Exploring the Caves
By Owen Clarke
On October 28, the employees of a small Colorado amusement park, Glenwood Caverns, found a 20-year-old man dead inside a women’s restroom. Diego Barajas Medina had snuck into the mountaintop amusement park the night before, wearing body armor and hauling tactical gear, assault weapons, and a combination of real and fake improvised explosive devices. But Medina never set off his bombs, and he only used one bullet.
Park employees found his body during a routine morning check of the grounds. They later discovered his car parked nearby, stocked with more explosives. He had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
Before he killed himself, Medina left a message on the bathroom wall. “I’m not a killer,” he wrote. “I just wanted to explore the caves.” (Glenwood Caverns offers tours in a network of caves below the park.)
I recall hearing about Medina’s death when it happened, but I was out of the country at the time and it was barely on my radar. Mass shootings are a dime a dozen in the United States, and this one didn’t even happen. Most of us barely register shootings unless they occur in our hometown or somewhere else we’re connected with. In early December of 2023, the BBC reported over 600 mass shootings in the United States that year, nearly two a day. In fact, on the same day Medina was discovered, the suspect of twin mass shootings in Maine—18 killed—was found dead. I imagine this is why Medina’s death didn’t make much news.
My partner, who had never heard about the incident when it happened, brought it up recently after learning about it on TikTok. This time the scenario captivated me. Nothing had happened really, aside from a mentally ill person committing suicide, but something very bad almost happened. “We had the potential for something very heinous and gruesome to happen in this community,” the local sheriff said at a press conference the following Monday. “We’re fortunate that it did not occur.”
In the wake of Medina’s suicide, the usual reports came out. People who knew him talked about how he was unassuming, nonviolent, “You never would guess he’d do something like this,” and so on.
But to me, it seemed like he had all the trademarks of a mass shooter. He was quiet, reclusive, and seemingly depressed. He’d recently lost his job at Family Dollar. He stayed up until the wee hours of the morning playing Call of Duty. He owned a ton of guns and tactical gear, and was fascinated with the police and military.
But unlike most people who feel a desire to kill others, who either go through with their massacres or never initiate them in the first place, Medina got lost somewhere in the middle. He never became a mass shooter, but he died—and will be remembered—as something akin to one nonetheless.
I wonder what went through his mind in those last moments. He’d gone to great lengths to gather all this gear and plan some sort of horrendous massacre. He’d set it in motion. Then, at the last minute, he changed his mind, but only halfway. He hadn’t been discovered, but he didn’t just go home. He shot himself in the head, and his last message to the world was that he wasn’t a killer. He just wanted to explore the caves.
In Alabama, where I grew up, there are a lot of caves. The National Speleological Society—the NASA of caves—is headquartered in my hometown. Some of my friends enjoy exploring caves, and in high school I thought I did, too. I like climbing, camping, surfing, paddling, and doing most other things outside. Why wouldn’t I like caves?
I’ve scrambled around plenty of caves over the years, but I’ve realized I don’t particularly enjoy it. The big ones don’t bother me, but the tight, squirmy passages, the ones with the low ceilings and narrow walls, where you can’t move your hands from your side and have to wriggle like a maggot to get through… They give me the heebie-jeebies.
I can’t think of anything worse than being lost underground. Lost in the mountains, lost in the forest, lost at sea, these would be terrible things, but it wouldn’t hold quite the same horror as being lost in a cave. Alone in the dark, cut off from the fresh air and the sun. I think claustrophobia is my biggest fear. The thought of being stuck somewhere, cramped up, unable to move. I read about this one guy who died stuck upside down in a cave and I started having nightmares about it.
Claustrophobia has affected me outside of caves, too. When I was 15 I went into an MRI machine because I’d developed chronic nerve and muscle pain and the doctors didn’t know why. They ordered a ton of imaging. I hated being in that MRI machine. It was a long tube they slid you into, and it was plenty large, but to me at the time it felt like being buried alive.
I squirmed while I was in there so much that they had to keep redoing the imaging. I remember it was early in the morning, around 3:00 a.m. and the MRI tech would only come to check on me every thirty minutes or so. Each time he’d look at the imaging and tell me I’d moved too much and we had to redo it.
After two hours or so, I was twisting and jostling so much that they tied my arms to my sides so I wouldn’t move anymore. After four and a half hours they got all the imaging done. I cried in the car with my mom on the way home. In hindsight it feels rather silly—I’ve had several more MRIs as an adult and not been bothered—but at the time I thought getting put into that MRI machine was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Two weeks later we found out that the MRI had discovered nothing wrong.
I get claustrophobic almost every time I zip up my sleeping bag too high, or fully close up my bivy sack on an alpine trip. At least a dozen or more times I’ve thrashed around in the night, half-asleep, with some primal urge to get out of my sleeping bag, tent, or bivy sack for no apparent reason, simply because I felt trapped.
While camping at the base of Mt. San Antonio outside of Los Angeles last fall, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get out of my hammock because I’d zipped a mosquito net around it. Even though I’d probably only been fumbling with the net zipper for ten seconds, felt like hours, and even though it was just a net and completely porous, it felt like I couldn’t breathe, like there was some insane urgency to ESCAPE. I tore through the net with my hands and flipped myself out of the hammock, ruining a brand new mosquito net and earning a gnarly knock on the head.
Claustrophobia feels a lot like depression to me. This inescapable pressure that’s all-encompassing, enveloping, an invisible straightjacket. It twists your mind into irrational horror. In the throes of claustrophobia, I get swamped by this feeling that because I can’t move right now, I’ll never be able to move again, even if it’s because of a factor that is obviously temporary, like being unable to find the zipper to a sleeping bag, or struggling to take off a pullover sweatshirt that’s a few sizes too small.
I’ve never been so claustrophobic that I’ve wanted to die. I’ve never wanted to die, period. But if time slowed down amidst the worst claustrophobia I’ve ever experienced, elongating the terror, the pressure, the weight, the feeling of being unable to escape…
Well, I could see myself starting to think death was better than life. I couldn’t see myself being a killer, but I could see myself actually wanting to see the caves, and not ever coming out.
The yakuza have this tradition where they cut off their little fingers when they make a mistake. It’s called yubitsume, “finger shortening.” When I read about it online, I learned that it’s supposed to be a punishment, a sign of dishonor, an indicator that you’ve failed in some duty or obligation and are showing apology and remorse. But in the movies, the yakuza seem to wear it as a badge of honor. An indicator not of remorse, but of pain tolerance, of sacrifice. Of a willingness to inflict violence upon oneself in service of something greater.
I have no desire to be a part of an organized crime syndicate, but sometimes I wish I had a reason to chop off my little finger. I’d gladly do it to end world hunger or to stop climate change or to prevent my partner Tessa from being abducted by terrorists—hell, I’d chop off every ounce of meat on my bones—but those aren’t real scenarios. We all give little bits of ourselves to the world around us through acts of service every day—holding the door for an old woman, cooking dinner for a family member, picking a bouquet of flowers for a lover—but these don’t seem to hold the gravity of self-harm.
I can think of no cause in my life worth dying or hurting myself over. (At least not one where dying or hurting myself is going to have a meaningful impact.)
It seems mass shooters, in their own twisted way, are looking for that. I can’t fathom what was going through Diego Barajas Medina’s mind when he killed himself, because he clearly—at one point at least—thought hurting others was the answer to whatever he was feeling, and I’ve never understood that feeling.
I hope I never do understand that feeling, but I do understand the feeling that nothing in life matters. When you start feeling that way, it’s easy to see how it’s a slippery slope to a point where you’re telling yourself there’s no difference between killing a thousand people or one (or just yourself) if all life is going to fade into nothing at the end of it all anyways.
At times I become jaded, and stray towards this rotten mentality. That every one in the world could die and it wouldn’t be any different than everyone in the world being alive, aside from the pain we’d feel at death.
Other times I feel so much pity and sadness and meaning over mundane life that it’s paralyzing. What’s odd is that the things that make me the saddest often aren’t human, and sometimes they aren’t even sentient. I get sad when I see dead plants, or lost toys, or closed down stores, or balloons floating alone in the sky.
The other day I saw an orange on my kitchen counter that was overripe and it made me want to cry because it wasn’t going to be eaten by anyone. I tried to eat it, but it was near-rotten and I ended up spitting out half of it in the compost bin. I tell myself I should eat leftover food because it’s wasteful not to, but really I just eat it because it makes me sad to think of it spoiling alone.
When I was in college I took a course called “Religious Theory” and we learned about Jainism. Jainism is all about this principle called ahimsa, nonviolence not just in action, but also in word and thought. There’s a sect of Jains called Digambara (“sky-clad”) Jains, who take principles of nonviolence to an extreme.
Sky-clad Jains don’t wear any clothes because owning clothes is “possession,” but our professor also said some believe this is because the clothes have to be made by organisms (plants and such) which would have to be “killed” to make them. They carry a broom made of fallen peacock feathers to brush aside microscopic bugs and other life forms in front of them as they walk, and brush areas around them before they sit. Some of the most extreme Jains apparently stop eating entirely, starving themselves rather than consume other life, even plant life.
In a sense, Diego Barajas Medina was an anti-Jain. Instead of not hurting anything, he thought he wanted to hurt as many things as he could. I don’t know why he thought this, but it doesn’t really matter, because in the end he came to the same conclusion as those extreme Jains: Ending his own existence was the only way to stop the violence.
Those last words, “I’m not a killer,” seem to buttress this assertion.
On the eve of his death, the one thing Medina feared the world would think was that he was a killer. Many probably think of him as one regardless. But one could make the argument that he was actually a hero. He took decisive action to destroy the evil that he believed posed an imminent threat to others… Himself.
Human beings create beauty in the world, by thought that begets word and action, just the same way we create darkness. We create beauty through art and music and literature and film. It is we create that makes experiencing and living worthwhile.
But it sometimes seems that the best things in the world—those rare things that we can’t place value on—are not humans or products of humans, but of the natural world. Macaws and mountain gorillas. Iguanas and elephants and mustangs and polar bears. Waterfalls and mountains and blue skies and wildflowers. Caves.
I’m just not sure if this value exists, though, if humans aren’t there to be impacted by it. Trees fall in forests, but if no one is there, do they? I don’t think they fall, but I don’t think they don’t, either. Those trees are neither falling nor standing upright. They are lost in the middle, like Medina.
Diego Barajas Medina was both right and wrong. Killer and hero. This life is supremely meaningless and supremely meaningful. Like trees in forests, the only thing that will change it is whether I’m around to witness it or not. You can tell yourself cutting off your pinkie finger is going to add extra flavor to things. I don’t believe it will, but then again I don’t care to find out.
If you think it will, why not try it?
Owen Clarke is a freelance journalist, motorcyclist, and mountaineer, and the founder of the Dead Foot Collective. You can find his work on his website.
