That Lonesome Road
I had a plan today. I’m in Bend, Oregon for the week, and I had the day off, so I decided to go hiking near a lake south of town. I got about 10 miles down Hwy 97, and the sky started pissing rain. We make our plans, and the gods laugh.
Right about then, I passed a sign that directed me to a nearby attraction: the “Lava River Cave.” It sounded drier than the lake I was going to, so I took the next exit.
According to the helpful informational placards, the cave was a conduit by which molten lava reached the surface during the last local volcanic eruption. It runs over a mile long before the accumulation of sand that’s washed into it blocks the passage, sloping gently downward as it goes. Humans have used it as temporary shelter over the centuries, but it’s too cold and damp for long-term lodging. For thousands of years, it’s been more or less empty.
I was the first one there, so I received my orientation lecture alone. A young park ranger told me how to be kind and courteous to the resident bats (13 out of 14 local species!!), warned me not to break or remove anything, told me to pee before I entered, and gave me a high-powered flashlight. I walked down the long, metal stairway into the mouth of the cave.
The cave really is a long, continuous tube. It curves gently, back and forth, but for considerable stretches it’s nearly straight, and you can see dozens of yards ahead. At times it narrows to the point where you have to stoop to get through, and other times it widens to vast thoroughfares, twenty feet wide and fifty feet tall.
The first thing you notice is the quiet. There is sound, of course: the dripping of water, the occasional shift of a pebble or falling sand. There’s the sound of your own breathing, and the scrape of your shoes as you walk. But the ambient sound--that constant, low background noise of the human and natural worlds, disappears. It’s a quiet that feels both massive and unnervingly close.
As I descended, the temperature did as well. It was about 40 degrees, and the bare fingers of my flashlight hand stung with the cold.
There wasn’t a whole lot of variation. It’s sand and rock and water. But as you go deeper and deeper below the surface, walking alone for a mile, the experience evolves. At first, there’s the wonder at being in such a place. Then there’s the acute awareness of being alone, and cold. When the cave narrows, a little claustrophobia creeps into the back of your limbic system, and you have to talk to yourself to keep it under control.
At one point, I passed a pile of massive rocks that fell from the ceiling some unknowable time in the past. I tried not to wonder what would happen if there was an earthquake while I was down there. The effort was unsuccessful.
Then, little by little, the darkness and the quiet started to feel more normal. By the time I reached the end of the cave, I had adjusted to this strange solitude. I turned off my light. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a darkness more complete than any I can remember. My eyes didn’t adjust--there was nothing to adjust to. It seemed to be a darkness that matched the silence, as if they were the sound and appearance of each other.
I hummed a soft note, and the cave walls returned it to me with a natural reverb. Then I started to sing. I sang Jame Taylor’s “Lonesome Road” from beginning to end, somehow remembering all the words. At the end of the last note, the silence returned to embrace it, and lead it away into the surrounding walls.
As I walked back toward the entrance, uphill this time, my body warmed. It felt like returning from the underworld, to the land of the living. When I saw the light of the opening up ahead, I could feel the darkness and silence pulling away from me and withdrawing back into the cave. I felt strangely exhilarated, as anyone would, having communed with Hades and lived to tell the tale.
So often, in our social mammalian brains and our overly busy lives, we forget that solitude is not the same as loneliness. There is a relationship we can only have with ourselves, and with the universe that surrounds us, when we are truly alone.
