He cancelled shows. By 1967, by one estimate, as many as half of his scheduled performances were being called off. At a Carnegie Hall performance in 1962, he had been so impaired that he could only whisper his lyrics. He was arrested in El Paso in October 1965, found carrying 1,163 amphetamine pills in his guitar case; he was suspected of heroin smuggling but faced the lesser charge, received a suspended sentence, and emerged with his public reputation only somewhat damaged.
He was jailed seven times for misdemeanors, each stay lasting one night. He started a forest fire in California’s Los Padres National Forest that burned 500 acres and destroyed part of the habitat of the endangered California condor; he was eventually ordered to pay $82,000 in damages.
None of this was entirely hidden from the public. Some of it was. But within the music industry, within Columbia Records, and among the people who worked with Cash, it was known that he was unreliable, that his health was declining, and that the question was not whether something would have to change but when.
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## The Cave
In 1967, Cash drove alone to Nickajack Cave in Tennessee, near Chattanooga.
Nickajack Cave is a large limestone cave that runs underground for a substantial distance, the kind of place where it is entirely possible to walk far enough in that the light from the entrance disappears and you are in absolute darkness. Cash later described, in his autobiography, that this was his intention: to go in far enough that he would die there, in the dark, unable to find his way out.