Darkness

It doesn’t happen very often that Anne and I actually get away without any passengers. Don’t get me wrong I love my kids, my parents and the in-laws or even our New City kids but its great to get alone time with my best friend. We had gone to San Diego last week, which was a great diversion but spent time between both of our families.

I always get a chuckle out of what my Anne shares when we are either driving or sitting at a restaurant by ourselves. Sometimes she’s getting on my case for doing certain things or not doing certain things. This time she talks about dog fights and the evil people who murder dogs and then toss their mutilated bodies in an area close to where we walk our dogs. It just happened that we were at a going away gathering for some great friends, Al and Brit, and reconnected with a mutual friend of Brit’s. She works at a dog-training center that provides service dogs for those with special needs. I know that this got Anne on her I will to ‘kill’ anyone that promotes dog fights or brutalizes animals.

This got her started about some of our youth that do have ‘dark’ tendencies to better understand what goes on in the mind of someone who pays or bets on a dog fight or chicken fight. Our discussion revolved around the topic of how it is easy to morally remove yourself from a situation so you become numb to the latent evil that is present. I can’t fathom that anyone would revel in mutilating a body of a deceased dog, cat or worse a human being. Yet, the reality is that there is a graveyard of dogs that have been horribly murdered for fun by some crazed person.

Now that I have set the tone for understanding darkness from a moral perspective it makes our day trip understandable as I talk about walking in the dark. I know that the Bible has lots of images of God being all light and that evil is all darkness or the absence of the light. Only a crazy person would purposely walk around in the dark, especially without any shoes on their feet. I know in my household there are a bunch of dog bones or chews that have sharp edges – OUCH! So for one of our get away adventures we decide to visit the Lava River Tube outside Flagstaff.

We had attempted to visit the Lava Tunnel a few weeks ago with my niece and nephew but unfortunately had bad directions and the weather went from overcast to a real down pour. Now the skies are only a little cloudy and we have great directions and actually find it! We had been here probably 10 years before for our Julie’s 21^st birthday. So we find the right mile marker and then the actually dirt road marker. We are now just a few miles away from experiencing real darkness. This is so different from either being in your bedroom with the lights off or being outside at night. We pull up to a muddy empty parking lot. This was actually a good thing because both of us needed to ‘re-leave’ ourselves.

We sort through our things to decide what to take and what to leave behind. We had unfortunately left our little backpack at home. (I won’t mention who did this) We know walk the 300 yards to the entrance to the cave or Lava Tunnel. We take a few pictures of the opening and the signs that welcome you to the Lava Tubes. The initial descent into the cave is rather a step decline that is rather dangerous as you maneuver the slippery rocks or boulders. I have decided not to make this a race so I actually look back and make sure my Anne is ok. As we slowly make our way from the entrance the need for our flashlights become more and more key.

The experience of going from total light to total darkness is incredible. All of a sudden I realize that I could either break a leg as I misplaced my foot or I could have a huge gouge in my head. We decided that it would be almost impossible for either of us to drag the other back to safety incase something happened to one of us. The rooms in this Lava Tunnel rage from very small to gigantic. I can remember a few head banging episodes from our Julie’s expedition. We stop a few times to just look at the cave and have a better sense of where we are in relationship to the entrance.

I have this paranoid feeling that we could take a wrong turn in the cave and end up thinking we are going towards the entrance and be back at the end. It is so easy to play the game, which I have done often in my life, where you pretend to live in the light but thrive in dark places. I know when we sat in the cave to get a drink and eat an apple and sour orange that it would have been real difficult to do this without any light. After having walked a mile or so I’m not sure whether I could have made it back to the entrance in the total darkness.

As we started our trek back to the light or entrance I did have a scare for a few minutes. We had come back to the Y in the path and it felt like we had been going in the wrong direction? Yet, I knew that as we walked ahead that was the correct way to travel. It is difficult to explain how someone would actually want to live in total darkness. The obvious downside for living in darkness is that you can’t see or appreciate anything in life. Yet, back to my wife’s concern about a group of animal haters and their thrill with watching dog fights does bring me back to the real question in life – why would anyone want to pursue real evil and then act as if it is totally ok and FUN?

I’m not sure how we will catch or find the ones who sponsor or promote this blatant evil but my Anne won’t sleep a whole lot without doing something that will include talking with one of my Phoenix PD friends. Yes, I would rather hike in the woods, hills or mountains and not in a cave, unless I have a really good flashlight and a spare battery. The great news is that the light totally exposes the darkness!