Cave!

  When I was a kid, I used to play in the woods at my grandma's house all summer. Looking back, my parents just needed someone to watch me when school was out, but man I loved it. She'd make runny eggs every morning and I'd explore or read or watch tv. Whatever, didn't matter. The best was a cave way back on her property. She never told me I couldn't go in--I think she'd forgot it was there-- so I'd hunch through the crumbly walls. It was 90% mud but there was a small apse. I loved to turn off my flashlight, huddle in the dark quietness, and feel held by the earth and apart from the world. When I was 9, I found an arrowhead and the whole summer I sat just knowing that I was in the same place as some Cherokee hunter had been hiding or waiting out deer hundreds of years before I was born. 

I grew up and I kept searching out that feeling. Fifty-five degrees and silent. Did you know that the Appalachians are older than bones? Literally, they formed before living things evolved bones. We were still in the ocean. I'd go find caves older than fossils and I'd sit in them and just... breathe the ancient air. Sit in its stillness. Turn off my light and exist where sun hadn't been for hundreds of millions of years.

So you can understand why I hated the Majestic Pigeon Forge Cave Experience! more than just about anything. There were fluorescent lights lighting all the formations and the centerpiece, this amazing waterfall coming in through a cavern wall, had changing multicolored lights on it. And a soundtrack. There was even a gift shop attached.

But I was going with my cousin Jeff, who had been stuck in a wheelchair ever since his accident and wanted to see a real Appalachia cave while he was visiting from the west coast. Not many caves are wheelchair friendly, so Majestic Pigeon Forge Cave Experience! was pretty much our only option. I bought us tickets for the accessible tour (smaller group, used the elevator instead of the stairs), fit him and the wheelchair in my truck, and we took off. My aunt swarmed him before we left; she gets pretty anxious whenever he's out of her sight, but he's 19, so in my opinion he needs to be out of her sight sometimes. He put the location tracker on his phone just to chill her out a bit, even though it's not like we'd get any reception in the cave. 

We get there and hang out in the giftshop for a while before our tour begins. I got a Red Bull and he got some fancy coffee drink, then the tour started so we chugged them and went in. He was so stoked, like, I didn't know he'd never been in a cave before. We were rolling down these wide paved pathways with rails, so it wasn't like you could even touch anything, but he was obsessed with these calcite curtains along the walls. You know the ones? They look like shiny milk. I was kind of over the commercial tourist aspect, but it's still a freaking amazing cave. 

Yeah, so we roll along the walk and we're going slow because we both want to check all the formations. Jeff looked like a kid at Christmas. I was having an awesome time with him, half the time he was oooh-ing and aaaah-ing and the other half he'd be joking about weird shapes in the stones. Looking back, that should have tipped me off. He kept asking if I could hear anything from the big stalagmites. Like, "That looks like a bear, can't you hear it roaring?" I couldn't, of course, but there were so many echoes that it made sense that he was hearing something. I'm used to small chutes. They don't carry sound the same way that the Majestic Pigeon Forge Cave Experience! does. 

Anyway. We get to the main waterfall experience. Jeff's hanging with the group and the guides turn on the damn music and the light show starts. I wanted to go into one of the side chambers while all that was happening. Jeff was entranced, didn't care what I did, and the guide said I could check it out as long as I was back in 8 minutes. So I went up the stairs to the Portal Chamber. It wasn't on the accessible tour because of the stairs, but it was on the main tour so it was still lit up. I wandered around, taking a break from the noise and the colored lights, until it was time to go back.

This was where I fucked up. There were like 8 other white guys with brown hair in wheelchairs, so I didn't notice Jeff was missing until we were almost back to the elevator. I told a guide and they sent everyone but me and the guide up. Kevin, I think that's his name. 

So Kevin is on the radio and we're backtracking. I keep yelling for Jeff, but there's no response. Just the echo. 

Hello.... hello... hell...

Jeff... efff... fff...

Answer!... ser... err...

We make it back to the waterfall cavern and I've got my phone flashlight on, looking for wheelchair tracks that veer away from the group, bits of chew, anything. I can't find it. The guide can't find him. They bring in search and rescue, then the damn dogs can't find anything. They didn't let me stay in the cave for that, of course, and I was talking to the sheriffs at that point anyway. He was "a vulnerable missing person." 

I stayed there all night. The place was crawling with officers and guides and I swear, I only left him for 8 minutes. 8 minutes. I couldn't face Aunt Bonnie so I crashed in my truck in the parking lot.

Thing is, Jeff can't walk anymore. He can transfer, drag himself around, but there was no wheelchair and no signs of dragging on the ground. And since it's a cave, a reasonably well-preserved one, there's ground formations all over. Someone going over that would leave some sort of mark. I kept running through it in my head. How, why, was he missing? How could there be 25 people on this tour, plus the guides, and no-one notice anything happen? I shouldn't have left him. I still hadn't told Aunt Bonnie.

That night I lay in the trunk bed in the parking lot under the rain tarp and shivered. I slept maybe an hour, just out of exhaustion, and kept dreaming about those Cherokee I used to think of as a child. They were hiding in the cave, pointing at something I couldn't see, and all of us getting frustrated at the limits of language. We were in the Experience! cave and the little cave in my grandma's land at the same time, in that dream logic way, and everything was full of milky stalagmites, breathing in and out with the moan of a beached whale.

Next thing I know, sun is coming up, it's 5 am. The caves aren't officially open but law enforcement's still there. State patrol and county sheriffs both. The guides look like they've been searching all night. I ask if I can go back down, look around. A patrol guy says no. I say it might trigger a memory. They still say no. I say please, I'm the only one he knew here, his mother's at the house, just let me go in one more time before I tell her. Deputies exchange a look with the staties. They say yes, I just need to go with a deputy to make sure I don't mess up a crime scene.

Crime scene. God.

Deputy Ham (for real), guide Tina, and I head back down. With the fancy tour lights and music off, it's a really amazing cave and I tell Tina that. 

She laughs. She knows. 

We walk the path from the elevator to the waterfall again. It's a quarter mile, top. I stop in front of the curtains. 

"There were his favorites. He'd never been in a cave before and it just blew his mind." I just stand there, staring. The Bear. The Cougar. We didn't know the real names, but that's what we'd called them. There was another one I hadn't noticed before, wide at the base and tapering into the brown wall. "That one's the king," I say, "sitting tall on his throne."

Tina gives me a moment, then indicates we need to walk. We go to the cavern and I stare at the waterfall. It's been there a million years if it's been there a minute. I stand and stare, watching it move. The rock around it is smooth and a small, hysterical part of me imagines sliding down it into the pool below, grabbing the eyeless salamanders, making a crown of them. 

"Jeff!" I'm screaming. The echo comes back, my voice sliding around the walls, moving behind the falls. "Jeff!" And I think this is point I lose it a little. My cousin is here, somewhere, but how? They checked the footage in the elevator--he went down and didn't come up. He's in here, but where?

"Jeff! Hello!" 

Deputy Ham stares at me with soft eyes. She's seen this before. Tina's eyes are wide, she's worried about me, probably glad Ham is here. I'm sure I come across erratic. My voice overlays itself in echoes.

Hello?... hello... hell... Hell.... Help

Ham looks around. She's heard it too. I yell again.

Jeffery!... Jeffer...rrrr...run... RUN

Tina is pacing now. She looks at Deputy Ham, not me. "Did... did the echo ask for help?"

Ham nods. 

"Did it... tell us to run?"

I take off, following the echoes of what no longer seems like my voice, back towards the elevator. I pause at the big curtain, the one I called the king. I keep heading to the elevator but stop. My back prickles like something's watching me. I stare at it, the wide base, the column, the narrow top. It glistens, water moving like sweat along a face with no eyes and no nostrils.

I lunge.

I'm at a distance, watching myself tear apart a formation that must be tens of thousands of years old. Calcite accretes at 10 cm per thousand years, I remember, and I watch myself tear through it like butter. It was there before the pyramids and I'm scraping, stone flaking under my nails, layered like mica and clammy like a pig. This isn't how rock acts, I think dumbly. Somewhere, Dep Ham and Tina grab me and hold me back until they see it, too. 

The shine of steel wheels embedded.