I don’t even like it when the elevator door closes,
but I like the feisty and fictional Anna Pigeon so much that I
gritted my teeth and followed her down into Lechuguilla Cave.
Nevada Barr’s newest mystery, Blind Descent, takes park ranger Anna
Pigeon a thousand feet under southern New Mexico, into the deepest
and, possibly, largest cave in the world.
Though
Pigeon fights claustrophobia to try to rescue a friend, the plot
takes second place to the caves themselves and to cavers as they
wriggle through wormholes on their bellies or traverse huge
caverns.
There are bad guys, of course, and here
they are the gas-drillers who probe at a slant into BLM land and
accidentally (or not) hit a huge unexplored cave which only Anna
and her dead friend have seen.
“The cavern walls
were draped in curtains of liquid stone, frozen in place one
molecule at a time over the history of the world.” ” But a little
further on, “That was what had been. Before poison rained down from
above … Aragonite trees lay smashed on the cavern floor. The lake
was full of mud … A pipe casing a foot in diameter cut through
the ruined ceiling to plunge into the hideous pile and disappear.”
Nevada Barr is a fine writer and a strong
environmentalist who speaks from experience. She has done stints as
a ranger in several national parks, and as one writer puts it: “Her
books are High Country News – fictionalized.”
*
Henrietta Hay
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Blind Descent.
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