by Darrel Bird
Now she remembered the man as she rode down the black top with her new-found friend. The tires of the big four by four sang as on the dips and turns in the blacktop on the steep mountain road that led toward the town of Estes Park.
She looked shyly at Kathleen, who seemed to be a no-nonsense person and wondered if she should mention it to her. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t, but these were no ordinary times. What the heck. She thought as she watched Kathleen expertly handle the big car, “I met a strange man a couple of days before we left.” She said, gauging Kathleen’s reaction.
“Oh? Do you want to tell me about him?”
She told her of the incident that day at the bus stop and on the bus. Kathleen said nothing, but Ruth could tell she was thinking.
“Do you think he was crazy?” Ruth said as she stared straight ahead.
“I don’t know honey; I don’t know anything any more. I wonder who the man was? Why would he say such a thing to you?”
“Do you believe in Angels Ruth?”
“My Mom used to believe in them; I hadn’t thought about that in years.”
“Where are your Mom and Dad?”
“There were both killed in a car accident just outside of San Diego when I was 14.”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t need to be; I've weathered it pretty good. I stayed with an Aunt in Long Beach, and the life insurance paid for my schooling at U.C.L.A.”
“My folks are both dead too; they were skiing in Golden Colorado and were both caught in an avalanche.”
“Do you miss your folks much?”
“I used to, but Rob’s Mom and dad adopted me when I met Rob, they have treated me just as if I were their own child, you would love Rob’s Mom. His dad too if you had of known him, he was the kindest, sweetest man I have ever known.”
They came into the town of Estes Park, and Kathleen pulled into the parking lot of a large Safeway store that sat by the side of the road.
Rob and Gary walked across the wet field where his antenna complex had stood, eventually coming to the edges of the woods, it was raining again, which was the usual fare for Western Washington at that time of a year, “It sure rains a lot here don’t it? It hasn’t quit raining over a half day since I got here. You guys must have moss as the chief crop up here.”
Rob laughed, “You get to where you don’t pay much attention to it, if you waited for it to quit raining, you’d never get anything done.”
A smoky wisp of fog lay against the trees as they entered the forest of fir trees. The fog giving the Fir trees a surreal look, they shed water from every limb they brushed up against. Almost immediately the mountain rose steeply after they entered the thick forest.
Rob came to a rock outcropping and pulled a bush back to expose a hole in the rock about 3 feet high.
He snapped on his flash light and crawled in on hand and knees, as Gary knelt to follow behind him, “I don’t like holes in the ground buddy.”
“Just wait.” Rob called behind him as he crawled further into the cavern; suddenly, the cavern opened up to walls that rose 20 feet to the top of the caved created by the flow of volcanic lava eons ago.
He stood up in the cavern. It went back 20 feet or so before a bend in the flume swallowed the bright light, the temperature drop was noticeable even at the entrance, the cave was a steady 68 degrees the year round.
The light exposed rock walls, which were black and gray and without color. The cave had a dampening effect on the spirit as they walked into the cave which was fairly round, and the floor wasn’t over ten feet wide in any place.
“How are we going to survive in this? We’ll all go nuts in a week Rob” Gary said as he shined the light around the cave.
