The Cave

(Detail of East wall of cave)

For months after the stent was implanted I felt stunned, not knowing what to do with my life or how much life I had left. I felt only half in the world, half in some ethereal, other-worldly place. In August, six months after the emergency flight to San Francisco, I impulsively decided that it was time to build an underground room, a stone cave. I wanted a quiet, meditative place I could retreat to, out of the intense daylight of the Alaska summer and the noise of the every day world. Wounded creatures retreat to caves, I thought.


I called a friend who was a heavy equipment operator and suddenly, within four hours, there was a deep, gaping hole in what used to be the back yard.


The planned room was about ten feet by fifteen feet, half in a semi-circle. I had never built anything out of stone and concrete before. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. My father-in-law, familiar with concrete from building in Poland, helped me pour the floor. I loaded and hauled twelve loads of rocks in a pick-up truck, and spent six weeks working with stone and mortar building the walls. Every morning I wondered what I had gotten myself into, and then worked each day until it was too dark to continue. It was close to the craziest thing I had ever done in my life, and it also felt like the right thing to do.


In mid-September, 2001, I went to Spenard Builders Supply, a local hardware store. Tom, one of the employees I knew there, was just shaking his head and talking about the events of September 11. “What are you going to do,” he said to me rhetorically, “Build a cave?”


We poured the concrete ceiling just before the snow came, in early October.


The friend and doctor who had suggested I come to San Francisco told me later that he was afraid that I was building a tomb. I didn’t think of it as a tomb, but I did see it as some kind of sacred project, something that was asking to be made from some deep part of me. The building of it got me back to being physically strong, grounded me in concrete reality, and brought me back to the world. It has been a very soothing and special place over the last years.