The Cave Birthday

I was born in early November; and it may be that the atmosphere at this time of the year shaped my personality or it may be that my personality predisposes me toward Novembrishness, but however it happened, we're a perfect fit, this landscape and I, the lowering skies, the 40% chance of mournfulness. When November holds its mirror up to me, I reflect its own face back. And it suits me. This year, for instance, I am living several hundred miles away from my lover and spend much of my time lonely, but it's oddly welcome, a little ache I rarely mind, to feel that melancholy drifting in, right at home in the drift of the season's last leaves and in the abbreviated daylight as it sifts slowly down.

Still, it has been lonely for both of us, and so when I write, for instance, that we got together for the weekend the phrase is impotent even in my own mind, failing, as it does, to convey how that feels, the heightened anticipation, the brief conjunction of our orbiting paths, then separating again, which I invariably start to fret about long before I ought to. But, we manage it, and I wonder sometimes if eventually, I might think back on this time and decide it wasn't so bad, after all, think it's even possible I might grow lonely for my own loneliness. I miss everything, once it's over. I have known for a long time that nostalgia is the real landlord in my life, it's where all my rent goes, and my tithes, and everything else right along with it. My nostalgia is in season now, these Novembers, and I notice myself thinking that things had better hurry up and turn painful somewhere, else what will there be to think about when I want to sit and stare out the window? Back in the spring when I was first falling in love I realized it had been years since I had understood the season at all, if I ever had. I took a picture one morning, that late April, of the ornamental cherry tree outside my kitchen window. Its branches were wild with flowers that day, flagrantly so, obscenely so, and when I sent this new man the picture I wrote: I have the most vivid flowers in my neighborhood because this year, I'm the happiest person in my neighborhood. The tree has gone bare again by now, of course, and a few days ago some of the outer limbs snapped off in a wind storm. I watch it scratching at the sky these afternoons as the sun goes down, and we nod at each other and I think, I know just how you feel.

But this year, on the weekend before my birthday, we met in central Virginia, my lover and I, landing in a sort-of midway point between upstate New York and North Carolina. Since we both like being outdoors, and since the area is famous for its caves, we drove on the day before my birthday to a well-publicized one in the town of Grottoes, VA. I thought I'd certainly live in a town called Grottoes, although when we were driving through, we noticed that mostly it was agricultural, that mostly the houses there were for sale. There's an Alcoa plant there in the town, and we wondered whether it might be closing down, thus precipitating the rush to move on out of there. It's always a little sad when you see that, lots of people moving away, and you imagine them sorry to go even though the reality may be much different, perhaps everyone has found a better job somewhere else and in an even nicer climate, or perhaps they've all finally met True Love At Last and are off for the next great adventure. Even the weather that day seemed to be hinting at something better about to happen: the trees were muted but still full of leaves, much more than they were in the New York landscape I'd left behind, and the sun was out that day, pale though it is in November. There's a poem Rod McKuen wrote about lovemaking that works that image in, something about our bodies like clouds and the pale November sunshine and even though he was a terrible poet and you don't like to think about the fact that you're remembering him, never mind quoting him, now, thirty years after the last time you picked up one of his books, still, he got that right: the pale November sunshine.

But I was thinking that I might like living in a town called Grottoes, until we first stepped into the cave and at that moment I mentally moved myself out of any of the Houses For Sale that we'd seen and set up housekeeping in my head right there in that cave, forever, I loved it that much, right away. It was my first time in one, and besides being in love I was startled on two counts, beginning with how you enter it. When we were driving down I was thinking about Merlin in his crystal cave, about the magicians of Lascaux, about the Tuatha dé Danaan; about oracles and hermits and the assorted holy folk who wander through all the stories you've spent your life absorbing. I was thinking about cave-as-tomb, cave-as-womb, and so I guess I expected to have a bit more of a preamble to the initiation. Instead, this is what happens: one minute you're standing in a sort of science museum, studying exhibits of bats and examining broken bits of stalagmites, and the next you've opened a door and walked through, and there you are, standing in the first chamber of the place. And so you arrive at your initiation without your ritual dress and purifying bath, with no hallucinogenic smoke to help you to see things and very little in the way of instruction, and you think about that and stare around for a moment and wonder, how did Merlin ever manage it?

After the shock of unexpected initiation came the shock of how little the cave looked like what I thought a cave looked like. However I got the idea, I've always guessed that caves resemble stony birth canals, cramped, smooth-walled little places you pass through for the express purpose of getting yourself back out again, pronto. The reality was so much better than my imagination, however, and I couldn't have been happier to have been wrong. The initial room was high, as most of this cave was high, with a ceiling that rose some forty feet above us. It, and the walls, and most of the floor, as well as the various hulking formations that gathered themselves up and out of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, all of these surfaces appeared to have been made by a mad mosaicist with infinite materials, a pocketful of genius, and no brakes on her time. There was little smooth about the place (my expectations about that shattering nicely on the million spiky edges that poked up everywhere) and nothing I could quite line up with my previous, non-initiated experience. Without the usual reference points of sky and horizon, once you stepped in, most of what went on in the non-subterranean world stopped registering and so you forgot about the waning sunlight you had just walked away from, forgot about all the bad poetry being written there and the people abandoning those rooms they'd been writing it in. The first thing I noticed was my lack of any sense of direction, in particular any sense of the direction down. Our path led us, in total, three quarters of a mile into the Earth and some 200 feet below it, but the journey through there felt upright and level, and I barely thought about how far down we were or how much weight slumbered above us, except for when we passed under enormous cracks in the overhead rock, deep fault lines running there, and then you couldn't help but think about it plenty. But everything stayed put that day, and when I asked I was assured that no, Virginia isn't prone to earthquakes.

Most of the cave, we learned, was made up of a calcium compound, which was why so many of the walls sparkled white in the light. There were bands of other colors, too, mostly muted green which turned out to be algae, and red, where the calcium had aged out, and black, which was either manganese or torch marks left over from visitors who had come there before the age of the electric light. The algae grew on account of those lights; people had been wandering through this particular cave for some 200 years that we know about, and I was glad to have been in a group that wandered through in these days of electricity and wiring. At one point our guide put all the lights out, holding up just a candle in his hand, and then he blew that out, too. I probably don't have to tell you just how dark dark can be, and I thought it went on just a little too long, the guide talking quietly in the cave-night as he told us a story about a party who had been trapped there for a couple of days, once, when all their lanterns blew out together. Imagine it, he said, imagine all those hours in this dark. He talked on, and I thought about reaching out my hand and trying to find my lover's hand, but knew I would start to panic if it turned out he wasn't standing where I thought he was. Mostly I could orient myself two ways: by the direction of the guide's voice, and by the whiskey breath coming off the man from the other family in our group. It was just noon then and we had watched him drive up with his nine-year-old son perched in the truck next to him, and the sharp, sour smell of the alcohol made the me turn my face whenever he happened to look my way. The mother was there, too, but distracted: her daughter-in-law was in labor, her water had broken just before we all entered the cave together. It would be the first grandchild. I thought about telling her: I was born now, too, this is a good time to be born. But who knows, with a baby about to come into a family that didn't smile or look one bit impressed by a single thing in that cave and the grandfather drinking mornings and driving around anyway, and so I said nothing. That may turn out to be a story his grandmother tells him, though: on the day you were born, I went for a walk in a cave...I think of the child a few years from now, bored with having heard this story too many times and none too impressed by a cave himself, looking away and out a window, thinking about the grayness of the month, thinking about the hidden sun and all the bad poetry being written out there in the world, thinking about whiskey breath in the morning. He may think to himself, when he is a little older still, all of this suits me...



There are two hundred years of records about people exploring it, and in that time, the cave has acquired a lot of names, different ones for the different chambers you come through as you walk the length of it. There is a place where someone carved risers out of the side of the wall, and once upon a time the traveling preachers used to come there and sermonize, everyone protected inside from the rain and snow. They would have gathered by candlelight or torchlight, too, and I imagine all that darkness coupled with all that shouting about Satan must have been a sure way to scare the bejesus out of a person, or into him. There is a ball room, where they held real dress-up dances a hundred years ago, complete with a flat rock stage where the orchestra sat. There were little chambers off to one side where the ladies could go to change into their ball gowns, making it unnecessary for them to wear them, dragging, in through the mud. There is a room called Dante's Inferno. (Sadly, there is no Oracle of Delphi, although there is a rock creature who guards the path about half-way through the cavern: we were told it's called George Washington's Ghost but my guess is, it's a case of mistaken identity.) My daughter and I read The Inferno a couple of years ago, and I wanted to go see, but it was hard to get to, and not well lit, and so I did not. That time, at least. I may go back and get myself in there; I keep reminding myself to memorize some cantos before then, to have something to chant as protection against the walls falling in, against my slipping into a hidden hole. Someone described to us how these caves got discovered, and we all squinted up our eyes, imagining it: the slow belly crawl through the dark and the unknown, and toward more darkness and more mystery, all the while knowing that if the little space we squeezed through turned out to be a false start, we'd have an even more difficult belly crawl retreat, this time scraping along backwards. I feel myself clouding over at the idea, having been born devoid of the discovery gene. One of the men from the hapless party whose lamps all blew out volunteered to try crawling out and so save the group; he fell into a hole somewhere along the way and although he didn't die, he was there for ten hours after the rest of his companions had been located, rescued. Imagine yourself, ten hours longer in that total dark, convinced you were feeling what eternity felt like while around you, the old old cave huffed and dripped and spoke its one invisible thought, if you think this feels like an eternity, just you wait.




The caves in this part of Virginia are known as solution caves, formed when the acidic ground water percolates through the fractures in the limestone and wears it away: creation by subtraction. It leaves behind the slate skin of the place, the minerals that seep in from the Earth. All of that takes one eternity to create. The limestone getting there in the first place takes another eternity, of course, the bodies of small marine organisms dying off and piling up and eroding down and settling in, hardening for millions of years. Pretty soon time as it's passed on the Earth begins to assume the proportions of distance as it unfolds in space, a scale that is always just outside your ability to comprehend it. In centuries past, tourists were avid--and reckless--collectors of the stuff of caves, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, we say it is because they didn't know just how long these things take to form. The solution cave has found its true calling as a sculptor, and everywhere we looked there were formations with names like shields and draperies. There were the structures I already knew, stalactites for example, no less fabulous for being more familiar. All of these form when the water drops evaporate and leave behind a little calcium trail, a microscopic footprint of the minerals that water drop collected as it seeped down through the earth. You can imagine that this takes a long time. I liked the draperies, which reminded me of organ pipes, and the shields that looked like oversized pendants a bold woman might wear on a chain around her neck. I wished I could figure out a way to play the draperies; I wished I was that woman who was comfortable wearing bold jewelry. For the entire mile and a half we walked, I felt like we were being watched, because everywhere there were smaller formations rising up that looked like statues of people, sometimes couples holding children, sometimes rows and tiers like choruses, and at one point, a white round figure that I knew was the Buddha of the cave. He stood on the other side of a pool and none of us could reach him to rub his good-luck belly. Our guide told us that it takes about 150 years for a cubic inch of these formations to grow. We came to a natural tower growing up in the middle of the path: the Tower of Babel, the guide said was its name: 30 feet high and 80 feet around. When I got home I asked my daughter for the formula to figure out the volume of the piece. At a cubic inch of growth every century and a half or so, my rough estimate for the age of that Tower of Babel puts it at around 122 million years old. I thought of myself confronted by that colossus on that Sunday afternoon, and realized that of the two of us, I was the elderly one, standing there with the absurdity of my soft tissue, this ridiculous little life span already so much used up.

We stood in a small room that had been carved out of the rock, off to one side of the main chambers we'd just come through. The entrance to this room was an arch in the wall, with rows of pointy small stalactites hanging down like teeth, and it reminded me of being inside the whale's mouth and looking out, perhaps a little mournfully, at the life you were just about to say goodbye to. As I watched, a drop of water grew with elegant precision at the end of one of these teeth, and I thought to myself, I'm going to stand right here, and when it starts to fall I'll open my mouth and let the cave water drop right in. But the drop never fell; it gathered itself there and then hung quite contentedly, and then we had to move along. Immediately as we came around the corner there stood on the side of the path a tall ceramic jug. Our guide told us, once upon a time they used to keep these jugs set up at strategic places along the trails, and they'd catch water, and you could drink it. This jug, he said, is a relic--we've found two of them, and the other is back in the museum, in a display case, in shards. He said, the legend is that if you drink this water, you'll get eternal youth. He said, probably what will mostly happen to you is you'll get kidney stones, what with all the calcium in it. As soon as he had turned away to walk on and everyone else had turned to follow him, my hand went into the jug and I dipped some water out and had a little drink. Of course I did. It was underworld cold, and tasted like stone. When I caught back up to the group I looked back and saw my lover emerging from the shadows behind me, although a moment before, I was sure he had been in front of me. He was smiling, and as he got closer whispered to me, I just had a drink of that water. Me, too, I whispered back, and we leaned our heads in, laughing at ourselves, eternally youthful together, eternally conspiratorial. I like to think the cave was laughing, at that moment, right along with us.

You see things in caves, because it's human nature to do so, you notice faces in the walls, see people in the shapes growing up from the floor, same as I saw fat Buddha sitting there with his smile, same as I saw all those choristers standing around to sing us on through. We walked into a room they call the Bridal Chamber: a huge white shield formation hangs down in front of you, with white draperies flowing off of it. There are two white lovebirds perched on one wall, and the outline of two hearts near them. None of these things, as far as the cave is concerned, are there (although despite this, the occasional small wedding is held in that chamber, even now. People just can't help themselves.) The word for this kind of recognition is pareidolia, and it means the tendency we all have to see meaningful images in otherwise meaningless patterns. It's how constellations came into being, it's why all children pick shapes out of the clouds, and it's why, the whole time I walked through that cave, I walked in the company of vast populations of people I recognized, faery-sized to ogre-sized, and every one of them right at home in their cave landscape the way I was right at home up top, then, in my November world. I thought for a minute that I wanted to learn to be like them. You don't want to die, of course, or at least not any time soon, but it came to me that once upon a time I might have died near a cave like this one, and someone would have painted my body red, and someone else would have set me inside the cave, and entombed thus in the center of the slow procession of cave time, my soul would have begun the long dream toward reincarnation and however long it took, it still would have been nothing to the cave that held me, with its cubic inch of progress every century and a half, its statuary built up over a hundred thousand millennia, that long and patient mystery with the recognizable face.

Maybe it was the water we drank that made us dream that night, and it may be that by eternal youth they really meant vivid dreams, and if so, that's still a deal I'm happy to take. That night we slept neither deeply nor long; when we woke, it would Monday, still the middle of the night, and time for us to get in our cars and drive off in opposite directions. It was the morning of my 49th birthday, and this was his dream: he had a trained cat, and when he cued it, the cat would leap from its position atop a counter far across the room, and land perfectly in his lap. The cat performed this trick over and over. This was my dream: I had gone back to the cave with my lover, where an invisible woman waited for me at the entrance. She handed me a long and hooded dark red cloak that I was supposed to carry, not wear, and she gave me a riddle. I understood that I would find the answer to the riddle as I walked back through the cave carrying my cloak. We then entered together, my lover and I, and at that point he became invisible, too, and the woman remained at the opening to wait for me. In my dream, I retraced all the steps we had taken that day, through every chamber, around every corner, and then all the way back out again, but I did not find the answer to the riddle. As I came back to the entrance I explained that to the woman, and she said it was fine, that I'd find the answer the next time I walked back through. I then told her that I was going to forget the riddle as soon as I crossed back over the threshold and left the cave, and she said that was fine, too, that was exactly what I was supposed to do. Just don't forget, she cautioned me, that you have the red cloak, that's the thing you're supposed to bring back with you. And I woke then, and felt the weight of the red cloak draped across my outstretched arms just beginning to lighten.

When I was in elementary school I had a twenty minute walk home at the end of the school day, and I was always a little tired then, and usually hungry. A few blocks from my house there was a commercial bread bakery, and most afternoons the smells of sour yeast and wholesale quantities of baking bread floated around on the afternoon air, fueling my hunger even though they were making white bread there, and I didn't care for it. I disliked school in those days, disliked most things. The world felt heavy to me then: the monotony of studies, the incomprehensibility of my life, even my own body as it dragged me along through my bewilderment. I have a strong memory of a certain walk home on one such day, probably in the late autumn or early winter because the air was chilly, making the bakery smells particularly sharp, and the sidewalk I plodded over was full of wet leaves, and slippery. In that town, in those days, most of the sidewalks were still made of slate. As I trudged along I thought to myself that I couldn't wait until I was 48--I remember picking that age exactly, although I have no idea why--I couldn't wait until I was 48 because by then, I knew, life would be staid and I would feel settled at last and all the current wrongs in my world would have evaporated, leaving behind a small perfect residue of contentment. When I was ten that's what I envisioned my 48th year to look like; and instead, I arrived like this at the door of my 49th and stepped through, with a red cloak, a riddle, and a second chance. After I woke I thought about that for awhile in the dark, and told myself the story of the dream a few times so as to be sure to remember it all. And then in the last moments before the alarm began to ring, I turned to the man who was stirring beside me and began to tell him the story, too.