Excerpt: Going Under

It came to him in the most coincidental of ways, while watching TV at the Mission one afternoon after a shower. What he'd seen was a news report, one that spoke of a group of people trapped in a cave out in Beaver Creek Park, a city-owned facility actually located in Meade County, about an hour west of Louisville. He knew about it, of course, having used the cave in question, Charley's Cave, as a sort of a training cave. It was a three-dimensional maze, not on the scope of Druid's Hole, out in Breckinridge County and currently his obsessive project. No, Charley's was smaller, not quite as lofty, but just as difficult and challenging in places, and it offered plenty of opportunity for one to get seriously hurt. And oh, how he'd tried! He'd swung monkey-like from stone projections fifty feet or more off the floor of the airy Grand Canyon chamber, a quarter mile deep into the cave, and he pioneered routes up the sides of the domes deep in the far recesses of the cave. There were spots back there that he'd known the purest of joys and the rawest of fears, times when he thought he really had finally bought it, and even one night when all of his light sources failed and he had been glad, so glad that he had actually practiced getting out of the cave in the dark. It took him till morning, and he had never had such an overwhelming feeling of exhilaration as that moment he finally glimpsed a faint glimmer of daylight from beyond the low, watery streamway of the entrance crawl. As he sat steaming in the half-light an hour or so later, he wondered if maybe he'd been hasty about deciding he would be better off dead.

And then he walked to where he'd parked his car, and found it missing. Oh, all of his belongings, such as they were, had been left behind, but the car was gone, and it didn't take a 4.0 GPA to realize that the finance company had finally caught up with him. Well, it was one less thing to worry about, he supposed.

And that was pretty much that. The car gone, his only means of transportation would be his feet, and though they were certainly capable of carrying him back to Louisville—he'd walked a lot farther than that in the past—he wasn't so sure he cared to. Not anymore. For what? For Moby Dick? He had a four or five hundred dollars in the bank, he forgot exactly how much. He didn’t need much, after all. Gas, some food. He was thin as a rail, but that worked out well as a caver. He never got sick, though the volunteer doctors that served at the Mission had been encouraging him to go to the clinic for some…counseling, as they termed it. Psych stuff, he figured. Just what he needed, more people telling him that he was mental, something people had been telling him most of his life anyway. Nothing new under the sun.

So, what to do then? There he was, at Beaver Creek, having just exited a marvelous little cave with as close to pure happiness as he'd ever experienced, only to have his world, such as it was, so roughly pulled out from underneath him. Maybe this was a sign of some sort, maybe this was where it was supposed to end.

Still, he felt some obligation to the folks who had hired him at Moby Dick, so he hitchhiked back into town, cleaned himself as best he could and went to work for the next few days, after which he cashed out and quit. He returned to the Mission and spent a restless night trying to decide if the decision he'd come to was really best, sitting through much of the next day and into the afternoon dwelling on the subject, until, finally, the revelation came to him in the form of the noontime news, which announced breathlessly of the rescue being attempted of a trapped group of eight adults and children in a cave at Beaver Creek Park. From the description given, he knew it could only be Charlie's Cave. Had he been in the loop, had he been…well, civilized, he surely would've been notified. Chances were just as likely that he would've been the first one called. But never mind.

Doyle Hubbard saw the news as a vindication of everything he'd been thinking of. Ending his life, yes, but perhaps, a chance to end it with a purpose.