Down the Tube

In the far northeast corner of Washington State, the Pend d’Oreille River winds through a dark and doleful countryside. The thickly-forested hills press close to the highway, and even in summer the sun seems reluctant to intrude. Weathered farm houses and sagging barns bear mute testimony to economic failure, and in stunted hamlets with names like Ione and Usk, lone figures eye the infrequent motorist with thin-lipped suspicion.

I loved it. I was fifteen and looking forward to adventure. There were eight of us summer campers in the new Ford van, plus our counsellor, Scott, all headed for Gardner Cave. I had never been in a cave before, but I knew it would be fun. At fifteen, pretty much everything is fun.

At Metalline Falls we pulled in at a store to gas up and stock up on candy bars and pop. Behind the counter, a gray old man in gray gabardine eyed us warily. “You kids goin’ to the caves?”

“Yes,” said Scott, himself not much older than we were. A good guy, Scott; he was vivacious and handsome and wore the first t-shirt I ever saw with writing on it—Draft Beer Not Students. It was 1968.

The store-owner frowned. “Goes down quite a ways, you know. Gets slipp’ry. Lose your footin’, easy. You got lights?”

Lights? Uhhh…Scott did, though, and he reassured the man that we had flashlights and extra batteries, and off we went. If any of us were worried over the guy’s warning, we kept it to ourselves. We were suburban kids whose lives revolved around rock and roll, bikes, and girls. We—some of us—had flashlights, candy bars, and nothing to fear. Several miles north, we pulled into a small parking area. Gardner Cave, said a crudely-lettered sign. Scott signed the register beneath the sign. Those who had them put on jackets, checked flashlights, then we clattered down a rickety wooden stairway through lush foliage. At the bottom we scrunched onto a shallow stream bed. The cave mouth gaped blackly at us. We marched forward and left the surface world behind.

It got cold fast. Nasty, slimy-cold. We wore long pants and some of us had light jackets or sweatshirts, but they were scant protection against the clammy chill. We could see our breaths. The stream splashed beneath us as we rattled down a metal catwalk, and bright overhead lights offered reassurance that this was a place both well-maintained and well-frequented. We passed weird curtains of dripping rock, the plunged into a deep, dark crevasse before emerging a vast cavern studded with stalactites and stalagmites. Grotesque, almost insectile formations lurked in dark alcoves. I felt very small.

It was weird seeing Mom standing under the platform lights in her camel coat waving as the train took my brother and me off into the night. We’d never been away from home alone before, and I kept seeing here there, slipping away behind us, and I knew I was leaving childhood behind. Haunted by the specter, I slept fitfully in the coach seat and hours later opened my eyes to the rolling hills of eastern Washington silhouetted black against the dawn. I thought of Mom once more, then let the spirit of adventure take hold. The train was interesting, the sun was bright, I was fifteen, and I was going places I’d never been.

At camp, I plunged into a maelstrom of strangers full of joshing and laughter and boy energy. The Pend d’Oreille River crept slowly past the camp like an immense snake, inviting us in to play or die, didn’t much matter which, but we were young, and no one died. Nights, we’d sit and burn marshmallows, and in the morning we’d pile into the dining room for pancakes and bacon, the guys smelling like soap and the sun burning into our young hearts. We went swimming and canoeing and exploring, and at night we crouched around the campfire roasting marshmallows and looking out at the river. At lights-out, Cal, the camp owner, a rangy, John Wayne type guy in a crumpled cowboy hat, came into our big green army tent and told raunchy stories. Many of them involved penis-size, and we all laughed heartily and fell asleep happy.

We followed Scott to a small black hole at the far end of the cavern. There were no lights and no walkway and the narrow tunnel forced us to walk single-file. I ended up last in line. I didn’t have a flashlight, so I had to focus on the rings of light from the guys ahead. The pitch steepened and the stone bore shrank until we had to scrunch down on our butts and slide. I wondered if this might be a logical place to turn back, but I said nothing and neither did anyone else. Down we went, down, down, head-to-toe, shuffle-shuffle-scrape-scape, until the tube was just large enough to fit a man of average build.

I wasn’t claustrophobic, but I had never been in a confined space like this—confined and pitch-dark—before. It was weird and creepy but also interesting. I tried to keep up with the guys, but the hole was so narrow and I could hardly see where I was going. At least the walls and floor were fairly smooth, and I didn’t get scratched-up. Steadily, the ring of light far ahead got smaller and smaller. Then, as the sound of dragging butts and nervous voices faded to silence, it disappeared.

We lived in caves once, and in some places people still do. We go into caves to look for stuff, we go in caves to escape things, we go into caves for fun. And we go into caves to work. Coal miners: they spend all day underground, away from natural light and fresh air. That’s bound to do some weird shit to your mind. And being underground all that time, you know they’ve got to find stuff besides coal. Fossils and minerals and weird things that we don’t even have names for.

Legend is livid with underworld myths and monsters, and many people are afraid of being underground. I’m not. When I was a kid I was pretty scared by movies about dinosaurs and giant ants that come from underground and eat people. But Mom said, “It’s just a story,” and that was pretty much that. I was a basic suburban kid, and fear was not a part of my life. And tunnels have always intrigued me.

I wouldn’t exactly say I was afraid, lying on my back in a pitch-black hole hundreds or maybe thousands of feet beneath the surface. But it was a weird feeling—a feeling more of potential terror than actual. What if there was a cave-in? A faint, cool breeze blew up the tube, making a sighing sound. Sound underground is not like sound above; you wonder where it’s coming from, and you figure that sound coming from underground has a much narrower range of possible sources, and you are probably not familiar with any of them. I thought about the movie Journey to the Center of the Earth and imagined a vast subterranean world far below, with dinosaurs and giant lizards. My main thought, though, was: When are the guys coming back?

I was hanging there staring into nothingness and wondering when I’d see the first faint glimmer of light from my returning chums, when I felt something touch my foot. Lightly, faintly, almost like nothing. A spider? A tarantula? Or maybe it was some kind of blind lizard or skink. Something that lived in total darkness. Were skinks blind? I thought so, but thinking isn’t knowing. What the hell is a skink, anyway? I moved my foot slowly—I didn’t want to crush some poor little skink—and thought maybe it was just the wind blowing on my pant legs.

No. It touched my foot again, this time going tap…tap. Then, it grabbed. Grabbed and pulled. What the fuck? I kicked down and yelled, ARRRR! Did I hear a grunt or a squeak of some kind? Maybe, or maybe I’m just telling myself I did. Maybe there was no sound at all—maybe it was me making sounds. It let go for a few seconds, then grabbed again and would not let go. I had the worst possible thought: a snake! Hadn’t I read something about cave boas? Shit! I kept yelling,hoping the guys would hear and come back, and that the thing would have to go away. How could they not hear me?

I’m not a fighter. One afternoon when I was about eight, I was walking home from a friend’s house and came around a turn and there was a gang of neighbor kids coming toward me. They were walking abreast of each other, arrayed across the street like movie desperadoes. I knew I was in trouble—I had recently sort of insulted one of them. They came close and the kid I’d called a name said, “He’s the one we want.” He punched me once in the gut. I never thought of fighting back. Then, they walked away. I was relieved he didn’t hit me again. I did not feel any lingering trauma over it, and a few years later, when I was old enough to feel like I had something to prove, I hit a kid on the school bus for no reason. He cried and I felt guilty, and swore off ever doing anything like that again.

Now, something was grabbing my foot. Grabbing me. Then I thought: It was the guys, fucking with me! I felt a rush of relief and yelled, “Okay, assholes, knock it off!” But nobody yelled back. The thing held fast. I was scared now, and pissed, but then I had another thought: This thing was trying to get me—but it couldn’t. It was too big and the tube was too small. God, what was it? If the tube was too small for the thing, it must occupy a larger space down below, where the guys went. Didn’t they see it? And what would happened when they came back? I jerked myself back up the hole and kept yelling and kicking and, hopefully, alerting the guys. Finally, it let go. I heard a rustling sound, then all went dead-quiet.

I saw a faint glimmer far down the hole. The light grew steadily larger and I yelled, “Hey! I’m up here!”

 “Hey!” someone answered, “What are you doing here?”

Nice of you to notice.

“There’s something in here!” I shouted.

A voice said, “Huh?” They were up to me, now. “What do you mean, something’s in here?”

“It grabbed my foot!”

“Yeah, right,” someone scoffed, and Scott’s voice boomed from down the tube, “Okay, guys, let’s keep moving.” I scrabble back up the hole, and when we reached a big enough space, we regrouped, hustled to the surface, and emerged slimy and shivering. It was good being back in the sunlight, but I kept shivering.

“Something was in there,” I told Scott. “That narrow spot where we got separated—something grabbed my foot.”

He gave me a strange look, halfway afraid, halfway you’re-full-of-shit. “Really? What?”

“I don’t know. It tried to pull me.”

“You’re okay, aren’t you?” He put his hand on my shoulder. I felt good.

“Yeah.”

He said something like Okay, then turned to the van and got in. We headed off down the highway back to camp, the guys chattering, and my shivering subsided. No one asked me about what happened and I didn’t say anything more about it. It started feeling unreal. You experience something and then you move on, the miles fly by, the light changes, and what happened, or what you think happened, dissolves. Maybe—probably—my mind was playing tricks. I mean, if there had been something there, wouldn’t the guys have seen it? We got back to camp, we ate, we sat around the fire. You’d think mine would be the perfect ghost story, but I was tired and my head was foggy. We told raunchy stories, we fell asleep, next morning the sun came up.

Fifty years later, I’m sitting in the Two Bells. It’s the farewell night—the place is closing for good—and Earl Brooks sings something about “going down the tube,” and it all comes back in a hot flash. I remember Scott and his gray Draft Beer Not Students T-shirt, the little gray towns by the river, the steep black hole, and the sound of my voice shouting down into the blackness as I kicked and scuffled at something or nothing. I remember how I thought it might have been one of the guys messing with me, and remember that none of them had yelled “OW!” when I kicked. I remember their apathy later. Maybe it was because I was a quiet kid with nothing much to say, and a lot of the others were from California and already knew each other from school. I was just a nobody from Seattle, an odd man out. I haven’t changed much, since.

Then I think: Maybe it was more than they could handle. That look Scott gave me: It was a look of empty bewilderment, as if he was thinking I was bullshitting him or having some stupid kid’s fantasy. I wish I had thought to tell it as a ghost story at the campfire that night—why couldn’t I be more creative? Maybe I’m too well-armored, or just too slow, to make a big deal out of things. But there I was, frozen in absolute darkness, a microscopic piece of plaque in a tiny artery of the earth. Lost. But not alone.

I see that Earl is wearing scuffy hiking boots and immediately think about my old boots, the ones I wore down Gardner Cave. They were good friends, those boots, they reminded me of camp and youth, and I wore them a long time, until they finally wore out. By then, the deep scratch marks along the sides had faded until I hardly noticed them anymore.