Cave Story

Likely the most bizarre part of being in a cave is waking up and still being in a cave. Anywhere the light from your lantern isn’t hitting is completely soaked in darkness. And the darkness is really very dark down here. Last night might have been the best sleep of my life if I’d been courageous (or foolish) enough to turn off my light. It might still be last night, for all I know. The cave has no circadian rhythm.

Most tourists come to Burlington to see the place where an explorer died in the 20s. I’m surveying these depths because all my life I’ve lived here and I feel I owe it to this town to experience the one reason it’s on anyone’s travel itineraries. Next year I’m abroad (although as my younger siblings have joked, I already am) for my first semester of college so now must be as good a time as any to subject myself to a good old fashioned spelunking expedition.

The two times I’ve experienced full, three-sixty degrees pitch black so far on this expedition have both been absolutely harrowing, to say the least. To say the most, dwelling in the light starved subterranean abyss four hundred feet into Sand Cave for even a few seconds is unlike anything else one can experience on this planet. The creeping yet consistent sense of claustrophobia you grow to seek refuge in gives way to the feeling of vast nothingness, an all encompassing unmeasurable vacuum where time stretches and sound is your only sense. Oh, the sound of darkness. It’s paralyzing. Ancient rivers flow through these buried caverns, and you can hear them babbling through systems hundreds of yards away. Is the cave alive? There is nothing from my life on the surface to compare the alien underworld to. The fundamental nature of this place contrasts entirely with what I’ve come to expect above ground. I am accustomed to north, east, south, and west, to landmarks, and to human intervention in the wild. The maps we use to orient our party are flat, yes, but vertical. The orientation of a map is something I’ve always taken for granted, and I’ve still yet to grow accustomed to thinking primarily with the z axis. There’s another good point– these routes rarely travel forward for long. They loop back under themselves, obeying the one rule of subsurface traversal: down. These tight channels are products of erosion, and water doesn’t go up. The consistency of this world is maddeningly contradictory. There is water, everything is rocks, and you will go down. But these caves also weren’t designed to accommodate humans. Openings I’ve just traipsed through present themselves as entirely unexplored the second I take my eyes off them. I can’t imagine how our guide manages to stay oriented, and occasionally I fear they’re no less senseless down here than I am.

My first brush with the void spanned only a few seconds. The entire party agreed to briefly switch off its lanterns in unison a few hours into the voyage, purely out of curiosity. I was never particularly comfortable dwelling in the darker recesses of my room as a girl and in those fleeting moments of inky black I felt a hint of what was to come the next morning.


​henry