Cemetery Deer

What is it with deer? They're stalking me. Everywhere I go nowadays, I encounter deer, even in the city. I never used to see them so often, not even when I lived in the wilderness of Waco, KY - with the sole exception of the now-infamous "Devil Deer" incident.

But now I see them everywhere (to quote Hank Thompson) and they're popping up in urban settings with greater frequency as mankind continues to encroach on what dwindling wild space is left to them. One even barged into the Middletown Fresh Market a few months ago.

And last fall (holy moley - I just checked and it was exactly a year ago today and I didn't even realize it when I started writing this. Now that's weird!) I was driving Westbound on I-64 at night through Franklin County, and ran over an enormous deer. I didn't run into it, I ran over it. Now, the impact was great, to be sure, but aside from a really skull-joggling staccato double-WHAM!! as each set of tires bounced over the unfortunate buck, it was relatively untraumatic. I have pretty darn good reflexes, or so I like to flatter myself, and managed to keep the car straight and continue driving with relative calm.

It wasn't until I got home that it really started sinking on me how incredible the whole thing was. It's like in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson look at the bulletholes in the wall behind them and can't figure out why they aren't dead. I kept picturing - and still picture to this day - the frozen-in-time snapshot my mind took of the moment just before impact. The deer's considerable rack should have been run over by my driver-side tires, and it's a minor miracle that my tires weren't punctured by them.

But then it's a major miracle that I'm even alive at all. When I tell the story to people, many have been incredulous - "you ran over a deer in a Volvo station wagon and didn't wreck? Is that even possible?" I admit it doesn't sound possible at all, and yet it happened. And all I lost was a muffler.

I recently saw a news story where a Brownsville man driving one of those monster-sized heavy-duty pickup trucks collided with a deer in Grayson County. If any vehicle could squash a deer, you would expect it would be one of those, right? Nope. The impact sent him flipping over repeatedly, totalling his vehicle.

And just this past weekend, someone died in a deer collision in Harold, KY (Floyd County).

The statistics for deer/vehicle impact fatalities are so grim that a number of organizations exist to monitor the problem, such as Deer Crash.



Anyway, I said all that to say all this: I was in Louisville's Calvary Cemetery the other day, and came face to face with Bambi. We stared each other down for a couple minutes before the little doe decided she didn't want her picture taken.

Cub Run Cave

In 1950, two young boys in Cub Run, KY made an intriguing discovery: a small hole in a rock outcropping was emitting freezing cold air.

Their suspicions that they'd discovered a cave were confirmed as they hacked apart the rocks to make the hole big enough to crawl into. They found themselves in a mud-filled passageway, and crawled 60 feet further to find the tunnel opened up into a large chamber with more passages going off into darkness.

Excitedly, they went back to tell everyone what they'd found. Unfortunately, you can always leave it to grown-ups to screw up a good thing. The underground cave system sprawled beneath more than one person's property, and a bitter dispute between landowners erupted. Unable to come to any agreement on how to share the cave, they instead sealed it back up and put it out of their minds for the next 55 years.

Thankfully, Cub Run Cave was finally reopened and made available to the public in 2006. It's one of only four caves in the United States to have a rare formation called "Box Work", and hosts a plethora of critters such as cave crawfish, lizards, cave crickets and three different species of bats.

See more images of Cub Run Cave here.

Cave Popcorn

Found this in a Google search for Kentucky + alien.

Though it does indeed look like some sort of alien brain, it's actually a coralloid formation known amongst spelunkers as Cave Popcorn. Cave Popcorn can range from small, delicate and fluffy-looking in appearance, to thick and bulbous calcite deposits such as these.

Jellystone, Kentucky?

I don't get why there's a Hanna-Barbera Jellystone Park resort at Mammoth Cave, since the fictional Jellystone of Yogi Bear cartoons was presumably in Wyoming like its satire source, Yellowstone National Park. But that's okay. Like Jack Burton, I was not put on this Earth to "get it".

Kentucky's Eyeless Cave Creatures

The Kentucky cave shrimp, known to biologists as Palaemonias ganteri, is probably our state's most famous weird critter. It's most often referred to in casual company as "blind cave shrimp", but I've always thought of that as something of a misnomer. "Blind" seems to imply that it has eyes that cannot see, but Palaemonias ganteri actually has no eyes at all.

It's classified as a troglobite, which is a term for life forms that have become so adapted to cave life that they couldn't exist anywhere else. A true troglobite is, by definition, eyeless.

Palaemonias ganteri is found only in three places on Earth, all three of which are Kentucky caves. It's been registered as an endangered species since 1983, mainly due to contaminated groundwater. In 1980 a truck hauling deadly cyanide salts overturned on I-65 near Mammoth Cave and very nearly destroyed the entire fragile ecosystem.


In addition to eyeless shrimp, Kentucky caves are very well known for their eyeless crayfish, such as Orconectes pellucidus and Orconectes inermis inermis, as well as other special Kentucky-only crayfish species as Orconectes jeffersoni which can only be found in one place on Earth: Beargrass Creek in Louisville.