Stephen Eginoire is a small man with abundant hair and a rock climber’s sense of fashion. He seems uncomfortable around the microphone, as if it might turn and devour him. It is Thursday evening at the Museum of Northern Arizona and Stephen is at the podium, leading us down into a world beneath the world, a photographic journey into the caves and aquifers of the Grand Canyon.
Far beneath the surface of the Kaibab plateau exists a system of caves carved over millions of years throughout the Redwall limestone. Inside some of these caves runs the Redwall-Muav aquifer, a mysterious system of lakes and moving waters, some of which reach the surface as springs. Roaring Springs, Thunder River, Vasey’s Paradise. The ancient water, mixed with younger groundwater, appears in these and many other places in Grand Canyon. We see water gushing from the Redwall and still have only the most incipient understanding of its age and source and the path of its journey.
Stephen, who claims not to be a scientist, is at least a rock climber, writer and photographer. Inside one of the newly discovered and unusually dry Grand Canyon caves, he has photographed the wonders of life hidden from our view but right beneath our feet. Gypsum sculptures, long white filaments no wider than a human hair, hang from the cave ceiling. Stalagmites and stalactites point bony, luminous fingers. Fantastic shapes, pale blobs, towering ceilings; ballrooms of limestone decorated with jewels no light has ever touched. Mummified foxes, mummified bats appearing just as they did when they flew into the cave more than 50,000 years ago. The images of death are as stark as the images of life are stunning.
What is it about the unseen that renders us speechless with awe or frozen with terror? Take a few steps off the edge of our world and our perceptions have nothing to cling to. And nothing to hold them back. A great expansiveness is available to us, yet we often long for the relative safety of the known.
When I taught eighth-graders everything I knew about writing, I was ambitious and started them off with similes and metaphors, what we call figurative language. I wanted them to understand that the power of writing comes from layering, placing one picture on top of another in order to elucidate a truth. And while it would always be easy enough to live on the familiar ground floor of the house we call home, strong writing required a trip to the basement. One boy, I’ll call him Samuel, had a mother who was a pianist and a little bit crazy. She never left the house and when Samuel left the house she clung to him and cried with fear. At the end of our time together, Samuel wrote a piece about his mother. He described her at the piano, her hands on the keyboard locked in place by a thick twining vine. It was impossible not to see a snake in that vine, and a mother who was held captive by primordial terror. In his writing, Samuel had descended to the basement. He had written down into his mother’s subconscious as well as his own, and through metaphor had brought to light a truth.
Bringing to light. Casting light upon. Enlightening. Enlightenment. This is the language of discovery and promise. If you’re a spelunker or a speleologist, you push your body through passages barely large enough for human shoulders, hoping for discovery and believing in the possibility if not the promise. Stephen’s team, a team of scientists, commuted to work every day, rappelling off the side of the canyon into air as thin as a frayed nerve, coming to land finally at the mouth of their workplace, then carrying their burdens of scientific equipment, and in Stephen’s case, cameras, into the complete and utter darkness of the cave. In this cave alone they have mapped forty-two miles of passages, with an unknown number beyond that left to explore. In the world above this magnificent emptiness, an emptiness full of new discoveries and appalling beauties and ancient preserved animals, there is no knowledge of this hidden layer, this hollow world below, no clue that it exists. That mysterious truth compels and confuses me in equal parts.
The day after Stephen introduces us to the world below, the world within, my sister calls with the news that she has breast cancer. A creature growing inside her is how she envisions it. We talk, say the things sisters say, and promise to talk again soon. After that I stand alone in my kitchen, feeling the workings of something unexpected and unwelcome. The glory of the caves is still with me, yet a creature is lurking there now, unknown, unseen, fearsome. It lives in the world below, invisible, yet as real as all that can be seen. My perceptions have nothing to cling to. I’ve stepped with my sister off the edge of our world. There’s nothing we’re accustomed to in this new place, and though we’d like to believe in the expansive nature of all that is, we long for the safety of the known.
