Lost River - Karst Information Portal

Falls at the age of six, it was paradise. It was real
caves and real cavers.
The mules never made it up to the hayloft
in the barn, so rolling out a sleeping bag there
provided good sleeping in the summer. The
Chapel had a wood stove. It made for good
sleeping in the winter. One day The Chapel
disappeared. The Chapel had a wood stove.
We would spend the days caving, surveying,
or digging in the various sinkholes. In the
evenings we would sit around a fire and swap
opinions, theories, and stories. The topics
ran the gamut from the virtues of kneepads
in Wayne’s crawl, to the virtues of aluminum
flywheels in Volkswagens, to various methods
of removing the virtue from members of the
opposite gender.
Dick Blenz owned the barn and the
surrounding 50 acres, including the entrance
to Buckner Cave. He lived in Griffith, Indiana,
in the northern end of the state and commuted
to his property almost every weekend. He
would frequently bring a mob including Jim
Rodemaker, Phil King, Craig Rohrsen, Ron
Martel, and others from Windy City Grotto.
Bill Mixon, Dick Flagel, and Marsh Kevit
would drive down. To our high school gang
they were the older guys in their early twenties.
Bill soon became “Uncle Willie” to us. Marsh
became my mentor. One of the pioneers of cave
radio, he was an electrical engineer, a genius
who could talk intelligently and in depth about
any subject that I could bring up. In addition
to the Windy City regulars, one weekend a
month, the grotto would have a novice trip to
Indiana.
We installed a wall to convert the northern
half of the main floor of the barn into an
insulated room. We poured a concrete floor
and insulated the ceiling, covering the
insulation with old aluminum plates from an
offset printing press. We gathered up a bunch
of old mattresses and created a field house.
Then one weekend it arrived—The Blenz Water
Heater. The thing had a large steel bowl on top
leading into a spaghetti of pipes, valves, electric
elements, a radiator, and a fan. A scientific and
technological marvel, it could heat a block of
The Barn
ice to boiling in 20 or so microseconds and
probably dimmed the runway lights at the
nearby Bloomington Airport when fired up.
The wonder of technology that it was became
secondary to many of us. We simply did not
need the Chapel and its rogue woodstove any
more on cold winter nights.
Warren Lawton and his younger son, Leigh,
came almost every weekend for several months
and worked at digging through the top of the
breakdown at the end of Buckner’s entrance
room. The theory being that the breakdown
was caused by a Civil War era blast that may
have sealed some saltpeter mining stuff in the
passage beyond. Good theories can sucker in
lots of labor. He moved several tons of rock
but never got through. A subsequent ground
resistivity study several years later shows an
anomaly where the passage should be, so that
peach may still be there for the pickin’. At least
that’s the theory.
The road between the barn and the end
of Eller Road would become a true slime hole
almost every time it rained. We became very
proficient at almost every technique of getting
vehicles buried up to their axles in the mud
unstuck. Dick would dig drainage troughs in
vain attempts to empty the ruts and expedite
drying. One Sunday, on his way out, Warren
shoved some cash into Dick’s hand and said,
“Get some gravel on this road.” Dick did. It took
a couple of months for the mud to swallow the
stones and return to its slimy rutty ways.
One of Dick Blenz’s many attributes is
his easygoing live-and-let-live philosophy. I
remember well the one and only time I ever
saw him thoroughly and completely pissed off.
Windy City Grotto was having its monthly
novice trip to Bloomington, so there was quite
a lively group on site. We had had a fun trip
to Cave River Valley, near Campbellsburg,
Indiana, that Saturday and were back at the barn.
We built a campfire in front of the barn under
the hay hood and spent the evening discussing
all sorts of virtues. Now admittedly, several of
us were partaking of fermented beverages, so
the discussions of virtues became louder and
louder. Dick was trying to sleep in the hayloft
243