Sale alert!
All of my ebooks are on sale this month for at least 40% off! Even better, Jack (essential reading for Halloween) in ebook format is free all month long! Find them at your favorite etailer:
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My first foray into a cave was as a Girl Scout when I was very young. I don’t remember much about it, but I remember the area around the cave, overgrown with thick vegetation and the constant reminders to be wary of Poison Ivy (which at the time, I still wasn’t completely sure what to look for, but I kept from brushing against small bushes with bare skin just in case).
The cave itself was very cool, with artwork on the walls and I remember how cool the air was, and how earthy everything smelled. It was like a whole other world.
And then we went to Lewis & Clark Caverns, taking a tour down into the deep, dark depths of other-worldliness that put the first “cave” to shame. Learning about stalagmites and stalactites, squeezing through small passages and crawling through short tunnels, watching water drip ever-so-slowly in a steady cadence from one smooth, shiny point to the next, and feeling the different textures of minerals underneath my feet…it was all just too amazing for words.
Then there was the black out – where the entire tour group huddled up in one of the caverns, and the tour guide would turn out the lights for just a minute. The kind of blackness that envelopes you is something you don’t ever forget. It’s so…complete. That there are species of animals that can live and survive in those environments is truly amazing.
I went back once as an adult, but it’s been awhile, and I’d definitely like to go again (or to another one). My fictional Gruesome Gully (which you can read about more on Friday) is located deep beneath a mountain, and is loosely based on the caverns we have here in Montana (I’m sure there are similar ones elsewhere). While we haven’t seen any lava rivers in ours (which is probably a very good thing), I added one to the Gruesome Gully mountain as both a decent source of light and heat, an extra source of torment for the souls consigned to the Gully, and also as an homage to our nearby super volcano underneath Yellowstone National Park. Could a normal human survive that close to a lava river with minimal venting? I think not. But that’s what fiction and mystical penal colonies are for – right?
What if you could? What if there was no other choice, because something happened on the surface and the only other option was death? Could we eventually evolve to live in caverns with lava as our main source of heat and light?
Interesting questions to ponder, methinks.