A spouse is a whole lot more than a dog. The patterns are everywhere. The way the clothes smell coming out of the drier isn’t even right anymore. It had been six months.
I didn’t go into a depression. I’m a fairly stable and accepting person. My several years studying old fashioned mindfulness kept me grounded. For some comfort though, I turned to reading ‘the classics’ again. And, once again, the John Carter stories were a favorite.
I’d always been somewhat of a collector, and during this time, I began collecting memorabilia; first editions, old comic book adaptations, a few mementos from the author’s life sold off by his estate. It was in some of those mementos that I found some things that made me… question things.
You see, in the original story of John Carter, the tale starts with a fictional encounter between John and his nephew. John is recently returned from his first trip to Barsoom, or ‘Mars’ and he delivers to his nephew a manuscript detailing his first adventure, and then he departs to return to his new home world.
John’s story starts with him being chased by American Indians, entering a cave, and waking up on what he believes to be Mars. I won’t go into a retelling of the story here. Read it for yourself. The important fact for me is that among the mementos and artifacts that I acquired was what appeared to be an even earlier manuscript of the story. It appeared to be a draft that predated the publication of the first book by at least 10 years, and told a somewhat different version, much more detailed in some respects.
The details weren’t so much in the story itself, though there were several accounts that did not make it into publication, as I’ll explain in a moment; the strangeness was in the prologue. This seemingly original version went into detail about where and when the story of the chase, the cave, and the manner of transportation to the red planet occurred. Incredibly there were descriptions of the location of the cave and even hand drawn maps showing the route taken. From reading it, these seemed to be John Carter’s map to get himself to the cave and back to civilization on Earth. Both the forward and reverse path were described as having several way points and markers, both natural and constructed by Carter himself.
In addition, several appendices detailed Barsoom customs, politics, food and dietary information, and even marital and sexual practices of the various races of the planet. The copy was riddled with strict warnings against any sort of publication, especially concerning the location of the cave.
Of course, both the appendices and the narrative were far too explicit for publication at the time. That was 100 years ago and the depictions would been considered unquestionably obscene. Today they would just be another book in the romance section of the local bookstore. The published story mentioned only that both men and women of Barsoom wore no clothing, but did not recount the more erotic details mentioned in the text that I had in front of me.
As far as I could guess at the time, if the story were to be believed, which it surely couldn’t be, the story, the customs and history, and the locations of the cave were delivered by John Carter to his nephew, who editing it heavily, produced the sanitized adventure and delivered it to Burroughs for final editing and publication. Burroughs was a natural story teller and, according to the account given in the documents that I had acquired, he had developed his literary style from the early telling of the stories by Carter.
It was an astounding find. And I was convinced that it was authentic. Not that it was true, but that it was actually from the author of the tales I loved so much as a boy. Over the next months, I researched the find as much as I could. I read and reread the manuscript. I carefully made electronic copies of each page and ran the results through handwriting recognition software. I took the results and corrected any errors in the computer-generated output. And I spent long hours translating the directions and maps into a modern overlay of how to reach “Carter’s Cave”.
At each step, I expected to verify that the places described could only be fictional; and as each step was taken, I found that it wasn’t necessarily so. Step by step, I found that it was possible that the place actually existed. It was in a remote part of Arizona, about 20 miles off the I-10 freeway. The closest ‘civilization’ being the infamous ‘Thing’ curio shop. It was located on private land out in the desert.
This was a hoot. I had a manuscript that purported to give the location of the very cave that John Carter traveled through to Barsoom. According to satellite images on the Internet, the spot was in a hilly location, and only 10 miles from a dirt road. Further digging revealed that land in the area was selling for about $500 an acre to anyone foolish enough to be suckered into buying it.
Well, I decided it was time for an adventure. I was well-off financially, and I could make the trip for a bit more than a good luxury two-week vacation in Hawaii, including the purchase of the equipment and supplies that I figured that I’d need; and I went a step farther. I went ahead and bought a 20-acre parcel surrounding the calculated location!
Time off from work was no problem and this was an adventure I could get into. At worst, I would find the location described and turn around and come back. At best, I’d find a cave, camp in the spot for a bit, and maybe even arrange to dig a well and set up a small retreat for myself.
I was going to do it. I had nothing else that I had to do, so why not?
I bought the land over the Internet and mapped out my route. I estimated that it would take three or four days to drive to the area where I would leave the freeway. My 4x4 pickup had never seen real off-road driving before, but this was just dirt roads and it would do great for that. I’d pull a small trailer with a new off-road ATV and all of my other supplies. I didn’t need to take too much; if I decided to stay for a while, I could always drive back to a nearby city within eight hours or so.
I figured that after I left the freeway, it would be about an hour drive in my truck and then one to two hours off-road in the ATV. Again, why not! It felt right. It sounded like fun. So I started making plans and gathering my supplies.
I placed the original manuscript, a copy, and the electronic files in a safe deposit box and set up my affairs to run without me for a while in case I decided that I liked desert life.
I spent time with my son and told him that I was going on a vision quest into the desert and left instructions with him… just in case. I made sure to warn him not to be hasty in declaring me dead if I was out of touch for a while. What if I did find more than I really thought possible?
The night before I began my quest, I took my son to dinner at a casual restaurant and told him most of what I have described above. We laughed at the idea and he lightheartedly accused me of becoming a ‘Vernian Hollow Earther’, referring to people who believed that the earth was actually hollow and that the Jules Verne account of the ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ and the Burroughs stories of Pelucidar were in fact realities, just like I was half-heartedly considering with the Barsoom story.
I couldn’t really argue with him about it. So, we laughed.
He said, “Dad, I kid you about it, but you know that if I didn’t have a new job and a fiance to take care of, I’d go with you in a heartbeat! This is incredible, even if, as you say, it is impossible to believe. You did find this stuff. What are you going to do with it? Can you publish it somehow?”
I replied, “I could, but I don’t know that there would be an audience for it now. For now I won’t do anything with it. I have copies and you have a key to the safe deposit box, and I’m going on an adventure into the desert. That’s it for now.”