Room and Tomb

Light returned to my dark resting place as I flicked the switch on my desk lamp. Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I reached over to grab my glasses and start the day. But even with my sight restored, I could not escape the reality of my situation. COVID, a curse upon mankind, had bound all the students at the campus to their dorm rooms in enforced isolation.

...

On January 30th, 1925, a man by the name of Floyd Collins walked into Sand Cave, just one of the network of labyrinthine caverns known as Mammoth Caves. It was the time of the Kentucky Cave Wars, a period in the 1920s where people with caves on their property struggled and fought against each other to attract eager tourists to their caves as they made their way toward the future national park. 60 feet deep underground, through dangerous and terrifyingly claustrophobic passages, Floyd was clearing himself a tunnel at the bottom of a 10ft. drop towards a beautiful cave structure. The opening was full of breathtaking stalactites, stalagmites, and glorious gypsum crystal structures. He could see it just beyond a small hole in the earth, obscured by piles of gravel and rocks. The allure of such an enticing attraction would no doubt grant him untold riches from eager tourists, and with competition for tourists so high, he had to make his way there and include it in his cave tour. Floyd had spent months digging his way, having to contort his body through the stiff rocky passage to reach further and further into the earth towards this secret fortune. Until that fateful Friday, when the roof of the tunnel he was digging gave way and pinned him under a pile of gravel. With his leg firmly caught under a heavy rock that fell with the collapse, and with no means of escape, Floyd was stuck in that dark abyss – a prison of his own making. All he could do was call for help and hope that someone deep in the caves would hear his cries.

...

My cries also went unheard. My professors didn’t acknowledge my presence or respond to my questions. I felt like they didn’t know I was even here - oh wait, I’m muted. With a click of the mousepad, my ignorant queries could once again be delivered to my computer science teacher. I didn’t understand why we took classes online. Other students could learn like this, but I knew I couldn’t. The people beyond the screen seemed so distant that I constantly asked myself if they were even real. I wished that COVID would pass sooner, so I could learn from the professor in person. I may have been an introvert, but I needed to see real human faces from time to time, not just ones hidden by masks and screens.

...

Despite the townsfolk gathering to try and get to him, none of them were brave enough to crawl through the tight passages Floyd had traversed. The first person brave enough to reach Floyd in his cramped prison would arrive 38 hours after he was first buried. The one who would meet him down there, face-to-face, was his brother, Homer Collins. Homer got his brother some coffee and nine sausage sandwiches, then he got to work. He alone worked to free his brother from his gravel-bound tomb, scooping away at the rubble bit by bit and hauling it out of the cave in an old syrup tin. When he finally was worn and weary, he returned to find a crowd of hundreds of “helpers” who offered only unhelpful suggestions and advice. None of them dared to go where Homer had gone, and he went to sleep frustrated and distressed.

Other people would reach him eventually. William Miller, a reporter for the Louisville Courier, and Lieutenant Robert Burdon, a Louisville firefighter, would meet the man and try to come to his aid. They tried to pull him out with a rope, but his screams of pain eventually dissuaded them. Johnny Gerald, a fellow caver, would try to dig him out, with greater success than anticipated. Henry Carmichael, the superintendent of the Kentucky Rock and Asphalt company, would assist in improving work conditions in the cave. Alas, hundreds of people were consistently gathering around the cave entrance, and the amount of activity was becoming too much for the cave to bear. But despite all the effort that had gone into saving Floyd, the cave collapsed. When the rubble finally settled, all that they had left with him was a single light bulb; a small bastion of heat to protect him against hypothermia, and a bright hope that the others would still be able to rescue him.

...

The glare of the computer screen was my sole escape from my confinement. I felt stuck sitting there on my bed with my back against the wall. It was so hard to move that I thought my laptop was pinning my legs down. That hollow screen served as an artificial freedom into digital delusions of real and fictional entities, such as my professors and their dubiously effective lesson plans. Floyd no doubt suffered from hallucinations too as the cold earth of the cavern gnawed his life away.

...

Lieutenant Governor Henry Denhardt would oversee the operation to dig down to Floyd from the surface and get him out of the collapsed cave. Engineers spent hours putting together expensive digging equipment, but they quickly realized it was all worthless. The fumes from the machines would fill the cave and kill Floyd before they reached him. But even after all this time had passed, they had hope that Floyd was still alive. That light bulb was strung out on a bare copper wire. This kind of wire is subject to sensitive changes in resistance, and the vibrations through the wire could be read - they were found to match the rate of a human heartbeat. Unfortunately, that lightbulb would burn out and die on the fourteenth day. With the light gone, Floyd’s condition also disappeared into that dark abyss.

At the end of 411 hours – seventeen days since Floyd was first trapped in Sand Cave – they finally found him, his gold tooth glimmering in the daylight, revealing his gaping maw. In the end, Floyd Collins died just three days before the miners could reach him. That warmth from the long-dead lightbulb was all that kept him from succumbing to exposure, and without it, Floyd finally passed away. All that effort that went into saving one man’s life - Wasted. The hole the miners had dug was unstable, and in the end, the miners agreed to let the cave take him and leave him buried there.

...

I looked at the shades on my window, obscuring what radiant hope for escape remained. Perhaps I too would stay buried in my prison. I shook that thought out of my mind, getting up from my spot on the bed and pushing my computer to the side. I put on my shoes and left my dorm room to go get dinner. At least in my prison, I had the chance to see the moon.