June 26,2007 - Day 1

Gondola C to Lower Visitor Center

72° F, Dry

11:53am

When I was about six, I had a nightmare.

I had watched a documentary about venus fly traps before bed (nature fanatic parents made great choices sometimes), and I dreamt that a giant one was chasing me through the woods on big stringy vine feet, snapping and gnashing at my little body as I ran, bare feet slapping leaves & dirt frantically. And then I was being tossed into the air, weightless, into its mouth. Soft, warm, fleshy, its wide grin closed and left me in complete darkness as I felt myself start to be digested, feeling rather than seeing my flesh melt off my tiny hands, screaming and panicking in the humidity and the darkness but no one was coming to save me--

Blinking away the memory, I just stared up at the glass ceiling, now vividly recalling what being eaten alive felt like; descending into the pink, ribbed tunnel of the park's esophaqus, rings of muscle shrinking away in a pattern that was digustingly mesmerizing. Flood lights made the mucosal membrane that coated every surface outside the gondola shine and gleam. Veins the size of my arm, my leg, my entire torso snaked along the walls, like a sickly ivy that pulsed ever so slightly in a slow, steady rhythm.

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How fucking huge was this thing?

Growing up, I visited almost every state, national, and local park in the continental USA. As I mentioned, my parents were nature fanatics; and park rangers. Retired ones, but still park rangers. So my childhood was all green and scraped knees and Steve Irwin and chasing animals around that I definitely shouldn't have been. I had a vague memory of being at a state park in Ohio as a teenager and spying a poster about Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. I remember asking why we'd never gone in our family travels and dozens of camping trips. My mom, a plain but pretty woman, just smiled like moms do and said we just hadn't had time. My dad, though... he'd looked away, mumbled something about the Pit being "wrong" and "exploited" but I didn't catch it all.

The next summer they both passed away in a freak accident; a tree had fallen on their car during a trip I'd chosen to stay home for because I was a typical moody teenager. Earthquake.

I grew up pretty fast after that.

Beside me, a baby started crying in its mother's arms.

For a second, my brain wondered if this was what being born was like, if we could remember it. Just staring up at that neverending descent, the tiny pinprick of light finally disappearing in favor of industrial flood lights posted every ten feet of so on the various clamps passing by. I suddenly felt a pang of some kind of primal fear, but I swallowed hard and let it ball up in the pit of my stomach. There were now too many bodies in thy lightly swaying gondola for my comfort. I felt around for a handle, a rail, anything to hold as I just barely staved off a panic attack. My fingers closed shakily around the side rail just as the gondola jerked to a stop, a jostled murmur from crowd followed by an apology by the staff over the intercom, saying it was a relay overload. We were moving again after about 45 seconds.

I sank into an empty row of seats along the perimeter of the gondola and closed my eyes for the remaineder of the ride, hunched and prabably looking like a fervently praying monk.

The cough-drop, fluorescent shape of the lower visitor center shone through the glass below us. I could see it through my eyelids.

And I was certainly praying.