Dark passage

Duckwalk with author Barbara Hurd through a sliver of space, a vein of air that narrows and narrows into an enormous body of rock deep beneath a mountain. The duckwalk becomes the crabwalk. The crabwalk becomes a crawl. Hard hat clanks on rock ceiling. Hands and knees grind into wet gravel. Standing is impossible. Don’t even think about sitting. If you want to rest, you’ll just have to lie down, and among the many things you must try not to think about is how much you don’t want to lie down.

Stop talking, and an emptiness seeps into you. If you were to turn off your headlamp, the world would disappear. And for some reason, that would be very scary.

It’s best to breathe deeply, relax and let your disoriented senses explore. It’s really all you can do, and precisely what Hurd suggests to someone who finds himself starting to lose control in the face of blinding darkness and the overwhelming power of stone.

The first time Hurd entered a cave, she bolted after seven feet when a vision of the Mack truck that had killed her cousin years ago came barreling down on her out of the void. But in the last three years -- time spent researching and writing “Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark� (Houghton Mifflin, 2003) -- she’s learned how to cope with these straitjackets of twisted geology. By crawling into caves to wrestle with the fears they evoke, she not only captures the beauty of subterranean wildernesses but also offers lessons in getting by in the above-ground world.

“Study the place,� she writes. “Watch how your mind leaps to absurdities. Watch the way panic looms and recedes. You’re not going anywhere at the moment, so you might as well be curious about where you are.�

In-depth exploration

At the moment, Hurd is deep beneath the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia, following a local guide through a cave called Red Run. A blue helmet holds back her short blond hair, curled by the humidity. She is in her mid-50s, an English professor at Frostburg State University in western Maryland.

It was a two-hour drive from her home, with a tropical storm threatening rain much of the way. By the time she parked the car, it was starting to drizzle. She hastily threw flashlights, helmet and water bottles into a fanny pack caked with mud residue of past explorations.

To reach the cave entrance, she followed a trail that skirts a farmhouse with a cabbage garden, ceramic trolls and Little Bo-Peeps in the yard. On the banks of the Red Run River, Hurd changed into grubby trousers and a sweatshirt and pulled on work gloves and kneepads.

Surrounded by a tumble of boulders and lined with mud, loose rocks, leaf mold and duff, the toothy maw of the cave presents a free fall into a world of snakes, bears and Minotaurs.

The space just inside a cave is known as the twilight. There’s enough light here to turn surfaces silver and black and illuminate acorn shells peppering narrow ledges. Pack rat scat, white with mold, glows beneath a crevice. Two minutes into the cave, the air becomes moist and still. The sheer rock mass muffles voices and footfall. Crickets line the walls and beads of water dot the ceiling, hanging in the light of a headlamp like drops of mercury.

Hurd’s previous book, “Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination,� staked out her claim on a peculiar niche in nature: places often unnoticed, even avoided, because they seem so far removed from typical notions of beauty. Descriptions of the wild often sound like movie reviews: spectacular, awesome, not to be missed. “We canonize beauty that can be framed on the walls, in a camera or on the postcard.�

By immersing herself in mud or by pushing herself through the darkness of a cave, she embraces a nature most shun and faces down primal fears, returning to tell us something about ourselves we may have suspected but never really knew.

“What I like most about caves is this stony nothingness that surrounds you,� says Hurd. “A cave is so much about absence, yet has such a presence.�

Deeper still

An hour in, the vein that has been tightening like a fist dead-ends as the ceiling wedges into the floor. Hurd pauses as if courting the discomfort, relishing the interplay of fear and control. Then she wriggles against the rock, turning around. Oddly, nothing looks the same from this direction. Good cavers take pride in their visual memory, because in a cave a landmark may be nothing more than a rock scalloped slightly more than any other.

Backtracking to the point where she can stand, Hurd takes a new passage. She climbs a 10-foot wall of rock, feet and hands groping for holds as water spills over the edge. At the top, the passage is mercifully wide, but the ceiling is barely 2 feet high. Now not even crawling will do. She drops onto her belly and pushes through thick mud with elbows and knees. It’s exhausting. Tedious. Difficult. So when the ceiling finally lifts, revealing a room as spacious as a cathedral, Hurd stands. A mountain has been lifted from her shoulders.

High overhead a natural bridge spans the cave’s walls as if it had landed here from the canyon lands of the Southwest. Instead of a blue sky, though, there is a hard beige ceiling, 30 feet overhead, marked by a pencil-thin line where the water first started leaching into this space. A fast-flowing stream, 45 to 50 degrees, cuts at the stone underfoot. Formed thousands, if not millions of years ago, this cave began its life when rivers and streams began seeping, knifing their way through the narrow seams of limestone karst that riddle these hills. Formations such as stalactites and stalagmites in Red Run are minimal. Scalloped ledges of rock jut out like long ribs above the stream. Hurd edges herself along in a childlike ballet -- hands, feet, shoulders and hips in contact with the stone.

Underworld

There are more than 40,000 mapped caves in the United States. A fraction are so-called public caves, tamed with sidewalks, lights and tour guides. The rest are wild, filled with tight squeezes, precipitous drops and unexplored passages suited for only the most experienced cavers.

It is moving through these spaces, mindful of herself and her reactions, that Hurd finds most rewarding. On a walk or a hike, you can allow yourself to daydream. But “the dynamics here are hard to comprehend because it’s so elemental. Here are rocks, water and space. That’s all. Now try to orient yourself.�

Muscles stretch, the body warms, breath becomes steam and the mind narrows in total concentration -- anything less leads to a cut, a broken limb or a wrong turn into a labyrinth of no return. It is, Hurd says, “an experience of nature unlike anything we’re used to.�

She turns off her headlamp. The dark renders millions of years of evolution meaningless. In these conditions humans are as blind as the salamanders and other creatures that have adapted to such an extreme environment. You may think you can see your hand in front of your face. You may think you can hear voices in the distance. But then you realize it’s not nature but our senses that abhor a vacuum.

“We use landscape and the people in our lives to orient ourselves,� Hurd writes. “Take all that away. Remove the sun, the east-running rivers, the routines and daily reminders. Put yourself in a chamber of absence....�

Lights on, she continues, bending her body around a small ledge, careful not to slip into the stream, now 5 feet deep. The sound of water and a slight misty breeze grow more pronounced.

Walking in a cave is like walking through the belly of a whale with its wetness and its hard bony edges. A cave is, after all, very much alive, its ecology fragile and vulnerable. Drop a piece of trail mix and you’ll set off an explosion of mold. Pull a flashlight out of your pocket and the lint that follows can gum up the centuries-old accretion of a limestone formation.

Still edging along, Hurd turns a corner and catches in the headlamp’s beam a waterfall pouring out of a rock face, plunging into a pile of stones. Water droplets, silver in the light, driven by the water-pushed wind, swirl around her. The stream roils in confusion, the energy of these broad braids of water eating patiently at the stone.

Cavers will tell you this is why they cave: that in these spaces is a wilderness not found elsewhere on the planet. Here there are no airplanes passing overhead or cars zooming down a highway in the distance. Here it is solitude, peace and the mystery of not knowing what lies ahead. It is this mystery that drives cavers deeper into caverns filled with castles of flowstone and deep cerulean lakes. Yosemite is no more grand than these places. Cavers walk the Earth’s surface looking down, wondering how many Half Domes lie untouched, invisible beneath their feet.

Fear faced

Now ask Hurd about the fear. Is it the darkness? No. The threat of being buried alive? No. The grip of a claustrophobia that would take an eternity to escape? No. The wet? The slimy creatures? No. Those answers are too simple. It’s how a person reacts to the nothingness implied by pure darkness and the overwhelming mass of stone. Lie down in a narrow sliver of space with the headlamp off -- suddenly the best equipment, training, endurance and even past accomplishments are meaningless. Where else can someone find such a pure, hard challenge?

At the emotional heart of “Entering the Stone� is a second story: that of Hurd’s experience with a friend’s slow death from cancer. By the end of her book, by wandering in these dark places and by thinking about her friend, she comes closer to understanding what lies beyond our daily lives, catching glimpses of the void, the nothingness we use as a metaphor for death.

Plato once famously speculated about what would happen if prisoners were chained to the inside of a cave and received all their cues about the world from the play of shadows cast by a fire upon the rock. When released from the cave into the sunlit world, the enlightened prisoners would see the shadows as mere illusions.

For her part, Hurd wonders what would have happened if one of those prisoners hadn’t headed for the sunlight, but rather gone deeper into the cave. What if he “changed his mind, pivoted and went down, instead ... down to where there’s no light at all.... What kind of knowledge might he bring back? What would it mean to be endarkened?�

Outside Red Run cave, a wood thrush lets out a trilled whistle and the arching canopy of rhododendron, tamarack and oak trees filters a light so green it makes eyes ache. The knot of fear disappears and in its absence are new possibilities.

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CLOSE TO HOME

Safe routes

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Crawling into a hole can be dangerous. Public caves, subterranean hollows with concrete sidewalks, lighting systems and tour guides provide safe and surprisingly spectacular introductions to speleology and, for the surface-dwelling Angeleno, can be easy, if sometimes cheesy, escapes from the topsoil.

Mitchell Caverns: Graffiti sprayed during the filming of “The Doors� long tarnished a wall, making this state park one of the more funky destinations in the Mojave National Reserve. Best, however, to make it a winter destination: Located in the Providence Mountains, Mitchell is 115 miles east of Barstow and, during summer, fit for only lizards and bats (though it is open weekends). (760) 928-2586.

Crystal Cave: Follow the squiggly, two-lane California 198 out of Three Rivers and into Sequoia National Park. Turn left before the Giant Forest and you’ll arrive at the crown jewel of California’s public caves. Located in a steep canyon formed by Cascade Creek, created out of banded marble bedrock, Crystal Cave is gorgeously decorated, wet, cold, easily accessible and not to be missed. (559) 565-3759.

Moaning Cavern: Sign the consent form and the liability waiver and you’re ready to rappel like a spider on a thread into the heart of California’s wildest public cave, located in Calaveras County. Shaped like a giant bell, Moaning Cave has it all: the Pancake Squeeze, the Meat Grinder and Godzilla’s Nostril, a marble shoot that’s more slippery than, well, you get it. (209) 736-2708.

Injun Joe’s Cave: It’s every Southern California kid’s first encounter with a rockbound abyss, in our own backyard, the Magic Kingdom no less. Grab a copy of Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,� raft out to Disney’s island and before long you too will wonder if that groaning from the Chamber of the Bottomless Pit is just the wind, or ol’ Joe himself.

Sunny Jim’s Cave: Pay $3 at the front desk of the Cave Store and follow the 144 stairs down into the confines of Sunny Jim’s Cave, one in a series of subterranean sea caves made famous by Frank L. Baum in “The Scarecrow of Oz.� If you feel more ambitious, head to La Jolla Cove, wait for a very low tide and scramble across tide pools to the caves that line the north coast. (858) 459-0746.

To learn more about caves, wild and public, join the National Speleological Society. In Southern California, there are four chapters, known as grottos, the oldest and largest of which meets the first Tuesday of the month at the Pasadena Public Library.

For more information, check out www.caves.org.