Trevor Nourse - The Tiniest Light in the Night

 

 

Three of us went into the cave that day. Yeah. I get a little fuzzy on details, but I know Jamie was there, because he's the one who threw the rock. I know my friend Terry was there, because he kept going on about his watch. My friend Terry was a techie before that was really a thing. He had just gotten this new watch. Timex had come out with this Indiglo watch line. This watch had this new cool feature. You hit a button and it lit up this fluorescent bluish green color. 

 

A funny thing. I told some kids this story and they all wanted to know, did the watch have GPS or [audience laughter] could you play games on the watch? [audience laughter] No, it was the 1980s. The watch lit up. That's what it did. [audience laughter] They weren't impressed. But we thought it was cool. Since I was the only one who had been into the cave before with the older kids, I had the flashlight and I led the way. 

 

Now, the entrance to the cave was a rite of passage all on its own. It was less than 30 inches in diameter. It was a 40-foot claustrophobic crawl that not everybody could make. But for those who did, it was worth it, because it then opened up into this massive ballroom sized cavern. It had all these connecting tunnels that led to other caverns. There was a steep drop section with a shallow ledge that forced you to hug the wall as you maneuvered across. There was even an underground river. 

 

We had made it just about that far when we started to hear noises. We heard these squeaking, scratching, rustling noises. So, I shined my light towards the sound in the ceiling. And there were bats. There were 50 bats, 100 bats. There could have been a thousand bats [audience laughter] hanging from the top of that cave. That's when Jamie threw the rock. [audience laughter]

 

Now, I don't know if Jamie actually hit a bat, but he might as well have, because those bats got pissed, [audience laughter] and those bats descended into that cavern like a big black bat tornado. I don't know where I got the thought, I don't know if I read it in a book or if I heard it in a movie, but my only thought was that bats attack the hair of the head. And so, I fell to the ground and I threw my hands up to protect my head. Somewhere in the midst of all of that bat frenzy attack, yelling, screaming, calamity and commotion, [audience laughter] I dropped the flashlight. [audience laughter] It went out and it was dark. It was pitch black, jet black. It was deathly black. 

 

Now, apart from being home to some of the most magnificent cave systems in the world, a lesser-known fact about South Central Kentucky, is that it's also full of ghosts. [audience laughter] The ghost of a well to do southern debutante who in her vanity and anger cursed the sky and God above and was struck down by lightning. The ghost of a freed slave who was killed in a clearing at the end of a dirt road in the old county. 

 

On one of my earlier forays into the cave, the older kids had told me another ghost story. They told me a story about an awkward, shy boy named Lonnie, who was lured into the cave by some of the older kids of his day, kids who played a prank, a prank that went tragically wrong. According to the legend, Lonnie never made it out of that cave. [audience laughter] 

 

It was right then, with my head full of ghost stories, that something appeared before me there in the darkness. I seen a face floating there in the darkness, and I was frozen stiff and I reeled back in shock when the face spoke. What the face said was, “You dropped the flashlight in the river.” [audience laughter] I had three reactions, the first of which was confusion, followed quickly by realization and relief. I was relieved when I realized that the face that I saw there floating in the darkness was not the face of the ghostly face of a boy named Lonnie, but the face of my friend Terry, illuminated by the glow of the Indiglo watch. [audience laughter] [audience applause]

 

It would be eight years before I would become a soldier in the United States Army and get the kind of night navigation training I could have used that day, [audience laughter] but I'd get a crash course, because the light of the watch only allowed us to see a few feet in front of us, so we were forced to crawl most of the way, clutching tightly to each other's belt loops. We encountered several creepy crawlers. It took us twice as long to get out as it did to get in. But we were able to find our way out of the darkness by the light of the Indiglo watch. [audience laughter] [audience applause]

 

And our adventures didn't end there at the cave. There would be many more close calls and narrow escapes, but somehow, we managed to survive those restless and reckless Southern Kentucky summers. I don't know if there ever really was a boy named Lonnie, but if there was, I hope he found his guiding light as well. Thank you.