Primal Fear and the Nutty Putty Cave

I've been in that cave the man got trapped in, the Utah Nutty Putty cave.

I had just turned 11 and moved to a new city. I was attending a hippie school with a serious outdoors bent, and to celebrate our first day and introduce some unit cohesion, we went out to the cave.

The cave was simply a hole in the ground, on top of a wind swept, hot and lonely bluff out about an hour from the city, within easy spitting distance of Utah Lake. There was no administration of the place then, and we brought no equipment other then hiking boots and palliative towels. The name of the cave,Nutty Putty, evoked the nature of the formation's unique mud, found nowhere else in the world, a geological singularity, a fascinating development.In laymans terms: the mud was exceptionally sticky and it got everywhere and took a million years to come off in the shower. I looked down into the hole, and up at my teacher, who I had met the day before. "You're sure about this?" I asked.

"It'll be so fun!" he said, encouragingly. I stiffened up my shoulders, and began to climb, down, down, down, everything getting darker, more slippery, my feet scrabbling for purchase on the slippery rock. It was only about ten feet to the bottom, but I wasn't even five feet tall, yet.

"HELL YESSS!" I heard, as one of my classmates flung himself down the hole, feet first, a flesh colored blur. He hit the ground adeptly: he picked himself up and regarded with interest the slime that now covered his feet and his hands.

"Don't do that!" my teacher said, desperately, from above our heads.

I'd been caving before when went down into the hole, in a huge and wild cave in Tennessee. That had been an adventure, something exciting and exotic, but the Nutty Putty cave was something entirely different: a hampster-tunnel made out of rock, just big enough to admit the body and not much else, a place that lent itself to wriggling and physical gyrations. I had a fear of heights, but nothing in the way of claustrophobia, and I began to enjoy it: we crawled through tiny spaces and into bigger chambers, we climbed up and over muddy obstacles, we chimney-walked through corridors and passages.

There were no stalactites or stalagmites here, no mysterious cave life, but it was an underground obstacle course and that was enough fun, for us. As we made our way back to the surface, my teacher stopped us, in the middle of a large chamber that could comfortably admit us all. "We're going to turn off our flashlights now," he said. All 12 kids did, with some sarcastic tittering tossed in. "Look, be quiet, just be quiet," our teacher said. "Now look around you."

The darkness was immense, all-encompassing, something that weighed on you, that pressed against your face. I felt as if my chest was being compressed, as if something was trying to push me into the rock that my back leaned against. It was disqueting, a horror: I focused on the sounds of the people around me, the assurance that they were alive. There were little phantasms of light around me, generated only by my mind (I knew that) - I wondered what they would turn into, if I was down here in the black for a long time. We kids had all gone quiet, totally organically.

My teacher broke the silence, after eight minutes. "That's pitch darkness. No light at all. Imagine what would happen if you got lost. If your flashlight went out."

"Horrible death," one kid said, trying to make a joke.

"Exactly," our teacher said. "So stay close."

We illuminated our flashlights, again. Our eyes adjusted to the light. We were quieter, now: still talking and laughing, but an aura of solemnity had taken us over, a bit. The class was a success, pretty much, from there on out, throughout a year of outdoors adventures of varying length and death potentiality. We had seen what could be the worst, what could occur if we pushed off too far on our lonesomes: it was inconceivable, too dire to consider. The things in the dark that came for you, the pressure on the chest, the endless, forever silence. Enough of a lesson.

I imagine the man who got trapped in Nutty Putty and give an involuntary gut-reaction shudder. I know just enough of what it must have felt like, for him, to truly disturb and terrify me, to imagine what he must have felt like. "He's now really in the bowels of the earth," a comment to the SLC Tribune page on his passing went. Good, god, let that never be me, I think, selfishly. It's an ancestral fear, one that is probably encoded deep in our DNA. Don't wedge yourself into holes, don't get caught out in the dark, and avoid the bowels of the earth, avoid death by wedging. Not that I blame the man who died - he was an adventurer, an athlete, he had made resisting certain instincts a habit, a habit that had brought him great pleasure, enhanced his life.

We can't succumb to cowardice and to our base and Darwinian (oh, that word is overused) natures when it comes to our lives, the risks we will or will not take. He's dead, it's a tragedy. The cave will be shut up forever, I've read. They couldn't take his body out of the place where he is - not in one piece. The authorities concluded that, both to protect the family and to protect the public, the cave will be filled in, rendered "a tomb." I can't come down on either side of that debate, if one man's misfortune should lead to the closure of the path he picked.

I can just consider primal fear again when I think of him, think of the cave: my first experience with the notion, conflated eleven years later with a current event, a pinpointed moment. I can't think too hard on it, or I'm not sure I'll sleep tonight, if my nightmares won't be crushing, claustrophobic.