Chapter 4 The Cave

The snow was deep –deeper than it looked. The dirt road out to the old farmhouse by the cave entrance had been caulked neatly into the hillside by the drifting snow. Trudging through the drifts was a novelty at first since winter rarely brings a lot to the southern mountains, but soon enough it became “just trudging”. The young man cut across the field, which was easier at first, but worse in the end. The combination of steep hillside and deep snow turned the trudging into crawling.

“This is just plain stupid”, he thought.

He looked back across the field to his grandmother’s house and there was a good smoke coming from the chimney. On the ridgeline beyond her house a farmer was in his barn loft throwing down hay for cattle. It had taken over a half an hour and he’d not covered a half a mile. Still, he was well over midway to the cave and the snow depth was seeming to lessen as he came round to the north side.

On the north side, the wind was combing the sea of broom sedge into whispering blond waves. In the east, the sun was chiseling cracks in the clouds here and there only for the wind to quickly, without effort, re-seal them. Before long the young man was standing at the mouth of the cave. Snow had almost half filled the deep, funnel shaped depression in the hillside that peeked into constant darkness.
Without much thinking, he sat down on the edge and easily scooted the 15 feet into the rocky fissure.

The Cave, as his family referred to it, had been a treasure for generations –a source for water, a natural refrigerator to store milk, a root cellar, an escape from July heat on a Sunday afternoon. The Cave is a permanent heirloom. It would be there long after the old home place would be a pile of lumber and tin riddled by corruption. Long after most could guess the purpose of implements like a tobacco spear, a froe, or a swingle tree. Long after the ghost stains on granny’s quilts could still speak their stories. The Cave would reach deep into the darkness beneath memory as time carries all things to dissolution and silence.

Inside the cave the young man dusted himself off and dug the snow out of his boots. Right away he was happy to be out the wind. The cave felt warm by winter standards. He loaded his lantern with carbide and water, stuck the flint and also made sure his small backup flashlight was working. Soon he had shadows cowering behind rock tumbles, in cracks and cervices, beneath ledges. The young man hadn’t been in the family cave since he had been permitted to tag along with a group of his uncles and older cousins at a family reunion when he was nine. In his mid-teens, caving became short after-school adventures on the farms near his home. Mostly, to avert boredom.

Why was he here today? He couldn’t answer. Maybe he couldn’t pose the question in a way that had an answer. In terms of knowing, language is often lost over the edge into a dark silence -the dark silence that has no purpose but to exposes the mind to its fettered being. The channel of the cave twisted through limestone tall and narrow in places, or wide and low in others. The senses of distance and time are unmoored from their terrestrial benchmarks and set adrift in a new current. It was a current of unfamiliar forces flowing through a sieve of flesh and bone.

The young man came to a place that was called The Kitchen. He had no idea why it was called The Kitchen, but he remembered it well. The channel that had been following a shallow creek opened into a large room. In size, it was not unlike a room in an ordinary house. He remembered this place because this is where his youthful expedition had ended and turned back. Instead of a continuing channel that allowed a more or less upright passage, the cave became a horizontal slit 2 foot high at most between smooth tablets of stone along the entire back wall. His light would just reach the far end of this crawl space to the lip of the ceiling. He thought about it. Before tackling that long of a belly crawl, the young man looked around the room for another way, poking around in the nooks and crannies. One of the nooks on the left had a low entrance, but was just big enough to squeeze his whole body into. So he did. It was like sitting in a broom closet, a capsule, a cocoon of clay and stone. He looked up. Instead of a ceiling, it was open. He stood up.

The back wall of the closet was open above his chest and a low narrow passage tunneled deeper into the darkness. It was level and the young man pulled himself up and began to crawl. In places the passage was larger, almost large enough to sit up. Sometimes it looked as if the tunnel would end only to make a sharp turn into another closet space with another exit and continue deeper into the heart of the mountain. The walls and floor were muddy and featureless.

After what seemed like the longer half of forever, the young man wormed out of the passage into a large room. The room’s side walls rose like a gothic arch to a rib just beyond the reach of his light. In front of him, a pile of stone ruble rose steeply to form the back wall, but on turning around he became witness to the most stunning mineral architecture he had ever seen. Hundreds, if not thousands of small stalactites dripping from the room’s back wall. Some were no longer than a fingernail and as thin as oat straw. The largest ones were about the length of, but slightly thicker than knitting needles. Colors ranged from the same muddy yellow ochre of the walls to almost transparent. But many were a warm, light ivory that gave the cave wall a striking likeness to the mouth of a monster chained here to gnash and gnaw on the bones of time.

The young man was exhausted from the crawl, but stunned by the pristine state of the formations. Despite the relatively large flow of people the main channel of the cave had seen over the years, he most certainly was one of a very few people to have been in this room. There was no vandalism or other sign of human activity. After studying the array for long while, he knew it was time to leave. He still had plenty of fuel, but it wasn’t endless. As he bent over to crawl back into the tunnel, BAM! He hit his head hard, and solid, on a ledge dropping down from the ceiling. He saw stars –bright ones. It hurt. A lot. Fortunately the light on his headband was only knocked sideways, but undamaged. He staggered back to a pile a small boulders and sat to regain himself. As he leaned back and planted his hand to brace himself…

“Hey! Watch what you’re doin’!”

Understandably startled, the young man reeled and bumped his head on another ledge.

“Yeah, I’m trying to get some sleep down here, so if you don’t mind… Oh. It's you again.”

The voice was somewhat familiar but pain and panic briefly had the better part of his brain functions occupied. Trembling he scanned for the source of the voice with his light.

“Calm down, I am right here -beside you” It was the salamander.

He’d almost forgotten the weird salamander dream by the waterfall. His head was throbbing. There was some blood on his hand, but not that much.

“Does this mean I’m dreaming?” said the young man.

“No, not necessarily, you’ve probably just been knocked unconscious for the moment by that nasty bump, and fall you took.”

The salamander seemed to have grown since he saw it last. Grown quite a bit -maybe 2-3 times larger. It also seemed to have a light about it, not a glow or beam, but a light that came from the inside to the skin, and no further.

“So what is it this time, Mr. Busibody Salamander. More insults? Insults with a pinch of mystery, maybe a dash of sarcasm? A few crumbles of bad advice sprinkled on top. Sara left you know.”

“Well, yes. Sara. Sara is prone to travel. You were afraid of her kitchen you know. Besides, she had other fish to fry. No, I just came to wake you up, otherwise you’ll never meet her.

“Oooww, cryptic metaphors and aphorisms now. Just pile on the hurt."

“Well, you are talking to a salmander.”

When the young man came too. He was in total darkness. Total darkness, as in an endless black hole of darkness. Can’t see the your hand in front of you face darkness. If darkness were an ocean there would be no shores kind of darkness. He was lying flat on his back, his head in a pile of rock. He felt his head –some blood but not that much. His carbide light and headband were missing. Before utter panic set in, he remembered the small flashlight in his pocket. It did work -not that bright but it was a light. He stood up and moved to the tunnel. There was the carbide light. The reflector was broken off and the gas jet plugged with mud. Great. He worked to repair it for a while, but realized the he was wasting time and far worse -light.

He made the return crawl through the tunnel without problem. The light wasn’t great, but adequate. It was just slow. Once he got back to The Kitchen and could stand, he found the flashlight was too weak to cast a beam that he could safely walk upright by. He squatted and began to waddle duck-like back through the labyrinth. Again, it was just slow. Sometimes instead of waddle, he crawled for stretches on hands and knees, through the creek, over rock bars or along narrow ledges. It seemed like hours and still no sign of the entrance. Finally, the channel left the creek and began to climb. First, there was a gray spot. It got larger, then he could feel some cooler, fresher air mixed with the damp earthy must.

The young man pulled himself out of the fissure into the funnel. It was almost dusk, and though in a twilight of shadows, the snow was blinding. Pulling himself up the funnel through the snow was nothing like the sliding down. Many times he lost his footing sliding backwards half his body length or more. By the time he made it to the lip, he was too exhausted to stand and he lay there in the snow without thought or movement -just breathing. Breathing.

Above, the sky was still packed with gray clouds, but just as the sun was to about to set, it cut a narrow slit just over the horizon and flooded the snowy blue hills with waves of electric orange. In no time it was gone and shadow reclaimed the land. His path through the field that morning had almost been blown smooth, and the young man chose to return by the road. It would be longer, but easier.

By the time the he made it to his grandmother’s back gate, it was dark. It wasn’t a wild, untamed darkness. It was a darkness that could be yoked with no more than a thin winter moon over snow covered hills, or a darkness easily fenced with a hayfield sky of dancing summer stars. It was a darkness without deceit unfurling a banner of peace and rest. It was a darkness that impatient spring lovers would gladly share with an infinite choir of frogs.