Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Walls of the Cave


"I'm leaving you a message,
I'm leaving you a trace,
I'm leaving thoughts for you
I hope that time will not erase.
And when the moment comes
To read the words that I engraved,
You'll find them on the walls of the cave,
Of the cave."

- Phish, "Walls of The Cave"

This past weekend, Jenelle and I went to explore the Cave of the Mounds. The Cave of the Mounds is a local national landmark and park that was surprisingly more impressive than I expected. I had heard of the park since around the time we moved here but just never got around to going to check it out. The caves themselves are between 1 million and 2 million years old but like many natural wonders, these caves were discovered accidentally. There was a long story to describe the history of the caves but to make a long story short, it was found when they were digging for the limestone in the area and when they blasted this area, they were amazed to find this huge series of caves below the ground. If you'd like to see some of the pictures we took, check them out here.

While I was looking through these pictures, this Phish song popped into my head. I'm not nearly the music expert that another particular blogger is, but I thought I'd start this blog post with a little excerpt from this song. Not only am I not much of a music expert, but I'm also not much of a fan of Phish. I probably couldn't even name half a dozen of their songs. But this song is one that stuck with me. Reading the lyrics, it kind of seems like a retrospective on one's life, almost something written with a postmortem perspective. But I also remember that there was a little controversy about the meaning of this song when it came out. An alternate theory held that this song was about 9/11, and the conspiracy theorists held that the abbreviated title for this song (WoTC) could also be an acronym for World Trade Center. I'm not sure if I believe this and I can't find any evidence that the writers of the song had this intent, but its an interesting meaning for the song nonetheless. I'm wondering if the people that believe this latter meaning of the song are also the ones playing Beatles records in reverse listening for hints that Paul McCartney was really dead.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The other particular blogger doesn't know this song. He will have to check it out. He's not a huge Phish phan, but has heard their bluegrass cover of "Gin & Juice" which is brilliant.