Far below ground on the slopes of Mauna Loa, Big Island of Hawaii

A small beam of light, that's all. There was nothing else.

It inched its way down the wall of rock with painstaking slowness, finding its way across her face. The intense burning sensation caught her left eyelid as her hand took a reactive swing to bat whatever it was away. It felt like a recently extinguished match head still smoldering hot being held a breath's distance from her skin, which made no sense as her swatting hand connected with nothing but air.

She'd been unconscious, totally out, for several hours; but the penetrating ray of sunlight brought her back to the surface of consciousness. She instinctively shifted her head, the movement of her hand creating a slight breeze across her face. The resulting pain from moving her head was excruciating. She screamed involuntarily, the echo rebounding as if she were in the bowels of a cave. The agony radiated out from the back left side of her head and continued to pulse throughout her body as nerve endings felt compelled to respond. Her foggy brain registered the action, lesson learned. Viane Koa shielded her face from the sun with her hand and tentatively opened her eyes, but there was nothing to see but the darkness.

Struggling to comprehend the best her mind would allow, she found she had absolutely no recollection of where she was or how she had come to be wherever that was. Her mind was blank — painful and blank.

Her body felt as though it had been rolled over by a cane-haul truck; everything hurt all the way to her toes. All she could be certain of was that she was lying on a very hard, uneven surface, and propped slightly askew by a large lump under her left shoulder. Her right arm was pinned beneath her hip, and she was cold, and her pinned arm was numb — but she still dared not move. There was nothing to see except a hole far above that allowed a ray of sunlight to enter. She watched the strand of light penetrating the darkness, marveling at all the tiny particles of dust dancing in the air in a silent slow-motion waltz in and out of the ray of light. The display was actually beneficial, encouraging her to relax and let go of as much pain as she could find the will to do.

There was a thread of memory floating around in her mind trying to come to life, like the name of an old acquaintance just beyond the mind's reach. Try as she might, she found it impossible to bring that thread to light.

She slowly lifted her left arm, the least painful part of her body, sideways, feeling a rocky edge to the surface she was lying on. It seemed to drop away less than a foot distance from her. Reaching as far over the edge as she could without stretching muscles to the pain threshold, she felt nothing but chilly air and space — and emptiness. A foreboding sensation rippled through her in response.

Unconsciously, she moved her hand to her head and, as she suspected from the sharpness of pain, felt the sticky mess in her hair that had run down into her ear. Unexpectedly, a high level of delayed pain followed after her hand touched the raw scalp wound, and she screamed again; but this time her scream was flooded by a deep level of fear that had been absent moments before. Her nose picked up the coppery scent of blood.

Intentionally, virtually forced, she laughed aloud at the seemingly hopelessness of her situation. At least my humor is not hurting, she kidded herself and then proceeded to force out more laughter. The jiggling of her body, though, hurt too much, so she quickly stopped. Laughter was a strange but learned response to help her think beyond most fears. It was something her father had taught her to do whenever she was in a frightening situation — it wasn't an easy habit to acquire. Do it with as much humor as you can muster, was what he said to her whenever such a situation arose, and your fear will trade places with understanding. An image of Pops, his face displaying a profound concern, tracked across her thoughts. Along with his teaching, he'd also instilled a warning: Keep fear at bay by whatever means you can devise. Unchecked, he'd warned her and her brothers, fear becomes terror, then panic; and at that point, you've lost the battle. Strong advice or not, she felt like crying as his image evaporated into the air.

Her right hip was becoming more and more sensitive to the hard rock beneath her. Attempting a slow-motion move into a more comfortable position, she found it wasn't going to happen without her pushing her system into grave response. Besides the torrent of pain rushing through her with each muscle shift, she again became aware of the soft lump beneath her that wedged her upper back to the side and kept her arm pinned. She ultimately decided it was her backpack to blame as she felt the pull of the straps on her shoulders.

Continuing her blind investigation, she reached in the direction she faced and discovered a wall of rock rising less than an arm's distance away. I'm lying on a ledge of rock encircled by dark, chilled air. She shivered.

Her backpack became a conscious catalyst for her, symbolic of hiking. Her surroundings began to take on clarity as memory began flooding back. It was like opening a bottle of liquid understanding upside down above her head. It was good having clear thoughts return, but those thoughts led to the horrifying reality of where she was; and her disbelief heightened with the memory of how she had gotten there.

She remembered rappelling through a small cave opening on the remote slope of Mauna Loa. She realized it was the very cave she discovered years before and had always wanted to return to explore ever since. Her mind replayed the sudden and frightening sound of her rope breaking far above her head. As a kaleidoscope morphed its patterns, she relived the fantastic cavalcade of thoughts that flooded her thinking during the brief, split-second fall to the rocky shelf. Even in the fleeting moments of her fall, she had time to pray she'd land on the ledge instead of falling beyond into the bottomless abyss below.

As her returning memory began clouding over from loss of blood, the startling impact of her situation slammed into her: she was trapped, on a narrow rock ledge, in the shaft of an old, vertical lava tube thirty feet below the ground. And the worst part? No one knows where I am.

Just as the sheer horror of her situation became agonizingly clear, her thoughts began segmenting and slipping away, pulling her toward a muted state of nothingness.

A peaceful euphoria, a warm breeze, and swaying palms swept over her as her eyelids relaxed and closed, closing out the hurt and closing out the dancing display in the sunlight. A loving presence and brilliant light began cradling her damaged body, gently pulling her deeper into a loving, unseen embrace ...

And all her conscious thought was simply gone.

Gone?

There's more to being simply hidden from sight.

There's ... gone!

There's gone ... but then there's also gone for good; good and gone. Gone forever!

But then there's the sweetness of finding, of rediscovering the hidden and all the unexpected good that rides with that ...

The realization of how our lives would change, though, becomes crystal clear when gone is forever!

Early Saturday morning Kapapa Island, Kaneohe Bay,...