Secret waterfall redux

I won't be offended if you think that, little by little, we're going insane. I just glanced back at the stuff we've been blogging about recently, and it occurs to me that a superficial skim might suggest a family increasingly unhinged. Mark unselfconsciously flouncing around town wearing a little girl's wristwatch and a sarong; Quincy claiming to hear the serenading songs of birds all night long; Maddox speaking in surrealistic riddles; and so forth. Even the recent photos may suggest that we've succumbed to some strange madness that drives us to obsessively sculpt towering toothsome concrete rabbits and to gaze oddly at our reflections in sheared-off auto parts deep within the Provençal woods. It's like we're no longer just a family on sabbatical, but are instead minor characters in a Werner Herzog movie, or Alice in Wonderland, or Apocalypse Now. You might half expect Quincy to start blogging about the sudden appearance of a strung-out ghost of Dennis Hopper in the vine-grown ruins of an ancient olive mill; or for me to report on how, during a recent trip to the market to buy cherries and flan we encountered the lumbering form of Marlon Brando sitting in the shadows of a cheese shop reading the poetry of T.S. Eliot and telling far-out tales of gardenias and riverbanks and razorblades and snails. (The horror. The horror.)

So, yeah, I won't be offended if, while reading our blog, you're reminded of that famous remark by Francis Ford Coppola: "We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane."

If not for the bits about being in the jungle and having too much money, that remark might be an accurate assessment of our lives. Oh and also the bit about going insane. Because, despite appearances, I assure you: We still have all our marbles. In fact, our lives are so boringly normal here that it's hard to find anything to blog about.

But, while I cannot report on any torrential rain of madness, I can tell you about something that Jasper and I did a couple of days ago that found us dropping down through a sort of rabbit-hole and plunging into the (non-metaphorical) heart of darkness.

I wrote once before about the secret waterfall and the caves. What I didn't mention was that, in addition to the big easy entrance into the short tunnel we explored already, there's another cave entrance that I'd previously ignored because it's just a little hole in the side of the cliff and I wasn't sure I could even fit through it. On a return visit, I just had to try. And I fit. And so did Jasper and Maddox too. And, once through, we were inside a substantial tunnel just goes and goes. We explored it for a little ways – far enough for the dry tunnel to start getting damp as it bore back darkly through the limestone. Having gone that far, Jasper and I were keen to return and explore it as far as we possibly (or safely) could.

We did so as soon as Quincy's brother Kelin and his family arrived in town. It was the perfect opportunity because (as those of you who subscribe to Nature, Geology, and the Journal of Geophysical Research already know) Kelin knows a thing or two about water and rocks and geomorphology. And because one of his girls (Teagan) is 10.

"I'm not going in there!" Teagan exclaimed when, after hiking out of town and climbing up to the waterfall, she saw the narrow slot in the rock that we'd need to shimmy through.

But she did. And with Jasper leading the way with the chirpy enthusiasm of an eager mole, the four of us plunged onward and gently downward through the darkness. Despite her vocal misgivings, I think there was only one moment when Teagan had any real regrets about being there. It was the moment when, as we dropped to our knees to get through a particularly low passage, our headlamps suddenly illuminated a large dense ragged-looking spider web right in front of our faces, occupied by a burly spider the size of my hand. We quickly scuttled on, and on, pausing occasionally so that Kelin could point out interesting features created by the interaction of gravity, water, and calcium carbonate. Because, you know, when you're hunched back-breakingly over inside a damp lightless passageway deep inside the earth, and you've just been nose-to-nose with a spider that looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings, nothing beats an impromptu geology lesson. Seriously.

Eventually, Jasper yelled out that she saw light ahead. And moments later we reemerged blinkingly, along with some gently flowing groundwater, in a familiar spot along a tiny road on the upper edge of the village.

And then we turned around and plunged into the heart of darkness again, back the way we came. Not because we were so especially keen to blunder once more into the webs of blind and bloated spiders, but because we were keen to take a bracing swim in the churning gray-green pool underneath the secret waterfall where we began.

Yeah, I know: It's not exactly a paranoid florid fantasy of razorblades and snails and Marlon Brando in his pajama pants. But it's all I got.