The last photo on the previous page showed the entryway to the back room of Spirit Cave. Here it is again but larger:
The back room is small, not dark, and I liked the animal-skin texture of the walls and ceiling here:
Why do I like to go into these small spaces? So I can sit for a moment and look out and gain some sense of what other have no doubt also seen here going back so many thousands of years ago that it is hard to comprehend:
Some of my fellow spelunkers are visible in this photo but not in recognizable form.
I was very pleased to have finally been at a site I had formerly just read about in Amie Dansie's publications. The place has a feel to it that suggests respect, to me. I loved both the rocks up close:
As well as a little bit farther away from my face (look at that shroud of tufa over the volcanic rocks):
Stepping away from the cave and looking back gave the sun an opportunity to make a statement, 'don't look back here, this place is under my protection':
Respect was the thought and emotion I experienced while in Spirit Cave. Respect and awe to be more accurate. Respect and awe for the fact that humans have persisted and reproduced (else where did we all come from?) despite serious challenges to their survival. It took a lot of hard work to simply survive from day to day in places like one sees today in the Fallon area. Maybe the marshes that were here in Spirit Cave man’s day made survival a little easier (as long as you like eating grass seeds and very small bony fish and all) than it would be today. But it was a very primitive existence, under very trying environmental conditions.
I respect the fact that people lived rather well by the sweat of their own efforts and their communities then. I am in awe of their strength and determination to not only exist but also to weave complex mats and bags and otherwise invest in technologies that aided their survival such as woven and rabbit-skin clothes and moccasins, fishnets of complex weave, and tools for spearing fish and killing smaller mammals for food and skins.
It is simply not my cup of tea to be a hunter-gatherer, especially not in a place where there was so little to hunt and to gather (according to me, who knows nothing about how it is done). But even if I could be convinced it was not all that hard to live in this place and time, I stand in awe of those who had the knowledge, the pluck and the persistence obviously to live here so long ago. They actually did rather well, it appears (perhaps until the more severe droughts of about 8,000 to 5,000 years ago that made even their lifestyle no longer tenable in that area, and they migrated once again?).
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