Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark
By Barbara Hurd
From her first panic-stricken attempt to crawl into a Conservancy-owned cave in western Maryland to her experiences with moonmilk (a soft, oozing deposit of calcite crystals) deep in marble caverns in Oregon, Barbara Hurd has put herself in underground places many of us wouldn't dare go. "The viscera of absence," Hurd muses, "call us to grope where we can't see, where the normal constraints, the habits, identities, and the definitions by which we might lift, disperse momentarily, leave us in enormous space." In Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark (Houghton Mifflin, $23), Hurd chronicles her experiences in these dark spaces and her intertwining journeys into fear, loss, intimacy and spirituality. Along the way, she opens our eyes to the beauty and fragility of this subterranean world.
— Evan Johnson
