La Cueva

R_ was pleased to take us to La Cueva. He rarely tipped his hand as to what mood he might be in, but there always was a detectable note of pride when he was about to show you something you'd never seen before. This trip he seemed to wear that look a lot. La Cueva is a large cinder cone in a field of large cinder cones although it seemed to stand off by itself, the nearest one being a few miles away. That's only a guess, and maybe a bad one. Distances are hard to gauge here. R_ says it probably got it's name from the small cave at it's base, but he also knew of a shallow cave on the north side about three-quarters of the way up. That's where the skull used to be.

R_ has a tradition of watching the sun set. In a respectful manner. Once, driving I-10 back from California, he made note of the time, pulled off the next exit, found a dirt road and drove up to the top of a hill. With an eye on the quickly falling sun, he grabbed two folding chairs from the back and two warmish beers, and we sat looking west until the orange sun had disappeared. The performance over and the bottles empty we rose and packed up. It might be my imagination, but it seemed like birds, bugs, and bats went about their business after having stopped, like us, to watch the day end.

In the same way, our arrival at La Cueva coincided with the setting of the sun. Lawn chairs were set up in a row in front of the mouth of a cave that opened in the ground about a stone's throw from where we would set up camp. After sunset we sat without talking or moving much. As the darkness fell and quiet got louder, you could see flickers of light in the black mouth of the cave. What appeared to be pale butterflies were actually bats, testing the night air and waiting to feed.
Their flights got longer as it got darker, and eventually they broke free of the safety of the cave, wheeling and diving at incredible speed. Our bodies just rocks or tree stumps for them to navigate around. I wondered at the time, "What eats bats? What could catch them?"

In the morning, R_ presented us with a kangaroo rat he found on his walk, recently deceased. Must have passed during the night of natural causes which I bet is rare around here. It was beautiful, and I took a picture of it on the hood of the truck. We made the hike up the south side of the hill, skirting the wide crevice that started at the lip of the crater and went most of the way down. Like someone started to cut a cake and then thought better of it. Two large raptor nests perched in the sheer side of the crevice although they appeared to be empty. The hike wasn't too strenuous, short dry grass dotted side and the cinders were packed down, and we were soon in the shallow bowl of the crater.

Looking down the north side, you could see bits of plane wreckage strewn down to the bottom, but the drop was sheer for a ways, so we had take an indirect route to the cave. It was more like two hollows side by side, and the plane must have hit a little ways down. But that's where R_ said the pieces of the skull were. A year ago a friend had moved the bones to the other side of the hill to better photograph them and left them sitting on a rock. That didn't sit too well with R_, and on the next trip he gathered them up and moved them back. He tries to tread lightly in this world.

The story is that back in the Seventies, a single-engine plane crashed into the north face of La Cueva in the middle of some moonless night. The assumption being that this was a drug run and that the pilot fell asleep or lost his bearings. No one reported the plane or the pilot missing and the wreck might have been there for months before anyone found it. The body was scavenged but nothing ever claimed, even by authorities, whatever authorities might be out here. Soon the wreckage was picked over for scrap or parts until there wasn't much left. And the skull remained, or the pieces of it. Walking down the hill you could see bits of seat cushion, bent pieces of aluminum, orange cloth, and pieces of plastic. Nothing bigger that a garbage can lid. I found part of a jaw bone, but R_ seemed to think it unlikely to be from our pilot, maybe desert sheep. I'm no dentist, but the teeth looked pretty human. This is a place where the lost and discarded have a pretty good chance of turning up someday.