Holding Hands

There’s one thought I keep returning to: a child could never reach that high. 

The tiny outline of a handprint is easily seven feet in the air, higher even than the largest prints clustered near what might otherwise be called the “top” of the painting--though truly it is too irregular to be labeled so specifically. A beautiful balance of chaos and order.

It is hardly a revelation, the idea that a child’s hand would never be able to press itself to the stone that high up without help. And yet the thought is like a thunderclap inside my head, impossible to ignore.

The highest adult hand paintings are consistent with the span of heights common amongst humans in the neolithic era, which means that in order for the child’s hand to have reached its position, an adult member of their social group must have been holding them up above their head.

My daughter’s laughter rings in my ears as the world goes blurry around us, centrifugal force tugging at my center of gravity. 

“Higher, higher!”

My own laughter makes it difficult to speak. “This is as high as I can get you, chickadee.”

“Then faster!”

I spin faster, and her shrieks of delight ring out through the apartment, her tiny fingers stretching toward the high ceilings.

I take a step back, forcing myself to shift my attention to the painted wall as a whole and judge the best place to take a photo. I nearly have to plaster myself to the opposite wall of the cavern, but I manage to get a few shots that encompass this little piece of history in its entirety. The rest of the pictures are of individual pieces of the wider mural, close-ups of the individual prints that create the whole. I’ve already documented the pictographic images closer to the mouth of the cavern in much the same way, so this is the last part of the job before I evacuate. 

My watch beeps. Thirty minutes left. Just enough time. 

With the analog photos taken, I stow the camera and unwrap the strips of linen from around the main tool for this excursion. Getting the copier set up isn’t all that different from setting up for the tripod photography I used to document the topographical features around the site. The only difference is I cannot walk in front of the lens of the machine while it scans the wall, or the safety protocol will kick in and start the whole process over again. Nobody wants an accidentally--or partially, God forbid--duplicated academic on their hands. 

Framed by the walls of the cavern system’s time-smoothed mouth, the sunset forms a mural of its own against the sky. The faint blue light from the copier’s scan is just enough to illuminate the cave as the sun travels ever lower toward the horizon and the shadows around me grow steadily longer. I still have to move carefully, but it’s enough that I can begin packing up the copier closer to the cavern entrance. The handprint scan is about two thirds of the way complete when my watch beeps again, letting me know I’m halfway through my remaining time. 

I look out to the sunset again, to the massive, empty stretch of rocky coast that reaches up toward where my base camp was just an hour ago. It’s a barren spit of rock--one that no one has bothered to walk in decades, if not centuries. 

This cave system won’t be rediscovered by humanity for another three and a half years--and by then it will be too late. The technology to preserve it in the time they have left just won’t be available.

My watch beeps, more insistently.

We technically have five years until the seas rise to reclaim this place, but I only have fifteen more minutes. And the university won’t be able to afford another trip like this for at least a decade. By then, with all the coordination that these preservation missions require inter-departmentally, it’s all but certain that we won’t be able to come back to this exact spot at an appropriate time. We can’t travel further than fifty years--I’m at the far end of the range already. 

“How long will you be gone?”

I smile reassuringly in the face of my daughter’s pout. “Just two days. You’re going to stay with Auntie Rina until I get back, remember? I thought you were excited.”

“I am,” she huffs, “but that’s so long! It’s like, forever. And Auntie Rina says we can’t even call.”

“That’s true,” I reply easily, hoping the light tone will help distract her from her melancholy, “but I promise I’ll let you know as soon as I’m back. Will that work?”

“Mmmm…okay. Oh!” She jumps up from the kitchen counter, nearly banging her knee, and scampers over to her school satchel. “Wait, wait! Take this with you.” She reaches for me, beckoning demandingly, and I smile to myself as I approach. 

“What is it I’m taking, chickadee?”

“This!” She grabs my hand and presses something smooth and round into my palm, closing my fingers around her. Her smile is wide and missing two teeth as she declares, “We made them in school--it’s good luck!”

The copier chimes cheerily, and a moment later the automated voice informs me, “Scan complete.” 

I straighten up from ensuring the first copier is properly stowed to lean over and check the files that the second one has just finished storing. Everything looks clear--should be no problem to build the carbon-print replica once I hand it over to the restoration department. 

My watch beeps. Five minutes. 

With all my gear back in hand, I make sure to return to my marked entry point and wait.

We call it “shifting”, but it doesn’t really feel like movement at all. More like a swoon: I’m a bit dizzy, my vision flickers, the world starts to tip sideways--and then I’m back.

Back home. 

Almost. 

The ocean is all around me, where a moment ago--a moment and five decades--it had been a rocky beach. The caves I had just been standing in are under a dozen feet of water. 

A soft exhale catches at the edges of my chest as I twist the face of my watch to turn on the beacon. The rest of my team should pick it up in seconds, and send the boat out to our temporary platform within the minute. So much progress…and so much lost. 

I look down at the water. My hand moves to my pocket, to the circular plaster disc I’d kept with me since I left home two days ago. My thumb traces the shape of my daughter’s handprint, frozen in time. 

It’s good luck, she told me.

I heft my equipment bag a little higher, starting to smile as I imagine those cave murals restored. That tiny hand reaching high. 

People have always been people. With any luck at all, we always will be.

Author’s Note: This story involves a fictional excavation site, but was inspired by real archeological discoveries indicating that young children in the paleolithic and neolithic eras did in fact participate in creating some of the iconic cave images of the Stone Age. Below is one of several sources discussing this:

https://www.history.com/news/prehistoric-children-finger-painted-on-cave-walls