Shavin: Tripping the dark fantastic; who knew there'd be dogs?

It isn't every day you get to walk down the corridor of your unconscious, but that was my husband's take on our trip through Shoshone, Idaho's Mammoth Cave, a long, underground, tube-like cavern created millions of years ago by a volcanic eruption.

It has been a bear cave, home to primitive man, a government fallout shelter and, most recently, a mushroom incubator, but it's now simply a tourist attraction for people traveling lonely State Highway 75.

Idaho's Mammoth Cave (not to be confused with Kentucky's Mammoth Cave) is a bumpy, gravelly mile-and-a-half off the main road. At the turn-off and at the entrance to the compound, you are greeted by a line-up of oversized carved stone faces, some grimacing, some smiling, some pensive, all so fabulously disturbing we would try (unsuccessfully) to purchase one before we left.

The cave itself is presided over by what my husband would later call "an apathetic Guardian of the Gate" - a young man deeply engrossed in the "Dr. Phil" show in the anteroom of the eerie Shoshone Bird Museum of Natural History. The museum houses the preserved remains of almost every creature that has walked the planet, including dinosaurs, wildcats, boars, a variety of fanged ancient canines, a giraffe, a hundred or more bird species and a few alarmingly alive-looking scorpions and furry tarantulas on little pedestals under domed glass lids. And that's just a partial list.

The Guardian tore himself away from the travails of a young woman and her rocky relationship with the mother who may or may not have stolen her boyfriend just long enough to light and hand us two voluptuously flaming propane lanterns and point us in the direction of the cave. We wound our way past an outhouse and down a few hundred feet of slippery gravel. The western sunlight was blinding. Noisy insects went "tick-tick-tick" in the dry brittle grasses. The fire from my lantern singed my wrist.

But when we stepped into the mouth of the cave, we were plunged into a deep hush. It was cold - 42 degrees, according to a thermometer - and if you didn't hold your lantern directly in front of you, the blackness swallowed the light.

We picked our way carefully along the twisting quarter-mile trail, holding up our lamps to glimpse ancient writings on the walls and inspect the rocky rubble. We marveled at the dark and the cold and the ghostly intermittent dripping noises.

"I feel like I'm in someone's colon," I said, prompting my husband's more erudite and less smelly "traversing the unconscious" analogy.

"So what's in your unconscious?" I asked, to which he responded with something hilarious and brilliant, the substance of which I immediately forgot because I was too busy peering at the contents of my own. There were only two things in there: an anonymous cocker spaniel I had yet to adopt and who existed entirely in theory but who I already adored, and the $300 lime and lavender John Fluevog shoes I had, over the last two months, tried on in every Fluevog store from the Rockies to Haight-Ashbury.

Later that day, I told my husband about the theoretical cocker spaniel. (He already knew about the shoes.) About how, a few nights before we left for our trip out west, I (unbeknownst to him) filled out an adoption application at an online dog rescue site. It was a form so extensive it took me the better part of an hour, due to the mix of essay questions (what is your philosophy of dog ownership?) and detailed inquiries into the specifics of my daily routine, right up to (but not including) my bathroom habits. I told him about how, three days later, I got an email from the rescue agency saying our application had been approved, and about how I burst into tears at the news.

None of which surprised him. In the fall it will have been seven months since we lost Shark and Bella, the last of our seven dogs. Deep down in my husband's carefully tended unconscious was the knowledge that the day would come when I would be clamoring for another dog or three.

"It's time to restart our family," I said somewhere between the stone heads and the tarantulas on cake plates. Time to let go the guardians of our grief. To invite in whoever will be next in an almost unbroken line of dogs, to illuminate the long and longing hallways of our hearts.

Contact Dana Shavin at dnalise@juno.com. Her memoir, "The Body Tourist," is due for release in November on Little Feather Books.

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