In a Cave

There is the feel of an ocean. Whipping banners and blue flags. The shops and vendors in the avenue. A small fountain. Driving along a boulevard of palms. Maybe it was for the Spanish I was speaking. The craggy buildings. Green hills to the side. The horizon dropping off below. I drove without thinking and rolled down the window—as people often do when nearing the ocean—for the smell of salt and the breeze. There was the buzz of motos and honking horns, the people baking in the sun, the smell of wood smoke and crushed vegetables and manure, and I was aware that I was not driving to the beach. There was not an ocean for thousands of kilometers. The avenue narrowed and turned to dirt, and then dropped between the houses like anthills, below the long green hills, a range of mountains I had not seen. 

Driving the car—a stick shift that wasn’t mine—down so many rocky, potfilled, roads, and getting lost within them, and reversing back down them, and performing three-point turns across them, from one muddy ditch to the other, had lent me a deep ache by the time we arrived at the caves, and I envied the workers we had passed, and the locals we had asked for directions, who traveled by donkey or horse or foot.

There were six cars in the parking lot at the caves. The yellow lettering on the treated wood signs reminded me of signs outside U.S. National Parks. A wooden fence with three triangular beams led to a small hut with a metal turnstile. A woman sat inside. Entering the caves would cost foreigners $15. Hondurans paid the equivalent of $2. I gave them the money and walked up a well-maintained trail along the river to the entrance to the cave. A small man with a smooth and round face like an olive walked out of the cave followed by a nondescript couple and their child, all of whom paused and looked at me and my companion. The couple continued down the trail along the gushing river to the parking lot and the guide introduced himself and asked if we had flashlights. We said no and he asked if we wanted a guide and we said yes and followed him onto the metal walkway and into the cool unscented darkness of a cave named Talgua.

Talgua is located in a cave complex outside the city of Catacamas, Honduras, in the Department of Olancho. It has human remains from 1500 B.C. And there is some mystery to them. The skeletons are all located in odd, somewhat unceremonious, places—several of which seemingly would require technical climbing gear to reach. And there are no paintings or writings in the cave. No drawings, no signs of life—as the saying goes—but the bones. One thousand five hundred years before Christ they were. That's a long time. That is same as the distance between now and the barbarians sacking Rome plus 2000 more years. 

We were not yet out of the light when the guide, who had a very nice and easy smile, motioned to a tunnel behind the handrail. It was of the wall behind us, and from it's direction it seemed it would lead directly where we'd come from. But scientists who had entered were forced to turn back after traveling for 8 hours without finding the end.

But there is a famous cave in France—now more-famous because it was the subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011)—that scientists are able to study without entering thanks to sonar-mapping technology. Out of fear of contaminating the remains and more importantly the beautiful, museum-worthy paintings within, only the Scientists go in. They can see paintings that have disintegrated and see what layer of paint was put applied at what time, digitally scanning the layers of the rock. Archaeologists regard it as a church. Something holy. It was. The paintings are good: running horses painted by torchlight 30,000 years ago (for there is no light). And next to them, painted 10,000 years later, a vast lion hunt. Then we found it. 20,000 years later. The fathoms of time. This is the point of the film. And it is a good film. Most haunting though, of this cave’s oddities, are a set of footprints, deep within the cave, where there is no light: the footprint of a boy situated neatly next that of a wolf. 5,000 years later (still over 10,000 years ago) a man walked around making red handprints. Some are on the rock floor, some on the walls. Scientists confirm the handprints were made by the same man. He had a broken pinky.

The guide told us that the bones glowed, and referenced the beautiful, sparkly, curtain-shaped, stalagmites behind us. Sales y minerales. They glow because of the minerals in the water. Then there was a set of stairs welded to floor. With a less-than defensive, but erect, and braced posture, the guide explained that due to the sensitivity of the atmosphere around the remains only certain people were allowed to see them. He apologized, and pulled the orb of the flashlight back onto the floor.

And this is when I noticed the scratches on the walls. Someone had written mierda, which translates to shit. If I had thought of it at the time, and I hadn’t been distracted by a strange color sitting on the rocks, I would have asked the guide if it was really better to wall anything off, like in France, or to set to work scratching things like mierda on the walls. But that is when I saw this strange color sitting on the rocks. Algae growing on the walls. I hadn't noticed it when we came in. The light increased. We were nearing the entrance. The tour was over. The guide began a brief, farewell-hope-you-enjoyed-yourself-and-come-again speech he’d probably said a hundred, hundred times, and we said thank you, and we stepped outside and someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was raining. How long inside? I was squinting, my pupils so wide it hurt.

Water and Poison

It is a nice house. You would call it a cabin. In Honduras there are just too many critters to keep out. So, naturally, a sort of indifference develops. A tarantula under the couch, curled up and dead. Looked like an upside-down crab. Alright. Centipede crawls out of the drain. It's OK. Stray dog and softball-sized frog get in fight. Frog sits in puddle. Dog afraid of water. Dog barks at frog, then runs into my house. That's not good. How do you say bad dog? Come.

Gecko on the wall scurries a few inches and stops. Sits in one spot for twenty minutes then continues. The reptilian brain. Could smash it, but why? They eat the bugs. But then what eats the geckos? Well, why does anything have to eat the geckos? Your problem with geckos, not mine.

You must kill all the ants though. Because they are smart as shit. They will destroy your home. They walked right through the front door and into my room the other day. I followed them. Found them dissembling a Chiquita banana sticker I’d left in some pants pocket in the hamper. Must have had some banana still on there. The next time I just put the pants on. They all bite at once. That was the first time I could say, "I have ants in my pants."

So I asked Carlos, my boss, a father of two, a pious and respected man in town who is considered endearing to everyone he encounters, "How do you get rid of ants?"  He said: “Find where they are living. Dump boiling water. Then put poison."

I have dumped boiling water. Put the poison. But you can't poison rain. And it has rained twice on my bed.

Hustling out of the rain up to your front door. Fumbling with the keys. Almost there. Click. Yes. Into the still dryness. The wooden coat rack and worn dining room table. Pass the kitchen, the wires, open the bedroom door. Rain on both sides of the window. Raining on the bed. The cell phone, laptop, power strip. The oscillating fan shaking his head, sputtering like a a baby. We’ve got to get you unplugged. We’ve got to get you all unplugged. You stand there a moment and watch because it's incredible. And then get a bucket.

But then again, I get it.

I was making tuna sandwiches last night with a neighbor. She has a son. Good mother. Young. Kid was crying when we were leaving, so we stayed. Making tuna sandwiches. Then she turns to me, which is when I realize I had been staring at her hands. 
“You like lime?” she asks. “Taste good?” Very pretty.
I say yes. It would taste good. 
"Bring one," she says.  I look around the kitchen. On top of the refrigerator. 
"You don't have any."
“The tree,” she says. Then I remember there's a lime tree out front. “Get big one.” 
And I go in the dark and pull at the loaded branches and find many limes as big as apples.

This is Water

Couples sit and face the sun. Young people talk in a circle: a yellow one, a blue one, a green one, a brown one. The thing about epiphanies is that they’re nearly impossible to keep to yourself, and thereafter, they’re regarded at best as good ideas, at worst, common sense. Maybe the most important thing about having one is that you share it with the right person.

200 years before Christ, the Greek King, Heiro II, asked Archimedes, a mathematician, to see if his crown was pure gold or whether a dishonest blacksmith had mixed it with silver. To calculate the crown’s density it would have to be melted down—but Archimedes could not damage the crown. He was on a deadline and he had reached an impasse, so, worn out from puzzling, Archimedes sought refuge in the tub. But he was distracted and when he lowered himself in, the water spilled over the sides. He stood up, looked down and cried, “Eureka!” He had found the solution to the big problem by solving the smaller one. By dividing the mass of the crown by the volume of water displaced, he could figure its density—by weighing himself, teleologically speaking, he had weighed gold. That’s a golden idea. And he could have made a lot of it if he’d kept it to himself. But he did not even take time to dress before he took to the streets yelling, “Eureka! Eureka!” which translates to “I found it! I found it!”

I was wading in, bending over to toss the water with my hands. I wanted to see how other parts of me looked below the surface, but I could not see my feet through the moving water. And then I looked away and thought of the other things—the things one cannot help but think. And then I looked up at my mother’s bronze cheeks and her satisfied eyebrows and eyes that were savoring the flavor of the coffee in her mouth, and the nice summer weather, and the view from our street-side table at the cafe. I would like to take pleasure from such simple things. And then I looked down and I could see my feet and the rocks that stretched out underneath them. The solution to things, I think, is forgetting them for a while and then remembering.

“I don’t know.”

“What?” she said. And her eyes thinned, and I could not answer, and then she was standing in a lake too.

“Come in! Come in!” my mother was yelling from the shore. It was during the heat wave of 1995. We’d left Chicago for the Indiana Dunes to relax, swim, and cool off. “Riptide! You’re too far out! Honey! Rip! Tide!” People stood on their beach blankets saluting while others ran along the water. The water was fresh and dark out by the rocks, slapping against the rocks, and I knew that I was afraid. My mother was wading in. We often camped near lakes. Mom likes the woods—I used to assume, because my father was like the woods, but now she likes it on her own and she likes to swim—much more than me, but she does not like it all at once. She likes to wade.

You know how it feels when you’re walking into a lake or an ocean? Sometimes I can’t help but do it, but it never feels good—with the waves deciding how to touch and when. It was torture to watch Mom feeling so cold for so long—and so needlessly—so I would prove how silly she was by running out to the point where the water took my legs, lower my head into the darkness and push out hard underneath with my legs and arms with my eyes open, staying below until it felt alright to have been swimming, and then come up, wipe water from my eyes, turn to the beach to get my bearings and then see how things were in the same place they were before, but also not where I thought they would be. It bothered me so much sometimes, watching her tremble and wade, that I’d raise an arm and slap the water. “Just get in!” I would yell and she would smile and say that she was. She was taking her time. So I would go back to the beach and lay down on a towel and shut my eyes. Sometimes I would splash her—I don’t know why, because it ruined the whole day for her. She would walk back out and sit on the beach, looking like a stubborn child, and I would stay in the water because it seemed like I had to. Floating in one place, guilty and angry that we’d switched places.

“Do you ever feel like you’re being torn apart?”

“In what way?” she said, and I realized that I had asked her a question. But she knew I was not really asking her, and that familiar anxiety I feel when I think about how things change without me came in, and I retreated into my well-worn thought: What would I be like if I’d had an insensitive parent. A drunk that beat me, abused me, or withheld kindness. What could be wrong with me then? I suppose I would not have much time to think of that.

“Forget about it,” I said. The day was passing on. People rose into the white reflecting light of the glass tables and floated from the cafe back into the street looking a little uncomfortable and off-balance until righted by the crowd that swallowed them. It was still a nice day, but it did not feel all-nice anymore. I had not meant to alarm her. It was nice out. The street was full of faces. I really did not mean to alarm her. I pointed to a little boy who was throwing a misshapen ball against the ground. He watched in amazement as it bounced from the sidewalk to the grass, against the fence, zigzagging unpredictably until it rolled to a stop along the curb. He ran after it. A voice caught him from behind and he stopped and dropped his head and his mother picked the ball up and asked him: "How many times have I told you to stay away from the street?"

Why do children collect things on the beach? Show mother a shell and she keeps it. Give father a stone and he casts it across the surface of the water. There are plenty of good rocks. Some are great, flat as pancakes, and smooth and cool against your palms, good to hold but better to throw. And then you know how good you are at skipping stones.

We were both looking at the spot where the boy had been when she said, “I remember when you were just a little guy. It seems like yesterday you were—” she was struggling for the words “—like this!” she said, and placed her palm face-down several feet from the ground and squinted at me and looked old and smiled. She lowered her coffee seriously. “I used to wonder what you would look like grown up. I had these dreams where this man would be walking toward me down the other side of the street and I would look closely and realize it was you. All grown up." 
"How did I look?"

“Well, you were just so cute as a kid. Then, you still are. You've always been very handsome.”

“But don’t all moms think that about their sons?”

“Well,” she said, and looked sort of school-girlishly up at the sky, squinting, weighing what she thought about her son, and what other mothers thought about their sons. “It doesn't mean you’re not.”
We were not talking about what I wanted to talk about. How does that happen? Right. The boy and his ball. Gone now. The ball pulling the boy along the shaded elms. 
Many fish probably think there are fish shaped like human feet that live in shallow water. Many fish probably think there are fish shaped like the-fish-shaped-like-human-feet that are bigger and have legs and live in deeper water. Many fish probably think that there are fish shaped like the-fish-bigger-than-the-fish-shaped-like-the-fish-shaped-like-human-feet that thrash against the ceiling of the water and then swim below, with heads and arms and faces just like people, far deeper than any fish.

We were standing on the beach together when I was very young. Someone was taking our picture, and it is from the pictures that I remember that day. I don’t know who was taking the pictures. We were wearing jackets and long pants. Mom’s hair was permed and frizzy and we both looked ugly. We stood side by side and faced the camera. The sun behind the clouds made the look of grimaces on both our faces. It was a brisk fall day on the East Coast, the ocean behind us had whitecaps, shortly after my father died.

Have you heard the story of the three fish? It goes like this. Two young fish were swimming along when they came upon an old fish headed in the opposite direction. The old fish paused and said, “How’s the water? but he did not stop and the two young fish continued on their way. Then one of the young fish stopped and asked his friend “What the hell is water?”

I did not want to swim. It was a cold day and the water was grey and choppy, but Mom said she had to, at least, put her feet in. She looked at Gary and I and said, “We’re at the beach!” And we were. But it was fall and the whole surface of the water was wide. Repeating a cycle of grey, dark grey, and white. And the wind-whipped waves at the point of the sun on the horizon, the point where I often like to look (and maybe everyone does) did not seem distant from the place where my mother was walking. The waves crashing on the waves at the shore, and the seagulls above turning sideways, then righting as their bodies to go limp against the wind. I wanted to tell her to come back, to yell out, but the trees were yelling out, blowing toward the water, and I did not know how to say the words. “Oh boy,” Gary said, nervously, as she kicked off her sandals, “she’s going to be cold.” He did not know her well at all. And when I looked up, she dove in.

I wanted to apologize, for everything, but I looked down and found myself sitting where I wanted to be sitting, with everyone across from me smiling in the sunshine and enjoying themselves, so I did not say that I was sorry—because suddenly I did not know what I was sorry for after all; I did not wish for rain, or for time to speed up or to slow down. We would stay late together if we wanted, drink coffee, talk or sit in silence—one and then the other. The beach is pretty today. The wind is not hot or cold. And the air and the water where all the children are swimming is blue.