Kimmswick

Walking over the underground before it walks over you.

There is a salamander so rare, you can find it only in the Ozarks. It is born wide-eyed and willing, eager to explore its surroundings: blue streams, green forests.

One day, the salamander wanders into a crack in the earth. This is the most fateful decision it will make. The world darkens, but the salamander keeps going: down, down, down, until no light remains. Over time, its skin begins to mutate. A film grows over its eyelids and fuses them shut.

The salamander is now blind. But it does not know. It will live, and die, in the eternal darkness of a subterranean cave.

I spent No Kings Day in a cave because I wanted to see the salamander. But I also wanted to ensure no film comes to cover my own eyes. A cave 250 feet underground has no cell service and no surveillance. It has no AI or GPS. Lone light shines from lanterns held by humans. They reveal a labyrinthine land of stone, not dead but slow growing. I go to caves to reset my senses. They show me the peace I am missing.

On the drive to the Ozarks, I saw a photo on social media. A protester held a handmade sign with a warning I wrote years ago: “THIS IS A TRANSNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATE MASQUERADING AS A GOVERNMENT.”

I’ve seen these words on signs for nearly a decade. In Trump’s first term, they were plastered around St. Louis by activists from the local Indivisible group. Now they’ve been revived. I’m glad people read my words, but I wish they didn’t still resonate. I want my books housed under “History” instead of “Current Events.” I want my warnings to be heeded and an alternate America to emerge: the America we deserve.

That outcome looks less likely each year. Time is the autocrat’s weapon: that’s why DOJ lackeys crowing “Be patient” were integral to mafia state rule. Officials knew what Trump was before they let him in, in part because he wouldn’t stop telling everyone. The remedy lay not only in exposing Trump but stopping the forces behind him. No one in power wanted to do that, for it would reveal institutional complicity.

As I wrote in January, “The most important thing about the election is not that Trump was proclaimed the winner, but that he was allowed to run.”

Despite my own ominous message, I was heartened to see the sign. I am grateful for the protesters: their refusal to abide tyranny and genocide, their insistence that immigrants and migrants be protected, their creativity and defiance. Protesting is honorable. Protests show the magnitude of dissent and shape new alliances.

Protests matter in their own right. But in the 21st century, protests have not brought policy change. Americans have never protested so much yet gained so little leverage. This is not the fault of protesters but of the multifaceted mafia state.

“No Kings” is a misnomer. Trump is not in charge. A birthday with a military parade gives the trappings of a king. But Trump is only the frontman for transnational organized crime. That’s all he ever was or will be.

Trump did not rise to this position alone. US officials have grown a second skin, one that seals their eyes and their deals and their documents. They entered the darkness of the mafia state and did so knowingly. Had they not, Trump could have never run in 2016 or in 2024. Party allegiance indicates whether a US official acts as an abuser (GOP) or an enabler (Democrat). But when they speak, it is often with one voice.

Now that voice is calling for war. This is another reason I descend beneath the earth.

US officials want war with Iran. They want it because Israel wants it and they do what Israel says. Israel has been planning to strike Iran since 2024: a timeline which makes Kamala Harris’s rehabilitation of Iraq warmongers look less like a campaign and more like an audition, and November resemble less an election than a selection.

Trump showed his willingness to abet an Iran War in his first term. The only question for Iran warmongers was whether they would rather have an ambitious bureaucrat like Harris or put up, again, with Trump’s mercurial grift.

The notion of not having an Iran War is dismissed. Israel is the main instigator but not the only one. The military-industrial complex wants war, apocalypse fiends want war, and alphabet agencies have had an Iran grudge since before I was born.

I don’t like comparing US officials to an Ozark blind salamander, because it is insulting to the salamander. But US officials have been obeying and abetting so long that they don’t remember what it’s like to see the world for what it is — or realize that we can see them for what they are, too.

* * *

The cave opening was a third of a mile into the woods. We gathered at the trailhead as the guide detailed our journey. It was rare for Cathedral Cave to be open. So rare that I, a cave connoisseur, had never been inside.

There were about twelve of us: my husband and kids, a few couples, and some folks from India who had never seen a cave. Everyone was excited that their first time would be in Missouri. A man in a Cardinals T-shirt asked me where I lived. When I said “St Louis”, he gave me the eye reserved for city folk.

“I’m from Kimmswick,” he said. A town of 134 people.

“Home of the levee-high pie!” I exclaimed. “I ate that pie, that big huge apple pie. And you have the apple butter festival! And the strawberry festival. We tried to go once, but it was too crowded.”

“The strawberry festival.” The man shuddered. “Don’t get me started. We get out of town for that. Stay and it’s 45 minutes to drive half a mile.”

“You had some hard years with the floods, right? 2019, 2022.” Canceled events, sandbags on riverbeds.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “We need that festival. The apple butter one too.”

“Once,” I said, “We went to Kimmswick without even knowing it was Deer Widow’s Weekend. My husband spent the whole time wandering around like, ‘Why am I the only man in town?!”

Everyone laughed. Later in the cave, the man in the Cards shirt helped a one-armed man make his way down the slippery paths, ensuring he was safe.

“Did everyone get bug spray?” asked our guide, a peppy parks ranger. “The ticks are bad this year. And there’s that new tick, the really bad one. The one that makes you allergic to meat.”

Everyone gasped. Here was a Missouri tragedy.

“Is that real?” asked my son. “All meat? Even hot dogs?!”

“It’s real,” the guide confirmed. “Allergic to all meat. Except fish and chicken, but those don’t count. I know someone who got bit. She’s a vegan now.”

We gasped again. Someone grabbed the spray and began frantically reapplying.

“Now there’s a shame,” said the Cardinals man.

“Poor thing,” a woman murmured.

“OK!” said the guide after a moment of silence for the tragic vegan. “We’re going to hike to the cave. Does everyone have their lanterns?”

We held up our “lanterns,” which were flashlights, but we liked the delusion. Cathedral Cave used to be a show cave when it was owned by Lester Dill, who also owned its neighbor, Onondaga Cave. I wrote about Dill in my book The Last American Road Trip, for he was a quintessential American: the inventor of the bumper sticker and tacky PR stunts, and an environmentalist who spent his final years saving Missouri’s caves and rivers from destruction. Dill led a life of wild contradictions: like his state, like his country.

In the 1930s, Cathedral Cave was a show cave with electricity. When the electricity broke in the 1970s, and thieves stole the copper wire, Dill decided not to fix it, but instead make Cathedral a “wild cave” lit by lantern. Missourians excel at transforming laziness and destruction into entertainment.

At the end of the trail stood a moss-covered concrete cube with a padlocked door. Here our guide showed us photos of the blind salamander, talking him up like a long-lost friend. She noted he had been hard to spot, but we should give a holler if he appeared. She gave the requisite warnings about not touching cave formations and urged us to protect bats vulnerable to white nose syndrome. I have heard these warnings for decades, but I never tire of them, because they mean someone cares.

She unlocked the door. A blast of cool air initiated our descent. We climbed into Cathedral Cave, navigating puddles and switchbacks. The railing was gritty from age but the formations dazzled, indifferent to time. Stalactites glistened with pearls of water: the ceiling lived. The guide noted that caves are impervious to earthquakes and other natural disasters. Stromatolites outlast everything: they are older, she said, than the rings of Saturn. It would take a deliberate act of man to destroy the underworld.