Mağaraya.

To the cave.

I gripped the deceptively small keys in my right hand; with a start, I realized that I was gripping them a little too briskly as the tines dug painfully into my newly-leprous hand-skin, creating tiny red crescents in my palm. The hazy morning sun glinted harshly off the blindingly white paint of the vehicle I’d soon be cramming with the confused and international; the dull crimson crest of Indiana University was clearly visible on the driver and passenger doors. I’d never driven something this large, and the thought of being responsible for seven lives simultaneously enthralled me and made me vomit a little in my own mouth. A Suburban. I clambered into it and turned the key and the giant land-cruiser roared to life, taunting me with enticingly smooth handling and a gas pedal that ached to be pressed to the floor. Be a good boy, I thought dully. People think you are responsible, and I’d no doubt be given the posthumous Dogpiss of the Year Award should I roll the damn thing on Indiana 37 with a carload of weeping internationals, begging for their lives in several East Asian languages. They didn’t pay $12 to end their lives on another continent, only to be scraped off the highway with snowshovels. With a heavy sigh, I accelerated to the speed limit and cruised out of the Motor Pool parking lot to the International Center, where a dozen non-Anglophone angels awaited their trip to the cave.

As a small child summering in West Virginia, I remember well being taken to gigantic caverns nestled deep within the Smokies, replete with paralyzingly acidic bat guano and the pathetic remains of paleo-Indians who’d attempted to explore a world that must have seemed impossibly otherworldly. I remember staring at ghastly translucent fish, leftovers from a bygone age, their eyes becoming completely useless in the pressing dank and darkness of the cryptlike caverns. Later, in my grandmother’s attic, in a small room utterly devoid of any light, I became briefly convinced that if I stayed in there too long my own eyes would cloud over and then leak out of my ten-year-old sockets. I didn’t know whether that would be cool or not, but I was guessing that I’d not be ever held accountable for doing pre-algebra homework ever again. As visions of Annie Sullivan holding my wee hands under the water-pump held court in my imagination, I drifted off into blessed, childlike slumber.

The internationals assembled, looking a little bleary – after all, it was 8 AM on a Saturday – and I piled six of them into my SnowBeastmobile. After about ten seconds, I realized that I’d managed to get six Mandarin speakers all to myself. They were all Taiwanese, born on the rim of the Ring of Fire in a country whose founders fled their homes on the mainland so that they wouldn’t be butchered by the Mao Zedong-led Communists. What none of them knew was that I knew enough of their freaky tonal language to develop a rudimentary understanding of what they were gossiping about. I’d hoped that it would be racy if not just juicy, but mostly they talked about their schoolwork, how flat Indiana is, and how you can’t find good Sichuan hotpot in these parts. Secretly I was hoping that they’d talk about the hairy mofo in the front seat and how badly he reeked so that I could impress them with my linguistic acumen, but the opportunity never presented itself. I’d heard more wildly saucy tales at my grandmother’s pitch-in dinners, and that was in Renick, WVA, population 43. So I fixed my eyes on the road ahead as it snaked south through corn, then more corn, and then, after that, more corn still. Knee-high by the Fourth of July my ass; this corn clearly was touched by the sweet-smelling hands of the Baby Jesus himself, as it was taller than I and bore the luscious white and yellow treats gravidly. As we neared Paoli, Indiana, we began to see signs indicating that we were in Amish country; like the leaping stag Deer X-ing signs, these are meant to warn you that something potentially lethal could be just around the bend in the road. How would we explain to these kids what the Amish were? That there were people who deliberately lived like it was 1850 because they really, really wanted to? Chances are good that most of them had family living at home or on the mainland who would have plucked one of their pulsing eyes out of the socket for decent, reliable electricity and clean running water and connection to the net, and here were people who were surrounded by it and would have nothing to do with it whatsoever. We explained that the Amish were a group of people who escaped to North America fleeing from persecution in their homeland, and who wanted to maintain autonomy in the face of a world that was turning in a direction they didn’t find savory. Then it dawned on me: Duh. These kids would TOTALLY understand what that’s about; their grandparents did it by crossing the Straits of Formosa in the late 1940s. Granted, Taiwan’s no Lancaster County, but the sensibility resonated inside them. Mostly, though, they wanted to know if they could shop at Wal*Mart, and after we explained that yes, they did, they seemed a little more at ease.

After about two and a half hours of driving, we pulled up a large hill into a parking lot set amidst a faux oldey-timey “village.” As the Suburbans disgorged, I became filled with dread: what the hell was this place? And would twelve international students survive this experience? One of the buildings was clearly marked with the words “Cavern Tour Tickets”, so we trudged up the grade to the shanty. Inside, in addition to the tickets, you could buy enchanting artifacts like flamingo pink Indian Princess headdresses and bat pencil sharpeners; in a smallish pen outside, two vastly pregnant goats frolicked in the hearthstone heat along with a black she-wolf (ok, ok, it was totally a dog) and a nearly feral cat. As we stared blankly at the gravid she-goat’s engorged girl-parts, a woman burst forth from the hut and began to shriek at the top of her lungs like a sodomized baboon. The tour had begun.

We descended seventy-three spiral stairs into the dankness of the cavern, which mercifully was a brisk fifty-three degrees. Our guide-woman-thing began to shriek about the difference between stalactites and stalagmites (one requires less energy to impale a hapless tot upon) and how Nature Herself poured the waters of the centuries into the caverns, creating the bizarre formations that we were urged not to touch. “You have oil in your skins that will repel water. Do you want to stop this here thang from growing? Do ye?” she screamed, the butt of her horsewhip gleaming dully in the fluorescent light. We shook our heads rapidly in the negative as she prodded us forward towards the Eerily Beautiful Underground Waterfall Thing, which indeed was moist and surgey. The best part, though, was that the calcified mortal remains of the discoverer of the caverns (Daniel Boone’s younger brother, Squire) were interred in a bizarre wooden casket next to a jarringly modern marblesque memorial donated by the Daughters of the Somethingorother. It’s not every day you get to roam around in a cave-grave.

After about an hour, we ascended the stairs into the pressing heat of a southern Indiana afternoon to frolic in the “village.” This consisted of a “bakery” that sold various microwaved fleshy treats (I had a hotdog encapsulated in barbecue), a soap shop that sold small stuffed animals with invigoratingly exfoliating underbellies, a candle store that smelled like a box of Crayola crayons and a store that sold rocks of various shapes, colors, and preciousness. After briefly toying with the idea of buying a rock animal I thought was a donkey with a rocket-launcher on its back (secretly, it was a squirrel I was holding the wrong way), we hiked to the top of the hill to the bizarre memorial cairn and natural cave entrance. The whole experience, save the caverns themselves, inspired an overwhelming sense of “what the eff?”

We crammed the internationals back into the Suburbans and then headed down into Corydon, the first capital of Indiana and the site of the only Civil War battle in Indiana. Unbeknownst to us was that this particular weekend was to have been the reenactment of the Battle of Corydon, a two-day event sure to be replete with men in ill-fitting, improperly antiquated clothing who’d neglected to bathe and whose devotion to all things Civil War would terrify the confused internationals, who for the most part barely conceived that the US was briefly torn in two in the 1860s. All it would take would be a man with a bayonet-tipped rifle and these kids would defecate their aforementioned meaty treats into their drawers. I can just see their letters home now. “Dear Mom”, they’d begin, “Today I went to a place where men with weird facial hair in old, yak-smelling clothes shot big guns and pretended to be dead all day for fun. Kisses, Xiao Fei.” All was well with the world, though, once it was discovered that there was an old-time ice-cream parlor in town; within moments, they fell upon it like naked-headed carrion raptors onto a putrid water-buffalo.

While walking towards a small apothecary named “Butt Drugs” – no, I am not making that up – I managed to step on a small baby bird that had fallen from its nest. I only knew something had happened once I heard the shrill death-cheep; when I looked back, there it was, still and quite deceased. I’d like to think that, since it was frying on the four-hundred degree sidewalk in its own broth, I’d euthanized it, but let’s call a spade a spade: I’m a ruthless slaughterer of the innocent, apparently. The ghastliest thing about it was that something made the offending shoe squeak the whole rest of the day anytime I put any weight on it; like the Tell-Tale Heart, I was doomed to hear that bird and rue my own inattention for all eternity. As I’d mentioned in one of my previous ‘blogs, my first memory as a child is of coming upon a baby bird who’d fallen out of the nest to cook on hot pavement; clearly, this is karmic retribution for all of the nuns I’ve helped to shuffle off this mortal coil.

It was a good day, truth be told. The countryside of southern Indiana is spectacular, with verdant, rolling hills alternating with the lush fecundity of deciduous forests and the rustling expanses of corn. The internationals all survived, though some will n’er forget the day they went to the Town that Time Forgot when they tell eerie stories to their children while they tuck them into a humid Taipei night. And maybe, just maybe, one of them will trust me more when they come into the office for immigration advice, I having delivered him or her safely home from a cave. Well, until I have to squirt warm “water” in their face with the Bottle of Divine Intervention.

I remain, as ever,

Domonic