No Light in the Cave

NO LIGHT IN THE CAVE

Dedicated to Jake Massee

The new sun was a goldfish, more natural-looking reaching toward the shore of its deep blue tarn than higher in the overrosy sky. We must have been there, at the summit, for hours to make that observation. We were surrounded by concentric circles of forget-me-not and snowdrops, grass in our hair, and hair in what we thought was our grass. Jake said, well maybe it’s not worth remembering, but he said that we should go down following the stream, through the shoe-swallowing peat, and that we should start before the sun finished rising. Helpless to disbelieve the wisdom wrapped up in his flannel, denim, the tough dark rubber of his soles, we began our descent.

We were too far north for there to be logging trails, so we had to follow the stream; that’s what he said. There was an old mine on that side of the slope, a bit further down from where we were. We gawked at the old soaked wood it was made of: its rot, its fungal mosaic, its separate teeth of breakage overhanging one another like the abashed after-brawl limbs of children. We were too far north for loggings trails; that meant the slopes were bare but for tundra.

Jake had a pack of cigarettes with him, “want one?” a hundred feet later, “want one?”

“Want one? It’ll distract you from the mud, let you focus on something on just how icky you’re getting.” He knew I didn’t smoke.

“C’mon,” I couldn’t get anything else out through my laughter. He was the better distraction anyway. The wet ground was cloying our progress. The bog-scent and Jake’s cigarette were fighting a war, and walking a few feet behind him, I was the no-man’s land. Once in a while, he would start singing a short song. Then he only hummed them, and then only breathed disconnectedly in a way that could only have been music in his head. I should have guessed he was getting tired from carrying most of the heavy equipment, but he wasn’t the type to pass on a chance to do the gentleman’s— rather than the normal man’s—  share of the labor when a woman was involved. Thus, his pack had a charivari of carabiners, water-bottles, bags of chalk, and bottles of medicine and dehydrated food, all for the both of us, constantly pulling down. 

We followed the stream to the point it turned into a waterfall. The only way down was two dozen or so soaked switchbacks of naked rock. While I craned my neck and reconsidered the virtues of mud, Jake’s yellow-pocked smile prefigured opportunity. He glanced at me, then started down, cat-footing down the narrow path and brushing the clammy rock with first his left, then his right, then his left hand. I followed him.

He became more flat-footed as we went down. I, meanwhile, was having fun, and on the steep decline which I undertook with abandon, I could finally catch up with him. He was breathing hard and wasn’t smoking anymore. He really did only smoke when it was necessary.

“We’re making good time now, aren’t we? Yeah, we’re making good time,” he said proudly, but really to himself, not to me. He grabbed a horn of rock and used it to spin 180 degrees, facing me like I was about to be included. He smiled. Like I feared, exactly like I feared, the horn started cracking. Seeing it at the same time, he began to spin again: a rabid tarantella. But though Jake might have thought that he had been poisoned at that moment, it didn’t matter. The weight and the exhaustion tore him down the slope. I could hear his baggage, his entourage, rattle against the rocks: farther and quieter and farther and quieter.  I didn’t see him again. But I didn’t look. I knew I wouldn’t. The rattle was terrible enough: the wrong bells and the wrong ceremony.  I wanted to cry for him.

A new part of my brain kicked in. I couldn’t see the way I used to see. The switchbacks only got steeper, and that was finally obvious. I comforted my guilty conscience with the nascent idea that he almost certainly would have fallen later if not for there. We were still up in the drab altitudes. There were still handfuls of flowers, many of them losing their petals in the roaring alpine wind, despite their short stature, on the various mountains on the range. While the upper switchbacks were concealed by an outreaching of the bluff, the lower ones had full views of the whole range. The valley below, with its tiny red barns and inaudible stream, was not reachable that way.

The second time I went through them that day, the bogs were harsher than I ever could have imagined them. I was deathly afraid I did have the energy to walk, and that night would harden the mud and freeze me in place. I believed I would drown if I crawled. I couldn’t move fast enough to stay on the surface of that mass of dirt and life. Our footprints: Jake’s, mine, vanished so quickly. I was almost astonished I hadn’t noticed them disappearing my first time across.

The texture of the peat against my skin (I rolled up my pants, knowing it would be getting cold and that no wet would do me any good) felt like the terrain couldn’t decide if it was desert or ocean. It was rough, clearly resisting me. When my trudges were swallowed without getting anywhere, it wasn’t hard to realize that the earth was living too. It was screaming, silently and eternally, the sound of a perpetually falling but lungless being, for my erasure from its tolerating roots, previously grounding and sheltering me from death’s sharp and angular grandeur.

Rain clouds were coming in; I couldn’t afford any more reverie. I couldn’t sacrifice any more time or thought and hope to be taken back. I had to make it back to the Tarn on my own. There was a cave there, and I could wait out the rain so long as no light got in. I knew that at that point, if the light came in and revealed Jake’s old cave drawings and our carefully sketched maps of the mountains here, I would be closer to doomed than being lost could ever make me.

So I got back here, more or less where I started. The tundra gave way to the barren peak. There was some food in the cave that I found half by memory and half by blind grope. There were cigarettes too, which I wanted and had to force myself not to take. 

I waited out the rain. When the clouds were gone, so was the sun. The moon is bleaching the tarn. Its daytime transparency was replaced with the milky opacity of the water’s surface. I still can’t look at the maps though. I can’t go back through the marsh either. It really will kill me. Jake couldn’t leave this mountain. There’s a comfort here: in the embrace of the cave walls and the moonshine of the lake, intoxicating my thirsty body, and with its opacity, closing like a gentle fist around my mind. 

There are no trails to bring anything down.

Jake couldn’t leave this mountain.

I don’t believe I can.