100 Miles in 6 Hours

We were cruising down I-65 in Kentucky, headed for Nashville, and for the moment everything was normal. Well, as far as traveling the country in a ’97 Chevy Astro loaded with wigs, beards, dresses, tofu jerky and booze goes. (Ordered in most to least.) Then suddenly, in the middle of snowy, heavy traffic, the van completely conked out. Actually, that is pretty normal.

Yes, old “Red Calf” checked out within a stone’s throw of Horse Cave, Kentucky. We call it Red Calf from an old anagram of Charleston Comedy Fest: Red Calf Costs the Money. The following tale will do no harm to that association.

I have no idea, however, why they call it Horse Cave. In fact, neither do they. In their informational pamphlets, it says “no one actually knows how Horse Cave got its name” where there should be a clever anecdote. An explanation of a name that consists mostly of explaining that there is no explanation is, on the scale of dumb, somewhere between using a word to define itself and naming an eatery The No Name _________ [noun]. I’m sorry, but where I come from, a name contains a name. And that’s Boca Raton, aka “Mouth of the Mouse.”

The pamphlet went on to suggest that perhaps the entrance to the famed local cave was large enough for a horse to pass through. But by that rationale, the town could just as easily be named “Floor Lamp Cave,” “TV Cabinet Cave,” or “Upright Mattress Cave.” By the way, I’m writing from a hotel room. I at least expected that the town was named by the bastardization of some local indigenous lore, a culture preserved and honored in the truck stop where we’d been towed to with a selection of, as Yogurt says in Spaceballs, “moichandise!” This included brown skinned and otherwise Aryan featured baby dolls in plastic buckskin, shrink wrapped and made in China. You could also buy tiny tomahawks armed with plastic moulds of rodent jawbones. Clearly, from Boca.