This Time Love

by Elizabeth Lowell

  When Joy reached the bottom of the rubble slope, she released herself from the rope and set it aside. In a few hours they would need it to climb out of the pit. As she moved, she was very careful not to step on the rope, forcing sharp-edged grit into the strands. The only thing worse than walking on a rope was hacking at it with a knife.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  Gabe turned slowly, letting his light play over the room. “Ready,” he said absently. Then softly, gratefully, “The route down might be different, but this hasn’t changed—the point of light, the darkness, the mystery calling in silence.”

  Joy looked up where collapsed ceiling had broken through to the ground above, revealing the presence of Lost River Cave to the outside world. The breakdown surrounding them contained blocks of stone as big as houses that leaned every which way. Smaller rocks of all sizes filled in the cracks. Debris had sifted down from the surface, sand and dirt and pieces of desert plants, even a few white bones left by animals that had fallen into the cave and not been able to get out.

  Though beautiful, Lost River Cave wasn’t any place for the unlucky, the foolish, or the weak.

  Slowly Gabe swept his light over the cave floor. Without tape marking the path, he quickly would have been lost. It took an experienced eye to pick out the smudge marks left by earlier cavers’ boots, especially when there was no single obvious path over the immensely jumbled floor of the cave.

  The floor was dry, as were the walls and ceiling. There were few formations visible, and none of them were the kind of fantastic stone decorations that made a person stand and stare in disbelief.

  “It seems drier than I remember,” he said finally. “Or is it just that this is a different route than the one we used to take?”

  “It’s drier. We’re in the ninth decade of drought. The past five years have been especially dry.”

  “Not what most people expect of a cave.”

  “The highest levels of our New Mexico caves are often like that. Without water, caves die.”

  “Is the drought man-made? Global warming?”

  “Doubt it. In this area the groundwater level has been fluctuating for millions of years. At one time this was all below the water table. That’s when carbonic acid from the groundwater above and sulfuric acid from the hydrocarbon field below went to work dissolving limestone.”

  She looked up, directing her helmet lamp at the ceiling of the cave. “As the water table sank, air filled the rooms and passages that were left behind. Sometimes there was enough groundwater to make waterfalls and rivers running through the caves. Sometimes water simply seeped through cracks and gathered in drip pools far below.”

  “So there aren’t any cave formations up here because it’s too dry now, or because there hasn’t been enough time?”

  “Oh, there are formations up here,” she said. “I could show you tiny draperies and ribbons of flowstone. Even a few miniature stalactites and stalagmites.”

  “But nothing like the formations farther down.”

  “Right. It’s the rate of water movement through the ground, not time alone, that determines how fast cave formations grow. It’s a lot drier today than it was a few hundred thousand years ago, so a lot less decoration takes place.”

  Joy turned and spotlighted the nearby cave wall with her headlamp. She left the trail and began picking her way over to the wall.

  “Should I stay here?” he asked, looking at the orange tape she had stepped over.

  “No. Just be careful. A lot of stones are loose.”

  Gabe followed, curious. He couldn’t see any other tracks, any other sign that anyone had ever walked on this particular stretch of cave floor before.

  Joy stopped near a knee-high boulder, shining her light on the surface of the rock. The angle of the light revealed a stalagmite no bigger than a fingernail. The stone growth was dry, almost powdery looking.

  “I don’t know how old this little stalagmite is,” she said. “In the years I’ve come here, I’ve never seen a drop of water on this stone. Maybe some year it will rain and rain until the ground is too full of water for it to be carried down into the cave in the usual ways. Then the ceiling will drip here, and water will fall on this little nubbin, calcium carbonate will precipitate out on impact, and the stalagmite will come to life again.”

  “I thought that evaporation was what caused stalagmites, not precipitation.”

  Joy almost smiled. It was good to hear curiosity instead of hostility or sadness or regret in his voice. It was good to sense his quick mind fastening onto words and phrases and facts, shaking them until a new insight fell into place.

  “That’s what speleologists used to believe,” she said. “We’ve all seen the salt formations left when one of the local runoff lakes dries up. We thought it was the same when groundwater broke through to a cave: water evaporated and left its mineral content behind as a layer of new stone. Very logical. Very neat. Except for one small, insurmountable fact.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Evaporation isn’t possible down beyond the twilight zone. In the darkness, the humidity is one hundred percent all day, every day, year after century after millennia.”

  “So?”

  She adjusted the cone of her helmet light and let it sweep across the jumbled room. “So the air simply can’t hold any more water vapor. Which means that water drops can’t evaporate and enter the air as vapor. And if water can’t become vapor, then all the lovely cave decorations we’ll see farther down must have another source.”

  The sidelight from Joy’s lamp washed over Gabe’s face, highlighting his thoughtful frown.

  “Okay,” he said, “water percolates down, gets to a cave ceiling—and then what?”

  “I’ve written a paper that—”

  “Translate it into layman’s English,” Gabe challenged, a smile in his voice.

  She laughed softly.

  The sound went through him like an exquisite knife, slicing open areas of memory that he’d spent years covering over in scar tissue.

  “I don’t know if I can translate,” she admitted. “That’s your department. You take new, esoteric worlds and translate them into universal experience for everyone to share. And you do it beautifully.”

  Her compliment was like her laugh, bringing Gabe both pleasure and pain, memory and regret. He felt at peace with and understood by Joy as he had by no one else, anywhere, even his own family.

  And yet . . .

  The past was always there between them. Like the shattered beauty of the underground room where they stood, the past was beyond hiding, beyond healing.

  “Without being too technical about it—” she began.

  “Thank God.”

  She ignored him. “The amount of dissolved limestone that water can hold is directly related to the amount of carbon dioxide that is already dissolved in the water. Are you with me so far?”

  “So far, so good,” he said cautiously.

  “Now imagine that you’re a water drop pressing down through the earth, pulled by gravity and pushed by the weight of other water above you. Okay?”

  “Um. Yeah.”

  “There you are, under pressure, stuffed with dissolved limestone and gases like carbon dioxide and you’re hanging on to them with everything you’ve got. You push through the ceiling of a big hole in the ground. Instead of being surrounded by water-impregnated stone, suddenly you’re surrounded by air. Sort of like what happens when you open a can of soda—fizzzzz.”

  “Still with you,” he said when she paused.

  “Great. Get ready for the moment of truth. The instant you push through stone into air, there’s less pressure keeping you together. Some of the carbon dioxide you’ve been holding in your arms fizzes up and out, which means that you can’t hold on to all of the dissolved limestone, either.”

  “It does?”

  “Trust me. Complex chemistry at work.”

  He smiled. “Okay. What next?”

  “You lose some of t
he dissolved limestone, which becomes a very thin coating of stone on the ceiling—the beginning of a stalactite. And then”—amusement lurked in Joy’s voice—“much lighter, you fall to the floor and go splat, helping to build up a stalagmite.”

  “But if limestone has already precipitated out of my water drop to make a stalactite, how can there be any left over for stalagmites?”

  “Because when you hit the floor, your hands and arms fly open, releasing more pressure and allowing even more carbon dioxide to escape. Which means—”

  “More limestone precipitates out,” he finished thoughtfully.

  As he spoke, he swept the cave floor with his helmet light as though seeking evidence of what Joy had described.

  “Right.” Her eyes followed his light beam, searching as he was. “And, if you’re very lucky, after hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, stone is built by tiny layers into shapes more fantastic than any man’s dream, creations as incredible as anything in art or nature.”

  His headlamp shifted from side to side almost impatiently, wanting to see what she had described.

  “Oh, we’re about a million years too late for this chamber’s glories.” Her voice was both brisk and oddly wistful. “If there were any cave formations here, they’re buried beneath the breakdown.”

  “Why did the ceiling collapse?”

  “Lots of theories.”

  “Pick one.”

  “Think about all that water percolating down, happily dissolving stone as it goes,” she said. “It widens natural joints and seams in the structure of the ancient reef itself. Eventually there’s not enough integrity left in the limestone to hold up the ceiling against the pull of gravity.”

  “How long does that take?”

  “There’s no rule. Sometimes the ceiling falls as soon as the water table drops, draining the room, leaving the ceiling unsupported. Sometimes the ceiling doesn’t fall until much later, and then it all comes crashing down, burying the beautiful formations that have been built drop by drop beneath it.”

  “Pity.” He tried to imagine what the room might have looked like with fantastic spires and columns and draperies of glistening, multicolored stone. “So much beauty destroyed.”

  “In some ways, yes. In others . . .”

  She hesitated, searching for words that would help him to understand that in the natural world there were no absolute beginnings and endings. Just a timeless becoming.

  “In others,” he prompted.

  “It’s simply change, not destruction. The water is still at work below the original chamber, leaping from ceiling to floor across a bridge of air, creating new beauty. And below the level of cave decoration is the saturation zone, where the chambers themselves are still being formed, waiting for the earth to shift and lift them up so that they, too, can be decorated.”

  Caught by the intensity of her voice, he looked away from the cave to her face. It was a study in golden skin and fluid shadows and focused intelligence. At that moment she was so beautiful to him it stopped his breath.

  “Maybe only one level exists down there, filled with water,” she said. “Maybe there are as many levels as there are beds in the limestone to form chambers. We don’t know. We only know that a cave is there, now, forming beneath our feet. Not destruction. Just change. And often, creation. In an eerie, magnificent way, caves are alive. Like us.”

  Slowly he played his helmet light over the ceiling and down the wall, trying to imagine the room filled with water in an era of great rain. Then the coming of drought, the water table shifting down, down, taking with it the power to dissolve stone.

  And finally the dripping of groundwater into caves. The slow, slow creation of beauty within a stone hollow. The eventual collapse when the ceiling fell, smashing everything that had been so painstakingly built through time spans incomprehensible to man.

  Like life, changing in an instant, rearranging everything.

  A sudden roar as a mountain gave way, and a grave as deep as time. A helicopter crash that devastated a young woman seven years ago, and a man today.

  He wondered if the cave felt the smashing instant of change echoing through time, reshaping everything, even the cave’s understanding of itself.

  The fanciful thought both amused and saddened him. He hoped that Lost River Cave wasn’t alive, not like that. He wouldn’t wish a million years of questions and regrets on anything.

  Even stone.

  Thirteen

  NOTHING WAS VISIBLE IN THE VAST DARKNESS BUT TWO cones of shifting, bobbing light and two stripes of orange tape. The floor beneath Gabe’s and Joy’s feet was rough, treacherous. As he followed her deeper into Lost River Cave, the rock surrounding him closed down. The chamber became a twisting, ever-shrinking passage.

  Earlier his helmet lamp had been lost in the immensity of the chamber. Now, nearby pale limestone walls threw back his light from all directions. Soon he could touch stone on both sides simply by raising his arms. The ceiling pressed down even as the floor slowly began to slant downward.

  “Watch your head,” Joy warned, tilting her helmet light just enough to highlight the ragged rock overhead. “The ceiling comes down to five feet four inches real quick.”

  Moments later Gabe was crouching to avoid banging his head.

  Joy didn’t have to bend one bit. Even with the added height of a helmet, she didn’t scrape the ceiling.

  He grunted and bent lower. It wasn’t long before his legs were complaining about having to walk in such a cramped, awkward way.

  She never even slowed down.

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” he said.

  “You bet your ass I am. Up on top I have to buy my clothes off the kiddie rack and stand on my tiptoes to see over everything except jackrabbits. But down here the world has to bend over and look at things my way.”

  In spite of his discomfort, he laughed. “I’m going to take you to see the sequoias someday. You’ll get a crick in your neck looking up.”

  “I get a crick in my neck looking up at Davy. Oops, going down,” she warned.

  While she stooped, he doubled over and rested his hands on his knees, his elbows bent outward. It worked for a while. Then both of them were forced down to their hands and knees as the passage kept on sinking deeper and deeper into the earth.

  Now the walls showed stains of black or brown or orange, depending on which minerals had been dissolved in the groundwater. Here and there patches of moisture showed through, shining in the lamplight.

  Gabe’s breath came easily but more deeply than normal. His curiosity remained in full force. “I don’t remember this route from seven years ago.”

  “New,” Joy said, ducking even lower.

  “Who discovered it?”

  “Me.”

  He grunted as he banged his helmet and then his elbows on the shrinking passage. His caving gear protected him, but he took the warning and slowed down.

  “You found it? Figures,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “Small.”

  “Yeah? Just wait until you try Gotcha. Had much practice crawling long distance on your hands and knees?”

  “Does six miles down a mountain trail count?”

  “It’s a start,” she said, but her voice wasn’t nearly as light as her words. The thought of Gabe injured and crawling down a mountainside made her stomach twist. “Ceiling going up.”

  “Thank God,” he muttered.

  He was too busy keeping his feet—and keeping up—to do much more than note that the floor wasn’t as rough as it had been. Even so, he sensed something changing around him, a quality of the air as much as anything else.

  A few minutes later Joy stopped and directed her light straight up, silently telling him that he could stand again. Gratefully he stretched muscles that were complaining from the unaccustomed use.

  “And I thought rock climbing used every muscle in your body from every possible angle,” he said.

  “Caving is a lot
like rock climbing. In the dark.”

  “No rain, though.”

  “Ever climbed up a cave waterfall?”

  “Can’t say that I have. Sounds cold.”

  “It is,” she said. “Bell Bottom is one of the few caves I’ve met that I didn’t like. You go in down a waterfall, which ensures a wet, cold time until you come out, climbing up the same waterfall.”

  “At least you don’t have wind tearing at you, the way you do on a mountainside.”

  “Don’t bet on it. Some caves literally breathe, with air flowing in and out at rhythmic intervals. Winds up to thirty miles an hour have been clocked. Not up to mountain storm speeds, but enough to tangle you and your rope real good.”

  “Wind inside the caves? What causes it?” he asked.

  “I told you. Caves are alive.” Amusement danced through her words. “Actually, no one knows for sure. Lots of theories, though. Most of them have to do with the movement of warm surface air replacing cold cave air and vice versa, or differing air pressures below ground compared to the surface.”

  “Any waterfalls or wind in Lost River Cave?”

  “Yes, somewhere. We can hear them but we can’t find them, damn it.” More than anything else Joy wanted to find the waterfalls that gave the Voices its murmurous music. “As for wind, nothing serious in most Lost River passages. We get breezes, even some pretty good ones, but nothing to worry about.”

  “Worry?”

  “Getting knocked off a ladder or a rope. Wind-chill factor.” She turned her light away from the ceiling and led him farther into the cave. “Hypothermia. When the body gets too—”

  “Cold to survive,” he finished. “A common problem for explorers everywhere but the tropics.”

  “Was it cold . . . that day on the mountain?” The words were hesitant, her voice almost husky.

  “Not really. That was the only thing that didn’t go wrong. That and a quarter-inch of rope.”