The Nutty Putty Cave Incident and the Banality of Cosmic Horror

You’re standing in your bedroom, holding something small and precious in your hands. Maybe it is your wife’s diamond stud earring, maybe it is the last Lego you need to complete your Hogwarts Castle, but whatever it is, you’ve dropped it. It bounced off your toe and skittered out of sight under your bed.

You carefully (depending on how old you are) get to your hands and knees, bend your face all the way over, and peer into the darkness between your bed and the floor. You don’t see it.

You lower your weight to your chest and stretch out your legs. By pulling with your hands and pushing with your toes, you are able to crawl right up to the edge of your bed. You can see every speck of dust on your floor from this angle, but the object you seek is nowhere to be seen. With a vast reluctance, you start to crawl forward, headfirst. First your head, then your shoulders, then your trunk, and soon your whole body is gone.

It’s dusty under here… how long has it been since you swept under the bed? No, not merely dusty… actually dirty, like it is under your deck. The dirt lays so thickly on the floor that it actually seems soft, and the toes of your loafers dig into it as you push yourself forward, again and again. The dirt gets under your fingernails. Pebbles, then fist-sized rocks start to appear, embedded in the soil. You scuff your elbows on the clay walls, and, to your immense vexation, the damp and gritty ceiling begins to affront the back of your head with an almost human ill will.

Surely you will reach the other end of your bed soon. It shouldn’t have taken more than a minute to search the entire area. But you have been crawling for several minutes now, and the end is nowhere in sight. The small muscles in the top of your back and shoulders are starting to burn. Shampoo-scented sweat runs down from your hairline, stinging your eyes and blurring your vision. The strangeness of the situation has long caused you to forget about the object you were originally looking for.

You no longer seem to be crawling on level ground. From the way your blood is pressing on your sinuses and behind your eyes, and the way you seem to be sliding forward more energetically now with each push of your toes and pull of your hands, you are quite sure you are crawling downhill. Like Lucy Pevensie, you try to turn around to see if you can see any remnant of your bedroom anymore. You can’t, though… your neck doesn’t bend that way, the walls are too close to allow you to turn around, and the ceiling is too low to permit you to roll onto one shoulder and look “down” at the room you left behind,

It may be a good idea to stop, you think, and you do. It’s cool and damp and quite black. With considerable difficulty, you manage to squeeze your body all the way against the wall to your left, so you can painfully maneuver your right arm down to your pocket, where your phone is. No service, of course, (the signal can’t penetrate the clay walls) but there is a flashlight, which unfortunately reveals nothing but more gray tunnel ahead.

Can you back up? You push at the ground with your hands (your legs, which are higher than your head and weigh over 33 pounds apiece, are useless at this task) but it doesn’t accomplish much. You try to worm yourself back by moving your trunk in a variety of inventive ways, but all you do is tire yourself.

There simply isn’t enough clear space between you and the tunnel. You cannot create enough friction with the ground to back yourself up.

And why should you need to back up, anyway? Didn’t all this start with you crawling under your bed? It’s a bed, it’s a finite area, you have been under here before many times for various reasons. It’s only a queen, for Lord’s sake. This cannot go on forever. You decide to keep pressing on, your phone between your teeth.

You hit a nadir in the tunnel soon after, and after rotating a bit, corkscrew-fashion, you begin to climb upwards. The blood drains out of your grateful face, you breath more easily, and you can believe, now, that you are on your way up, and out of wherever you got yourself. You squint ahead for any hint of a light.

Instead, you reach the top of a little hill in the tunnel system. Once you crest the hill, you can see the tunnel ceiling about a foot and a half in front of you, and the ground sloping down and away once again. A little disheartened, but no more able to turn your 200-pound body around than you ever have been, you begin to crawl downhill again.

It is a little steeper this time, which makes you slide a little faster and makes you feel, once again, stuffy and somewhat light-headed. You still have hope, though, that you’ll be coming to the end soon.

Down, down you slide, your only companion the sound of your heavy mouth-breathing in your ears. Turning around is absolutely out of the question, but, again, it must end, soon. You have no doubt that you will attain the other side soon enough and emerge with something new to talk about in the locker room.

Except, the tunnel seems to end, right there up ahead.

Oh, wait, no, it doesn’t! Thank God.

For there is a small hole in the floor in the tunnel ahead, roughly the shape of a trapezoid (if you remember your 9th grade geometry): about the width of your shoulders from side to side, and about as wide as your head on the right side, tapering a bit on the left side.

There, then. Right? There.

In go your hands, now your elbows, which you use to grab the walls of the hole and pull the rest of you to the edge. It really does go straight down, and when your head enters the pit you feel at your most severely perpendicular angle yet.

It’s extremely uncomfortable, being upside-down like this. Expanding your lungs against the weight of your abdomen and your pelvis requires more strength out of your already exhausted body. Your sinuses swell even more and your eyes bulge in your face. You really, really want to get out, so you exhale all the way to get your torso as small as possible and go in for the last descent.

It happens very fast after your chest follows your head. Your entire body weight descends on your worn-out arms, and they collapse under you. You helplessly pin your arms to the dirt at the bottom of the pit, for there is definitely a bottom. The hole is a dead end. You kick your legs and feel the edge of the pit chop at your shins, about 6 inches up from the soles of your shoes. The kicking motion causes you to slide further down, but the pit is so narrow near the bottom that your head will not hit the end. You will instead hang, suspended, sweat dripping off your face and running into your nose, imprisoned by gravity, immobilized, and upside down.

I’m sorry I brought you here, and I’m especially sorry I left you here (for, make no mistake, there is no escape) but I felt like I had to. I didn’t think I could start by telling you that John Edward Jones was a new father, a medical student, and a recreational spelunker, that he was exploring the Nutty Putty Cave with his family in Utah shortly before Thanksgiving, that he thought he had made his way to a known section of the cave, or that he actually crawled into an uncharted section, wedging himself upside-down in a crevice 150 feet below the surface of the earth, from which, despite the heroic efforts of dozens of volunteers over 27 hours, he would never be extracted. I felt like I had to start by putting you there, where he was, where he still, today, right now, is.

I did not only want to inform you of the facts, in other words. I wanted to make you feel how I felt when I first heard his story, which actually began, not in 2009, but millions of years ago, at the end of the last ice age.

Across this land of ours, in verdant glens and oxidic deserts, up hills and down dales, are small, dark holes in the ground. These holes are the entrances to caves: vast, convoluted geologic formations of negative space, carved by the melting glaciers. These spaces do not care about your human shape or your fleshy consistency. They twist, jut, ascend and descend, fill with toxic gas from decomposing soil material, and occasionally flood completely with storm runoff. Some people go in them for fun.

Now, a line like that certainly does serve to put distance between you and “some people,” i.e. the kind of people who explore caves for fun, something you would never do. The more distance between you and them, between you and John Edward Jones, upside-down and struggling for breath, the more comfortable you feel, especially after the journey we just took together. You would never allow yourself to be put in a position like that, would you. You are safe.

Cosmic horror is an artistic subgenre within horror that focuses on the terrifying face(lessness) of the universe itself. It looks to the night sky and calls up the same fragility and fear that early man felt when he looked up at the stars, and it asks the same questions: Of what significance am I, in this big world? What do all my dreams, hopes, and accomplishments add up to, in the black face of empty eternity? How easily, how trivially, I could just be crushed, like an insect, my humanity simply erased? The most famous artist in this sphere is probably H.P. Lovecraft.

The doom of John Edward Jones did not come out of outer space, but I find the story of his last day cosmically horrifying all the same. He puts a real human face, this man who actually existed and touched the lives of the people around him, on some truly unresolvable anxieties that I’ve always had.

Haven’t I gone exploring? Haven’t I done things without 100% certainty that it was all going to work out? I have… maybe not in caves, but I am an ultradistance trail racer, and I have been off course before. I have been far away from anyone, in cold rain and poor cell service, and one misplaced step away from a totally immobilizing injury. The fact that I have not died yet is not proof that I am more sensible than John Edward Jones, who is entombed forever in the cave that took his life.

And if I ever needed rescue, I would know, I would personally witness, the love we as fellow humans have for each other. John’s rescuers worked through two nights straight (John got stuck on Tuesday night and was not declared dead until late Wednesday evening) in the same tight spaces that held John captive, sometimes becoming stuck themselves, and sometimes, as in Ryan Shurtz’s case, become severely injured to the point of hospitalization. They fought on. They did not stop or slow down until it was over.

They fought, continually, against the unreal situation created by the juxtaposition of John’s rapidly deteriorating body (alive and unhurt when the rescuers discovered him), and the absolute indifference on the part of the mundane reality surrounding them. There were times that John was lifted partway out of his hole, only for him to beg his rescuers to stop, as the pain in his dying legs was too much to bear. Always, the rescue team had to account both for John’s needs and for the rock, for the stagnant air, and for the simple and terrible gravity that constantly dragged him downwards.

Hence the phrase in this title: “the banality of cosmic horror.” No otherworldly monsters necessary, no alien gods turning humans into playthings… nothing but rock, a little bit of space, and the same gravity that’s kept you safe all your life.

Throughout their efforts, John and his supporters prayed, sang hymns, and spoke of faith. I do not know if God spoke to John, or to his wife Emily, or to his brother Josh, or to Susie Matola, or to Ryan or Dave Shurtz, or to Brandon Kowallis, that day. It is possible that He did not, and His silence, in the face of such struggle, of such caritas, is cosmically horrifying. Would God have anything to say to me, if it was me?

I was getting ready for bed one night, feeling a little agitated and like I didn’t want to be alone in the bathroom with my thoughts, which is what prompted me to turn on my phone and have YouTube playing in the background while I brushed my teeth and took my vitamins and washed my face. I am going to link the exact video that the algorithm served up to me and from which, from the first sentence out of the narrator’s mouth, I could not look away.

I have to warn you to not click on this video if you have any doubts. The first time I watched it, I had to spend some minutes in my wife’s arms, speechless and shaking, before I could share what happened.

There’s nothing more I can add to Mr. Breakdown’s narrative except to note that Susie Matola reported that, when she first found John, he thanked her, graciously, for coming to help him. He could have said anything, but the first thing he told her was “Hi Susie. Thanks for coming.”

The next thing he said was “But I really, really want to get out.” I wanted that, too… with all my heart. Requiescat in pace.