Into the Under

I lift the lid of the large bucket and put my ear to the slick, wrinkling sound within it. Sometimes I close my eyes to mimic the slick, tunneled darkness. Inside the bucket is a damp existence rich with the dark castings of worms. If I look quick enough, I can spy them retreating into the soil they are creating beneath the soft scatterings of table scraps I provide. Translucent slivers of carrot. Browning red onion. Iceberg lettuce soft and white like a lake’s thawing surface. I dip my fingertips into the compost until I feel fleshiness. I lift worms, along with the decomposing relics of their everyday lives, to my nose and sniff.

A diver died exploring here, I told my friend Maddie three days ago as we descended into a sink hole where a local cave is found. A welling of water gushed from beneath a limestone wall, slithered across the floor of the sink hole, and into the very large mouth of the tall cave where it eventually entered a sump. The first rule in SCUBA diving, I told her, is to never dive alone. Then I smirked. So that you won’t die alone. Maddie admired the formations of ice around the mouth of the cave as I picked up cold, smooth rocks from the stream bed, each of them a primeval narrative that I gently let slip from my fingers. The water not terribly high, I entered the cave, its ceiling ridged and toothed like a mouth. I noted the water’s conversation with rock. The dialect of drip. The language of calcium carbonate. The stutter of debris. The slur of warmer air. The tongue of current. Step by careful step I entered the darkness, looking back at what could have been an alluring rock formation at the bright entrance of the cave. It was Maddie’s silhouette. I continued deeper into the darkness, my hands out, ready to feel something.

About an hour before walking into the cave, I donned my galoshes and descended into wetlands where song sparrows sang and I felt nothing. I had gone to the ponds to bide my time until Maddie was ready to go to the cave. I considered walking to the far end of the final pond where the poison hemlock was a simple, chartreuse rug and not yet lacy, menacing curtains. But instead, my eyes fell on the darkness between the thousands of floating duckweed leaves, so honest, they gave away the wind. I imagined the leathery, Triassic bodies of snapping turtles burrowed in the mud below. I stood there, also longing to be a subterranean castle of mandible, maxilla, and tail. I walked no further, the poison hemlock just members of my memory. And alas, Maddie’s text. She was ready.

I can’t say for a fact, my friend Frank said to me two days ago, but I believe someone dug for coal here. We stood at the soft edge of a large, mature hole in the ground. No rotting roots or timber nearby, the hole looked pressed into the ground by a god-finger. The walls of the hole sloped just enough for entrance and escape. It was definitely not a sinkhole. I imagined myself curled up at the bottom, asleep. Frank and I continued up a wooded hollow that follows Loup Run, a freestone stream that tumbles into a small reservoir where it lazes until it spills back into the tumbling stream of itself. When we reached the placid reservoir, I stared down at its still water as Frank explained that the invasive brown trout somehow got into this reservoir from the stream below. I thought about the invasives: the oil-slick murmurations of European Starlings; the delicious pesto I’ve made from Garlic Mustard; the Japanese Barberry with its delicate, yellow flowers that face the ground rather than the sky. Standing there, I felt it coming, as uncontrollable as gravity to water. Spring. The days where the buds burst forth and I force a smile to bloom on my face. The days where the mycelial network raises the glorious bells of its orchestra and I sigh. The days where the evenings are finally longer and warmer, but I don’t linger and instead walk the short distance back to the car, and what a long walk it always is. Spring, the season of long stares at the ground. The season of blankness in mind and spirit. The season of long sighs and shrugging shoulders.

I think I’m getting depressed, I laughed, as I drove Maddie along the winding road to the cave. My galoshes were still wet on the brake pedals from my slow meanderings around the wetland ponds. Maddie expressed a similar sentiment, briefly mentioning something about a lot going on energy-wise and I did not know if she meant in her life or in the cosmos, or both. I explained to her that the cave is a hole in the ground inside a hole in the ground. What sounds like a tomb or a crypt is a cave inside a sinkhole. Eventually, we pulled up to the edge of the sinkhole. We got out of the car and stood on its soft precipice of leaf litter and humus before descending into its depth.

She eventually followed me into the cave, careful not to get her feet too wet. I love watching people as they look at beautiful things. My eyes follow their gaze or their pointed fingers. Lips always part in some kind of amazement. Eyebrows of the delighted always raise while eyebrows of the thoughtful always furrow. Sometimes a hand shields the eyes from light or other such distractions so to better see. Eyes sometimes squint. And my favorite, the smile. And my other favorite, the lowering onto the haunches to better investigate an intricate this-or-that. Maybe they’ll pick up the rock or stroke the mushroom cap. Maybe they’ll pop the puffball or gently peel back a layer of bark. Or another favorite, just falling to the knees. As Maddie gazed at the cave’s ceiling and ran her fingers over the soft ridges of rock, I mimicked her. I mimicked her marvel and novel. Sometimes I even took the same pictures. I feared that if I were alone, I might not have gone into the cave. Not for a lack of wonder but for a seasonal lack of spirit. Instead, I might have stood right outside it, hands in my pockets, nudging the sandy shore of the limestone stream with my foot before prematurely heading home.

Frank and I continued up the hollow, following Loup Run, when he suddenly stopped and pointed upstream. I looked and there it was, the waterfall he wanted to share with me. I felt my eyebrows raise and my mouth open into a smile. It’s no Niagara Falls, he had warned me earlier before the hike. I laughed at what seemed like his worry at disappointing me. I assured him that I was not expecting magnificent falls in Blair County. I know, he said. You appreciate the simple things.

We approached the eight-foot waterfall that was graced with another, small waterfall just downstream from it. He crossed the stream to the other side as I stood on a jutted rock, staring at exactly what it is: water falling. Water following gravity, using the path of least resistance. It’s water falling, I whispered to myself. Yet somehow, the word itself—waterfall—ignited magic much like how Marco Polo claimed to see a unicorn, describing it as an ugly beast—when what he actually saw for the first time was a magnificent Indian Rhinoceros. I looked over at Frank who was on his haunches, capturing the good angle of the waterfalls, water curving around his boots.

On our way back down the hollow, we noted the dried hulls of witch hazel blossoms. We wondered if a certain large tree was a Cucumber Magnolia so I proposed that we search the forest floor for their seed pods, which he found. We noted the old Morse code of sapsucker holes in the bark of a tree. We passed several more of the man-made holes that had been dug for treasures of coal. I looked at Frank and thought what a treasure.

Maddie and I ascended from the depths of the sinkhole and again stood at its edge. I imagined bodies swimming in tunnels under the ground. I told her what sump meant, and explained that the water entering the cave sees light again just down the road where it re-emerges. I drove her there, stopping on a bridge and pointing down to an arch of rock where water sparkled in the sun. I watched her look as I imagined the terror of human error, complete darkness, and disorientation in the dark wet caverns beneath us. I looked up, squinting my eyes at the sun.

The worms don’t care for light and they wriggle into the lump of compost in my hand. Their bodies, covered in chemoreceptors and nerve endings, are in constant dialogue with taste and sensation. I poke at the compost to see them just one more time. What a way to be, I told the feel-everything worms before letting them slip from my fingers and back into their dark tunnels where they do their life’s work so that I can do mine.