We waltzed in the midday sun, along straight roads outta town, through long lazing fields of potato plants, to find this dark, glittering, frozen planet. The sun beat down, and up, from the ground to swirl around our legs in a hazy heat that reminded me of the deserts of Arizona and California. We were in Idaho, yet we were a million miles away, on the surface of a sunny moon. A moon where rocks lay about in strange formations - small, foamy and gassy cinders, light enough to bob to the surface, rolling along on top of heavier ropey waves that washed out from the inner earth. Caught in a few crevices here and there were tiny starlike flowers, shuddering in the wind that ran across every surface.
We loped along, exploring caves and climbing cones. Oliver was much more daring than I was - he descended into the darkness through holes so small they caught my breath in my chest and throat. I watched, feeling a kind of compulsion to try and fail, yet again, to climb into the wombs of the Earth. I have always had a fear of small spaces, as long as I can remember… Perhaps it has something to do with a blurry memory of a game of hide-and-seek, and an uncomfortable spell tucked away in a cramped wicker laundry basket or some such thing. Whatever it is, I have struggled with nightmares of small caves becoming smaller as I crawled, and have even foregone certain adventures if they meant I had to squeeze through a narrow opening. I watched, with longing, wishing I could gather my courage. It felt as if this land was testing me. I dipped my toes in the dark water, but pulled out before I lost my breath. It would only be a year later, when guided by the glow of spirit, motivated by the thought of never-again, and pumped up with many deep breaths and sips of water, I slipped past a small opening such as this, into the depths of a wide cavern on a small island in Bali.
But no matter! There was much more to explore, on this tiny slice of the moon. Larger caverns with wide openings called, and so did the bats that slept and flapped inside. A tall cinder cone begged us to walk to the tippy top, where the wind whispers secrets and tickles your ears, and a twisted tree sits alone, overlooking the black lands. The rocks talked, chattering with the voice of that wind, whistling simple tunes, while catching at our shoes with their rough edges, trying to get us to stop and admire them. Touching them was like feeding a horse - careful, gentle, fingers held at just such an angle so they wouldn’t bite or scratch us.
Oh, to think of what devastations happened here, what huge acts of heaving and wrenching and spilling destruction, that led to this quiet creation! All is hushed now. All serene, all calm, only the wind and it’s song.
