It has been about fifteen years since Al and I were up here in Oregon fishing, in the Cascade Lakes region just south of Bend, Oregon.  It is a cool place not just because of the mountains that still have snow in August and lakes with huge Mackinaw trout (next story!) and pine trees, but because it is also the center of volcanic lore from days gone by and days that may yet come again.   Crater Lake is just down the road, a lake in the caldera of an ancient volcano it is almost too impossibly big to imagine.

I guess because I grew up in Illinois where volcanoes were something I read about in geography books, it didn’t occur to me until I moved out here that volcanoes do as they please, whenever they please.  I remember being shocked at the devastation – in the 20th century no less! – of Mt. St. Helen back in the 80’s.  The photos made me cry – especially the before and after photos of Spirit Lake – a pristeen mountain lake turned into a mudhole.  It seemed so wrong or prehistoric.  I didn’t get it.  It just had never occurred to me that active volcanoes still exist – silly, I know, but hey I know all about the Great Lakes so leave me alone.

Around here, the magnificence of volcanoes is everywhere ,this being smack dab in the middle of the Cascades, part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.  The rocks are volcanic, the names of everything are lava this and lava that, caldera this, devil’s that.  Today Al and I went to a lava tube- which is a cave that was formed by lava flows.  Let’s see if I can get this right: the lava starts to flow down the mountain, it quickly forms a crust under which more lava flows.  This process goes on and on until the mountain has purged itself of its apparent night-on-the-town gone bad, at which point the “crust” may be 50 feet thick.  The lava drains itself out of the tube and voila: you have a lava tube.

It was the second time we’ve been to one, and it is still one of the neatest things I’ve ever done.  It is just a tunnel – like one you would drive through traveling through the mountains, except that in places this one could house a couple of freight trains stacked on top of each other.  It is dark – you rent a lantern at the ranger station before you go in.  This one required us to walk down about one hundred steps to get to the floor of the tube.  Then it was a mile hike to the point where it gets so small you can’t go any deeper…this caused by a “sand plug” of eons of seeping sand that clogs up the tube.   We wore our headlamps as well so we could look up on occasion and view the ceiling and walls. They are not like the pretty limestone caves you see advertised with colored lights to enhance the experience – they are every shade of black and grey and a glassy silver, layer upon layer of lava, in some places it appeared that some lava had seeped through the wall and cooled mid-ooze, hanging from the wall like black candle drippings.  I didn’t see any bats but I looked.  They are good at hiding, I know they are there.

You have to watch your step – this is not a tourist trap cave.  This is a cave in which to feel small, to feel out of place, to know on a gut level that you are inside the earth.  It is cold – 40  Fahrenheit- and again, very very dark.  At one point when there were no others around, Al put the lantern behind a rock and we turned off our headlamps.  Whoa.  Dark. Really dark.  Did I mention how dark it is?

My imagination gets carried away.  I would like to spend the night down there.  Or spend a day – bring a chair, sit there all day, turn off my lights when no one is there.  Be scared in the pitch blackness, hear the dripping of the water from the ceiling, try to figure out the meaning of life, that sort of thing.

People who go into these caves are a special breed. I know there are some reading this who would not go into a cave if they were being followed by a grisly bear intent on a meal.  For me, even though I have never done as much of it as I would like, and who never goes into a cave without worrying about an earthquake while I’m in there, a cave is irresistible.  Today there were little beacons of light ahead of us, behind us, coming towards us, all kindred spirits in the dark cold silence of the tube.  I was pleased to see parents taking their little ones down there – they played with the echoes that were endless in some of the cavernous rooms.  They made ghost noises “woooo!” and giggled at each other as they startled each other and talked about whether there were spiders and stayed close to mommy and daddy.  There were senior citizens, drawn by the eeriness and sacredness of the space, like an underground church.

At one point I remarked that it was like Halloween – little points of light in the darkness, lots of joy and laughter (“is there a Starbuck’s at the end?”)  How amazing that nature, without a thought for us and indeed sometimes seemingly bent on killing us before we kill her,  makes secret playgrounds for us, under the sea, on top of mountains, and even under the ground.

Al and I trekked out again, stepping out onto the baking hot surface of the earth.  Ascending the path to the parking lot, we could feel blasts of cold air blowing out at us from under the brush and grass.  We couldn’t see the holes, but we knew they were there by the air conditioning that sent us on our way with one last memory of our time down there.

By the way – how do they discover most lava tubes?  A part of the  ceiling collapses leaving a hole that reveals the tube underneath.  There is really no way of knowing how many there are, according to the National Forest Service…