Cave Walk
It is a story or two, this mouth, open always, but never in anticipation. It is a cavern, shale stacked and careening sharply into the curvature above. Blushing moss, the mouth beckons into the tunnel, over a mile long, perforating Afton Mountain. Once it was for trains, now it’s for my eyes to adjust to the reality of unknown things. Or really, to adjust to what is always present, but what must be experienced with skills summoned in silence. It is quiet in the cave, a primordial buzz of water and air scores the journey from one side to the next.
Step after step, you are transcending the light that consumed you before entering, and for a while you are in the process of disappearing. Your skin puttering out as the last rays of sun find flesh out of reach. Eventually you stop looking at what you are. Others cannot see you without a headlamp or a flashlight, no matter how close they venture, and this makes it all awake. Every version of you, many falling behind, not needed like a winter coat as we shift to spring.
There is the smell of wilderness and the rain water percolating over stone face, shaping it into sculpture, made mostly for the mind, made mostly for support. The small resistance of erosion over two hundred some odd years of tunnel time is inspiring. It’s almost ancient, what has kept this all from collapsing on your head. But smell. Sommalier subtle, but not aloof, a smell for all us animals emerging from our own space into the collective one. So much potential exposed in emptiness, so great the expanse that you can only move with feeling. Feeling is the only way to know if progress is being made.
The slow sureness of your foot is more of a lie than the alabaster wind at your cheek, warmer than the air already inside the tunnel. In total black, you are a whiter shade of pale, shaking away the fear of fact here that everything is unknown. Noticeably, you must put one foot in front of the other, wise or not, to filet the darkness with your being, anchored only by the pinhole of light seeping through at the other end. What you always knew, arrives doubly true. Your humanity is magnetized to light.
In a moment of weakness, after my brother stepped in a pothole and almost fell into the cave wall, his phone was used to illuminate our area. We could see the lamp of another party, but our light did not reach their silhouettes, dancing further along in time. They were our future, closer to the next light. Our light revealed twin ditches running along either side of the black path, rippling with crystal spring water, reflecting pools for the rare light that could be generated so far in.
These feet did not feel like they were falling. They felt like they were tracking as a dog on the trail of a scent, an exciting lead to somewhere. You lead somewhere. Foot heaving up for a tender placement down, in case of uneven terrain or water, both of which are present and plenty.
In true cave style, every surface was glistening in our artifice, the iPhone light impacting all, still made in scale so small. Every step brought us closer to thinking about nothing but the present light. We agreed we don’t want it to be like the womb, where many were already poisoned. This dark space has been recovered, reclaimed, into nothing. Nothing for you to enter into. A grand entrance it is.
