Great Outdoors

BEAR GULCH CAVE

Water Between the Stones

I feel my body swing towards the center console as my friend Jenna accelerates around the bend, a cyclone of concrete that sinks towards and into the interstate. She asks Ayana and me what we’re most afraid of–rational or irrational.

“Zombies,” Ayana says, a little too quickly.

I don’t say life in a Sixth Extinction. So I say, “Gravity–not working. Everything slipping away. Like a rapture but with all the cars floating up into the sky.” The centripetal force stops tugging me. We settle in our seats, hurtling forward, pushing ninety.

Jenna asks, “But wouldn’t like, the ozone, just dissipate?” Smoke rolls out of her mouth, blueing the air of the car, as she says this.

“Into outer space?”

“Probably, right?” She hands me the lighter.

Neither of us has the scientific background to take the conversation any further. The sun blanches the blue of the sky at noon. The bass of the music Jenna plays is loud, and the production is layered and synthetic. I watch the concrete and metal of the city grow fluid with the speed, my vision blurring. The highway is somehow fast and congested. The steady rumble of speed surrounds us, melding with the crunchy bass, as thin-limbed trees sequestered on a strip of pale green grass by the highway blur by silently. I squint at the sky and see the scar of a contrail.

Billboards advertising fast food and car dealerships shrink away, and the sky gets bigger but less blue. I try to concentrate on the conversation, but the light and sound just hurt. My eyes keep slipping to Google Maps, watching the animated icon crawl along a straight line of electric blue. 

“Tell me when we get off.”

“Okay.” I glance down to check the map. My phone’s almost out of battery. I look up to read the sign and see pale umber mountains erupting from the horizon. It occurs to me that the two times I’d driven this road before were at one in the morning, and I had never known those mountains existed. Never saw them at least.

Melting ice rattles against metal. Jenna hands me the flask and I fill my mouth with cold water.

We switch cars in San Jose. Jenna heads back, and it’s just Ayana and me now, strangers. Like pretty much any road outside the South, I’ve never driven this road before. But highways always feel familiar, like I’ve been exactly wherever I’d just been. I ask Ayana, “So how much longer do we have to go?”

“About an hour and eleven minutes.” I suddenly think of 316-E, between Atlanta and Athens.

Ayana and I get to know each other. The plains and hills we drive through are brown or neon green. Occasionally a tractor powders a plume of thin red dirt into the sky, or a water tower juts out of the ground. Infrequent patches of shotgun houses look small under the sky. We figure out where home is for each other, where we’re trying to live next, before talking about long-distance relationships.

A silver train accelerates parallel to us before diverging. Whenever Ayana says so, I flip on the caution lights and jerk onto the gravelly shoulder of the highway. We wander out, fifty feet from the road. I’m struck by how brutal it feels, alien. The soil caves beneath our feet. It occurs to me how few people must have stopped here before, by the train tracks in front of patches of tomatoes shriveling under the sun in coarse soil, by mounds of knotted iron. The earth is the color of ash, moon dust. I look into a small concrete square, full of still water. Green algae accumulate against its sides. I can’t see my reflection because the surface is suffocated by a rust colored membrane. The sunlight becomes more golden, and the air smells like exhaust.

The land reminds me of the Mojave, how the sand sparkled like stars, how freight trains rattled into oblivion past the horizon, how water was nowhere and everywhere.

I ask Ayana, “So do you know what a gulch is?”

She snaps another photo. “Nope.”

“Me neither.”

I enjoy the music, the drive. We lose cell service, and I feel completely okay with it. I am alone with the sound of my breath, Ayana’s snores, and the air conditioner. Other than an occasional cluster of cows, you can hardly tell humans had been here. The sky becomes a softer purple, and the imprint of half a moon dangles in it. The tar is as black as the heavy shadows that blot the landscape, like spilled ink beneath thick-leaved trees.

The road is on a slope, and it’s almost as if we’re flying above it all. I stop occasionally to get out and skateboard, unafraid of the headlights that might hurtle out from behind the curve in the road, past a wall of carmine stone. The car never comes, and I think of the glaciers that softly shaped entire valleys before highways, before state lines, before any mouth formed the words “mine.”

I count five, six, eight–more than I can count–blackbirds orbiting in the sky. They don’t flap their wings, making microscopic adjustments to remain buoyant on the wind.

I get back in the car and follow the signs to the national park. I drive past an ancient tree, black and knotted from its roots to its thinning branches. The sound of the car causes small birds to erupt from the tree’s limbs, and they collectively ripple and unfold in an amoeba before their form is swallowed by soft blue.

I yank the aux cord out with a pop, and we find a place to park. My phone is dead. The air is markedly cooler. There are clumps of bushes the color of dried blood, and everything smells like clean water. Hawks circle in the sky. Lizards dart between fallen limbs.

As Ayana and I hike up into the trees, red spires of rock erupt from the ground cradling us. The dirt is wet and sweet, and fuzzy-headed reeds jut out between the trails, taking flame in the light. At the few campsites we pass, kids play catch while their parents look at their phones.

We stand beneath a mesa, and I plant one foot on a boulder, my body above a small sea of thin-limbed plants fighting for air and light. I look at the boulders, then up at the far larger monument of earth. It’s jagged against the palm but smooth from a distance.

The stone seems to curve and it occurs to me that when winter comes, the place where I stand will be underwater. The gap between the rocks that I stand above will be flooded. Plants will be ripped from their thin roots. Water will shed millimeters of stone from boulders like snakeskin. And those waters will evaporate again under the same sun. I see my shadow ripple in the plants. I think of a philosopher, probably Greek, whose name I know will come back to me. They said something to the effect of, “No one steps into the same river. Because it isn’t the same river, and they aren’t the same person. It stays the same by changing.” I look into my shadow and watch it warp in the ripples.

The sun forms a halo around spires standing in the sky. A wall of rock curves open. When we walk through the new gateway, we move like water through and between stone before the sky breaks again. 

When we reach the cave, I have to crouch to get through, then hunch to avoid hitting my head. We’re there in the darkness against a wall of green moss in a cavern of sound and darkness. There’s a stream at our feet, and the water is cold and still.

My eyes follow the line from the mossy wall, up the cathedral-like ceiling, to the small isosceles triangles of sky, turning a darker purple in twilight. These small segments of light break between massive boulders and wedge between walls of stone. I try to take a picture, but the light, which was soft against the eye, refuses to be captured by a lens. Hypnotized by these small bits of light, I hardly notice the whole sky erupting just above my head. Ayana and I stand in thin water, in a square of soft blue light, listening to the wind and the murmur of bats. We step into the dark, move through it, lighting the feet in front of us with the flashlight of her cellphone. The dark is something holy. By the time we make it to the end of the cave, the wall comes down and we are brought to our knees.

Squinting at the sudden light, the enormity of sky, we slip occasionally on loose earth while climbing up the side of the mountain, away from the cave. We try to catch the sunset, eclipsed by the mesa. The trees around us are otherworldly, dark red with grey leaves. I stop, hearing my breath louder than I’d heard it in a while. The wind rattles the grass and the limbs of trees; everything shudders like cicadas. The sound of the world and the sound of myself remind me that I am a part of it, not apart from it. I breathe in the wind and breathe it out to the coming quiet. The sky is lit orange, purple, pink, with a dome of dark leaning in from the east, the stars peeking out.

We’re driving in the dark through Monterey, but the lights of the console illuminate our faces. The blurs of brake lights move past us. We rush through tall pines I’d seen before. Small pockets of city sparkle in the distance.

I look to the side of the highway, out of Ayana’s window, out at an overwhelming darkness.

“Do you think that’s farmland or the ocean?”

“I really can’t tell.”

I keep driving, thinking of the cave.

Words: Tom Lambert

Photos: Ayana Mora