The Start of Time Read online

  I drove until just about midnight and finally pulled into a mid-grade hotel. I didn’t believe in staying in dumps unless I had to. The desk clerk was pleasant despite the late hour and my room was comfortable. I fell asleep quickly and was awake again about dawn and back on the road by six AM.

  I usually don’t eat breakfast as soon as I wake up, so I drove for a couple of hours before stopping at a convenient diner, just off the freeway, for an omelet and hash browns. My habit was to leave a generous tip wherever I went, and the waitress thanked me as I left and I headed back onto the road.

  The time passed easily. Most of my thoughts were about my wife and how different life was at this moment. I didn’t fret over plans for the future, I just embraced the emotions that came to me. Each day memories, emotions, trials, or joys come to us and knock on the door and visit; we need to invite them in and offer them tea and sit and let them tell their stories and triumphs and woes. My grief was the process of letting go of conditioning based on over 25 years together, not a crushing depression or loss of purpose. My wife had been a wonderful woman, full of life, and now that was over. She would always be part of me, but a much smaller part than she had been.

  I’d known friends who lost a spouse and who never themselves lived again. From that moment on, they lived in the world of what they had lost. They lived entirely in the past; in the life they used to know that was never real again. Or, they lived partly in the future, never being able to imagine a life of happiness for themselves again. My wife and I had worked hard to learn to live in the present, to be with each other when we were together, and I was living in the present now.

  Right now, I was driving down the freeway through open country. Memories of my wife sat with me in the passenger seat and we talked about where we were at right now. We laughed about past things and cried over tender moments. But they were being discussed now, as I drove and watched the miles tick by; not reliving past moments, but sharing them. This quest was a step forward, a new thing…and the start to who knows what. Every beginning starts with and end. The beginning of every new thing comes at the death of an old thing. How I react to it depends on which thing, the end or the beginning, takes the biggest portion of my thoughts. When both are in proper proportion, when they are in balance, there is peace.

  I was at peace with my wife’s passing. I was at peace with my transition to a new life without her. My memories and thoughts sat in the passenger seat and passed me a piece of beef jerky to chew on, and I drove down the freeway.

  I like eating just after normal hours, when there’s a lull at the restaurant. I like it when the staff isn’t rushing and when you have a chance to smile at them and try to bring a bit of cheer. Waitresses are almost always single moms; I have compassion for them. My parents stayed together my whole life, but I feel for those who didn’t have that kind of family. I enjoy being kind to strangers, especially single moms who have such hard lives; working to make ends meet, looking for a relationship and a way to be loved and appreciated, raising a child without the help that could make a hard job just a bit easier.

  Lunch was at a little dive Mexican place. The food was good. I don’t think that the waitress was a single mom. She wore a wedding ring. Come to think of it, I wondered if Mexican restaurants tended to have fewer single moms? As I think back, I think maybe that’s true. Maybe I’ll remember to pay attention and see if my theory holds. Is there a lower divorce rate, or a lower incidence of unwed pregnancies in the Hispanic community?

  When dinner time came, I wasn’t really hungry. That isn’t unusual. I pulled into a place to stay for the night before 10PM and slept until dawn, like the day before.

  The next day was much the same. I drove. I listened to the radio a bit. My thoughts were peaceful, and the time passed easily.

  The third day of the trip started the same way. By noon, I was in Arizona. I began to make plans now.

  I would want to start out as early in the morning as possible from a point as close to the destination as I could get and still have a decent night’s sleep in a comfortable bed. I was expecting about two hours of driving after I left the highway, plus an hour or so to unpack the ATV before heading into the hills. I decided that I’d stop and stay about an hour’s drive before the point where I would leave the freeway.

  Once again, I woke up at dawn. I hadn’t used an alarm clock for many years, but regularly woke when the sun came up. I ate breakfast at the hotel before heading out because there wouldn’t be many amenities or places to stop for meals from here on out. I was on the freeway for the last leg of this part of the trip early.

  Chapter 3 The Desert and The Cave

  This was it. Now my thoughts turned to this moment and the few moments to come over the next few hours.

  This was it. Today I would really begin my quest. I had brief thoughts of self-doubt. Any time you build up to something for several weeks, something really important to you, as the moment approaches, you question what you’re doing. What if it turns out to be a big disappointment? What if you ‘fail’?

  Of course, that fear of failure is nonsense. What is there to fail at? Not just in what I was doing, but in life in general? I was driving into the desert to look at a piece of property that I had bought sight unseen over the Internet. A worthless piece of property. A piece of property with no resale value that I would be required to pay very modest property taxes on for the rest of the time that I owned it.

  But, it was more than a piece of worthless property: it was a treasure map. Did it matter if the map was a fake? It only mattered if it mattered to me. There was no one but me to judge me, and I wasn’t judging me. I had studied the treasure map and decided that it showed real locations and a path to a real destination. That destination may have been one of Burroughs’ favorite camping spots and nothing more…but what if it was? If that were the case, I would be exploring, and the owner of, one of my boyhood hero’s favorite camping spots.

  I wasn’t sure about that though. Nearly a hundred years ago, could Burroughs have even gotten to this place? This freeway was certainly not that old. Burroughs had lived in southern California, about 530 miles from my destination, but in those early days, there wasn’t a freeway here. Would the trip have even been possible without spending a week on horseback? Why go to that trouble when Yosemite was so much closer and more beautiful? The only reason for coming here in those days was for mining; the reason that John Carter was purported to be here. Burroughs had never held a mining claim, or any interest in the property I had purchased according to any records that I had been able to find. It was a mystery.

  I had a map, that I had drawn myself, that detailed a location that seemed to exist, and no good reason for anyone to have ever been here. That didn’t bother me. I was on a quest and the bigger the mystery, the better.

  I pulled into the famous gift shop and museum housing the tourist attraction, ‘The Thing’ and filled the truck with gas. I considered taking the tour, but I was more interested in getting on the road…or off of it. I did ask the people at the cash register if there had ever been any rumors of Burroughs having visited the area, but they had no idea what I was talking about. This place wasn’t that old. I did buy a few things: a Mexican Poncho, a nice large hunting knife, and a souvenir water bottle.

  A few miles down the freeway, I pulled off onto a dirt road that headed straight north. There was no off ramp or exit sign. I just pulled over on the shoulder and then headed up the bare dirt track. From here, navigation was strictly by GPS. I had carefully mapped out a route and entered way points. There were no addresses or street names, but the dirt paths turned out to be more or less where I had expected them to be, based on satellite images.

  It was dusty, but the going was smooth. There was a hard dirt path, but there was no sign that any tires had driven this road for a long time. From one track to the next I worked my way along my map. Eventually, I came to the end of the road. Literally.

  The road didn’t so much end, as fade away. This wa
s about the point where I’d expected to have to leave the truck behind, but now that I was here, I had second thoughts. I stopped the vehicle and got out to stretch my legs and reconnoiter. The question was, how safe would the truck be here? There had certainly been no one near this spot this season. There were no tire or human tracks, but I didn’t know whose land I was currently on nor what they would do if they found my truck and trailer. I had gone so far as to purchase a desert camouflage net that I could cover the truck with, but I’d rather not take the chance.

  Now that I could see the terrain in person, it looked as though I could drive several miles farther off the road than originally anticipated. The ground was hard, not sandy, and it began to rise toward the hills that were my ultimate target. I decided to see how far I could safely go cross-country. I’d have to take it slow because of the trailer, but it didn’t look like it would be too bad of a trek.

  Once back behind the wheel, I headed in a straight line toward the point on my GPS. I only made about five miles an hour on average. I crossed several arroyos where water ran down from the hills when it rained, but for the most part, the driving wasn’t difficult. Rainfall in this area was about 12 inches per year. Not enough to grow crops, but enough for some well-water to be available in the right spots…and summer thunderstorms were always possible.

  As I drove toward the hills, the scrub brush became more common. I was surprised that I was able to take the truck as far as I did. It started to look like I might even make it all the way to the edge of the property.

  The parcel that I had purchased wasn’t square. I’d combined several adjacent pieces in a long rectangle about 450 feet wide and about 2000 feet deep, with the location of the cave, if it existed, roughly in the center of the back, about 200 feet from the ‘back fence’. This left roughly 1800 feet toward the end of the dirt track where the road had disappeared, about a third of a mile between the edge of the property and the site of the cave. The additional land on all sides was for sale as well. Like I’d said, it was essentially worthless in its present condition.

  By the time I stopped the truck, I’d reached the edge of the property by driving carefully and slowly, picking my way among the low brush that grew sparsely in the area. I was able to go a full 500 feet or so onto the property before hilly terrain prevented further forward progress. And, here I was, about a quarter of a mile from my destination.

  I parked the truck on a flat spot just before the rise of the hill and began to set up camp. I was probably just four hours away from town. Actually, it was probably less, maybe just three hours, because the return trip would be faster if I wasn’t pulling the trailer and since I had an idea of the lay of the land, so to speak.

  Setting up camp involved unhooking the trailer, unloading the ATV, setting up the large canopy that I’d brought, putting out a six-foot folding table, setting a second canopy over the top of the truck for shelter, and pulling the desert camo nets over the top. Even though the area was uninhabited, I still wanted to be discreet and not attract any possible visitors in the remote case that I was spotted from the air.

  I was excited to move on up to search for the cave, but I was also hesitant to take these final steps. Again, it was that resistance to finding out how it would ultimately turn out. If I didn’t find the cave, would I be done with my quest? Would I pack up and head back home? If the cave was there, what would I do? Would I stay and make plans to build a small remote private retreat? Maybe a dome and a well? I could bring in a small tractor if I wanted to and clear a parking area and a building site. Or, I could pack up and go home. For the moment, I would offload my water supply and secure my food and plan to stay for a few days at least.

  When camp was finally up, I decided it was time to start the search. I could have easily walked the quarter mile that I estimated remained, but I might have to walk back and forth several times while searching, and besides, I had this brand-new ATV and I wanted to play with it. I loaded some bottles of water and some snacks, plus the flashlights and electric lanterns and a rope and my new knife and started up the engine.

  The ATV was a 4-seat, 4-wheel drive buggy with a soft top and all the bells and whistles, including its own GPS and moving map. From here, I had only a suggestion of where to look for the first marker on the map. I hoped that the cave actually was on my land. The first marker was the entrance to a shallow dry stream bed that came down between two low rises in the terrain about 50 yards from where I sat. I thought that I could see a likely spot ahead of me and I moved the ATV toward the location.

  I won’t describe each marker that I searched for here, they’re all recorded in detail in what I now believe to have truly been Carter’s manuscript and also in my own notes. I have updated them and added markers of my own to make it easier for my heirs to locate the spot, but the easiest way is to simply find the GPS coordinate that I finally pinpointed.

  It took me about an hour to work through the clues and find each point, but I did just that. Every single marker was there, just as described. Some had been shifted by the hundred years that they’d lain undiscovered, but they were there! The published version of the story had changed the description of the cave to make it seem less accessible than it actually was. When I found the place, it was a small volcanic cave with an entrance about 10 feet down in a depression at the side of a tiny stream bed hidden by low hills on each side. It turned out to be just about 300 yards from my camp, though I traversed the area several times as I searched. I was able to drive the ATV to within about 50 feet of the entrance.

  The descriptions in the published story, and the accounts in the manuscript, and the fact that the details were written a hundred years ago, had set my expectations that the cave would be much more difficult to reach than it really was. It wasn’t much past noon and I was essentially ready to ‘see what I could see’. Somehow, this obscure find had led me to exactly what it had promised…to the entrance of a cave at least. I was still a skeptic, but that just meant that I didn’t believe what I was told simply because it was what I was told. It meant that I questioned it, not that I disbelieved it.

  So, what did I know? I knew that I had a manuscript that seemed to be a hundred years old. It was written by someone connected to the publication of the John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It had led me to the very area and cave that it described in the Arizona desert.

  Now the question was: Just how deep did the rabbit hole go? Was there a hookah smoking caterpillar and a Mad Hatter down there, or not?

  The published story described a shallow cave and a gaseous mist that paralyzed Carter and transported him to Mars. A volcanic cave could certainly release a poisonous gas, even a hallucinogenic one, I imagined. On the other hand, the manuscript, not the book, described this cave, one that went maybe a hundred yards down to a volcanic ice cave and a small glowing yellowish green pool of water that sucked anyone who entered it into a swirling energy vortex at its center. In this case, I needed to believe in the energy vortex version rather than poisonous gas version.

  But the time for action had come. I gathered my supplies into a day pack that I had with me and took a powerful flashlight in my hand and descended to the entrance of the small cave. The way down wasn’t difficult. The opening was about 20 inches across and I peered inside. It seemed to drop down at an angle for about 4 feet and then open up to a larger chamber. I lowered my pack and dropped it to the floor a few feet below. I tossed my lit flashlight on top of the pack and climbed down myself. The climb back out should be fairly easy. As I stood on the floor of the cave, my head and shoulders were still above the opening. I moved my pack to the side and ducked down into the opening.

  I retrieved the light and crouched, looking into the interior. Just a few feet ahead of me, the floor slopped down and the ceiling receded to allow me to stand upright. Searching the walls, I spotted the final marking, just as described and supposedly made by Carter himself, proving that I had found the cave pointed to by my research.

 
At this point in any story, something inevitably goes horribly wrong. The hero missteps and falls and hits his head or falls down a hole or an earthquake hits and seals him in or the poisonous gas envelopes him or a blinding light knocks him unconscious. At least I could be careful and try not to trip and hit my head.

  The floor exhibited signs of having been enhanced by the work of human hands. It was plain that dirt from outside had been brought in from the outside and poured over the rough rocks of the natural cave to make it fairly smooth. The years had seen the dirt filter deeper into the cracks so that some of the rocks could be seen, but it was still much easier going than if I’d had to climb over lose stones . The tripping hazard was definitely here though.

  The path branched several times, but at each juncture, the dirt floor clearly indicated a single correct route and I followed it down into the darkness. As expected, before too long, maybe a hundred yards, though I wasn’t counting, the passage turned sharply and then opened into a chamber about 15 feet across and seven feet high…and there was the luminous pool, about four feet across and containing a strange swirling ‘vortex’ in its center. At the entrance to the chamber a stone pedestal about three feet tall had been erected, and a small metal box sat on top.

  I had practiced hard to cultivate the ability to choose my reactions and maintain calm in many situations, and every practice I knew was kicking in now. I had found John Carter’s cave. I owned the property it stood on. I was the first person in a hundred years to see it. It was still too fantastic to believe that John Carter was the same man of the stories, but it appeared that he was actually someone, not just a fictional character. And, there was the strange vortex in front of my very face. There was no natural explanation for it. The way it moved, it seemed to continually suck in the water around it and yet never to actually take any in or diminish the water volume in the pool. Was it time to suspend my disbelief? What was in the metal box on the pedestal?