jinian | Trip report, part four

Sunday, 7/1/01

The plan for Sunday was that my uncle, who lives in the Bend area, would call Saturday night or Sunday morning and then we'd probably go meet some distant cousin from Prineville (also right in the neighborhood). By ten or so, we still hadn't heard from him. (We never did hear from him. I'm not very worried; he's just like that.) My mom and aunt decided that we should just start driving and get home sooner.

I had woken up too damned early again for no good reason and had gotten breakfast already, but nobody else had eaten. They all decided to go to brunch at Yet Another Crap Restaurant. I plaintively wondered if anyone else wanted to go to the lava tube. Nobody did. But! Mom was willing to let me borrow the truck and go alone! Bliss!

I set out alone in the big truck. On the way there, I discovered that I'd been right: Highways 97 and 20 occur multiple times within the city limits of Bend and we didn't have to make all those turns we'd made to get through town the first time. I'm not sure I can explain it, but I know how to get from one end of Bend to the other now. It came in handy.

When I got to Lava River Cave, I found that:
1. It cost $3 to get in and $2 to rent a lantern
2. They were going to whinge at me until I brought a coat in with me
3. One of the attendants was the peculiar man who'd turned us away last night

So I went back to the truck, swiped some quarters from Mom's change stash to make up for my paucity of funds, put on running shoes instead of sandals, and brought my flannel with me. Backtracking. Grump. The ranger-types tried to talk to me a bit, but I was in my "I am alone so why are you still here?" mode, and they figured out with creditable speed that I would just like to go into the cave now, please. They lighted my hissing Coleman lantern and I walked down the ramp to the cave.

Just outside the cave is a fantastic little microclimate where the cave air mixes with the desert air and produces what's basically Seattle weather. It was not the most diverse little ecosystem I've ever seen, but it was so much fun to see the damp-weather plants at my feet and the sagebrush ten feet away.

My first hint at just how large this cave was had been the first time I walked up to the payment booth. There's a brochure which shows how the cave runs for just about a mile, going underneath the highway and a good way past it. I began to think that this was going to take longer than brunch, but I figured people could entertain themselves. They don't wanna climb into giant holes in the ground for fun, that's their problem. So I descended the stairs into a hole between tumbled piles of pumice boulders. I took a couple of pictures of the entrance, which I'm betting are the only ones that came out at all, and then went into the dark.

I don't seem to be susceptible to phobias. I was afraid of aliens for a good several years, but constant exposure by way of an ex who thought they were cool has pretty much cured me of that one. However, I am not immune to checking whether I have phobias. I automatically try to scare myself when going into a situation that I know would cause some people to freak out. So I fantasized about the whole tunnel collapsing, or a giant slab of rock falling on me, but I didn't really get anywhere with it. Guess I'm not scared of that either; my brain was always able to say "don't you think it would have happened by now?" and I didn't worry about it. I did think it'd be a pretty good way to die, though: crushed by the collapse of a national monument! And the cave walk rapidly turned into a spiritual experience once I was inside, so I figured if it was time, I'd just walk all the way to the womb of my goddess instead of just exploring the birth canal.

I can't say much about the walk. There were too many other people, I can tell you that. :) The brochure divides the cave into various sections, and I looked at the plaques as I went through, but my impression is of the cave as a whole. The floor was mostly packed sand made of volcanic ash washed in by the rain and tiny lava bits eroded from the walls by dripping water. It is a wet enough cave that I was dripped on three times and there are pits in the sand of the floor where drop fall, giving the floor the look of having been quilted by someone who didn't quite get the point. On my way out, a flash of blue caught my eye from one of the floor-pits, and I saw what looked like crystals of copper sulfate forming in the hole. There were other mineral desposits on the walls in places, but mostly it was rough igneous rock with a few places where the rock had melted and run down.

The cave was cool, around 40F, and I could feel it on my skin. I didn't feel it at all inside, though. I fancied that the cave remembered the lava, and that I was fulfilling that role now: warm thing what moves through the corridor. After a while I felt like I could have breathed fire. (Alternate explanation: Weird body temperature effect associated with menstruation. I certainly get those.)

The height and breadth of the cave expanded and contracted, which added to my vaginal concept of it, but tended to get smaller as I went along. It ranged from very tall to perfectly Kylee-height until very near the end, when I finally had to duck and then crawl. The last few hundred feet of the cave were actually dug out by some ambitious fellows in the 1930s who wanted to find out how far the tube went. When I got to the end, after a time of crawling, giggling, and attempting to manage my baggage, I discovered that their work is constantly being continued. The very end of Lava River Cave is a long, conical hole in the sand with the marks of fingers where people have gone on excavating. I hope the picture I took of that came out. I took a film canister full of sand with me as my contribution to the digging effort.

As I sat at the end of the cave with sand and bliss all over me, I heard people coming up behind me. "There's a light up there. I don't know if it's a lantern or what."
"It's a lantern!" I called. A young man and woman who had gone into the cave around the time I had came through the low tunnel. I pointed out that it was the end. He seemed a bit disappointed, as I had been. The truly marvelous thing, though, was that the young woman was wearing long white pants. She had not a spot on them. I'd been crawling, and so had her friend. She must have been the Limbo Queen.