One of the great joys of writing novels is the rabbit hole experience. Over the years, I’ve spent hours learning about the history of pockets in women’s clothing, the 1930s line-up at the Grand Ole Opry, the 1885 cholera outbreak in Spain, and adorable microscopic creatures called water bears. None of these things ever ended up in a novel, but they made for interesting afternoons.
Sometimes a rabbit hole really earns its keep, though. I started working on my new novel, Ruby Falls, after I’d visited the real Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, Tenn., and I’d gotten hooked on the idea of an underground world inside of a mountain. I’d also fallen in love with the true story of Leo Lambert, who crawled for seventeen hours through a narrow slot in the rock to be the first human being to ever lay eyes on a hidden waterfall and then named it for his wife, Ruby.
I knew I wanted to set a book during the early Depression-era days after Ruby Falls was discovered, with Leo and Ruby as part of the backdrop. I knew, too, that I wanted my main character to be a woman who didn’t fit the expected template of wife and mother but who found she fit perfectly in the dark mazes of the caves.
So I had characters and a setting, but—glaringly—no plot. And then one afternoon when I was supposed to be working on something entirely different, I started googling women cavers. (Googling is essentially a synonym for rabbit-holing.)
I found Katie Stabler almost immediately on the National Parks Service Web site: born in 1872, Katie grew up exploring Wind Cave in South Dakota with her father and siblings, carrying twine to tie around rocks so they wouldn’t get lost and developing a code of knocks to communicate between different underground chambers.
She was eighteen when she started working as a guide—the first woman tour guide in the area—and she kept the job until 1902. She sat down to write her memoirs in 1941, and they’re full of fascinating bits—her mother’s near death of poison ivy, an encounter with Sitting Bull, blizzards and floods and clouds of grasshoppers and hailstones so big they bruised her hands.
I caught my breath, though, at the first mention in those memoirs of Mr. Johnstone, a celebrated mind reader who came to South Dakota to show off his supernatural powers by finding a pin head in the miles of underground caves.
Katie’s pages got crazier as soon as the mind reader came into the picture, with passages like this description of Johnstone taking the reins of a wagon:
Mr. Johnstone drove the twelve miles of very bad roads in forty-five minutes. This drive usually took us one and a half to two hours to drive. One of the horses dropped dead….I saw the horse drop. As he [Johnston] entered the hotel he took a razor from my brother’s hand (my brother was shaving my father) and shaved a few stokes. We all looked scared to death.”
I gobbled up Stabler’s account, and then I went looking for more about Paul Alexander Johnstone. He did indeed come to Wind Cave in June 1893, and he swore he could find a pin head hidden somewhere in the ninety miles of mapped passageways while blindfolded. He gave himself a deadline of twenty-four hours.
Three days later, he and the rest of his party stumbled out, delirious and dehydrated, but Johnstone had found the hat pin. They had been without food and water for days, they said, and wild stories circulated of pistols being drawn and mad ravings and brain fever.
Most interestingly to me, although newspaper articles talked about the men being lost and helpless in the caves, in her memoirs Katie Stabler wrote, “We knew where they were all of the time as we sent a guide a distance behind them in case they should get lost. This guide carried blankets to sleep on and food.”
The story of Johnstone was the true beginning of Ruby Falls. What if that publicity stunt didn’t happen in South Dakota? What if a similar venture—no blindfold, because that was too crazy—had happened in 1930s Chattanooga when desperate times meant it was hard to manage groceries, much less splurge on a ticket to a waterfall?
What if my woman caver were charged with following and protecting a supposed clairvoyant who increasingly seemed to be a madman? Also…what if you threw in a dead body?
Rabbits don’t actually live in holes, you know. They live in burrows, which are interconnecting tunnels, sometimes vast and complicated.
This novel taught me that diving deep isn’t the only way to research: you can wander around a while. You can twist through various decades and cross state lines, skipping from story to story. You can stop to consider dead horses and brain fever, collecting your favorite pieces before you head back up and see what shape they take when you resurface.
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