By Todd Sformo
Only hundreds of feet into the earth, declining slightly in slope, is time at 45,000 before present, where a placard punched into the permafrost defines a formation called reticulate chaotic. The dark of the cave starves light except for bulbs that carve-out the near, although exact boundaries can’t be pinned. The cave, therefore, retains much of its netherworld quality that comes not from long, arduous exploration like that of the sea, the poles, the Amazon, but from excavation, into a world that was never meant to be, never an explorer’s geography or conquest, never a final destination.
Fog of silt, loess, rises like trapped butterflies on an airstream; once up can’t get down as a liquid breeze buoys the deposits in a drowning, milling fill, a floating quicksand that coats all surfaces and moist linings. You see this when you blow your nose. Ice-cemented walls and billowy lithic ceilings inspire the dolorous, the road edges of strewn. Even the cool of the cave does not stave off odors of ruin, despite perennially frozen. There’s an un-orderly decay at 30 meters where roots, stems of grass (some still slight green), bones of the extinct, rust into this void at 14,000. I reach for the ceiling, simultaneously touching the bottom of a dulled Martian-photo lake; a drop of melt on my finger loses itself into muddies. And a few lunar steps away, an ice wedge, a liquid filled crack 25,000 years ago, is a buried waterfall, a statue within, from which bacteria that can come back have been caught in the solid mist of crystalline time, but I move easily. Four seconds to cross meter 40 to 50, reeling off thousands of years, down to meter 70 at 45,000.
As if trying to fix distant stars, I stare up at the reticulate: birds’ feet, hopping in mud. Cuneiform. Dehiscence in-filled with ice-thin black. Sutures. This void integrates with an astronomer’s gaze, but in meter-years, not infinity, into man-made circumference, unlined. I am behind a mosaic, behind unfathomable tesserae. My damp hand on the cold wall has soaked up powdery silt, and a stone peels loose. Loess plummets, a smoky amount rises, air-flung in convolutions and kink, and I stamp on gravel my ancient thumbprint.
Todd Sformo is a biologist in Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, working on fish and bowhead whales to support subsistence activities for the Inupiat communities of the North Slope. Besides scientific papers, he has prose poems in Hippocampus, Cirque, and The Ekphrastic Review, and essays in Catamaran and Interalia Magazine.