Time: 7 minutes. Click here to go to my list of prompts.

“Driftless” (If anyone’s curious, the driftless region is in Southwest Wisconsin. It is indeed full of valley and caves and unwashed hippies. And Holsteins.)

They call this region the Driftless region, a region around which the glaciers split so they didn’t drift the soil. It’s rough and wild, unlike everything else around. As a kid, I always assumed driftless refered to the quality of the region. It didn’t drift. Nothing changed. You came to the region and didn’t leave, and the less washed you were, the more likely you were to arrive.

But the geological reason made sense, too. Still, I wondered, how do glaciers just go about splitting? It seems like you’d need some force to split glaciers. We don’t have high mountains or great volcanos.

We also have a ton of caves around here. I started to wonder, between massive glaciers splitting and rendings in the Earth, well, was there something below? So I read what I could on Wikipedia and packed for a journey under the Driftless region.

I’m stuck down here now. I’m writing down why I came here, as if I don’t make it, hopefully these records do. Small bipedal creatures are running up to me and stealing food from my bag. At least, I think that’s what’s happening. I have no light, and they glow, and either this is a hallucination or I’m onto something really exciting. Either way, I’m not sure about the odds of my survival.