A la Node

47 – Cave

The hills rise up out of the plain like soft rumpled blankets thrown over a romping puppy. They are rounded, gentle, convoluted and complex. The dark sultry crevices that branch out into the intimate interior of the landscape hide rivulets of water, streams, pools, humid pockets of hidden space where the stones of the earth were almost obscenely moist and exposed. Those little valleys can seem endless, a fractal boundary of infinite length between forest and home.
That was where the summer dwelt, conserving her warmth in lush green folds. It was in that wet heat we found the little cave, opened by the slipping of stone from the hillside in a high summer downpour. The wound was raw with fresh mud, red clay and dark humus earth, and the cave a ragged black gash dripping with soil-thickened water. How old was I? Old enough to be queasy and fascinated by visceral opening, not so old to find the warm dark valley and its luridly exposed opening carnally suggestive. Old enough to find the prospect of exploring a cave irresistible, not old enough to consider the seeping weight of the hill above and how the weak stones had so recently given way to the rain.

I was old enough to know that I loved Kylie Charles, and not nearly old enough to know what that meant. When we saw the cave, she grabbed my hand and squeezed, transmitting more eloquently than any number of breathless words her delight, her presence beside me, her willingness to be there with me, to be at my side as we entered into the very earth itself. There was a moment of shared vertigo as we stood there on the edge of an adventure that pulled at us with gravitational certainty, and then we climbed, sliding comically across the muddy slope, bracing ourselves against each other only to slide back down again in a heap. We were gloriously smeared and sweaty by the time we made it to the lip of the cavity. Cool musty air floated out of it, it smelled stale and damp.

Kylie stepped into it. She didn’t pause, or take my hand again. She just stepped into the darkness, slipping down and away from me, darkness swallowing her so quickly that I nearly yelled out in surprise. I heard the scraping of her hiking boots receding into the depths. Somehow the fantasy of endless caverns that had sent me running for the ragged hole had not prepared me for an actual cave. That pragmatic part of me had assumed, down below the level of conscious thought, that this would be like all shining promises of exotic adventure: a shallow and predictable thing requiring all the power of imagination to remain entertaining beyond the initial inspection.

Deep in the hillside, a feeble light flickered. Kylie’s keychain flashlight, tiny and dim, but striking in the darkness of the cave. I followed the light.

The cave was narrow, a gap between two masses of stone, the walls uncomfortably close and the floor, such as it was, a foot-grabbing crack. Kylie shuffled ahead of me, her tiny flashlight doing little more than casting outlandish shadows past the silhouette of her curly hair. The crack seemed to go on forever. Where I expected it to close up in front of us in a dead end, it widened slightly, and where I expected it to widen out into a chamber, it narrowed, became an endless cramped and twisting passage.

Where did I lose her? The journey was almost hypnotic, tightly enclosed by damp stone walls illuminated by wild dancing shadows. Around a turn, the light dimmed, disappeared. For a moment, I waited for it to come back, and inched forward, feeling my way along when it didn’t. I didn’t call out to her. We had been silent since entering the cave, holding our voices against the moment we found something amazing in the cavern. I felt ahead of me, expecting to meet her muddy but warm body in the darkness, still not speaking, not wanting the edge of panic to be audible, not wanting to spoil the moment my hands would find her, wrap around her body, pull her against me. There would be a kiss. Deep underground, in pitch darkness, in heavy humid air, I would kiss Kylie Charles.

Around the bend, I found no warm body. I stumbled on, but my hands found only rock, and walls that came close together, too close together. The passage became too tight to move further. I could feel the walls close in ahead of me, there was no space in which to move, in which she could have moved. Panic flowed up from within, and I yelled out for her, my voice sounding weak pitiful, absorbed by the wet stone and lost inches from my lips. I forced my body back the way I had come, desperately feeling in the darkness for some side passage, some hole, some pit. First to explain away the mounting terror at her disappearance, second in hopes of finding her safe and well.

The stone felt too heavy, too tight, breathing became difficult, almost painful. I found myself thrashing at the walls, trying to propel myself back out of the cave in mindless desperation. My feel jammed into the cracks, I forced myself to stop, calm down, take a careful step. Then another careful step.

Daylight shining into the crack was painfully bright and welcome. I scrambled towards it, towards the normalcy of the hot summer day and Kylie, who would be waiting, somehow, outside. Clever Kylie, laughing, fooling me, finding a way out around me so that she could make fun of my childish panic when I finally emerged.

Kylie wasn’t there when I pushed my head out of the crack and took a deep breath of humid living air. She was not in the little valley at all, and she was not in the cave when I plunged back in, screaming out her name, shocked by the impossibly narrow crack that confronted me mere feet into the cave. Not even a cave, just a crack in the hillside, not big enough to accommodate even my skinny frame. Water seeped down the rock, silent in the oppressive heat.