Tarkiln Cave
The idea for my novel, THE CAVE came to me as a direct result of my experiences in Tarkiln
Cave, a large 2-mile long cave near
the northeastern Kentucky town of Olive Hill. I became acquainted with Tarkiln
by accident. It was the spring of 1988
and I had just finished writing my history of the C-130 tactical airlfft
mission. My (now ex-)wife and the children had
become interested in caves the previous summer when they met caver Don Kemper at
a church camp. I was too
busy - and not too interested - to become involved myself at the time, but after
I finished the book and with some time
on my hands I decided to take the plunge and find out what was so fascinating
about caves. My experiences started
out with a trip through Bat Cave in Carter Caves State Park at the annual
"Crawlathon" in late January.
We learned about Tarkiln completely by accident.
No one in the ESSO Grotto, which we had recently joined,
had ever mentioned it. But one day we stopped at Charlie Burchett's store on the
way home from the park. There
we met a young man named Robbie and when we mentioned that we had been caving,
he told us that there was a
really big cave on his grandfather's farm. This caught our interest. Robbie gave
us his phone number and we called
him and made arrangements to go see the cave. We also called some ESSO members
and Larry Matiz and Brian
Bain accepted the invitation. Robbie had given us directions to the farm and we
met up with him there. The cave
turned out to be everything he had described, though there were - and still are
- some stories about secret rooms,
etc. that didn't check out with our later explorations. Brian was a student at
Marshall University in Huntingon, WV at
the time and was heavily involved with the NSS. He decided that since the cave
had never been completely mapped,
it would make a good project for him. He and my wife made the majority of the
survey trips, while I was along
when I could go and Steve Duncan became involved in the final mapping. The
survey showed that the cave was a
little more than 2 miles long, with parallel passages that had been cut into the
side of the hill under which the cave runs.
One passage is dry but the second and third are usually wet - and there is
evidence that the whole cave will flood
during periods of heavy rain.
Tarkiln has a history - in ESSO grotto in the late 1980s it
was looked on as sort of "a mystery cave." There were a lot of
rumors about it. The cave is somewhat isolated in that it is in a valley some
distance from pavement, although there
are gravel roads within a mile or less. The cave has been known locally for
decades, and probably since the eighteenth century. A few hundred feet from the resurgence is an elevated
level with a pit entrance above it that has been
used in the past to store potatoes, and a family lived there during the
depression. At least one local boy hid out in the
cave to avoid the draft, probably during World War II. There are rumors of
hidden treasure. The cave itself has a
somewhat gloomy atmosphere that caused my oldest son, who was an officer on a
nuclear submarine, to decide
he didn't like caving anymore. He was about 12 at the time. The cave has been the
scene of two dramatic incidents in recent years. In the mid-90s an escapee from the local jail
made his way to the cave and hid in it until he was
discovered by a deputy. There was a shoot-out in the cave but no one was injured
and the convict was apprehended.
In July, 1998 Tarkiln was the scene of
a tragic triple-murder. Three local young men went out for a joy
ride in the woods on their three-wheelers and apparently decided to go into the
cave. They evidently ran into a local
man who was on probation for a minor offense in Ohio where he lived, but had
fled the state and returned to Kentucky. He is believed to have somehow overpowered the three men, tied
them up then took them outside the cave
and shot them each in the back of the head and left them in the creek at the
entrance. State Police and other authorities came to the cave after the men were missed and the bodies
were found. The alleged murderer took his own
life with a shotgun blast on the hillside above the cave a few days
later.
Tarkiln served as the inspiration for the cave that formed
in my head as I was writing The
Cave, the novel about the Vietnam
War. I had some old survival maps like the ones I had carried in my survival
vest when I was flying the Blind Bat
mission over North Vietnam and Laos in 1966. Whole areas of Laos are marked on
the map as simply "karst." I put the
two together - caving and my Vietnam experiences - and came up with the
book.