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Thanks for lending me the time, sweetheart. I know you’re a busy lady nowadays, but I needed to get this story to a professional, and you’re the only geologist I know. Well, and the best, of course, but that goes without saying. But you made me go and say it, didn’t you?
Right, right, rambling. Sure. Let me get right to the point: sometime around the summer of nineteen-seventy-three, I decided to dig a hole in my sandbox straight to China.
Well, why not? We didn’t have the internet and the television was broken and I sure as hell wasn’t going to READ anything. So it was hang around the house complaining until Mom gave me chores to make me shut up or dig a hole to China. An obvious choice, I’m sure you can agree.
So anyways, after a good solid lunch I picked up my shovel – plastic – and put on my miner’s helmet – plastic, and cracked too, after your grandfather nearly put his foot through it earlier that year – and I walked out to my sandbox, which was more of a sinkhole that Dad had shoveled some dirt into for us. Considerate of him. And then it was as simple as shove, heave, shovel some more. Just one scoop at a time.
No, I didn’t hit any difficulties. Well, not immediately. We didn’t have any trees for roots to snag, we didn’t have any real rocks or anything. Just sand and dirt and dirt and sand ‘till I was so far down that I could barely see daylight from where I was digging.
Now that you mention it, I’m not sure where I put all the dirt I was moving. I think I sort of packed it onto the walls. It was a long time ago, and there was a LOT of digging, okay? I didn’t exactly carefully save all the memories of shovelling – there’d be no room in my head for anything else if I did. The next thing I recall is hitting bedrock, and then falling through bedrock, and then landing on top of a moleman, and that sort of distracted my brain from remembering all the digging, alright?
Yes, molemen.
No, really, molemen.
Look, there’s a bit more to this story, and it’s going to take all afternoon to tell you if you keep interrupting, d’you mind if I just get on with it? Thank you.
So I landed on top of a moleman – they’re pretty lumpy, by the way, and their hair is as bristly as steel wool – and we both sort of panicked. I mean, lumpy overweight kids dropping out of the ceiling on your head, I can understand its point of view on that. So I screamed really loud and it made this sort of weird whistle-pipping sound. Yeah, a whistle-pip is how I’d describe it. See, it sort of whistled, and then it went pip. Like when a little grain of popcorn gets cooked.
No, I’m not high, I haven’t been high since you were a preteen, would you kindly stop nagging and let me keep going?
Okay, so after the initial shock it sort of realized it was twice my size and it snatched me up and dragged me off to its underhive, where all its molemen friends were waiting. They were proper molemen, by the way – most of ‘em you find in fiction look more like moleratmen, with bald asses and big buck teeth. These had funny snouts and grey fur and puckered, dark little eyes. They had a big talk over me there, those molemen – I think they were trying to decide whether or not to eat me. I don’t know how it ended, because around then I remembered that my miner’s hat had a flashlight on it and turned it on.
Yeah, it went down pretty much like you’d think. A lot of roaring, shrieking, whistle-pipping, and in a rush I was off again, through the rock, down and around in winding tunnels and spirals that were danker and darker the deeper I got. I don’t think the molemen went down there very often; must’ve stayed just at the bedrock level to harvest all those worms and such above their heads. It got stonier down there, and with strange rocks. I saw dinosaur bones and mammoth tusks and ammonites all over those walls, sometimes overtop of one another. I also saw a skull that winked at me.
What kind? I don’t know, it’s been years since I was twelve and I’ve been an accountant for three decades. All those latin and greek and who-knows-what names gone and filled up with information about tax returns and birthdays and finance. Maybe a hadrosaur? Could be.
Well, once I got farther down, I got to a sort of a rift. A big old valley there, under the ground, the sort of thing you’d find where tectonic plates meet. I know there aren’t any spots like that in Idaho, but Idaho also doesn’t have molemen, so obviously somebody somewhere doesn’t know everything yet. And in that rift there were a thousand things all over the place, most of which was trees. Lots of trees. They were purple, though. You have no idea how wrong it seems to see a tree that isn’t green until you can’t see a single tree that isn’t purple.
So, while I was walking through that jungle valley, here’s what I saw. Dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. None of them recognizable to me, of course – I mean, you leave the things along for sixty-five million years and they aren’t going to look the same as when you last saw them – but mostly they weren’t very big. I saw a sauropod that came up to my ankles, some sort of triceratops thing that was the size of a Shetland pony, and a whole bunch of little flappy pterodacthingies that were something around the size of little brown bats. Then I ran into a – well, I’m not sure what it was related to, but it had teeth – and it was bigger than my dog at home, and you know, that was big enough. Can’t believe I outran it, given it had seven legs, but I was pretty scared. That puts muscle in your sprint.
Yes, yes, I promise I’m not high. Again. Where’s that daughterly trust you had in me when you were seven and I told you that Bill Nye the Science Guy used to be president?
So I ran away from the thing with the wrong number of legs because I was scared and I didn’t even have my nice hat anymore, which meant I didn’t have a flashlight, which meant when I ran through a dark stretch of the forest I didn’t see the pit underneath me until I was all the way through it. I mean, I couldn’t see it then either, but I knew it was there, because I was in it. You get it?
So I fell a few thousand feet in total pitch blackness. All kinds of odd sounds the air makes when you’re going that fast. Whistles. Moans, groans, grumbles. Whispers. I think a few times something tried to tell me something important, but I was too scared to hear it. I do know that just before I hit, something else told me to do a cannonball, but that might’ve been in my head.
Landed in some water. I know that shouldn’t be safe from a few thousand feet, but honestly, guessing how far I fell is just guessing.
Also, it might not have been water. Smelled a bit like fish and iron, felt like old age and creaking stones.
Also, I’m not sure how long I was in there; it felt like a second, but then I was at the bottom of a big pit.
Also, I didn’t really manage a cannonball. Sort of bellyflopped. I’ve always felt bad about that. Missed opportunity.
By now I was deep, real deep. The rock was warm and a little bit fluid, and the air tasted like someone had been huffing tinfoil in it for a million billion years. I got lost a few times, passed out a few more, and scraped and shuffled my way down and along.
The tunnels, by the way, all seemed the same. I should probably mention that. All the way from the molemen down to here. All the same. The fossils here were shaped funny, though, and they didn’t look like bones. More like abstract art, the funny kind with too many angles and not enough lines. Also, I’m not sure they were three-dimensional.
I know, I know, I know. Look, I became an accountant so I’d have a nice stable job to raise you lot on. If I were an artist I’d be describing this much more clearly, yes, but I’d be doing it to you from a homeless shelter. Which you would also be living in.
So I kept going down and down and around and around and at some point I started crawling for a while, then climbing. Lots of climbing. Cliffs like you’d never imagined, and I went up all of ‘em. Yes, this is why I went to Everest last summer. No, it was easier. Nicer view though. And less mist. Less giant fungi too – they were the size of elephants, I swear, and the noises, sweet lordy lou the noises they made. Like somebody molesting an elephant seal with a megaphone. I tore off bits of my shirt for earplugs and I could STILL hear it. Not sure why they were making all that noise, the most they ever seemed to do was plod around slowly and scrape stuff off the rocks. Since I was on the rocks that had my attention, but well, like I said, they weren’t so fast. Took me forever to get off those cliffs, but by the time I reached the top it was cool and damp again and the air wasn’t trying to bake my lungs.
After that I found some dirt, and then some sand, and then a ladder. Then more sand. And then I came up in somebody’s sandbox. Right in the middle of his sandcastle, too, so I can understand why he hit me with the shovel. Good thing neither of us understood the names we were calling each other – his mother ran out to see what was with all the yelling, spanked us both, then made us eat lunch. I don’t remember anything I ate, but I do remember being surprised there wasn’t any rice. China was supposed to be all about rice.
And after lunch I went home. The boy gave me a new flashlight and a knife for the trip back – got some good use out of the one, not so much out of the other, aside from leaving little trailblazing signs. The only differences on the way back were that I knew what I was doing, and that when I popped out of MY sandbox my mother didn’t spank me, just lectured me. For hours. I think I almost wanted to go back to China at the end of that.
Of course, she made it up to me with that Lasagna of hers. Delicious.
How long? A few hours I guess. Lord if I know.
Yes, yes, thickness of the earth aside, the core, the mantle, et cetera.
Look, I’m doing you a favour here – it took me years to track down that house, and I’ve got it, right here, right now. Marked off the spot with ropes and prissy little pegs and everything. You’re the geologist in the family, and your dad just wants to lend you a hand. Also, you’re the only person I know with a Mandarin-English dictionary.
Yes, I’ve got the shovels, you just bring a couple of flashlights.
Maybe a few extra.
Food? We’ll get it on our way out. Can you stop at the bank and get some yuan? Make sure there’s enough for at least five, I owe a lunch to a few people.