Inside on a Rainy Day

Hitching Post Cafe

The road to Pluto Cave

Steady drizzling rain this mourning and a sullen dreariness, like I’ve seen on the faces of chimps pictured on NPR, just waiting, with no ideas on how to pass the time.  So I drove to the only café in Dunsmuir that opens early, the Hitching Post, and listened to the waitress complain to me, her only customer, that her otherwise good job is boring on a rainy day with little to do but watch it rain.

Soon a lady came in and wanted to talk.  Why not sit and talk, with rain coming down hard outside,  and the basement flooding because of a clogged drain.  “If only the city man would come by like he always does,” the waitress said, “I could at least complain to him about it.  I’ll flag him down if he doesn’t stop.”  It was not ten minutes before I saw a city pickup approaching, and since the waitress was in the back, I jumped up and ran out in the rain, like a flapping bird, and waved him down.  He and the waitress had a little discussion, while I and the lady customer who had recently walked in, had a conversation.

“A little girl went missing in Nome, Alaska,” she said.  “That was many years ago, but today she’s grown and living here in Dunsmuir.  Abducted by aliens and transported here.  They meant her no harm and she’s doing just fine under the beneficial ambiance of Mother Mt. Shasta.”

“I’m new here,” I said, “staying for a month.  I read a few stories like this on the internet and in a couple of books.”

“You should feel behind your right ear,” she said, “That’s where the aliens place the device they use to track you.  If you feel a new lump there, then you are one of us.  But most people are no more than characters in a Hollywood movie.  Their brains are cabbage.”

She talked as rationally as I claim to talk.  Her words could have rolled off my tongue if they were about dark matter and the advantages of becoming a possibilist.

“I saw a light above the farm on the night I got pregnant,” she continued.  “Late in the night; my boyfriend saw it too.  ‘My alien baby,’ he calls our daughter.

“I watch the earthquake website every day.  The San Andreas Fault lights up like a Christmas tree with little earthquakes.  That’s because the aliens are holding back the big one.”

The city man had stopped the flooding in the basement by the time I left, and the lady with a lump behind her ear had gone into some spiritual aspect of Mt. Shasta, like many others in this town, completely enthralled with having finally found the answers to life’s burning questions.

Pluto Cave

Pluto Cave

I was headed for a place northeast of Weed, called Pluto Cave.  The wet hike into it would take only fifteen minutes, and once inside, I could enjoy a dry place where once molten lava flowed hot and fast.  I had walked through my first lava tube in Hawaii some thirty years ago, where Mauna Kea lava took the short route to the ocean.  The surface flow cooled as it ran down the volcano, but under the surface it flowed like water in a pipe.  The lava tube eventually drained and became a cave.  Today I visited a similar lava tube three thousand miles to the east and remembered it as if I were there.

Pluto Cave

Pluto Cave

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Funny how artificial light plays
on a black lava rock inside
 a cave and makes it look like a vase