Anecdotes || Story Times

2: Cabin in the Woods

Woke up fairly early, came downstairs and only Sol, Iris, and Benjamin were awake. Benjamin was recovering from a concussion, so at least once every day I would see him with an eyepatch over his eye, looking up and down at some paper he taped to the wall, or tapping it in a certain order with a wooden spoon, or drawing a giant circle again and again.

Sol and Iris were making pancakes, Sol's recipe which seemed more like crêpes than pancakes, but just as delicious. They were sugar free and vegan, as with most of the food we made since Iris can't have sugar and Benjamin is vegan. People started to wake up one by one to the smell of pancakes, and the pancakes were disappearing so fast Sol and Iris had to make another batch.

After those of us who didn't cook cleaned dishes and kitchen, Iris said we were all going to go to the caves, which sounded awesome.

Jess was very excited, and had been to the caves a long time ago. She said there were tons of spiders and something called cave crickets inside them, and I was already terrified of spiders and I was not sure what the heck cave crickets were, but I was determined to stay excited about the caves.

It was going to be a bit of a hike up there, so we all got ready, and Iris' grandpa was going to be leading us. We started on our lovely hike through the forest, all of us chatting happily while Dogwood ran around carrying the latest too-big stick she'd found. Iris' grandpa was like a tour guide, and the forest we were going through used to be owned by this guy who collected trees, so there were over fifty different species of trees. Iris' grandpa was pointing out tons of trees to us like sycamore, silver birch, rowan, and something from China I can't remember.

Also, Sol and I started collecting little bits of wildflowers and seed pods to stick in her ponytail, so she had quite a bouquet going as we walked along.

We were walking on old logging trails, so it makes sense that we would come to a place where there had been logging a few years ago. I was slightly sad to see the lush foliage of the forest suddenly cut off to a barren dirt stretch of nothingness, but as we walked through, I noticed there were saplings protected by fences starting to grow back, along with tons of foxglove flowers everywhere.

We went back into a denser part of the forest that hadn't been touched for quite some time, so more bushwacking was required, and then we came to the first cave. It was a steep pit in the ground with a huge boulder jutting out of one side, and there was a narrow opening underneath the boulder that was all darkness.

Jess was first in, then Benjamin, then Iris, and before Alice went in she told me to be careful because most of the spiders were in the decaying leaves at the entrance of the cave. So I didn't even take a flashlight, because there was no way I was going to look where the spiders were as I'm almost crawling on my stomach to get into this cave.

So very quickly I crawled into the cave, and others soon followed. The cave was still dark despite our flashlights, and I was struck by the sheer size of it. It was the size of a school portable in the ground area, although we all had to stay in a crouch. The ground was moist and earthy, and the smell was so pure even though it smelled like dirt, it was almost a little bit like the smell after rain and the smell of freshly turned soil in a garden, but somehow older and more ancient.

Our whole group was able to fit inside, all crouched down. There were some wetter, muddier parts of the cave floor and some small pools along the side we had to be careful of, but they had little tiny stalactites and stalagmites growing out of them! Iris started leading us towards the part of the cave we could stand upright in.

There was a rock over a pool we had to climb over and then we could stand. There were sections of the cave roof that sparkled like stars, some of it from the type of sparkly stone, but most of it because the breath of all of us inside the cave was making little droplets on the ceiling. There were also tinier little caves much too small for us that went off into darkness, one of them Benjamin got all muddy trying to fit through, and one of them on the ceiling with a faint light coming from the other side like it led back to the surface.