Dust, small rocks, earthy water, boulders. A vibration, a world overhead and underneath moving. Stumbling and disorientation. Falling, tumbling. Light broken, and broken, and broken. Until totally extinguished.
She felt cool, wet floor beneath her knees. Blinked to clear the confusion, but nothing came before her eyes. Complete darkness. Quiet.
An earthqauke, she realized. Alone in a cave. Trapped.
----
It was a long-weekend trip up to the mountains. She and some coworkers from the office had planned the getaway a couple of months ago. They said she needed it, said that after the divorce and now being an empty-nester, she needed a little space, needed a few drinks, some fresh air, some hard hiking miles in the trees. A few days just with the office girls.
Reluctantly, she agreed. In the last many years, she rarely took any time away. But they used to--her, the newly-divorced husband, the kids. They would pack the car full, pitch out the tent, spend days trouncing in streams and over trails. She supposed it would be good to visit the trees, again, the pine-scented air, the cool water.
The first couple of days had been good. They hiked sweaty trails, drank microbrews at the local bar and made lewd jokes about the good-lookers there that were a decade or two too young for them.
She only cried a couple of times. Once around the campfire, a few drinks in. They had asked how she had been, what it was like at this point in her life to be unwed, no kids at home. Was it sad? Weird? Freeing?
Like falling through open space, she had said. Like you wake up one morning without an identity, without any sense of what needs done and when. Like an arm had been cut off.
It was morning when she struck out on her own, dawn early. The chirps of forest birds, unfamiliar to her urban ears, played through the branches. Starting up a familiar trail spur, she ascended the small hill near their camp. Work the muscles. Clear the head. See if the trail might give some sense of direction.
It was on one of the tight switchbacks, about half way up the hillside, where she found the cave entrance. She had left the trail briefly for a rest and, from there, felt a cool breeze seemingly eminating from a huddle of bushes.
Exploring, she found a small opening in the earth but not so small as to require crawling or feats of clausterphobia. Ducking her head in, she decided to explore. Excitement, a little bit of fear (she hated bats), and a sense of leaving something behind washed over her as she stepped into the dark, damp cool of that underground.
----
Stalactites hold tight to the ceiling. Stalagmites grow up from the floor and might reach the cave's top. She remembered this from elementary school as she tapped on her cellphone light and observed tan-stone structures dangling from the cave top and growing from the cave floor.
Surely, she couldn't have been the first to have been in the space. And sure enough, she found evidence that others had preceded her--the scrawling of names in rock with a pocket knife, a boot print left in the cave's fine silt floor, and even drawings on the cave walls, these looking old, primitive, as if they were done in charcoal taken from the remnants of a campfire. One arresting image seemed to depict a face tilted slightly upward, eyes wide, mouth dangling open in awe.
She wanted to go deeper. So, scanning with her light, she found where the cave journeyed further into the hillside. Crouching, squeezing, shuffling, she traveled through hallways, natural stairwells, antechambers, until, panting and sweaty, she came to a large, domed room whose high ceiling and roundedness reminded her of pictures of the Pantheon. She uttered a breathy, quiet wow to herself.
She recalled, one time on a field trip in middle school, they had toured a cave in a nearby state park. At one point, the tour guide shut off all the lights that had been wired into the cave and asked the class to be as quiet as possible. Giggles were hard to supress, but indeed, it was total blackness. She had her hand right at the tip of her noise, but alas, blackness was all she could see.
So now, she did the same. She found a slightly raised and smoothed spot on the cave floor, sat, and tapped off her cellphone light. Supreme darkness. And quiet.
She closed her eyes, though she hadn't needed to, and sat cross-legged. It was so completely silent that her ears began to ring, her sensory equipment expecting to encounter some kind of input but not receiving any. Eventually, the ringing went away. Stillness. And her mind drifted.
She thought of her children. Moments of joy, of frustration, of exhaustion, and worry. She thought of her broken marriage, felt the knot of confusion tighten around the question of what had went wrong. She saw her tiredness, and shame, and sadness. Heard her own voice in her head. How had all this happened?
A tear curved down her cheek. And then the earth shook.
----
She was losing track of time. She couldn't be sure of how long she had been in the black cave. But, she had passed through a number of waves of hunger and tiredness. Two days? Maybe three?
During the earthquake, her phone had been jostled and broken. So, there was no light, no way to communicate. And in that void, she had searched for what felt like hours for an escape, groping in the darkness trying to find the way out. Tripping, stumbling, crawling, desperate.
And now, exhausted and overcome with despondency, she laid down on the cave floor, buried her head into her arms. Sobbed. Gratitude for her life, regret over her selfishness, despair about the choice to enter this cave. She was wracked by the realization that here, locked away in the dark side of a hill, she would die.
Spent of emotion and energy, she dozed. From some unseeable corner of the great domed room, she heard what sounded like padded footsteps, the shuffling of dirt, breath exhaled onto dust. A low rumble and a huff of air. Some kind of animal.
Glowing with an unexplainable iridescence, the thing stepped into the room, swaying on all fours. A bear.
But how? From where? And how was it producing its light? She was frozen less with terror and more with the perplexed clarity that comes from empty exhaustion.
The bear approached a few paces off and sat on its hind quarters, looking calmly at her. Strangely of all, the bear spoke. Not with movements of its mouth, but a voice seemed to emanate from the bear, as if the bear's voice was speaking inside of her. It was then that she wondered if, in fact, she had died.
Why are you in this cave? the bear questioned.
She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing came out.
How did you find it? the bear questioned, again.
Still unbelieving of the apparition in front of her, she heard herself saying, I was on a hike and found the cave entrance.
Why are you still here?
I am trapped. Lost. An earthquake closed off the way out.
I think I can help you. But first, do you mind if I tell you a story?
A story? But, why? I've been in here for days, I think. I would really like to get out.
You said you were lost and trapped. I think I can help with that, too.
Too drained of energy and swimming in doubt, she answered, sure, a story, why not.
Very well, the bear started. Many winters ago, a group of three bears, brothers, took a journey to forests further to the south. Normally, they would have been hunkered into their torpor for the cooler months, but the cold air had come earlier that year than usual, lakes and even streams freezing before all the leaves were off the trees.
This made fishing difficult, and they hadn't put on enough fat to sleep away the cold. So, they planned to explore southerly lands, where perhaps the air wasn't so cold and the streams were still liquid.
They had been moving many days, without having found a breath of warmth, when atop the slopes of a craggy mountain they were caught in a gale-some storm, pelting snow sneaking under their thick fur and shivering their thinning bodies.
The younger brother became frightened. He pleaded with the middle and older that they should turn back, that at least they knew the in's and out's of their home forest and there they might have a chance at living. The eldest reassured his brother, encouraged him to be calm, but the youngest was too consumed by the violent whirlpool of his anxiety, too drawn by the known and terrified by the unkown. He sprinted headlong into the storm, not to be seen again.
The middle, compelled forward to escape the maelstrom, yelled to his elder brother that they must keep going, that they had to hurry, that escape from the buffets and snarls of the blizzard was their only option to survive. The eldest, again, attempted to sooth his brother, to urge patience, to explain that hurling headlong into a blank whiteness would leave them with no path to go by. But, the middle brother shook his head in disbelief and protest, turning to press forward and, too, to never be seen again.
The eldest, filled with misery at the vanishing of his brothers, closed his eyes, sat, and attempted to still his emotions, still his breathing, still the lightening in his mind. He rested, breathing deeply, and remained still as the wind and stinging ice crystals tornadoed around him.
He wasn't sure how long he had sat, but eventually, slowly, the wind wound down, the ice settled, and the sky gave way to a pure blue illuminated by a guiding sun. Clean, untrampled snow was all around, the tracks of his brothers having been dusted away. Recognizing a remaining coat of sorrow on his shoulders, he stood resolute nonetheless, navigated his way southward and still further south to where the Sun hung higher in the sky, where the streams flowed, and where the fish could be seen in clear waters.
----
She hadn't realized that, as she was listening to the bear's story, her eyes had closed again. Blinking, she noticed she felt the cool cave floor beneath where she was laying down. She turned her head around the blackness. Nothing but dark. No bear breath and no glowing bear.
Yes, she was still indeed in a cave. And yes, she was indeed still trapped. But now, she sat up, breathed deeply, closed her eyes.
Electric images passed in front of her eyes. The time her second-oldest child got meningitis. When her ex-husband was laid off. Her cancer scare. The first night at college. Jumping from the diving board at swimming lessons.
Pain, too. When she stopped talking to her mother. When she dropped out of her preprofessional program. When she...heard her name...
She sat. Sat. Sat. Stilled.
And again she heard her name. In that revelry, she expected to see the glowing bear. But her name wasn't in the bear's voice.
Again she heard it. She opened her eyes, saw glints, and flashes. Another apparition, likely. Again and again, her name.
Then the sound of pushed-over cobble, boots on grit and wet rock. The glints becoming beams and falling cobble preceeded by metal on stone. Finally, a roll of cobble into the domed room, and in stepped pairs of legs, her friends and helmeted rescuers.
They swore, when they first found her, with the dust swirling around and her face narrowed in hunger, she looked just like a bear.