Over and Under (3 page)

The trace narrowed as we rode on, forcing Tom and me into single file. We then left the easy riding of the trace and turned again into the brush, as we stood up on our pedals to gain traction. Finally, when pedaling was no longer possible, we laid our bikes down, satisfied that they were sufficiently hidden by the weeds. We continued on foot.

I felt the cave entrance before I saw it—a thin ribbon of cool dry air that felt like air-conditioning in the middle of the sweltering woods. Tom and I walked a short distance to a shelf of limestone that hung over a cave entrance we knew well. From even just a few feet away, the entrance looked like no more than a shadow under the outcropping.

I had suspected this was our destination when we left the picket line. The rest of Tom’s plan, like most of the cave, was a mystery to me. We ducked to enter and let our eyes adjust. The hole was smooth and the dirt floor well-traveled—we were far from the first kids in Clark County to explore the more accessible portions of this particular cave. The chamber widened a little after the entrance. We walked hunched over across the main chamber, toward a small chute that led deeper. Directly above the chute, growing from the dirt, a knobby, thick stalagmite stood guard, the first recognizable cave feature, a smooth pillar of stone pushing through a tangle of dusty tree roots. Tom reached behind it and pulled out two red plastic flashlights that he kept hidden there, and handed one to me. We clicked them on and climbed on down the chute, past two slumbering bats who ignored us.

Fewer people had preceded us into this second chamber, judging by the dwindling number of beer cans and cigarette butts on the ground. We finally got to the far wall, the apparent end of the cave, where Tom turned and smiled, looking slightly demonic, underlit as he was by his flashlight.

“Listen,” he said. His excited voice echoed slightly. I closed my eyes, but still heard nothing but the blood rushing in my ears. I shook my head.

“Down here,” Tom said. I stooped over and put my head next to a hole about the size of a basketball where he was pointing. I had never noticed it before. The room we were in was not large, but I could only ever see what was inside the narrow beam of my flashlight, and it had never fallen on this particular spot before. The hole looked like someone had dug it out and enlarged it, but it was impossible to say when. Time froze in caves, with their constant temperature, low humidity, and eternal shelter from the elements. The hole could have been dug out the week before by some bored kids, or centuries ago by a wandering Shawnee mystic.

With my head next to the hole and my eyes closed, I heard what Tom was talking about: swiftly running water. Water was blood to a cave, and running water meant a living cave: spectacular formations and strange creatures, our eternal quests.

“I think we can get to Squire Boone through there,” said Tom.

“No way.”

“I’m not shitting,” he said. “We get through that hole, and it’ll connect.”

I shook my head. Squire Boone was almost to the Ohio River, just a short trip from the interstate and from Kentucky. I had heard Tom say repeatedly that all the caves were connected, but this notion strained my considerable respect for his knowledge of our local geography and geology.

“Come on,” he said, impatient with my doubts. Even as the rational part of my mind braced itself halfheartedly to debate Tom about his theory and the wisdom of pursuing
it, the rest was assessing the beam coming from my red plastic flashlight: steady and strong, ready to go exploring, at least until suppertime. Tom was already digging at the hole, enlarging it one handful of gravelly dirt at a time. I heard rocks falling through it, out the other side, and landing some distance below. Soon, the hole was almost big enough to fit through, and Tom started climbing into it feetfirst.

“Wait, you don’t know how far down that is on the other side,” I said. “You could fall two hundred feet.”

He hesitated. “What should we do? Just walk away? Let’s try it and see.”

“Come on out, I’ve got an idea.”

Tom reluctantly stepped back while I sifted through the gravel he’d dug out, until I found a rock about the size of a Ping-Pong ball. I shoved my arm through the hole as far as I could, up to my shoulder, until my ear was up against the wall. Then I released the rock.

I listened to it roll. When that sound stopped, when the rock was falling through open space, I counted in my head “one Mississippi” to mark the seconds. Before I could say “miss,” the rock struck the bottom, a hard, high-pitched crack that echoed sharply.

“Let me try that again.” I grabbed another rock from the cave floor.

“That’s bigger,” said Tom. “It’ll fall faster.”

“No it won’t,” I said. “But it will be louder.” I rolled it down the chute again, and counted the brief fall.

“So how far is it, professor?”

“It takes two seconds to fall fifty feet,” I said, standing up and brushing the dirt off my hands.

“And it doesn’t matter how big the rock is?” He sounded as doubtful as I had about reaching Squire Boone.

“Nope. You’d take two seconds to fall fifty feet, too. And that rock fell in less than a half-second.”

“So…”

“It’s hard to say. I’m guessing around ten feet.”

“Then it’s like jumping off your porch roof,” said Tom. “That’s about ten feet. Let’s go.”

He resumed climbing into the hole, forcing himself through it backward. At one point before he completely disappeared, he looked up at me with only his head visible, like a grinning human hunting trophy that had been mounted to the wall of the cave. Then he popped through and was gone. When I didn’t hear any screams or breaking bones, I knew I had to follow.

It was a tight squeeze, even for wiry kids like us. I had to put my hands over my head to fit through. I pushed backward, slid for a few feet, and then fell straight down through a brief, terrifying emptiness, before landing squarely on my ass. Stars traced tiny curls in the blackness. When they faded, I pointed my flashlight straight up, to see where I had landed, but realized with awe that the size of the chamber was too large—my beam couldn’t reach the top. Tom and I had discovered something massive.

“Holy shit,” I said, the leisurely response of my echo another indication of the room’s giant size. I swept my flashlight around; I saw Tom’s beam moving in the distance as he did the same.

Surrounding us like the trunks of redwoods were the
biggest stalagmites I had ever seen, ropy columns of pink stone that looked like molten wax, each identical, each at least twenty feet around at the base and rising straight up. They were wet—alive—still growing as water dripped onto them from the unseen ceiling, depositing tiny amounts of dissolved limestone with each drop, growing each massive column a few molecules at a time. Right through the middle of the room ran the stream we’d heard from the other side, burbling in from a hole at one end and crashing into another at the far wall. The stream had cut a trench through the stone floor as straight and true as an irrigation ditch.

“Think how old these are,” shouted Tom from across the room. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, I had been warned in countless school field trips that the oil from our hands could kill the cave formation’s growth, but I reached out anyway and put the palm of my hand against the side of one of the columns. It felt preternaturally immovable and solid, as if the columns were holding the whole surface of Clark County above us in place.

Tom was less transfixed than I. He quickly worked his way to the other side of the chamber. “Check this out,” he shouted in the distance, his voice echoing more sharply. I walked toward his flashlight beam. It felt strange to be so far away from him in a cave, where usually things were more compact. “Look,” he said when I reached his side at the edge of the chamber.

He had called me over to a wavy sheet of rock growing up from the floor. It was as thin as paper, thin enough that we saw the yellow glow of a flashlight held to it on the other side. Its folds and curves looked like a curtain blowing
over an open window. Tom and I stood on each side, facing each other, examining it—we’d never seen anything like it in all of our explorations. Water dropped onto it from above, growing the wall microscopically, imperceptibly between us. I was lost for a minute, watching a perfectly spherical drop of water fall onto it and roll along its edge.

“Over here,” Tom yelled from far away—he had darted away from me again, moving on with his exploration. At the end of the chamber, one of the giant treelike stalagmites had fallen. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be in the chamber when that thing had tumbled over. It was broken into three even sections, looking like a column from a ruined ancient temple. Tom scurried up the ragged broken end of one of the pieces, using the jagged nubs for handholds. He soon stood atop the fallen column, which put him within reach of a horizontal crack in the wall.

The crack was about two feet high, and ran the length of the chamber, at least as far as we could see with our underpowered flashlights. Tom hoisted himself into the crack, and lay down inside of it, looking down at me, where I still stood on the cave floor. “Come on up,” he said.

I hesitated.

“Come on up,” he said again. “This crack’ll take us to Squire Boone.”

“Wait, don’t you want to check this out? This room is better than anything at Squire Boone, even the five-dollar tour.”

Before I was done even saying it, Tom was crawling forward, endlessly enthusiastic about finding the next chamber, learning how they all tied together. I climbed up the broken end of the column, peered inside the crack, and
pulled myself up and in. Tom didn’t say anything; he continued scurrying forward, into the darkness. I paused just a moment to look ahead. The crack was rough and dirty, with no formations—it really was more of a fissure in the dirt than what we typically called a cave.

We crawled until I completely lost track of time and distance. Gradually, the ceiling above and floor below turned back into smooth, damp limestone. I hustled to keep Tom in my light. The crack shrunk as we progressed, a millimeter at a time, until eventually I felt my back scraping against the ceiling and my belly on the floor as I moved forward. Soon, I was pushing hard through the crevice. Then I was stuck.

I watched as Tom, slightly smaller than me, continued forward a foot more, until he, too, was stuck fast. I could see only the soles of his shoes, struggling, his toes scraping the hard stone in an attempt to push forward. His shoes scraped a line into the thin film of watery mud that coated the rock. Then, just as I had, he tried to move backward. “Shit,” he said.

No one knew where we were—that was my first thought. Both Tom’s parents and mine accepted that on fair summer days we would both disappear into the woods all day, returning home filthy and tired but always in time for supper. Local folklore about boys killed in the caves began racing through my mind. Being trapped in a chamber as it suddenly filled with water was one popular motif. Tom had once explained to me that a dusty cave was safe, while a wet cave like this might get flushed out once in a while by a lethal flash flood. And drowning wasn’t the only way to die in a cave. Sheriff Kohl sang lead in a gospel group around
town, and I suddenly remembered a lyric he sang at the Harvest Homecoming about a Kentuckian who had died in a cave long ago: I
dreamed I was a prisoner, my life I could not save.
The man in that story, Floyd Collins, had died of “exposure,” a word I found horribly vague and descriptive at the same time. Without even a T-shirt to protect me, the stone on all sides leached warmth from my body. My teeth started chattering.

“Are we screwed?” I asked, trying not to sound like too much of a puss. Tom stopped struggling just long enough to let me know that we were.

The fear seemed to make my body swell, fixing me even tighter in the crack. I knew better than to try and muscle my way out—I wasn’t stronger than all that limestone. I could tell by watching Tom’s feet that he had not given up. His shoes twisted and twitched. The crack, I noticed, was barely as high as one of his shoes. One of those shoes came off, then the other, and he continued the struggle in just his socks.

I fought harder to move, completely unsuccessfully, and the frustration allowed me to completely give in to the fear. I could move my arms, and kick my feet about an inch up and down, so I did both as fast as I could in a kind of swimming motion that I couldn’t stop once I started. In my panic, I actually wondered how long it would take me to shrink a little, how many days might pass before I starved enough to slide freely backward the way we came in. Long before then, I knew, my flashlight would die, and I would somehow have to remember which direction to crawl in the total darkness. As I flailed, sweat combined with the dirt and stung hard as it dripped into my eyes.

I stopped long enough to rub my eyes. I noticed then that Tom wasn’t thrashing. He was digging his toes into the dirt and pushing in a very deliberate, determined way. It was hard to see at first, but he was moving infinitesimally forward. The motion was almost imperceptible because his denim shorts remained in place—Tom was pushing himself right out of his Wranglers. I watched as his feet went up inside the legs and disappeared and the shorts collapsed, as if Tom had wanted out of the crack so badly that he had willed himself into vapor. His dimensions reduced by the thickness of one ply of well-worn denim, he shot forward, past the range of my flashlight’s beam.

“Got it!” I heard him say at the other side. By the echo and the strength of his voice, I could tell he was in a chamber large enough to stand in upright. I didn’t shout for Tom to come back and help me. There was no possibility that he wouldn’t.

He crawled back to me without his flashlight so that his hands would be free. I saw his white face like a rising moon when he came within range of mine. He stuck out both hands, and I let go of my flashlight to grab them. With a hard yank, Tom pulled me forward. I tumbled out of the crack, leaving behind in the crevice my flashlight, as well as Tom’s shorts and shoes.

I took in the new room where we found ourselves, my senses heightened by the receding panic. Tom had left his flashlight sitting on a ledge in the chamber, pointing more or less at the crack that almost swallowed us forever. The walls of the new chamber were high and smooth. Inviting paths led out from two sides. The packed-down dirt made them look oddly well-traveled.