Caving (sans analysis): Went Caving. Found Beer. Drank it.

I don't particularly enjoy small spaces. Or dirt. Or, especially, breathing dirt. I'm not often known to sit, alone, in complete darkness. But, with only one flashlight between myself and four eager and curious companions, and at least 50 feet of pitch black between myself and the entrance to the cave (the only source of natural light), I figured that light and company were probably preferable to solitude and darkness.

That's how I ended up trekking (squatting crawling and crouching) to the end of the Sandia Man Cave for the second time. The aforementioned flashlight not being in my possession, I didn't have much say in the direction of general travel, so I pressed on with the group for what turned out to be the better part of an hour, into the "depths" of a cave whose entrance is actually some 30 feet above another small ledge, itself perhaps another 50 or 100 feet above the canyon floor. It's accessible now by a painted metal staircase that spirals tightly, too tightly for comfortable footing, in fact, up to a platform at the cave mouth.

Sandia Man Cave, where Frank Hibben first discovered artifacts in 1935, was the site of two archeological treasures: Folsom artifacts (a certain type of spearhead technology dating to about 25,000 years) and Sandia artifacts (a different kind of spearhead with a different characteristic shape than Folsom spearheads, estimated at 30,000 years or so). [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,763963,00.html]

I vaguely knew this while crawling on my knees through a few centimeters of red ocher dirt, staining my hands and clothes. It is difficult while crawling through small spaces to maintain a sense of reverence for 30,000 years of human history implicated in the exact place in which you are struggling to maintain your balance, composure, and regular heart-rate and breathing patterns, but every now and then I manage a brief, startling thought back to the unknowable history of this place. Sometimes the thought is accompanied by a more concrete one, usually associated with fear for my own safety ("the cave hasn't collapsed in 30,000 years, it's probably not going to come down today"). But sometimes as the light that Scott has strapped to his forehead disappears around a corner and I'm enveloped in a cold, dry darkness, I try to imagine the endeavor this would be with a torch. If I can't breathe in the dust, I certainly couldn't breathe with a thick layer of smoke.

Now, a day later, I wonder if there is evidence of how far into the cave Sandia Man and his compadres must have gone. Maybe they weren't too keen on bringing fire into enclosed spaces, either. Certainly they wouldn't have brought the beer we find littered around the place--bottles and cans both causing the light to glint and reflect into our eyes. It is these more recent artifacts (combined with the ubiquitous graffiti--one is dated AD 160, can you believe it?) that have me thinking, even as I choke on the dirt kicked up by those walking deeper into the earth in front of me, about reverence, about leaving our marks. What is it that compels us to scratch our names (or paint them) into the surfaces of rocks, cave walls, or trees? (The last time I was at the Man Cave with my then fiance, I was enchanted to find E+J inside a heart on the delicate white bark of an aspen. There it was, and I didn't even have to carve it myself. I could relish someone else's destructive act in my own romantic way. I took a picture.)

Marie scratches something into a low ledge and the scritch-scritch sound vibrates a little bit in the air around us. We laugh as Laurel (or was it Christine?) chides her for ruining the "pristine" nature of the cave. It's only one name among a thousand that have visited this place. Is it vandalism? Or reverence? to put your name on the place you have been? to make your mark and let the world know, "I was here."

As we go further into the cave it feels warmer and damper, but I can't tell if this is my own body heating up from the gentle exertion (today my muscles burn ever so slightly) or if the air is really changing, growing damper and therefore feeling warmer. Scott presses on, belly first, it seems, and shines the light back for the rest of us to keep up. We are content to go on until we can't see over the next ledge, anticipating a scarier drop, perhaps, or a different scene around the next dark corner. Then we stop, discuss. Move on. The one light keeps us all together, as does a mutual curiosity, a feeling of being compelled--propelled?--forward that Laurel articulates before we drop off the last small ledge into another chamber. It turns out that there is nothing different to behold--all is darkness, coolness, a composite of jagged edges and smooth curves for ceiling, floor and walls. Dust coats everything in thick layers. I rely more on my hands and fingers to tell me this than my eyes. My eyes are useful in this dim light at the back of the pack only for making out edges that endanger my face and skull. My hands do the rest of the navigating.

At the end we sit in a space with barely enough head clearance to accommodate our straightened backs.

I ask Scott to turn out his headlamp, and as it goes out, the cramped space we inhabit seems to disappear. There's an infinity in the absolute darkness that I hadn't expected, an extensiveness to the physical dimensions that I wasn't prepared for. (Still, I wouldn't risk attempting to stand or move.) Scott wonders if his eyes will adjust, and though I know where he is as he speaks, his voice comes from everywhere and nowhere all at once. So do Laurel's, Marie's, and Christine's. I think of Bilbo Baggins when he meets Gollum. Even that darkness wasn't so complete.

Our eyes don't adjust. Even so, we all seem to think we see colors. I can imagine my hand in front of me. I know where it is. I know where I should see it. It is there, and yet, it isn't. It is cold. The fear that goes with darkness and silence breaks over me in waves, tempered by the conversation that I intermittently participate in. It gets weird and Christine's camera gives a flash. Too much darkness is unnerving, and we move out, much as we came in, only more quickly, and with a different kind of urgency.

Coming out into the light, someone asks, "Has the world always been this bright?" and I wonder.