the dark knight rises, a spiral in the sky
Yesterday was one of the coolest days, thanks to the Alamo Drafthouse. I've done some awesome events with this theater over the years. (For heaven's sake I met my spouse at one.) But this was something on a whole new level of amazing.
We drove down to the beautiful new theater on Slaughter Lane to pick up our tickets and board a charter bus. The ever hilarious and fun Henri Mazza lead the adventure, which was extra cool because I think of all the personalities and people I've seen host stuff at the Drafthouse Henri is my secret favorite. So on the bus, we're watching Batman Year One and cruising along until we get off the interstate. Our engine started dying, and there was a five mile stretch where we wondered if we would have to hike out to the caverns. Our driver kept it limping along, sometimes barely 15mph, all the way to the parking lot at Natural Bridge Caverns. We cheered.
Natural Bridge Caverns is probably not my first choice of fun place to visit because quite frankly caves freak me out. The weight of the earth over my head is scary. I have vague memories of going there over twenty years ago in elementary school, but it didn't prepare me for the intense damp. The caves are relatively cool, but the humidity is so high that everything is constantly dripping and slippery. Thank my stars I wore the boots. My glasses kept fogging up.
Getting past the terror, it is eerie and beautiful in there. As well as dark, dark in places and kind of creepy. I can't imagine hunting through this in the dark, squeezing through eleven inch wide passages. We went down 180 feet and walked 3/4 of a mile through the ground.
(A few years ago - hell even a few months ago - I probably would not have been able to do this without hyperventilating and falling over. Achievement unlocked.)
After our sweaty cave adventure, we drank Icees and hung around waiting on our replacement bus to take us over to Bracken Cave nearby. The lovely folks at Bat Conservation International hosted us to tell us some about bats, and the Alamo fed us an amazing meal and there was freeze booze from Bacardi. (Bats, of course.) There was peach soup, little cucumbers tuffed with quinoa and tiny yellow tomatoes, smoked pork wraps, and a pasta salad full of asparagus. But the absolute killer part was the pear and agave tart - it was summer wrapped in pastry and the color of fruit punch and better than anything I've ever baked.
Bracken Bat Cave is home to the world's largest bat colony. There's something like 16 million bats living in this cave, making into a furnace of heat and bodies. It takes four hours for all the bats to exit through the narrow mouth of the sinkhole. That's four hours of a cloud of bats that obscures the sky and shows up on doppler radar and interferes with air traffic in the region.
So as the setting sun disappeared, the high sky turned pale blue and the few clouds were pink and red like cotton candy. The bats started to flicker up and out of their cave. Soon it was a whirling vortex that sounded like a waterfall. The flicker of wings and bodies obscured the ground on the other side of the sinkhole and created clouds in the sky. It was like looking through the rain or underwater, the way the air rippled.
(Do you remember the scene in Fellowship of the Ring, when the cloud comes fast against the wind and it is the spies of Saruman? It was exactly like that.)
I have seen a lot of strange things. I have seen the bats come out from under the bridge downtown, and I've stood in beautiful old places in different countries and on the edge of the Grand Canyon and many places. But hands down, what I watched last night ranks as one of the strangest and most beautiful. Sometimes stray bats would sweep close to us, barely a foot or two away. Part of me wanted to climb down and stand in the center of it, to feel the beating of all those hearts and the wings like a storm.
They came up and up and up and up forever. I saw a handful of albino bats. There were tiny, tiny baby bats. They just kept coming, spinning up in a spiral to gain air and fly to the southeast to begin hunting. They were black stars, rising into the growing darkness. We stayed until it was full night and we could only see them as a smokey shadow against the cloudless sky.
We drove back to Austin, back to the theater with its comfortable seats reserved for us and a hilarious pre-show of epic weirdness. They ran the clip of Gary Oldman reading R. Kelly's memoir twice, and I never get tired of hearing him shout "What up baby?" in that voice of his. Part of our group was a bunch of friends in amazing costumes, including a very sexy shiny Catwoman and a guy dressed as Bane who sat right next to me. He was adorably loud before the show and I just wanted to hug him for making me laugh.
So yeah, after that day, it didn't even matter if the movie was good. Luckily the movie was fantastic. I won't describe too much because not everyone got to see it last night. but I loved it more than I imagined I would and it made me hold my breath at times. The color and the sound of it flooded my brain. Hans Zimmer is Hans Zimmer and the soundtrack was something extraordinary. It's a big sprawling movie, tangled with love and blood.
Now to try and return to my regularly schedule life, for just a few days.
We drove down to the beautiful new theater on Slaughter Lane to pick up our tickets and board a charter bus. The ever hilarious and fun Henri Mazza lead the adventure, which was extra cool because I think of all the personalities and people I've seen host stuff at the Drafthouse Henri is my secret favorite. So on the bus, we're watching Batman Year One and cruising along until we get off the interstate. Our engine started dying, and there was a five mile stretch where we wondered if we would have to hike out to the caverns. Our driver kept it limping along, sometimes barely 15mph, all the way to the parking lot at Natural Bridge Caverns. We cheered.
Natural Bridge Caverns is probably not my first choice of fun place to visit because quite frankly caves freak me out. The weight of the earth over my head is scary. I have vague memories of going there over twenty years ago in elementary school, but it didn't prepare me for the intense damp. The caves are relatively cool, but the humidity is so high that everything is constantly dripping and slippery. Thank my stars I wore the boots. My glasses kept fogging up.
Getting past the terror, it is eerie and beautiful in there. As well as dark, dark in places and kind of creepy. I can't imagine hunting through this in the dark, squeezing through eleven inch wide passages. We went down 180 feet and walked 3/4 of a mile through the ground.
(A few years ago - hell even a few months ago - I probably would not have been able to do this without hyperventilating and falling over. Achievement unlocked.)
After our sweaty cave adventure, we drank Icees and hung around waiting on our replacement bus to take us over to Bracken Cave nearby. The lovely folks at Bat Conservation International hosted us to tell us some about bats, and the Alamo fed us an amazing meal and there was freeze booze from Bacardi. (Bats, of course.) There was peach soup, little cucumbers tuffed with quinoa and tiny yellow tomatoes, smoked pork wraps, and a pasta salad full of asparagus. But the absolute killer part was the pear and agave tart - it was summer wrapped in pastry and the color of fruit punch and better than anything I've ever baked.
Bracken Bat Cave is home to the world's largest bat colony. There's something like 16 million bats living in this cave, making into a furnace of heat and bodies. It takes four hours for all the bats to exit through the narrow mouth of the sinkhole. That's four hours of a cloud of bats that obscures the sky and shows up on doppler radar and interferes with air traffic in the region.
So as the setting sun disappeared, the high sky turned pale blue and the few clouds were pink and red like cotton candy. The bats started to flicker up and out of their cave. Soon it was a whirling vortex that sounded like a waterfall. The flicker of wings and bodies obscured the ground on the other side of the sinkhole and created clouds in the sky. It was like looking through the rain or underwater, the way the air rippled.
(Do you remember the scene in Fellowship of the Ring, when the cloud comes fast against the wind and it is the spies of Saruman? It was exactly like that.)
I have seen a lot of strange things. I have seen the bats come out from under the bridge downtown, and I've stood in beautiful old places in different countries and on the edge of the Grand Canyon and many places. But hands down, what I watched last night ranks as one of the strangest and most beautiful. Sometimes stray bats would sweep close to us, barely a foot or two away. Part of me wanted to climb down and stand in the center of it, to feel the beating of all those hearts and the wings like a storm.
They came up and up and up and up forever. I saw a handful of albino bats. There were tiny, tiny baby bats. They just kept coming, spinning up in a spiral to gain air and fly to the southeast to begin hunting. They were black stars, rising into the growing darkness. We stayed until it was full night and we could only see them as a smokey shadow against the cloudless sky.
We drove back to Austin, back to the theater with its comfortable seats reserved for us and a hilarious pre-show of epic weirdness. They ran the clip of Gary Oldman reading R. Kelly's memoir twice, and I never get tired of hearing him shout "What up baby?" in that voice of his. Part of our group was a bunch of friends in amazing costumes, including a very sexy shiny Catwoman and a guy dressed as Bane who sat right next to me. He was adorably loud before the show and I just wanted to hug him for making me laugh.
So yeah, after that day, it didn't even matter if the movie was good. Luckily the movie was fantastic. I won't describe too much because not everyone got to see it last night. but I loved it more than I imagined I would and it made me hold my breath at times. The color and the sound of it flooded my brain. Hans Zimmer is Hans Zimmer and the soundtrack was something extraordinary. It's a big sprawling movie, tangled with love and blood.
Now to try and return to my regularly schedule life, for just a few days.