Cliff Climbing and Garbage Fishing

I dreamed I was in a warehouse on the side of a mountain. It was a shoddily constructed storage room made from a modified cave. The cave/warehouse was about halfway up the mountain, and there were streams and waterfalls in which people liked to swim and go tubing a little higher up.

The main river had some pretty intense drops and whoop-dee-doos, which made the tubing fun, but treacherous. One could get stuck in some washing machine-like back currents that were created as the water rushed over the uneven terrain of boulders and deep pools. I took this little ride and enjoyed the first little waterfall, but the washing machine stuff was too scary for me, so I bailed after one or two of the giant whoop-dee-doos.

After exiting the river, I had to climb back up some sheer cliff rocks to get back to the warehouse, which served as a kind of halfway point in the trek back to the place where you'd jump in to take the river ride. I made it to the relative safety of the warehouse and was hanging around in there with a couple of other people. Among them was Chris Knoll and Kay Doering. Some others, like Cousin Tim and Johanna Scott were there also, rounding out the very randomly mixed cast, though their roles were not memorable.

Kay was easy to remember, though, because of what happened next. We were in this cave/warehouse/cliffside room doing some cleanup and repairs. There was a lot of junk that needed to be sorted through and either tossed out or repaired and put back into service. Kay was doing something on the side of the room nearest the doorway.

The doorway looked out on a sheer dropoff, and there were no guardrails, stairs or safety features of any kind, just a rickety sliding door which was always kept open. A wind rustled through the cave, catching Kay off guard, and out the door she went, plummeting hundreds of feet to her death.

Kay's sudden demise put the rest of us into shock. We still had to clean up the warehouse, and some people still wanted to go back up to the top of the mountain to use the water slide, but now there was now a sense of tense urgency. We couldn't just stay there in the cave, now that its safety had proven to be so tenuous. 

I shut the door to the cave entrance, alleviating the immediate threat of another wind blowing someone to their death. We still had to retrieve Kay's body, which lay crushed and mangled at the bottom of the mountain.

"Has anyone seen it?" I asked, callously referring to Kay's corpse as an "it."

"She's pretty banged up." Chris replied, shaking his head woefully.

We were all pretty shaken up by the event, but we kept at the cleanup for a while. Suddenly, I decided to stop. What was the point, I thought, really? The people who owned the cave didn't deserve much more than a full day's worth of on-the-clock mourning from us, since it was their poorly constructed workplace that had caused our friend's death. 

The rest of them agreed, and we decided to go fishing. There must have been another way out, or else I teleported or something, because there was no way I was climbing any more cliffs. Not after Kay's tragic death. But somehow the rest of us wound up at sea level, fishing in a small bay near the bottom of the mountain. 

The fishing was not yielding much in the way of actual fish, however. The bay was polluted, and we kept reeling in garbage, rather than fish. Someone got the bright idea of fishing on the ocean side of the inlet and immediately started having better results.

"Always fish where you see the most seagulls," advised Reggie Martinez, reciting elementary fishing wisdom as he reeled in a large salmon.

"They are on the ocean side, guys," I told the rest of the group, who were by now frustrated with reeling in garbage and eager to get in on the action. 

We'd still not forgotten about our friend's death, and a somber spirit was still pervasive in the mood of the group. I woke up, still feeling a little shaken. It qualified as a demi-nightmare, due to the anxiety level created by the river rapids, the death of a friend and the general fear of falling to one's death.