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Thanksgiving: A personal history
From the mythic Midwest of my childhood to the mesmerizing Chicago of later years, this holiday has always evoked a place.
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[11/24/99]

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[11/19/99]

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Expert advice on cooking classes in Europe, plus airline passenger rights and Irish B&B planning.
By Donald D. Groff
[11/18/99]

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Bill, I say to my husband, who's at the wheel. For God's sake, Bill, we're going to fall. And then, because God has intervened, we are miraculously spared.

Earth, in this southwest knuckle of France, is a phantasma of layers. It is our planet left essentially alone or, more true, it is our planet respected. Ruined stone castles crumble down hills. Iron crosses sprout out of unlikely limestone pilings, like rusty bouquets to religion. I come from a place where land has been disregarded, pulped, and here, in this region of unblemished possibility, I suffer from a sadness that is also partly prayer.

On the day we leave for La Grotte Rose, the valleys are obscured by fog. It all burns off before noon, and by then we are already too far gone along a narrow necklace of road to turn back. Closing my eyes, I leave the navigation to Bill and the entertainment to our son, Jeremy, who is doing a fair impersonation of Ricky Martin in the back of the rented Renault.

At one hairpin curve some 860 meters up, Bill swerves and curses a camper barrelling down wide on the opposite side of the single-lane road. I put one hand over my shut eyes and sip at the air through clenched lips. When the earth decides to level out again, I open my eyes to find a dull gunmetal-algae landscape, with evergreens that are stumpy and ill-shaped. We pass through a town big enough to have a name, small enough to be contained in a single photo. The roofs of its five houses scrape against the ground. A battalion of white geese honk their unilateral opinion.

The caves, when we reach them, are a relief. We are offered former visitors' discarded sweaters to wear, for it is cold -- 10 degrees -- inside the earth. We are given the history, which sounds like folklore, about a shepherd named Sahuquet who, one crisp autumn day in 1880, saw a fox enter a fissure in the rocks. Being the good shepherd he must have been, Sahuquet set off in pursuit, fitting himself between the stones. It wasn't until his eyes adjusted to the light that he saw the ghosts knocking their heads against the smooth domed ceiling, the colored magic wands thrusting up from the nether world. At the very instant he let out a scream, others -- invisible, haunted -- let out screams back at him. This was hell of course, and Sahuquet ran from it, pawing his way back into the sun. Vowing never to return, he never did.

But he told his friends what he had seen and heard, and soon enough, Edouard-Alfred Martel, a fancy lawyer hungry for adventure, had brought the nascent craft of speleology to the caves. It is him we must thank for the lighted stairs we're about to descend.

In the sun, we fiddle with our adopted sweaters until the tour guide, his story over, finally steps aside to let us through. Inside the caves, the air seems more wet than cool, and we pull our arms in toward our chests, like birds settling their wings. There must be two dozen of us on this tour, and when I turn around there is already no sign of sun behind us, no evidence of the gray-green tundra, or of the nasty gap at the edge of the Jonte cliff, through which we are now walking. Claustrophobia has no business here. Over the next damp hour, we will walk for two kilometers and go 120 meters down into the crepuscular belly of the earth.

Next page | Imagine cavemen living in this wild place