The danger with the cave is footsteps lead toward it, and none out of it...

Two years ago, in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, I was staring at a shed snakeskin on the grass when one of the other motel guests came up behind me and said, I wouldn’t stand out here for long if I were you.

I took a step back from him, assuming he was making a threat.

What he meant—he clarified immediately—was that there were dangerous (although reclusive) American Black Bears in the woods, alongside twenty species of snakes in the region, two of which were venomous: the Timber Rattlesnake and the Northern Copperhead.

Right, okay, I said, moving away from the grassy bank, toward the motel.

In the mornings, that man drove off in his big truck, and brought back coffees, including one for me. I was grateful. I’d had no idea the motel was so remote.

I can take you up to the Skyline Drive which spans the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountain, he offered me, more than once. That’s kind but no thanks, I said, feeling annoyed that I had to choose personal safety over seeing the Skyline Drive with a stranger.

It reminded me of that quote by Olivia Laing: "Which bodies can go where might be the central question of our century."

In any case, the man reminded me of Trump and I didn’t particularly want to spend time with him. As it so happened, I ended up spending time with him - I wrote a little about that in this post.

I had travelled up to Luray Caverns with an uber driver, Scott, who told me that as an adolescent, he’d chased hurricanes to surf their tubes.

Scott’s son also had the adrenalin bug, he explained, which had led to him being recently bitten by a snake. The tissue was necrotic. I didn’t know what to say about that.

Scott was a Boy Scout leader. What about the girls, I asked.

We don’t let girls in, he said. We can’t even keep the boys safe.

Right.

This was my “room” at the motel, protecting me from the cicadas and the bears.

Something undeniably out of a horror film.

I would swim in the hotel pool or sit out on the veranda and read books and listen to the singing tower just across the street. The melodies were recognisable but played at an off kilter, lurching pace, with jagged, overlapping notes.

The night I arrived, a motel guest called Clayton who was barbecuing out on his veranda offered me to join them for hotdogs and told me my room was the honeymoon suite, but wheeeeeerreee is yooooooour huuuuuney, he said in a lowland Southern drawl, vowels lengthening before breaking.

Where indeed.

I’d gone on my own, to seek out the Great Stacalpipe organ at Luray caves:1

It seemed too wild and weird that I’d be travelling transatlantic for the express purposes of the stalactite organ and a singing tower, but there I was, unable to hear myself think beyond the cicadas, oppressive 40 degree heat, and those confederate flags.

During that trip, I learned to sit with myself, to enjoy that I was in another space, on a veranda, charmed by the singing tower. It is quite something when communication with others drops to an absolute minimum, and you are left with these small transactions with waitresses and motel staff.

Very lone-wolf.

I had hoped to write a lot more than I did, and in that previous post, I articulated my inability to:

“I have tried to ignore the pressure to write whilst I’m here. The writing doesn’t need to be done on the trip necessary. It is enough that I am away, untethered, with new patterns, behaviours and distractions, open to the idea that a different version of me will emerge, precisely because I am unanchored. Perhaps I will intuit more, generate more ideas, experience an expansion of awareness and harness energy from this liminal experience of travel-pause. It is enough to know that I am a person who can survive the unexpected conversation with politically-opposed strangers (!) or that I am someone who can sit in stillness alone for hours on a veranda. It is about re-wilding the human who isn’t responsible for anything or anyone for a few days.”

In that post, I also wrote about “the 37-note organ, which is the largest instrument in the world, occupying an area of three and a half acres. Electronic mallets are wired throughout the caverns. When a key is depressed, a tone occurs as the rubber-tipped plunger strikes the stalactite tuned to concert pitch.

The pipe organ at Luray caverns often plays Bach or Beethoven, but during my visit, it played a recomposed version of A Mighty Fortress is our God by Martin Luther.

It had been many months since my last cave trip, and I forgot how the cool air of the cave embraces you, how the drips and echoes sound against you, the rush of learning the new ghost story.

Allegedly, an entire tour went missing in the late 1940’s, after venturing into the caves.

Luray Caverns has one resident ghost—a lady in a blue dress, hovering at altitude.

Subsequently, I made a film poem—posted below for your enjoyment. At 1 minute in, the recording captured a child asking his father a question. 2

It's interesting: though I may not have written much, I came home with traces. An accidental capturing of a moment in which my life briefly overlapped with someone else's.