Notes from Maine - 2021/03/21

I went to college at Virginia Tech. When I chose that school, I’m sure that I told people it was because it had such a good engineering program. That really wasn’t the deciding factor. My decision was really based on proximity and remoteness.

It was close to where I grew up, but not too close. Freshmen had to stay on campus—I couldn’t bring my dog and I didn’t want to be too far away from him. But I also had a pretty sizable impulse to get away from where I grew up, and a 4 hour drive seemed like a decent buffer. Tech hit that sweet spot where I was close enough for a visit, but far enough away to breathe.

There was another factor though—Virginia Tech was way more rural than the other schools I visited. I grew up in the suburbs of DC, and I couldn’t stand all those people around me all the time. There was a peeping Tom in our neighborhood when I was a little kid and, honestly, it didn’t make me feel any worse about living there, because it was already terrible. I always felt like I was under observation. 

Down at Virginia Tech, we had space between things. If you walked fifteen minutes away from the campus, you were likely to be all alone. I needed that. I had to be close, but I had to be able to walk away easily. 

Anyway, it worked out great. Scholastically, I never really excelled, but I grew a lot as a person. And I’ve held a lot of jobs since I left there, and nobody has ever asked to look at my diploma or my transcripts, so I’m not sure it makes a difference how I did scholastically. 

Maybe it was inevitable that I would eventually want to find a place to hide away from my place to hide. One of my roommates was into geology and trying to join the Cave Club. I’m not sure if he ever got in, but he learned enough to go on some expeditions. With no training, other than what he could remember, I got a helmet and a carbide lamp and the two of us started going into local caves every chance we got. We would go get lost in deep caves for four or five hours at a stretch. It’s amazing that we always made it out. Everything looks the same in those muddy limestone caves, and landmarks you notice going in seem completely different when you’re headed the other direction. 

There are some ledges where the slope keeps getting steeper and steeper until you realize that you can no longer crawl back up. The crack you’re slipping into just gets narrower until you’re stuck with no hope of extraction. In the deepest part of the cave, before we would turn around, we would turn off our lamps and sit in complete silence and darkness. Eventually, you can hear the blood moving through your own veins as your ears strive to pick up on any sound.

There are mysteries in caves. We would be twenty minutes away from our apartment and yet in a completely different world that nobody else knew about. I loved those trips and yet I’ve had no desire to enter a cave since I left Virginia. I already walked on that ledge, understood what it was like to truly be isolated, and now I’m all set. 

Or maybe I’m not. 

I was thinking a lot about caves a few years ago, so I wrote a book called Inhabited. I set the story out west, but I tried to capture the feeling of those limestone caves in Virginia. I hope I managed to put the reader into a situation where they could feel the same claustrophobia and fear of the unknown.