of the books remain on the shelves: “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Homegoing,” “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto.” The committees also recommended that the other twelve books be ��retained with restrictions,” meaning that they would not be shelved openly and could be checked out only with parental permission. But that, it turned out, was not the end of it. The women who initiated the book-removal requests appealed three of the committees’ recommendations. The seven-member school board would have to decide if “Fun Home” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” both queer coming of age memoirs, and “Homegoing” a multigenerational novel about the ramifications of the slave trade, would be allowed to remain in the high-school library. That decision, which was to be announced at a school-board meeting, would be final.

On May 12, 2022, hundreds of Nixa residents filed into the community room of the school district’s administrative building. Hundreds more were in a nearby overflow room or at home, watching on a live stream. Most members of U-Turn were in attendance, as were about twenty high-school students. Before the meeting started, the students had presented the school board with a petition opposing the removal of books from the library; of the three hundred and forty-five students whom they’d approached, only five chose not to sign it.

One of the petition’s organizers, Meghana Nakkanti, a junior at the time and a member of the debate team, was the first speaker during the public-comment period. She cited Miller v. California, the 1973 Supreme Court case that redefined obscenity from that which is “utterly without socially redeeming value” to that which lacks “literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” a criterion, she said, met by none of the books in question. Another student, Justice Jones, who reported on the book bans in the school magazine, helping to spark student opposition, pointed out that “limiting a student on the perspectives they can read is not preparing them for the types of people they would encounter outside of school.” Tamara Yancy spoke, too. “I don’t really have much to say, because I think that you guys probably will listen to the students,” she said. “Their voice should be the loudest. Theirs should be the one you should consider. It’s their library.”

Most of the chairs in the community room, though, were occupied by people who had come to voice their opposition to the books on the docket, many of them members of a private Facebook group named Concerned Parents of Nixa. Some of the speakers called the school librarians pedophiles and groomers who should be arrested and put on a national sex-offenders registry. The final speaker, a Nixa student named Alex Rapp, went off script. He addressed the librarians directly, saying, “We as a student body are behind you and will support you.” And then, one by one, the school-board members were polled on the choice to retain, restrict, or remove each book. In the end, they voted to restrict “Homegoing,” whereas the two queer memoirs would be permanently removed from the school library. “I am not for bans for any reason,” Tamara told me. “But it would be one thing if a book was never in the library because, during the vetting process, it was decided that it was not appropriate. It’s a totally different story to have it in the library and then physically removed. That, to me, is a lot worse.”

Many of the books being challenged in Nixa are on lists posted by Book Look and Book Looks, Web sites spun out of the dark-money-funded, conservative organization Moms for Liberty. Besides nearly identical names, the Web sites have complementary goals. Book Looks stated mission is to provide “reviews centered around objectionable content, including profanity, nudity, and sexual content”; Book Look’s “plan of action” is to get people “engaged with outrage” and to vote out school-board members who “refuse to work on this issue.” According to research by PEN America, nationally, more than sixteen hundred books were banned between July, 2021, and June, 2022, and most of them addressed L.G.B.T.Q.+ themes or had a protagonist or prominent secondary character of color. Most of those books were targeted by groups that did not exist before 2020, but which now, the report notes, “share lists of books to challenge, and . . . employ tactics such as swarming school board meetings, demanding newfangled rating systems for libraries, using inflammatory language about ‘grooming’ and ‘pornography,’ and even filing criminal complaints against school officials, teachers, and librarians.” Tamara, who is a substitute teacher, told me that she has been called a groomer and a pedophile “many, many times.”

In southwest Missouri, the book bans were also being promoted by Andy Wells, who was then the head of the state chapter of No Left Turn in Education. Wells, a former Army helicopter mechanic, is hostile to what he calls “government” schools. At a recent gathering of the Stanley M. Herzog Foundation, which gives scholarships to families to send their children to private Christian schools, he said, “This is a place where we, we as Christians, have the option to send our children to where we want them to be educated, not where the people who want to change society want them to be educated.” According to lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, who sued the Wentzville, Missouri, school district over its book-removal policy, Wells is part of “a targeted campaign . . . to remove particular ideas and viewpoints about race and sexuality from school libraries” and “has advised that challengers should talk about sexual content in the books rather than sexual orientation, sexual identity, or race to avoid legal scrutiny.” (Wells denied that the campaign’s intention is discriminatory and maintained that it was about removing explicit material from schools; the suit was withdrawn when most of the books were returned to the library shelves.)

Groups such as No Left Turn in Education and Moms for Liberty are now active in hundreds of school districts around the country. A number of state legislatures have taken up their cause. Around the time of the book bans in Nixa, Rick Brattin, a Missouri state senator, proposed legislation that would make it a Class A misdemeanor for anyone affiliated with a public or private school to provide students with “obscene” material. “In schools all across the country, we’ve seen this disgusting and inappropriate content making its way into our classrooms,” Brattin said. “Instead of recognizing this as the threat it is, some schools are actually fighting parents to protect this filth. The last place our children should be seeing pornography is in our schools.”

Two months later, a version of Brattin’s provision was added to a sex-trafficking bill, S.B. 775, making it illegal to expose a student in a K-12 school to “explicitly sexual” visual material, without defining the meaning of “explicitly sexual.” Nonetheless, any school employee found to have done so can be jailed for a year and fined two thousand dollars. The law went into effect last August. According to Colleen Norman, who chairs the Missouri Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, teachers, administrators, and librarians, fearful of running afoul of the law, began removing books from their classrooms and school libraries: “Because the law is vague, schools are overreacting and pulling everything that could possibly in any way be deemed inappropriate, because they’re afraid of a lawsuit.”

In February, the Missouri chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sued the prosecuting attorney in Jackson County (as a proxy for all Missouri prosecuting attorneys) on behalf of the Missouri Association of School Librarians and the Missouri Library Association, challenging S.B. 775, which it called “the government censorship law that caused school districts across the state to order the removal of hundreds of titles from library shelves.” Weeks later, the chair of the Missouri House Budget Committee, Cody Smith, retaliated by removing all funding for public libraries from the state budget. Though S.B. 775 is specific to schools and school libraries, Smith expressed anger that the Missouri Library Association was a party to the suit. “I don’t think we should subsidize that effort,” he said at the time. “We are going to take out the funding and that is why.” In April, the Missouri House agreed with him, passing a budget that eliminated the four and a half million dollars that had been allocated for the state’s four hundred public libraries. (The Republican chairman of the state’s Senate Appropriations Committee is apparently moving to block the effort; he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “There is no way that money is not going back into the budget.”)

Meanwhile, Missouri’s secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, who is running for governor, and who has been shoring up his conservative bona fides by, among other things, voicing his opposition to gay marriage, proposed a complementary rule to S.B. 775. It penalizes public libraries that allow minors to access “non-age-appropriate” material. It also, he said, gives parents “the right to challenge a library’s age-appropriate designation for any material.”

Ashcroft’s rule is set to go into effect at the end of the month. “What this could mean is that if a teen-ager walked into my library and wanted to check out something by Stephen King or James Patterson, they would not be allowed to because it is in the adult-fiction section,” Norman told me. “Under this new rule, it would mean putting into place new systems that libraries currently do not have to create a separate library card for children. That would be a huge financial burden on libraries and goes completely against our tenets of intellectual freedom and free access to materials and education and resources.” Because the secretary of state’s office administers Missouri’s public-library system, Ashcroft’s rule did not require the legislature or the public to vote on it.

I met the core members of U-Turn in Education one evening in late March, a week before an election that threatened to add two candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty to the school board. The mood at the meeting, held in the home of Sheila Michaels, one of the librarians at Nixa High School, and her husband, Jeremy Hayes, was convivial. After more than a year of working together, the group members had become good friends; they told stories and joked around, but the stakes were high. The election threatened to install a “parents’ rights” majority on the school board, which would likely lead to more book removals. Michaels, who has two children at Nixa High, said, “Even if I didn’t work here, the fact that a small, very angry, and loud group of people undermine my parental choices isn’t right. They say that it’s all about parental rights, but they’re trampling on the rights of others.”

Michaels grew up in an evangelical household near St. Louis, and attended Evangel University, a Christian liberal-arts college in Springfield. “But then you go into public education, and you see all these different types of people and their struggles,” she said. “And that just builds your empathy so much.” She became a librarian five years ago, after teaching English at the school for more than a decade. “For better or worse, librarianship is my identity,” she said. “It’s my values.” Last year, she was named an American Library Association Emerging Leader; this year, she was appointed to a national task force working on issues related to intellectual freedom. She told me a story of a student who saw an L.G.B.T.Q.-ally sign on her office window and sought her out; the girl’s parents were threatening to kick her out of the house for being queer. “If we take away books that represent marginalized populations, what does that say to those kids who are in those populations?” Michaels said. “You’re not appropriate? You’re not O.K.?”

Two members of U-Turn, Elizabeth Dudash-Buskirk and Jasen Goodall, were also running for the school board. Dudash-Buskirk, a professor in the communications department at Missouri State, had been a particularly outspoken member of the group, she said, because her job was secure and she no longer had a child in the school system. At the school-board meeting last May, she had read provocative passages from the Bible, implying that perhaps it, too, should be banned. “I was reading about Lot’s daughters, and how they got their father drunk so that they could rape him and produce an heir,” she said. “And these people were shouting that I wasn’t reading this from the Bible. It was disturbing.”

Goodall, who owns a store that sells billiard tables, seemed less likely to be a member of U-Turn. He had spent six years in leadership positions in the P.T.A., had been the president of the P.T.A. Council, and counted many Nixa school administrators among his friends. “I’ve always tried to stay neutral in politics because of our business,” he told me. But, after the Goodall’s house burned down last September, his priorities shifted; the realization that life could change in an instant convinced him that it was no longer prudent to stay out of the fray. “I really don’t care if someone that opposes me shops with me or not,” he said. “This issue became more important than saving my business.” The Goodalls have two children in the Nixa schools; two and a half years ago, their youngest came out to them. “My daughter makes it personal for me,” he said.

The next night, at a candidates’ forum for the school-board election, around sixty people sat in the gym of Nixa’s junior high school, as the five candidates answered questions that had been provided in advance. Alex Bryant, an evangelical pastor who likes to say that he is “a big, bald, and beautiful Black guy” married to “a little white lady,” told the forum audience that he “absolutely” supports the efforts of Concerned Parents of Nixa, which had been renamed Concerned Parents of the Ozarks, to remove books from the school library. The reason he was running for school board, he said, was “to serve the people who are like me. We’re conservative, and we want our kids taught math, science, history, and English, not critical race theory or gender ideology or any of that stuff that does not line up with our values.” Bryant was endorsed by Moms for Liberty, even though the organization does not have a chapter in the county.

If elected, Bryant would become the second board member chosen to advance parents’ rights, joining Bridget Bidinger, an original member of Concerned Parents of the Ozarks, who unseated a long-serving incumbent in April of last year. During Bidinger’s campaign, she had appeared on a podcast produced by We the People, an organization dedicated to “restoring the Constitutional Republic as created by our nation’s founders.” “It’s not about banning books,” she told the show’s host. “It’s about making sure the library is offering books that are age-appropriate. When it comes to books that are sexually explicit in nature or pornographic in nature, those books have no place whatsoever on the library shelves.” Bidinger told me that the pandemic, with its vaccination requirements and mask mandates, had shaken her and other parents in Nixa out of what she called “a very trusting mind-set” about public education. “I loathe the word ‘ban,’ because it’s taken out of context in many of the cases, and it’s meant to stoke fear of censorship and fear that your freedom of speech and your rights are being taken away,” she said. “But I’ve got to think that the majority of people, myself included, are doing it with the best interests of the students, and protecting their minds.”

When the election results were tallied the following week, Bryant received more votes than Dudash-Buskirk and Goodall combined. The Nixa school board will vote on the next set of books in June, which will include the possible removal of three graphic novels to maintain compliance with S.B. 775. A total of fifteen books had been challenged, three of which, Tamara Yancy told me, were not even in the high-school library: “They didn’t even check. They just downloaded the information sheets from Book Looks and turned them in.” She and Cirt have discussed whether they should move again. “But on the other hand,” Tamara said, “who’s gonna stand up, if not us?”

#books #education #censorship #politics

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darkeldritchdepths · 1 year

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THE MARBLE CAVE OF MISSOURI

A very large protion of the State of Missouri is honeycombed by caverns to such an extent that the underground drainage in many places deprives the surface of small streams. For many years, the existence of a large cave in the extreme southeastern portion of Stone County, Mo., has been known, but the inaccessibility of the locality has kept travelers, with but few exceptions, from attempting to visit it. Within the past year, however, such remarkable accounts of the wonders and extent of the cavern have appeared in the local and metropolitan newspapers that the Missouri World’s Fair Commission and the State Geological Survey determined to investigate the cave thoroughly and see what there was of truth in the stories which had been so widely circulated. Consequently, our party of three, representing both organizations, besides our photographer, Mr. C. E. DeGroff, of Warrensburg, Mo., left Aurora, a live mining city of Lawrence County, about 270 miles southwest of St. Louis, on the “Frisco” road, one charming day last fall, to explore the new wonder of the world. The 40 mile drive over cultivated prairies and through fine open but almost uninhabited forests might be dilated upon, but the limits of our space compel us to hasten on to the description of the object on our journey. Stone County lies for the most part on the southern slope of the so-called Ozark Mountains. Three mountains, however, are merely hills and ridges which have been formed by the erosion of the plateau which is known by geologists as the “Ozark Uplift” and would (continued on page 70.) [transcription continues after images]

(Continued from first page.) not to be called such by one familliar with the Alleghanies, the White Mountains, or even the Catskills. No railroad has yet touched the county, the forests of oak, with sycamore, elm, and walnut in the valleys, are for the most part in their primeval condition, and thousands of acres of fertile land may still be taken up under the U. S. homestead laws. The forests are free from underbrush and much grass grows under the trees, giving the scenery a park-like aspect.

Mr. Truman S. Powell’s claim occupies Echo Glade and the neighboring hills about a mile and a half from the mouth of the cave and about 300 feet below it, and is the best headquarters from which to visit the cavern. Mr. Powell is the editor of the Stone County Oracle, published at the county seat, Galena, 18 miles from his farm. He says that he has explored fifty caves in Stone County. He is a firm believer in the future of the county and is an ardent admirer of Marble Cave. His eldest son, William T. Powell, is the good-natured, efficient guide to the cave. He is strong and active and a keen observer whose judgement is very reliable.

Climbing this hill, which is known as Roark Mountain, we saw in its top a large sink hole about 200 feet long by 150 feet wide and 55 feet deep, the bottom of which had dropped out, leaving a yawning chasm opening into the chamber below. Descending a series of log steps in the side of the pit, we came to two short ladders which led through the opening to a platform, from which we descended a large, strong wooden adder into what seems to be a bottomless pit. This part of the journey is fraught with many imaginary dangers to those unaccustomed to ladders, but our party had received considerable training in entering mines in different parts of the State, and consequently we hastened down without fear, anxious to see what was in store for us. The bottom of the ladder rests upon the top of a mound of debris, about 45 or 50 feet below the platform above mentioned. Climbing down this cone of earth and slabs of limestone, we reached the bottom of the vast room which is called the “Grand Amphitheater.”

Some light comes through the great rift in the roof, which is the bottom of the sink hole, and as soon as our eyes become accustomed to the semi-darkness we could see something of the really grand dimensions of the immense dome in which we stood; but when the room was illuminated by red fire, its full g r a n d e u r was revealed. The dimensions as given in the newspaper accounts are greatly exaggerated, but the truth is sufficiently grand. The room is about 150 feet wide by 200 feet long, and the roof rises in a magnificent arch to a height of 165 feet from the floor. Some stalactites were seen on this broad expanse of roof, but the beauty of the scene lay chiefly in the symmetry of the arch and the variations produced by the differences in the limestone strata.

Two beautiful examples of drip formations occur in this great amphitheater. One is the “Great White Throne,” a magnificent stalagmitic mass of pure white onyx about 50 feet high, 50 feet in extreme width and 12 or 15 feet in thickness, showing all the beautiful forms which one might imagine to be caused by the freezing of a fountain. It is hollow and one can climb more than half way to the top inside.

A few yards from the Great White Throne rises the “Spring Room Sentinel,” a beautiful fluted column of combined stalactite and stalagmite about 20 feet high and 2 to 3 feet in diameter with swelled base which stands near to the opening leading from the Grand Amphitheater to the Spring Room and to the Animal Room. This passage is a long, straight, gradually converging one following a “joint” in the limestone, which lends to a large low room of unknown dimensions which contains the mummified remains of hundreds, even thousands of animals, mainly, if not entirely, of carnivorous species. Admittance to this room is positively forbidden by the owner of the cave, but the assistants to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington have had access to the material from it and are now at work upon their identifications. A specimen from this room which was shown to me consisted of the skull and jaw bones of a cat-like animal to which portions of dried skin and fur still clung. It had a very ancient appearance. The continuation beyond the Animal Room of the joint leading to it seems to emerge in the side of a ravine outside the cave. What was once apparently an opening here is now filled with earth and debris.

Mr. Will Powell thinks that this is the place where the much desired horizontal entrance to the cave can be made with comparatively little trouble and expense.

Opening out from the passageway to the Animal Room is the Spring Room and beyond this lies the “Shower Bath Room,” the latter being a perfect example of a conical dome some 30 feet high, down the roof of which the water trickles down and flows over a low precipice to the spring room. This water showed the remarkably low temperature of 48° F.

Behind the Great White Throne, in the Grand Amphitheater, is a passageway which leads to the waterfall and to the other portions of the cave, which will be described as we gon on. The first room to which this passage leads is called “The Registry Room” because the walls are covered in places with firm, damp, red clay, in which numerous visitors have inscribed their names with finger or staff - an unstable method of gaining celebrity. Here our guide called our attention to the fact that the atmosphere had become much warmer than it was in the first great chamber. There is, in fact, a difference of six or eight degrees. Then pointing to a great black hole in the floor of the room, he said “Listen!” and taking a huge rock cast it into the abyss. After some seconds we heard the sound of the rock as it fell into water below us. The abyss is called the “Gulf of Doom.” Actual measurement proved this precipice to be 88 feet in height!

Turning to the left and descending a slippery clay bank and a narrow ladder, we reached a point at which the cave divides, one arm going past a great slab of limestone standing on end, known as “The Lost River Sentinel,” in a direction S. 30° W. to “The Lost River Canyon,” a journey which we reserved for another day. Taking the other arm, leading in a directly opposite direction, and clambering through two passages like the “Corkscrew” in Mammoth Cave, we soon reached the top of the waterfall. The edge of this fall is about 20 feet across, and the water passes through a series of beautiful little pools with projecting rims of calcite crystals before it takes its final plunge 50 feet into the darkness. The top of this waterfall is about 285 feet below the top of the hill at the entrance of the cave.

Retracing our steps for some distance from the top of the waterfall and turning on our track again at a lower level, we reached the bottom of the pit (8) into which we had cast the stone from the Registry Room above, and then passed on down a narrow defile by the aid of ladders and over slippery clay banks until we stood at the foot of the beautiful waterfall. Half way down the precipice a projection has caught the spray from the water, and the deposits of ages have formed there a beautiful bowl of carbonate of lime. Pointing to a 25 foot slope of miry clay and water, which lay just beyond us, Mr. Powell Said: “That’s the way to ‘Blonde’s Throne,’ the prettiest thing in the cave.” We looked at the prospect in dismay, and anxiously inquired whether there were no other way to get there; being answered in the negative, we left him behind, as he said there was no need of a guide, and plowed our way through the miry mass, which came to our knees. After toiling up this slope and through a narrow cleft in the rock, we reached the beginning of what they called “The Dry Crawl.” We wondered what the wet one was going to be. Down we went on our hands and knees and began the toilsome journey. One hundred and fifty feet of this, most of which was too low even for this method of locomotion, brought us to the “Midway Rest,” a small room, out of which a passage leads upward to several small chambers, in which were phantastically carved shapes in the limestone. We suggest the name of “The Temple” for one of the chambers, which contains fine Doric capitals. But Blonde’s Throne did not lie in that direction. As soon as we had gotten our breath and adjusted our surveying instruments we started on the “Wet Crawl,” and wet it surely was! We were pretty careful about the first pool, and tried to keep out of the water as much as possible, but when we reached the second pool we saw there was nothing to do but plunge in and work our way across. After thirty or forty yards of this kind of travel on hands and knees in the water, or worming our way through comparatively dry holes in the rocks, we reached a room a the base of the ascent to our destination. Further progress on the level on which we had come was stopped by a pool of water of unknown extent, known as “Mystic River,” spanned a the beginning by a low symmetrical arch of limestone.

A short, steep ascent led us to a great narrow cleft in the rocks about 100 feet high. Following this a short distance, we came to a steep incline of wet, slippery limestone, up which we climbed 25 or 30 feet, then pushing our way through a hole in the wall, barely large enough for our bodies, we were in Blonde’s Throne. This is a small room, only about 15 feet in diameter, but it is a gem. It is almost completely filled with beautiful and curious stalactites and stalagmites. Some of the stalactites were in sheet-like folds, and a sufficient number of them gave forth musical sounds when struck to enable a skillful musician to play simple tunes. The stalactites here are in all stages of growth, from narrow, hollow tubes, like pipestems, to solid pillars several inches in thickness. A small opening in the side of the room revealed the existence of a room which has never been explored. Rockets fired into it show that it must be a room of large dimensions.

Returning from Blonde’s Throne, and slipping and sliding down by the aid of the slimy rope which had helped us up the steep ascent, we reached the bottom of the incline all to soon for some of our party, Lighting up the cleft by magnesium ribbon, we could see weird drip formations filling the crevices and projecting from the walls far above our heads. The return journey to the bottom of the waterfall was made much more expeditiously than the advance, because, being thoroughly wet, muddy, and cold, we did not stop for scenery or surveyor’s measurements.

Another day was spent in exploring the windings of the “Lost River Canyon,” which, as stated above, lies out to the southwest from the Registry Room. Climbing over huge blocks of limestone which had fallen from the roof, or threading our way between slabs standing on edge, we soon came to the beginning of a much longer but drier crawl than the one just described. After worming our way along for some 200 yards, we came to a beautiful stream of water flowing swiftly through the underground channel which it had carved for itself in the l i m e s t o n e. This was the “Lost River.” In several places tortuous passages led out from this canyon, which are barren of interest, and serve merely to confuse the traveler and add to the length of the cavern. Somewhat less than a quarter of a mile from the Registry Room we ascended a steep slope and arived at “Springsted’s Throne.” This is a room about as large as Blonde’s Throne, but with a smaller amount of drip formation in it. The special feature of this room is a small recess, which is separated from the main portion by a lattice of stalactites. The cave has been explored for about a fourth of a mile beyond this room, but nothing of interest has been discovered in that direction.

The explorations thus far described have been along galleries opening out from only two places in the grand entrance dome. On the north side of the Grand Amphitheater another series of chambers opens out, most of which are comparatively small and devoid of drip formations. The first of these is the Mother Hubbard Room, in which an isolated waterworn pillar of limestone stands which has received the name “She” from its suggestion of Rider Haggard’s weird descriptions. A dry crawl of 70 feet from this room takes one to the “Battery,” a dome which is 60 feet in greatest diameter and 50 or 60 feet high. Here the bats congregate in vast numbers, whence its name. From one side of the battery a series of rooms, one of which is known as the Dungeon, and low dangerous passages extend to the Grand Amphitheater again. A low narrow passage leads from the Mother Hubbard Room to the northwest to a series of barren rooms two of which are said to rival the Grand Amphitheater in size. This part of the cave is dry. The second room reached contains considerable amounts of epsomite, MgSO₄+7H₂O, and therefore is called the Epsom Salts Room. The passage to these rooms is called the Windy Passage on account of the strong current of air which sweeps through it.

As there were no means at hand of exploring this passage and the dangerous route beyond, we did not undertake to visit it.

In addition to bats the living animals to be found in the cave consist of crickets, newts, and eyeless fish. Plant life is represented by a peculiar white fungus which grows on the rocks in the Grand Amphitheater. Vast numbers of bats make their home in the cave, especially during the winter season, and the floor is covered to a depth of many inches with bat guano. Mr. [Page 71 begins] Powell has distinguished five kinds of bats here, none of which, however, are of unusual size or appearance.

That the cave was known to the early settlers and explorers of this region is shown by the notched poles which were found in the cave when it was first rediscovered, and which evidently served as ladders for entrance into the cave. Two of these are now to be seen in the Mother Hubbard Room. Local supposition is that these notched trees were used by the Spaniards, as it is known that they occupied the land in this region before the English settlers took possession of it.

The cave as thus described is of considerable extent and possesses variety in scenery and interest. It is well worth a visit, and when the projected railroads from Aurora and Springfield pass near it, it will undoubtedly become a summer resort; but the estimation of the distances, heights and depths which have appeared in certain usually responsible papers and magazines are very wide of the truth. Its unexaggerated beauties are enough to recommend it to the popular fervor. The accompanying map represents, as accurately as the circumstances would permit, almost all of the cave that has been explored. It is certain, however, that the cave is by no means fully explored and that further investigation will add largely to this map. At present even Blonde’s Throne and Springsted’s Throne are practically inaccessible to the average visitor, but a not excessive amount of work would materially lessen the most serious difficulties in the routes.

My special thanks are due Mr. J. D. Robertson, assistant on the Missouri State Geological Survey, and Mr. H. D. Card, draughtsman for the Missouri World’s Fair Commission, for their painstaking assistance in making the accompanying map and measurements and the thermometric determinations that are given herewith. To Mr. Powell and his family is due the credit for almost all the exploration that the cave has received.

An exceptionally low temperature, 48 F°., was observed at the lowest point of the Grand Amphitheater and in the air and water of the Spring Room. Throughout the rest of the cavern the temperature seemed to be about that usually found in caves, 54° F.

In considering the scientific value of this cave, the fact should not be overlooked that this is the first cavern reported in this country containing mummified animal remains in large quantities.

#nonfiction #speleology #1890s #geology #cave #caving #long post

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rural-panoptes · 1 year

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@szemiesza

Nixa, Missouri is the most populous area between the residential city of Springfield and the tourist hotspot of Branson, with a total of about 23k people. It's on one of a few plateaus between two small mountain ranges forming the US interior highlands, or Ozarks region. This is where the stereotype of the hillbilly was made. Small towns and the roads between them are carved out of the limestone and there is precious little signal outside of densely (relative) settled pockets.

A car is flagged on one of the provided routes for being too nice and Melchior is followed from about a quarter mile back, the tails switching out with neighbors a few times along the way. Once Violette starts getting radio updates on his location; she, her girlfriend, and her ghoul head over to the meeting spot just south of Nixa to wait.

#thread #//felt like establishing the area a little. extremely impoverished zone for one to two hundred miles in every direction #//i think anyone established as being in there can hop in if it feels right

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aspoonofsugar · 1 year

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on jaunes inspiration being the maiden of orleans ( and how she was called the holy maiden or la pucelle ( the maiden ) a theory I have often seen and believe is that the crwby originally planned for jaune to be the next ozpin (but due to effectively gotten threats from fanbase to miles (the attacks on him ) they created oscar ( I mean the maiden powers came from ozpin and the wizard of oz in the books was a fraud who pretended to be a wizard and got into a leadership position which is like how jaune forged his transcripts and got into a position of leader both the wizard and jaune got trained by an active practicioner ( glynda trained oz in magic pyrrha trained jaune in combat ( though oz's best asset was still his head) plus the whole salem wanting to see ozpin burn ( jaunes inspiration being put to the fire for witchcraft ( among other things ) and salem witch trials being associated with witch burnings not to mention the ozark mountain range which includes the salem plateau. ( and

And I thought of the word Ozark, as in the Ozark Mountains/Plateau in the central/southern US, and I know that both Ozpin and Salem are (to a degree) named after places already

So I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it turns out that it’s split into subdivisions, including one called the Salem Plateau

Which made me think maybe I’m on to something here, speaking crackpottily

So then I looked at the etymology of Ozark(s), and learned that it might be a corruption of the French phrase meaning “of the arches,” (It is even suggested aux arcs is an abbreviation of aux arcs-en-ciel, French for “toward the rainbows) aux arcs

aux arcs

Ozark

Oz Arc

arc en ciel means rainbow

( jaunes family symbol on the shield is the rainbow ( and the only color jaune doesnt currently have in his design from the rainbow is the color green the one color missing from the rainbow)

Hi!

Mmmm I am sorry, but I am generally not interested in these kinds of theories...

When you start a series, you are gonna brainstorm for ideas... so obviously you are gonna come up with tons of plot-points you are not gonna use... I am only interested in what is in the final story... not because alternative ideas are bad or uninteresting, but simply because they were not written, so... there is really nothing to comment

In general, I don't like people deciding writers change things because threathened by the fandom... Unless it is stated by the writers themselves (like... for example Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes), I am not gonna get interested in such behind the scenes theories. Moreover, I think there is this idea going on in the fandom that Jaune has been somehow "downgraded" from MC and is now a secondary character. Well, imo this is simply wrong, he is a MC/deuteragonist and his importance is not less than the beginning. It is just this is an ensembled cast, so he has to share focus. His arc and story is still one of the most important in the series.

Oscar's introduction and story work for several reasons and I think he was always meant to be put in the narrative. His existence is foreshadowed since ep 2/3 when Blake speaks about a man with 2 souls. His story strongly parallels Ruby and they comment each other's arcs. I think the writers stated that since Jaune was growing they wanted a new newby that could give a fresh perspective on the other characters and the conflicts they were going through. Finally, his own allusion sets him up to be introduced later on. Princess Ozma/Tip is a key character in the Oz series, but she doesn't appear in the very first book. So, it makes sense for Oscar to appear after the first arc as the 8th true MCs after Pyrrha's death.

In short, I think the idea of having Oz reincarnate in Jaune is interesting and would bring a very complex dynamic and different plot-points and arcs for the characters. However, this is clearly not what the story wanted to do. Jaune and Oscar's arcs are similar, but different and both are important for the story... Having Oz reincarnate into Jaune would simply be a completely different series :) I also think it is totally fine for people to speculate and headcanon, though!

Thank you for the ask!

#rwby #megashadowdragon #asksfullofsugar #jaune arc #oscar pine

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roosterbruiser · 7 months

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i saw the ask that you literally just posted, where you said that in your novel camp arcadia is going to be in missouri. and i seriously got so excited because i’m also from missouri!! i currently live in nebraska though (which is 10x more humiliating trust me) but i genuinely feel like there’s so many areas of the state that will be very fitting for the story. is there a specific real life place it will be set in?

omg bestie!! that is so amazing!!

luckily I'm close enough to a big city to always just say that I'm from there versus somewhere in the middle of nowhere!! and also Nebraska.....ouch. but Lady Gaga sings about Nebraska in You & I and that's like her best song!! so that slays!!

so the story will include flashbacks to when Willie (Gale) is young and the flashbacks take place in Lone Jack, Missouri in the mid-70s. so it's pretty underdeveloped and impoverished!

the main storyline will take place in a fictional town called Red Bud that is on (the very real) Ozark Plateau! couldn't base it in MO without adding in the Ozarks, could I? lol

#millie mail #cruel summer

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dumbassacademia · 9 months

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This is a very random peeve of mine but it irritates me greatly when maps that include the Ozarks (whether actually a map Of the Ozarks or region maps or whatever) cut off a Huge chunk (I’m talking 1/2-2/3) of the Missouri part of the ozarks

Ik a lot of people think Arkansas when they think Ozarks but Missouri is literally the biggest part of it and I’m sick of maps doing it as like, equally distributed with Arkansas when it is objectively not? Like bro are you really forgetting about pretty much the entire fucking Salem Plateau?

Also, frankly, I just don’t want to be lumped in with Northern Missourians

#ozarks #this is pointless btw #Missouri #dumbass academia #I just get annoyed #and don’t get me wrong I know that regions can have multiple names #Missouri is overall part of the larger Midwest region #and if you’re just doing that and moving on then okay fine #but if you’re doing a more detailed regional map and you Include the ozarks #you’re wrong and dumb and I hate you #jk I don’t hate you and you’re not necessarily dumb but you’re definitely wrong #also some people do add even smaller regions that can cause overlap but I don’t mind that as much #but like #personally I live in the kind of cusp between the ozarks and the Great Plains #but if you asked me which one I was in I’d absolutely say Ozarks first #like just #do not talk to me about corn and soybeans and shit #I mean don’t talk to me about those things anyway bc monoculture is a scam #but seriously #this is relevant to only very few people #but if you have any interest in regions and shit #Please look up an actual map of the ozarks instead of just going off of what some color coordinated map made in MS Paint says #just a thought #💖#I’ll stop now #I got really worked up and I needed to vent this out idk

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kamreadsandrecs · 11 months

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By Sue Halpern

To evaluate the books in question, the school administration appointed a set of committees, which eventually recommended that four of the books remain on the shelves: “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Homegoing,” “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto.” The committees also recommended that the other twelve books be “retained with restrictions,” meaning that they would not be shelved openly and could be checked out only with parental permission. But that, it turned out, was not the end of it. The women who initiated the book-removal requests appealed three of the committees’ recommendations. The seven-member school board would have to decide if “Fun Home” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” both queer coming of age memoirs, and “Homegoing” a multigenerational novel about the ramifications of the slave trade, would be allowed to remain in the high-school library. That decision, which was to be announced at a school-board meeting, would be final.

#books #education #politics #censorship

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