I hiked to Timpanogos Cave with my family on a sunny day in the early 80s. My parents had a burst of spontaneity, so they packed up some trail mix and Snickers bars, a couple of rickety baby backpack carriers, and their four tiny kids and drove us a couple of towns north to the base of a mountain.
A few things stand out in my memory about that hike. Foremost is the rare experience of having an entire Snickers to myself. But also the paved trail rising up in front of me, inviting me to conquer it with my young and energetic legs. Jagged rocks along the trail that were perfect for climbing. Holding my dad’s hand in the cave when they turned out the lights and we were plunged into darkness blacker than we’d ever known. And the calls of my mother all the way down, telling us to stay with her, to not run ahead, to not get too close to the edge.
I don’t remember any cliffs.
This summer I hiked that trail a second time. Spontaneous day trips to Timp Cave are now a thing of the distant past, so we scheduled our hike online weeks in advance. Two adult tickets, three children.
The trail was familiar, paved and steep, though the ache in my hamstrings was new and immediate. We came across the same rock formation that’s been preserved in my family’s collection of Kodak slides for the last thirty-something years and took a photo next to it, but this time I didn’t scramble up on the rocks. I held my daughter’s small hand as we stood in the cold, dripping cave and the lights went out, and I marveled at how the absence of light feels more like a presence, a kind of closing in.
Amidst all of this familiarity, something new grabbed my attention. Danger. One side of the trail featured steep drop-offs all the way up. I couldn’t stop noticing the places that fell away, free of guard rails, down rocky edges, past the tops of pine trees that began hundreds of feet below. How easy would it be to stumble in just the wrong spot? To plant your foot where the ground wasn’t sure?
As we climbed, I placed myself between my youngest child and the edge. On the return trip, I called out too often as gravity eased us down the deepening trail.
“Don’t run!”
“Away from the edge, please.”
“Stay with me.”
My older daughter has a paper route because she’s too young for a “real” job and she doesn’t like babysitting. Unfortunately, because her bike is unrideable, her paper route is also currently my paper route. Twice a week I drive her to the newspaper office to pick up her stack of forty-three papers, and then I drive her through neighborhood streets with the route map on my lap as she runs the papers up to porches.
Our second time doing this, her ten-year-old brother wanted to help. The job went much faster with him along. He had a way of hurling himself out of the minivan and sprinting up to every other house, enacting feats of strength and agility in his mind, no doubt, heroically quarterbacking his way through an otherwise mundane chore on a hot day.
“Watch for cars,” I warned automatically every time one of the kids set out for a porch across the street. And they did, they watched. I told myself they were too old to need the warning every time, yet I couldn’t stop my mouth from giving it. Watch for cars! Remember, watch for cars.
Finally we reached the last two houses, one across the street from the other. I pulled over and checked the house numbers on the map.
“You take this one here,” I told my daughter, “and Jacob can do the blue one across the street. Then home!”
I bent my head to cross off the house numbers. Heard the van’s sliding door slam open and a gleeful cry of “Race ya!” Sensed to my left a blur of yellow t-shirt and speeding white vehicle, a clash of horn and shrieking brakes, my own sharp gasp and tight-shut eyes, shoulders taut, face turned away.
A slow-motion instant with no light.
Then the white car drove on and my boy was back in the seat behind me, breathing heavily and hiding his face.
A small, nervous voice. “I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t see them! But good thing I can juke, right? I was like one inch away from that tire!”
I tried to breathe again.
We pulled up in front of our house and the kids ran inside. I stood on wobbly knees and watched them go, feeling I might actually vomit. Inside, I started making dinner but I couldn’t stop my shaking.
“That could have been so bad,” I repeated to no one. “That was way too close!”
“Yeah,” my daughter said, “but nothing happened, Mom. He’s fine! So what’s the problem?”
The problem? The problem, I wanted to say, is that if your brother had bolted out of that minivan one second later, I might not be standing here browning ground beef. This whole evening, this whole life as we know it, with your brother pounding out piano chords and your father calmly driving home from work and your sister laughing on the neighbors’ trampoline, all of everything we forget that we love came so close to crashing down in that one tiny second. And one instant is just too small a thing to hold such power.
There is danger you don’t see, my child. We are always one inch away from catastrophe. One beat, one mistake, one diagnosis away from a helpless freefall.
I didn’t say that.
But that is the problem. The perfectly random chance of it all is the problem. The wrongness that we’re fine for now but there’s no real reason we should be.
That night in bed with my eyes closed, I saw again the twist of a yellow shirt through squinting eyelids as I flinched my face away, unwilling to see what I was powerless to change. What was it I had felt in that split second of shock before I had my boy back in my car again, shaken but whole? Resignation? An inevitable closing in? A certain fulfillment of a lifelong foreboding?
We’re living our lives on the edge of a cliff. We mostly look up, at the challenge ahead, the wave upon wave of green pines rising around us, the cloudless cathedral of endless blue light, but sometimes we stumble, or we hear a cascade of rocks crashing far out of sight, or we pause and glance down the steep drop-off that’s been there all along, and for a moment we’re standing still in that heart-clutching darkness, grasping hands we can’t see just to know we’re not alone. Then—if we’re lucky—we get to turn away from the edge and keep ascending in the sunlight.
