Our school bus pulled up to the parking lot of a local gas station and I silently insisted that we couldn't be at the right place. The teachers waved us off the bus so we hesitantly tiptoed down the steps and looked around. Old men drank beer at the station's stoop while lizards snaked up the beaten and discolored walls. There were no gas prices listed beneath the fading Shell sign. Our teachers smiled tensely.
We were told that we were at the location of Puerto Rico's eighth wonder. I debated calling my mom.
We hiked up a steep dirt road that began behind the gas station. It was cratered with pockets of loose mud and stray tree trunks. I regretted wearing my new neon pink sneakers because by the time we were halfway up the road, they had turned a dull baby pink. There was a small group of people ahead who seemed to know what they were doing, so the teachers, between whispers and shared looks, decided to follow them to our potential doom. Most of our class of 45 did not seem to pick up on the fragility of our situation. I looked back at our group of uniformed ducklings laughing as they broke a sweat, and I wildly imagined that this supposed open cave was nothing short of our high school's ploy to kill us all for the hell we'd raised so far in our senior year.
We arrived at a cave opening that was lathered with vines and wild greenery. Our teacher, Mrs. Fortuño, who I assume was the only one who did her research on our field trip, pointed out a small, round plastic container wedged between the rock and some branches. She said that this location is listed in many adventure magazines and that people who visited this location as a step in an all-around-the-world scavenger hunt got to write their names on a piece of paper and slip it in the plastic orb. This information both settled and alarmed me. It settled me because this means that other humans had gone through this grueling hike for a purpose. It alarmed me because the people who tended to read adventure magazines were the kind of people who climbed canyons with no harness, like I'd seen in the movies, and not 17 year-old high school students who had no plans to fall to their deaths anytime soon.
One by one, we were led into the cave and instructed to hold onto a loose rope as we carefully lowered ourselves into the darkness. One girl had already started crying. The rocks were dusty and slick; and several times I lost my footing, but, finally, I made it to the bottom. I caught my breath and stilled my heart. Thanks to the light of the cave entrance, I could see above me arching stalactites that peaked out of the darkness and dripped foggy water onto my palms. As I looked above me, I was reminded of Spanish class when we learned about Gaudí's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, whose entrance was reminiscent of distorted cave formations and featured sculptures of Christ and his disciples. I was no longer wary; I was full of wonder.
I was led deeper in to the cave; and when our whole class had climbed down, we dropped lower, careful to not slip on the limestone, into the cave, lit only by the opening of the cave and a couple of lights that were installed. Mrs. Fortuño told us that this cave had been an underground river that had carved its way through the mountain. The limestone on the walls, a soft and malleable type of rock, dripped water once the river had cleared. Stalactites and their corresponding stalagmites formed after years of this dripping water calcifying into these rock formations.
“Shhh," Mrs. Fortuño hushed. “Come close and be quiet."
We stood there in the darkness until we realized what she wanted us to hear. Light chirps surfaced from the silence and I thought wildly of the black birds that infiltrate the Puerto Rican beaches. But when I listened closely, I realized what it really was: bats. Bats everywhere. Their soft squeaks echoed through the cave. She pulled out a flashlight that shone red light and pointed it up to the ceiling to see huge clusters of bats huddled together like dark pollen on a flower.
Some students gagged or muffled their shrieks. The bats did not scare me. Instead, I couldn't find it within myself to disturb the sleeping masses. She clicked off her flashlight and we kept walking.
I began to wonder when the “Eighth Wonder" would appear. I didn't quite know what it would be. It had been described to me as hole in the mountain that overlooked the valleys of Puerto Rico. In my mind's eye, I was expecting a small peephole of sorts. I imagined one of the many highways sliding through the view of the island.
The cave began to grow narrower so that I could graze my fingers on the smooth limestone. Stalagmites allowed my classmates to weave under and around miniature caves, leaping over puddles of water. Light giggles echoed when my classmates scared each other around the corners of the labyrinth.
Soon, natural light began to tickle the walls as we walked further. It was blinding at first, but once our eyes adjusted, what appeared before us knocked us all silent.
It wasn't a hole, really, but rather a large natural window one hundred feet wide and fifty feet tall whose edge dropped off to a view of a valley. Electric green hills rolled along in the distance. At a clearing at the bottom, palm trees and large shrubs gathered around a river that winded along the hills in bright blue glory.
It was the contrast of the brilliant colors with the dull limestone that made it so amazing, as if Mother Nature herself broke open a hole through a mountain for all of us to see. Look, she says, look at what you are apart of.
One student suggested that we sit in three minutes of silence and just simply look. We sat cross-legged, along the jaggedness of the cave, and sat before the splendor of the view. I looked to my left at my classmates, who were illuminated by the light, and was surprised to see that everyone sat there silently, drinking it all in. There were no more tears, no more shrieks, no more giggles, just silence and the sound of the distant river.
