Sandia Cave

by T.B. Morse

It took me most of the day to find Sandia Cave.

I’d gone to Suki’s funeral in the morning, and after a break I drove up into the Sandias. Then just before the mountain turnoff I saw the sign: "Warning: Dangerous Unimproved Mountain Road Next Seven Miles…Closed in Winter." It wasn’t winter, in fact, it was an amazingly hot day for mid-Fall, but I was sure they weren’t kidding about that road. I’d been in New Mexico before.

Almost immediately, I found out I was right. Theoretically two way, the road was narrow, and in my direction hugged the outside edge of the cliffs. There were no fences or curbs although, in the worse places, the road was graded slightly upwards at the edge. Soon enough, things got worse. I began to see the curved arrow signs that indicate hairpin turns and jackknife curves. The speed limit was down to fifteen, but only a fool would take this road that fast.

I supposed that for the locals, this was all just part of the fun, but as an outsider, it just seemed like another warning to me: You’d better go back, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re in over your head. A water metaphor for a land that hasn’t touched the ocean for millions of years.

Of course, I was too stubborn to go back. The steering wheel left red marks on my palms, and my speedometer read something below five miles an hour, but I kept going. Then came the moment I had to admit that I must have passed my turnoff and I’d have to turn the car around, a near impossibility. There were no cliffs now, but the road was still two way, and ran at the edge of a small creek bank. When I found a spot where I thought I might manage the turn, my right rear wheel actually spun over the creek bank edge for a moment. I pulled forward, turned off the engine and sat in the middle of the road, blinking stupidly. But soon my hand reached out and turned on the ignition again. I headed back the way I’d come.

Forty-five minutes later I was back at the sign: "Warning: Dangerous Unimproved Mountain Road…" Cursing, I spun the wheel and turned around again. An hour after that I was back at the creek bed, but by luck another driver – a man in a black four-by-four – was going the opposite way. I stopped and rolled down my window to ask him "Where is Sandia Cave?"

He was an Anglo, about fifty. A New Mexican resident I guessed, from the braid of graying hair he wore down his back. I flashed on that moment five years ago when I was standing in a section of the Albuquerque Museum and saw the Hispanic man standing near me. He also wore his long brown hair in a braid. His face had the weatherworn look of a middle-aged Mexican peasant, but his eyes were Indian: dark, deep, and – as they flickered over me for an instant – compelling.

His shorts were fringed. He was wearing a leather shirt and sandals, several beaded necklaces, earrings, ankle bracelets all of silver set with stones, a red and black sash around his waist. Never had a man looked so masculine to me, so attractive, and so unreachable. I would have followed after him in an instant, forgetting everything. Why didn’t he ask me? If he had, I would never have gone home to marry Curt.

I blinked, and the man in the pickup said "Sandia Cave, it’s back that way," and he pointed back the way I’d just come. "It’s not marked. Look for a gravel turnaround, there’s a log across the road there, where you’re supposed to park.

Just that, and I knew he was a New Mexican. An Easterner would have said "It’s rough going up there," or "Isn’t it a little late for that kind of a trip?" or even "Lady, what the hell do you think you’re doing?" A New Mexican figures you know your own business, unless you’re going to inconvenience him.

It’s a strange attitude, one that seems hard to reconcile with the easy Western friendliness, the willingness to say "Good morning" or give directions. It takes a while to realize that nobody ever gives you one bit of information more than you ask for, that if you want the whole answer, you must first learn how to ask the question.

Now I nodded at him. "Thanks," I said, and he nodded back, drove easily away from me, going about his own affairs. I faced another turnaround, and the likeliest scenario had the car sitting upside down in a foot of water, but I was going on. Tomorrow morning, I had to catch the plane back to New York, and I was pretty sure I’d never be in New Mexico again.

Sandia Cave. Five years ago I’d come here on a "vacation" to visit my old friend Suki. For years, Suki and I’d been best friends, which meant she took a back seat to the latest man in my life and never challenged it, such being the way of the world for women of my generation. When I flew out for my visit, it was really about a man. About Curt and whether, two months pregnant, I should marry him."

The beginning of that visit didn’t go very well. It had been ten years since I’d seen Suki, and fifteen years since I enticed her into riding in the front car of the Cyclone at Coney Island, and all the bobby pins flew out of her hair by the time we hit bottom. Suki had thick black hair down to her waist then, although with the perversity of a teenager, she pinned it up to make herself look "older."

Now I’d flown into New Mexico, back into her life, and she remembered me – suddenly – as the kind of person who always got her into trouble. She stared suspiciously at me out of her tilted black eyes, and I stared back at her flat, strong, almost masculine body, topped by an aggressively short haircut, all that beautiful Asian hair chopped right down to the roots.

Suki always made me think of that old folk song "The Wagoneer’s Lad" and the line "I work for my living, my money’s my own, and if you don’t like it, you can leave me alone." But I couldn’t leave her alone. Her friendship was precious to me, and I wasn’t willing to just let her slip away.

It was hard those first few days when the rug I slept on was full of her dog’s fleas and I had to unplug the refrigerator before I could use the toaster oven. But I would have stuck it out if her house had burned to the ground and she’d put up a tent in the charred out ruins. You don’t throw away fifteen years because of a leaky roof, a tick sitting on the middle of your pillow, a bathtub where you had to turn the hot water on with pliers. After a while she thawed to me, although she was right, I did get her into trouble.

Before she knew it she was taking a "vacation" herself and she and I drove all over the state in her beat-up pickup truck. She was behind the wheel all the way up the mesa to Acoma Pueblo, on a 90-degree mountain road, although Suki’d always been afraid of heights. She hiked the Sandstone Bluffs with me, inches away from a fall down onto the rocks. We went out to Coachiti Dam, it was just being built then, and by mistake wandered onto private reservation land. Two Indian men with shotguns politely pointed us to the road back out.

We went to the Inter-Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, and camped out together through a windstorm in Redrock State Park. We climbed down a ladder into Kiva inside the excavated ruins in the Bernalillo State Monument, and stood at the altar. "We’re supposed to say a prayer," I said, and she said "Yeah. I pray I can get back up."

We drove all the way North to Echo Canyon, through ,miles of empty land. She kept wondering what we’d do if we blew a tire. When we got there it was, like almost every site we’d been to except the Ceremonial, completely deserted. I had an urge to revive my brief days of glory as a fold singer by belting out a song into the most incredible acoustical chamber I’d probably ever see but, for the first time in my life, I found I didn’t know what song I wanted to sing. I was still puzzling over it when I got back in the front seat of the pickup.

I always knew what song I wanted to sing, what direction I wanted to take. If I had to make a decision, it usually came to me along the way. But here I was pregnant and 2.000 miles away from the father and no answer had come to me, not even in Carlsbad Caverns, with its one million two hundred and fifty thousand bats.

Everywhere we went I felt the answer eluding me, as the country itself was elusive, starkly clear yet as untouchable as the man in the dark museum hall that afternoon, as the giant rattler Suki and I saw dying on the highway on our trip to the Sandstone Bluffs, five feet long with neat tread marks sticking his middle to the road. I wanted to get out and look but Suki said "No! It’s too dangerous!" and for once I was inclined to agree with her.

The whole damn land was too dangerous, brilliant but deadly. But how could it be otherwise, in a State that owes much of its beauty to the deathwish of the Government? The Government owns miles of land here, virtually all of which it uses for the obscure purposes of nuclear war. The Manzano Mountains, they say, are hollowed out and filled with missiles, their deadly silver noses pointing obliquely towards the sky. White Sands testing ground is in New Mexico. We drove past it on one of our expeditions, and past the Very Large Array telescope Carl Sagan later wrote of in his book about a first encounter with extraterrestrial life.

Somehow, the Nuclear Age slowed time in New Mexico, and the residents owe their clean air and vast mountain views to an unexamined compromise. You can buy Indian break at the side of the road, on your way to visit the Almogordo A-Bomb museum.

The time I spent in New Mexico with Suki had the same quality as my childhood in Los Angeles, where the West was already mythic rather than actual, the desert confined to carefully tended rock gardens, the cactus planted in rows down the middle of well paved streets.

Here the land was real, it was man and his purposes that were false, and so was I. I remembered and understood the earth’s vocabulary, words like cliff, bluff, gully, mesa, foothill, arroryo, seguro cactus, juniper, high desert, tumbleweed. I longed to change my wardrobe for long black Flaminco skirts with twenty pounds of beadwork on the hems, soft peasant blouses, or leather with fringe and beads, beaded earrings, necklaces, silver on bracelets with turquoise, the small blue-green gems an echo of oceans far away.

But I was still the woman who stood in the Albuquerque museum in my Easterner garb. Jeans, black mannish short-sleeved one pocket T-shirt, sensible brown walking sandals on my feet, my hair cropped short in a minor punkish look, prescription sunglasses to protect my sensitive eyes, no jewelry of any kind except a red and white functional Casio digital watch on my left wrist. And I was pregnant. And New Mexico just wouldn’t let me in.

I knew that I belonged here, in some house or piece of land presently occupied by others, or by snakes and rabbits and lizards, waiting around some bend for me. Unknown, unguessed, yet definitely at this point of convergence between the valley and the mountains, the desert and the mesas, the Indians, the Hispanics, the Anglos, a scattering of Asians and Blacks, and a few assorted expatriate New Yorkers like myself. But just because you feel a place is home doesn’t mean that the current occupants agree with you.

Everywhere I went, I felt it. The door politely closed, and nothing volunteered. Behind the smiling Western faces I read the message "You’re welcome here, you can even live side by side with us, but you’ll never be one of us. You’re just a tourist, and someday you’ll go home." So I, who had such a need to be a part of something, faltered. My baby and I had a life waiting in New York, and suddenly it became clear that I’d been kidding myself. I didn’t have a decision to make at all.

I figured it out on the day I saw Sandia Cave listed on a flyer about camping in Cibola National Forest.

"Hey Suki," I said, "let’s go see Sandia Cave."

"Okay," she said, and we went.

We must have driven that same mountain road, but that wasn’t what stuck in my memory. Or the turnoff, obviously. Maybe it was marked then. I do remember walking on the cliff edge path up to a spot where I saw the stairway to the cave entrance, and hearing Suki’s indrawn breath behind me, because the staircase hung out into space, just metal treads over the air, loosely held together with a nail at the side.

I thought "I am always getting her into trouble," but something drew me so that I started going up instead of back down. And then, when we got up there, it finally hit me. This was New Mexico, not Pennsylvania, where the last cave I’d visited had been a guided tour with fluorescent ceiling lighting. For a wonder of the world like Carlsbad New Mexico would do it, but this was a hollow in the rock and on one side or the other of it – in total blackness – lay the cave.

No warning signs, no recommendations. Just that hollow in the rock. We didn’t have a flashlight with us, and once we went down to the car we weren’t coming back up again. I turned to my left and tried to look, but the blackness could have been a solid wall. Then I tried to put my hand into that blackness and I couldn’t will myself to do it. I couldn’t shake the image of my drawing back my arm a moment later with a bloody stump at the end.

There it lay, only feet ahead of me – New Mexico. Open and inaccessible, compelling and remote. Like my father, who’d run away when I was five. Everything I wanted stood right there in front of me, and I still didn’t get it. I was too busy living around unexamined compromises of my own. If you’d asked me, I’d have cheerfully told you that I wasn’t looking for a home, oh no, I was only on vacation. And Curt was nothing like my father, I wasn’t the least afraid of having the baby growing inside me, and it was only practicality that kept me from pushing into the blackness beyond.

So I was defeated, and we climbed back down to the pickup. I sprained my ankle on a rock. We drove back into Albuquerque silently, and I realized I might as well go home. Two days later I said goodbye to Suki and flew back to New York to marry Curt.

Seven months later we had Vickie, three years after that we were divorced. I didn’t call Suki as much as I used to. I didn’t come to visit. Because after Curt taught me there were worse things than living alone, I never wanted a man in my life ever again and I didn’t want to remember those days when Suki and I’d sit around and gossip about boys and how we were going to be wives and mothers. It wouldn’t bother Suki – Suki, in her wisdom, had never needed anyone, and as far as I could tell she was better off – but I was bitter, and it hurt me to look back. So I let her slip away after all.

It was a Saturday morning when I got the call. She’d shot herself. I didn’t ask where Suki got the gun. Guns are easier for the private citizen to come by in New Mexico than in Manhattan, where only the muggers have them.

Self-sufficient to the last, she hadn’t said a word to anyone. She just put her affairs in order, found a home for her dog, and bought a rifle. When they found her body, her address book and her Will were neatly laid out on the coffee table.

First I felt the pain. Then I was too numb to feel anything. I left Vickie with Curt for a long weekend and flew out here. I picked up a car at the airport and drove out towards the Motel I’d be staying in. I had a map. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was unprepared for that sudden first sight of Albuquerque, when I drove down into the bowl where the city lay spread before me, and to the East – like a painted movie backdrop – the Sandia mountains.

I was home and I was a stranger, a stranger too in my own life, no less than Suki must have been at the last. I pulled the car over and sat there, tears of rage running down my face.

I don’t know when it came to me. That night in the Motel, I guess, because in the morning, before the funeral, I bought myself a maglight and a new pair of sneakers. Before I left New Mexico I still had one thing to see. Sandia Cave. Then I’d be finished and I could leave and go back to New York City, to Manhattan of the shoving elbows, the all-out run for a bus or subway, the crowding and the concrete, so that everywhere you looked there was only people and pavement, blurring into each other, until you’d kill for an inch of personal space. Once, outside the 72^nd street subway station a woman knocked into me and we nearly came to blows.

The day Suki shot herself, I saw two middle-aged well dressed women – one black and one white – get into a shoving match because they were sitting next to each other on a bus and one of them turned sideways to look at something out the window and bumped into the other. I put Vickie behind me and pushed us both towards the back, ready in case someone took out a gun. Not a plain easy to understand rifle like Suki took her life with, but some sinister little black toy-looking gun from which shots would spray wildly out into a bus full of innocent victims.

New York, where I had to stay now because Vickie needed her father, needed to know her father, to avoid making the same mistakes I’d made, spending my life looking for a father I didn’t know, and finding him again in Curt. And not even Suki, now, to remind me of a different way.

On the morning of the funeral, I was still angry. I thought it was because of all the waste, but maybe it was just Suki having the nerve to go somewhere so far away without me. Whatever the reason, I knew the only cure for it would be Sandia Cave.

So as the man in the pickup drove off I spun the wheel and turned around and looked for the gravel turnoff, and on the last run-by I found it, just a hollow in the road. I parked in front of the log and got out of the car. I had on my sneakers and a lightweight sweater tied around my shoulders. I carried the maglight. I knew I was being silly and Sandia Cave was probably about five feet deep, but the unknown is the unknown and what if it went back for miles into the mountain? This time, I planned to go right through to the end.

The things I’d remembered were still there. The rock path. The staircase. I stood in the hollow in the rock and turned on the maglight and there, to the left, perfectly clear before me was Sandia Cave, cut right down to size. In fact, it was a little disappointing. Small and narrow. I had to stoop down in one spot, and then I came to a ledge I had to climb over to drop down into a space where the cave continued on.

I started down, but somehow my right foot got stuck in a hollow and I fell down onto my hands and onto the rock floor and twisted, the maglight falling and landing a couple of feet away. I lay sprawled there, my back and head pressed against cold rock, my right leg with the still caught sneaker sticking up at an ugly angle, badly broken in an instant.

The pain knocked everything out of me. I knew I was hurt and had to pay attention, but somehow I wandered away and thought I was home in my apartment on one of Vickie’s weekends visiting Curt. The phone rang, and I rose to answer it, blowing my nose on a yellow tissue. I had a bad cold.

"Milk, chocolate syrup, seltzer water," Curt’s friendly, slightly hyper voice said carefully in my ear, and I dutifully answered "Egg Crème."

He was pleased with the way the visit was going. He wanted to share all of the details with me. The making of the Egg Cremes. The "Nature Walk" through Central Park.

"I found a dead pigeon with its head off," Vickie said into the extension. "Dad said it could have been done by a rat."

There were surprises of technology. "Vickie likes the Sega system." And items relating to Curt’s collection of pets. "I have a new Eastern Box Turtle," he said. "It makes five, but I think this one’s a male. I’ve got to get a bigger tank. They’re sitting on top of each other in there."

Curt’s voice radiated charm, and promised adventures to share in, games to play no matter what your age. We chatted in friendly voices for five minutes. Then I talked to Vickie alone.

"Tell her," Curt’s voice said in the background, and Vickie said "No, I’m going to tell her my stuff. You know what, mommy? Daddy has a cake and we’re going to eat it."

"Good idea," I said, really happy now. Happy with myself, grateful to myself for kicking Curt out and double-locking the door behind me, so he could establish this wonderful part-time relationship with Vickie, facilitated and entirely dependent upon 1) my good will, 2) my willingness to ask nothing of him financially, and 3) the expenditure of great amounts of my time and attention. Now, I knew, I was the only one who really remembered the bad times. Curt had amnesia, and Vickie was so young. How little she would have missed him, if I’d waited another year.

"Goodbye mom," Vickie said happily, "I have to go."

"Goodbye, sweetie. Be good," I said and I shivered a little as I hung up the phone. It was getting cold, I should take a hot bath. It was cold and I opened my eyes. I was in Sandia Cave and my leg was trapped and it was getting numb. The maglight lay on the ground a few feet away from me. I couldn’t reach it, but amazingly, it was on.

I was cold, and I was in such an awkward position I couldn’t even untie my sweater from around my neck and put it on. But I had to do something. I had to think. But the only plan I could come up with was to wiggle my foot, if I could.

I couldn’t feel the toes. I knew the leg was broken further up, and if I had the means or the nerve to cut away the Jeans leg I’d see a bone splinter pushing against the skin.

There was the horrible fear that if I did anything I’d make it worse, but it was beginning to be counterbalanced by the fear that if I did nothing I’d die in here and no one would find me until next spring.

The plan was simple. I’d wiggle my foot out of the sneaker. But like all my plans, it was sure to be ill timed. The foot was undoubtedly swollen, the leg was broken. How I’d slide out of the sneaker and free myself was a mystery. But what time was it? When I tried to check my wrist I found I’d broken my watch in the fall. Certainly, it was after 6 p.a. I didn’t know when nightfall was, but if I was going to help myself, it had better be before then.

There was that latticework staircase over the cliff to get down, and I couldn’t remember now if it even had a guardrail. Like so much of my life, I hadn’t noticed the details until they became monumentally important, which is how I could wake up next to Curt one morning and hate him more than I’ve ever hated anything in my life. Those unnoticed details had me sweating now, in the cool cave. When the sweat dried, it would feel like a cold cave. I knew enough to know I was shocky, and hypothermia was likely if I spent the night without help. And say I made it through the night, when would the next person find the gravel turnoff to Sandia Cave? How many people came up here? Every minute I waited I lost body heat, lost coherence. The foot had to come out of the sneaker. If only I had a knife. I wiggled my foot. I screamed and fainted.

It was dark and I heard a man’s voice calling my name. "Pay attention!" it said sharply.

"Why," I said, "Is the rattler coming back?"

Then Holly Near started singing "A Woman Has Disappeared in Chile." "Ay una mujer desaparacia…"

Of course," said, "that’s the song. That’s the song to sing in Echo Canyon."

I’d sing it there as soon as my leg woke up. My leg. Over the singing I heard Suki screaming in my ear. "Wake up. Wake up!"

"You’re a fine one to talk, you wake up," I said.

"I’m dead," she said, and I woke up. I was still lying in an impossible position just under the ledge. The maglight beam was fading, and I didn’t want to be lying there when it went out. I didn’t want to hear Suki’s voice again. I’d never forgive her for leaving, or myself for failing to tell her not to go. I still couldn’t make sense out of it. She’d always been so cautious and I was the one who rushed off into things without thinking. Now she’d stripped off her life as if she were a careless child who’s slipped out of her coat and left it lying on the rug, as I lay on a cave floor, paralyzed by fear, because I didn’t want to die.

It was that fear which led me, finally, to scream and put my hands on either side of the break in my leg, and to pull on it as hard as I could. I screamed to release the pain, and to allow me to keep pulling. I screamed as my foot slid, and then I was free and I was still conscious.

The world was gray, but I fought the grayness until things came clear. I had to think. God knows how long I’d been there. Outside it must be night, and after the staircase down there was still the path and the car, which I had to try to drive with my left foot. God, which way was the car pointing? When I pulled it out, would it be facing down the road towards the creek bed or would I have to drive the cliff edge in the dark?

I propped myself up and looked at my leg. I could move a bit now, and I inched over the maglight, got hold of it, and used it and my sweater to splint the break. It was crude, but I could move now without fainting, if I was slow. As long as I didn’t put any weight on that leg.

It took me a long time to get up to the ledge again. It took me a long time to come back those few feet I’d gone in. It seemed like hours but finally I sat leaning against the entrance to Sandia Cave and looked out into the night. The air was warm, after the cool of being inside a mountain, and I’ve never seen so many stars. The path ahead of me was difficult but clear. Somehow I was going to make it, because I wanted to live. I’d do whatever it took.

Two months later, I flew back to New York. My leg was still in a cast but I could use crutches now, and Vickie was waiting for me. Vickie and Curt and a deadly life. I knew now I would survive it. I’d learned that if you can’t walk you crawl and if you can’t crawl you drag yourself along with your arms, and if you can’t do that then you can always grab the part of you that’s broken and pull as hard as you can to get yourself free.

Who would have thought it? All those years, as we lived our separate lives, Suki and I had quietly struggled with the age-old question "What is the meaning of my life?" She found her answer. Now I’d found mine in an old cliché. Life, even in New York, is largely what you make it.

Vickie would grow up never knowing personal space or the natural geography of an empty land. Words like "High Desert" would exist only in Dictionaries, without the immediacy of words like "Subway," "Handgun," or "Video Game." Her "nature walks" would continue to hinge on the habits of rats. But she would have a father. I knew I was making that decision for her, a decision which would also have its consequences.

As for myself, in twelve years Vickie would be grown up and I would mercifully never have to speak to or see Curt again. I could live through twelve more years and still have something left. I’d learned the secret: pay attention to the details. Hold on to memories, like Suki and the man in the Albuquerque Museum. Keep them as a promise of some theoretical better life, like the moment I came out of the entrance of Sandia Cave and felt the warm night air with all its stars.

Someday, I’d come back to New Mexico. I’d find the gravel turnoff. I’d climb the staircase over rocks and empty air. I’d go back into Sandia Cave. This time, I’d bring food and water, a knife, and a medical kit. Whatever it took, to get right through to the end.