Wherein I wrap up the year

Your eyes will never get used to this.

We were about a hundred feet underground, with six or seven other people to the right and left of us. The guide had just turned the lights off midway through the “Crystal Palace Tour”, the shorter of the two tours we were taking at Marengo Cave. Jenna was showing us what absolute darkness was. The lights stayed off for maybe five seconds, which wasn’t nearly enough for me to test that hypothesis, but her phrase stayed with me the rest of the day.

This was the third cave system tour that I’ve been taken through, the others being Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and Cave of the Mounds in Wisconsin. Walking through with a bunch of other people, you lose the one thing that really attracts me to these kind of environments: the sense of aeons of time passing. When one jogs by a five-foot tall stalagmite hearing that it grows one cubic inch every hundred years, and then on to the next thing, I want to stop and say, “Hey, doesn’t that put things in any sort of perspective for you? Doesn’t it make you think about our place in the cosmos?” It gives me a similar feeling to looking up at the night sky and considering the stars not as albino pin pricks in a sheet of construction paper, but as vast worlds of their own. A little shiver. Keep moving.

Your eyes will never get used to this.

“Remember to keep your hands at your sides. There’s oil in your skin, and oil and water don’t mix. If you touch a formation, it will stunt or stop its growth.” 2011 was a year like that for me. Given the uncertainties of my present existence, it’s been very difficult for me to make connections. Needing to reach out in very low light, and warning myself against trying to make contact. The flashlight did illuminate a few natural wonders, to be sure. Steadfast friends, deeply moving artistic opportunities, my children’s successes. But always the return to the semi-darkness.

Mirror Lake. A body of water about an acre. The trick question is, “How deep is it?” Guesses range up to thirty feet, then the flashlight reveals an actual depth of about six inches. Again, we go on. But the amazing part is revealed when you wait until it is perfectly still, and faithfully reflects the ceiling and lighting above, making it appear as you’re on an upper floor of an atrium looking several hundred feet to the lobby below. I try to convince myself that it it’s an optical illusion, to put it into context without the cheat of trying to force ripples on the surface. But the incredible beauty is in the stillness, and I give up, and prefer to think of the depth.

Your eyes will never get used to this.

When the Wife and I made our first trip to Bloomington to scout out apartments, we extended the trip to see Mammoth Cave. We had been married about a year, and were young and silly. We stayed in a Days Inn in Cave City, and ordered out from the nearest place, which happened to be a Pizza Hut. We took the Adventure tour, which involved hard hats (which we could keep), helmet lights (which we couldn’t), and crawling on our hands and knees, which I could do because I was thin enough, barely. Our lives stretched out before us. Now, these many years later, it seems as though this cave trip should bookend this time period. New things are in order.

I’m far past they day when I should believe in a perfect state of being, but that hasn’t prevented me from trying to achieve it: “If I just get X, Y, and Z in place, things will be good enough, and I’ll be able to stay in a groove for a long time, mutatis mutandis.” Life isn’t like that. There’s always another layer. We were walking through one of the more massive underground spaces, and the guide was talking about the fact that we were under the cemetery. I turned to the Wife and said that she should have said that the stalactites hanging from the ceiling were the fingers of dead people. Daughter #1 quietly asked if the carbon dioxide emitted from the corpses affected the formation of the cave. She didn’t do it in a smart-ass fashion, but because that’s the way her mind works: Jenna certainly wasn’t expecting that kind of question. When they began the cemetery, the possibility of a huge cavern underneath their loved ones that didn’t have Satan in it was not what the villagers of Marengo, IN thought.

Your eyes will never get used to this.

The trip to the cave took about two-and-a-quarter-hours. The route that Google Maps gave us was the shortest, mostly state highways. The last half-hour we were in country that hadn’t been laid flat by glaciers during the last Ice Age, and the surveyors laying out State Route 66 hadn’t seen fit to level the ground at all, so we drove up and down on a road that seemed to be made out of stretched-out salt water taffy. The girls were much better about not complaining about car sickness than I would have been at their age, so on the return, I was able to map out a slightly longer route that was primarily interstate highways.

Now that I think about it, I trust that 2012 will be a good year. That Jenna has led me, Virgil-like, through the Inferno, and that I’m now on the route to, if not Paradiso, at least Purgatorio. We received so many thoughtful presents from friends and relatives this Christmas, and I’m working on a number of halfway-decent employment prospects. Tonight is a kid-friendly New Year’s Eve party at the house of some good friends. My job this year is to mount the stairs out of the absolute darkness and take greater advantage of the few streaks of light that my eyes can pick up. As long as I keep climbing, my eyes won’t get used to the absolute darkness.

The best New Year to you and yours.