When I was little, I took a class trip to a planetarium that was housed in one of our local schools. A sky full of stars and planets inside a schoolhouse seemed a marvel to me. I remember tipping my head back as the auditorium darkened and the world of night arched above me twinkling and glittery, a glamorous sequined ceiling. I don’t remember much else. I’m sure there was talk of constellations and comets, Jupiter storms and the rings of Saturn. I only know for sure that the world for a while on a bland school day was punctured with pinpricks of light and sparkle.
I returned to this same planetarium a few years ago as a school librarian and a teaching veteran in the school district that raised me. I experienced what many of us feel when we return to the places we roamed as children, like giant Alice in a shrunken space. I settled into the refurbished seats, tipped my head back resting in the darkness for a moment, enjoying the quiet and then the sky was lit up like an electric celebration summoned by an on/off switch of some design, delivered from darkness into light. Despite the artifice, I still thought it was beautiful and under the starlight was reminded of a line from a Mary Oliver poem, “Where are you?/Do you know that the heart has a dungeon?/Bring light! Bring light!” I wondered at the mess of city lights outshining the stars in our urban lives.
Then the aspiring astronomer’s booming voice filled the room like Zeus speaking to the mortals. Except it wasn’t Zeus at all, Zeus with his rage and spite, lust and promises. It was just a middle school science teacher’s voice from the neon heavens amplified and explaining.
As the voice rambled on about longitude and latitude, gravitational pull and facts and figures and certainties, the stars actually seemed to dull or maybe that was just my heavy eyelids snuffing them out. The science soothed me almost to sleep, even as I longed for poetry from the astronomer or simply silence. I believe the stars belong to the poets and the artists, not the mathematicians and the scientists. I am content to come to the night sky dumb with awe, letting it be nameless and bright, inflamed with miracles and mysteries, lovely to me without the strain of numbers and measurements and equations.
I felt the same way when we visited Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. The rangers there tell two different kinds of stories: one filled with geological exploration and explanation and the other alive with spirits and the breathing earth.
In 1881 in the Black Hills, brothers Tom and Jesse Bingham heard a strange whistling sound, loud enough to turn their heads, pique their curiosity and send them exploring. They found a hole churning with a wind brisk enough to blow Jesse’s hat off when they looked inside. It must have been difficult to tell if it was a greeting or a warning from the breathing cave. They were intrigued and put the cave on one of those story maps of tall tales that spread through whispers and brags, knee slapping, and disbelief. Word travelled as it does, like seeds and sound waves, until it wafted to the ears of an adventurer.
In 1889, Alvin McDonald began exploring the cave when he was just 18. To him, it must have been like a portal to another world, another planet, an underworld of darkness he could light up with revelation. He found the cave full of delicate creations, lacy earthen structures, boxwork ceilings, and frostwork flowerings. He found crystals and mazes and no end in sight to the complex floor plan that seemed a mansion of passageways.
The Lakota tell a different story of this cave, one that suits my sensibilities. For the Lakota, the hole in the Black Hills is sacred and is the place where people emerged from the Spirit Lodge beneath the ground once the Creator prepared the Earth for them.
I love origin stories. They answer the big questions of life but never get hung up too much in the science. I respect the scientists, but I live by the poets and the philosophers. I admire the explorers and the explainers, but I will always seek out the mystics and the storytellers.
Descending into the cave, I thought of the spirits even as I marveled at the engineering feat that allowed us to take an elevator down into this maze full of rooms beneath the ground. I worried I was inviting something unnatural by visiting the underworld. If I had passed this opening to the earth with the Bingham brothers or with Alvin McDonald in the 1800s, I would have let the spirits breathe on me a blessing and kept on walking. Nothing would have enticed me to step into darkness, yet there I was in an elevator leaving all the sunlight in the world behind and hoping the electricians have lit the way for me inside the cave. Ah, science, bring light, bring light!
The cave was cool and damp, and if I let myself think too much about the weight of the dirt and what strange constructions might be keeping it at bay, I would have run screaming for the sky. I distracted myself with the earthen artwork and tuned out the ranger’s explanation imagining fairies instead making lace out of rock, pearls out of stone, sculpture out of time itself. We walked and walked hearing stories of people getting lost in the cave, trapped in the cave, seduced by the cave. We learned about people mapping the cave who always think they will find the end of it, and they never do.
Then, the ranger took us to a seating area in one of the rooms and invited us to experience the cave as the early explorers did, in total darkness. She prepared us, soothed us, warned us then snuffed out the light, and the darkness was infinite. I reached for the kids, for Chris and wondered how anyone endures anything alone. The ranger turned on a flashlight, a weak flame but a comfort still as we thought of the early explorers moving slowly with only the next step illuminated with no idea of what loomed ahead. Now, this is a story I recognize. We all know what that feels like even if we don’t explore caves.
Mercifully, the ranger clapped her hands or muttered magic spells and the lights came back on, and the darkness disappeared. We walked on guided by light and by stories. When we got back on the elevator and began our ascent to the surface, I couldn’t help but wish it was always this easy to summon elevators and light out of the depths and out of the darkness.