Enlightened in the Dark

Our driver fails to notice the imminent riverbed and the rusty truck lurches down, drumming our heads into the roof as one. She corrects the vehicle’s two-wheel motion with a burst of acceleration, burning litres of fuel to launch us out of the ditch and back to the trail grooves, coating the stunned jackrabbits with sheets of fresh sand. We are in the arid centre of the desert. Hurtling through dunes and rocky riverbanks of old I feel certain that today I will die, to be found years later as a collection of clean bones near the carcass of an ancient Ford, five miles from the mud caves of Anza Borrego.
But we do not die. The truck shoots into a canyon, and with a scream of delight the driver skids to an angular stop. I take inventory of my person, headlamp, water, bag of baby carrots, testicles. All have survived. We will need to take the same route out of the desert at night, but that is not the way to think in California. Instead we scramble out of the sweaty seats and hit the dust, running towards the first cave inlet slivered in the side of the grand mud wall, stretching our jittery legs. Cool air gently licks my neck as I step inside the crack, beckoned forth by the knotted darkness.
We run through the tube with as much eager haste its twists will allow. Sharp turns and muddy overhangs necessitate belly-slides and limbo; dust clouds fill our mouths with grit and noses with brown gunk. Water is splashed, and the dust turns to militaristic sludge, darkening our dewed faces.. We slide on, towards the centre of this giant brick, baking hard in the noon spring sun. This cave will never look the same as it does today; such is its function within the canyon. Should a storm trundle over, the water would be absorbed into the hard mud and the slick walls of the tunnel would squeeze and warp. We are crawling through a sweat gland.
The tunnel offers one final, fallopian bend before depositing us into an echoing cylindrical cavern. My pupils dilate for six silent minutes before I can see the others, the young Californians, prototypes of future students in my homeland. I have met many an Australian who has immediately dismissed America as a cultural wasteland, a refuge for the philistines and the fat. They are wrong. A vibrant spontaneity lurks at every hour, hiding in the grins and accents, pushing you into waves full of sea lions, student protests of thousands, or mud tunnels hidden in the cooking desert. I am infected with foreign anti-apathy. We must do more than merely complete this cave.
Ducking and twist-sliding back to the entrance, we feel the cool, still air against our bare bodies. Tight turns graze our dusty backs. We clench our shed clothing in muddy hands and run, full pelt and stark naked, into the canyon sun. I am blinded by its brilliance.