My name is Rob Paulette. I'm 65 years old. I'm a digger of caves and a piler of rocks. I've been excavating caves for about 25 years and actually I didn't get started until I was 39 so I've been a late bloomer in life.
I've always had to learn things for myself. That's pretty much why I quit school. I wasn't interested in things that could be taught or learned.
I was wondering what was inside of myself that was completely, uniquely my own perspective. These caves are done as a celebration. I want to create a space that's transformative. I want to subject, mercilessly, a person to the aesthetic in a way that stimulates a deep emotionality to a point in which it becomes a transformative tool.
That's a big goal, but I'm ready for it. Sometimes I feel more like an archaeologist. I'm covering something that's already there. Construction, space is captured.
But creating space through extraction, I can feel it. I can feel the empty space. I can come. The side of the walls very quickly.
I can feel where the floor is. I always check it out with levels but I can usually come to flat pretty quick. In digging the cave I go in 15-20 feet and then I more or less breach like a whale or a dolphin. Open up the skylight and let the light flood down. Now I've got air circulation.
I go in deeper and then come back up again and I do that continually. All those things form the architectural shape. I use only hand tools. Shovels, medics, scrapers, wheelbarrow. No dynamite, no tractors, no pneumatic drills.
I do it all by myself. I don't have generators, I'm too far back. I do have mirrors and I use the mirrors, which must have been the way that they did it thousands of years ago. But I'm always on the lookout for something to make the action easier and more efficient.
I know who's done it. I mean the ancient people, religious people would dig. Digging a hole in the ground and finding God in that hole has been an ancient practice among religious adepts. I don't think they got into the shape of it like I...
When I'm working on a project I'm totally obsessed. I'm thinking about it all day long, all night long I'm dreaming. Usually senses digging dreams. Most people that are engaged in physical labor aren't having the fun that I'm having.
You know, it's pretty down and dirty work. There's not too many people that are digging in the ground. I've tried to get people interested in it.
I've tried to tell young guys, you could do this. You could have a cave of your own. And it doesn't register.
It doesn't register. This material, this very soft sandstone material that is very compressed, it's the material that really got me interested and got me started. I saw a real small cave that kids had done. and realized how workable it was, and I could do sculptural things that would take a sculptor in stone months, maybe years to do.
It can be done in days with this material. My assumption is that this is pretty unique to the area. It's solidified sand dunes, and this was the shoreline of an ancient, ancient sea. You could not do your work anywhere but in this patch of northern New Mexico. as far as I know.
I'm sure there's other material that you could dig caves in, but not by hand. When I first started digging back in 86, I had no idea of what the material was like and wondered if I was doing something completely foolhardy by even trying to dig a cave in it. I imagine people coming up to rescue me and maybe even endangering their own lives, digging my corpse out of the ground.
So I wrote a note apologizing and wore it around my neck, just as an assurance to the rescuers that I appreciated their efforts. I'm not an engineer, but I am an intuitive engineer. And over the 20 years I've gotten a pretty good idea of what's safe using my own fear levels as a guide.
I have had structural engineers as visitors, and they've all given me a thumbs up. My arches are about like this. And I probably in this material could get away with that, although I would be afraid to do that.
If a cave lot was like this, it would collapse till the final shape was something like that. So I keep my arches very conservative. I mean, it's one thing if the old cave digger gets buried alive, I mean, it would be tragic.
But for me, what's really scary is if someone else were hurt in these caves. That fear keeps me honest. I met Rob before I met Shel, and he was a garbage man in Taos.
She and I were boyfriend-girlfriend, and we're dear friends now, but neurologically we're not suited for each other. Liz is a go-getter type person who loves to do everything as a teen, whereas I'm kind of off to myself. Liz and I, we were talking about Chaco Canyon and I said, well I've never been there.
And she said, well let's go. I kissed my girlfriend goodbye and came over and picked up Liz and she kissed her goodbye. And off we went to Chaco Canyon.
And then things kind of changed after that. What happened at Chaco Canyon? That darn shell came in, you know, shell of course, who's also my very close buddy, came in and stole her away.
I had been working on Liz's landscape, doing a lot of rock work around their old house. I actually stuck it out and kept on doing the rock work. While Shell was coming over and they were in the house partying down, well, that might not have been that dramatic.
That's the way it felt. Well, Raz's not your typical person, which is what I like about him. He doesn't do things for himself.
He does things for art. He does things for other people. He has been such an incredible friend to us for many years.
We just knew that Ra needed work and we had seen the cave that he had done up on the mesa and it was beautiful. The project was more about Ra and helping Ra out than the cave itself. He just said, you know, it'll take two months and cost $2,000.
We thought, okay, well, knowing Rod, it'll take four months and cost $4,000, but we could probably deal with that. So how long did it take? It took more than two years.
Liz and Shell's Cave was a real project. Liz was in the midst of cancer treatment, serious cancer. In hindsight, I should have just stopped the project until Liz's treatment was farther along.
I don't know why I didn't. I guess we were hurting for money and we needed income. I remember coming... home at one point and there being a huge hole in the top of the cave with no plan to close it in and thinking how far is this going. The uncertainty of the cave, the way it was developing, and not knowing where it was going, all of her, you know, cancer fears were kind of, you know, went into the cave.
And it was getting big, although contrary to what I had seen, to popular opinion. I know when something's finished. When he has a shovel in his hand, he's like a Coke addict with the piles of Coke. He just wants to keep going and going.
So Liz would say, I have cancer. You go tell him he has to stop. No, not stop, but finish what you're doing, not make it any bigger. And he'd go, yeah, I couldn't really stop what I was doing.
I couldn't adjust it. They were getting more and more anxious about the size. You know, people are very scared about having something that doesn't have blueprints to it. I thought I had convinced him, it's big enough, you have to finish it. And then I went up there and he had dug these closets out in the bedroom area.
And I went, you told me you were not doing it anymore. And he said, just these closets, just these closets. Somehow the money... He kept being there when we needed to pay him, and he only worked 20 hours a week, and he was only charging us $15 an hour or something like that.
It was too much. I felt like I was causing suffering. You know, while I was unfolding this project, that was, you know, that was something. I can still feel it when I'm in Liz and Chell's cave.
I can still feel the emotional residue. All of a sudden it was a beautiful cathedral-like cave instead of an ever-expanding hall. We thought we were doing him a favor, but in the end he was doing us a favor because he made us this beautiful, beautiful thing. Actually held to the plan that I had.
But the original plan was two months and it took two years. Yeah. Did I say two months? I don't know.
I think he guards his life. You know, I mean if you call that selfishness, he just makes sure that he gets to live his life the way he wants to live it. Of all the other ones I've seen, ours is the only one that got totally finished. It seems like Ra had just, everybody who had him build a cave for some reason stopped before it was 100% done.
I often envy the person that goes into their studio and doesn't allow anyone in until they're ready to have it be revealed. But with myself, I have people watching the process. It gets to a certain stage and they'll say, oh good enough, because I don't want to pay anymore.
I don't have the reputation and the status to call the shots. When I came to Christina's property, I was looking for a cave site. The property only goes up a little bit of a ways, so I thought I could get back in there and put the cave back in there by coming low through here.
But in doing so, I came in and hit this major rock wall. and decided that this cave wasn't possible. Well, you know, I told Christina maybe we can make a cave out of it. She got pretty upset. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no.
You're not going to leave me with a hole. There is a cave here. I just know it.
So he said, oh, all right. Well, look, I'll dig in this direction. I said, no, no, no. I really feel you should dig it in this direction.
So, you know, he's the digger. So he went and dug in the direction that he wanted to dig in, and he came up into rock. And I said, do me a favor. humor me. Why don't you dig in the direction that I want you to dig in?
So he did and lo and behold we started to get a cave. We did come up against a couple of little disagreements, let's say. My client was not pleased with my carving.
I don't know what she thought where I was going. I mean, they're really, really beautiful, but I was envisioning, you know, a cave that had the simplicity of the Eagle Cave. And I really just wanted him not to do this. You know, I wanted to be kind of part of... of the discussion of what did they look like rather than him starting to do it before we'd even built the canvas here.
She said stop doing your little squiggly things on the walls and you know I was momentarily upset but I had to laugh. You know there were a lot of things that we were discussing. We're going to put a waterfall out there, a little fire pit here and this is where we're going to have the goddess. She was going to be carved out of this. In fact, someone was going to do me like this.
Anyhow, I was frustrated by perhaps the fact that he was functioning very independently. This was on my land and this was my property and this was my cave. I just kind of had to call it quits at one point because I'd kind of spent my budget, which was around about $20,000. $90,000, $25,000 I think, and I was still getting more curly Q's than I was wanting.
And I couldn't quite get Ra into the mindset that we were working together. He was off on his lone artist thing. It's definitely important for me to have a rapport with the people that I'm doing a project with. They have to trust me to a certain degree.
They certainly have input, but I am not the paintbrush. and my client is not the painter. These freestanding geological formations are called hoodoos.
I was a traveling cave salesman. I could see these formations from the highway. This is my stuff. This is great stuff. I had pictures of the very first cave, the heart chamber, and went to John and David who owned this, showed them a few pictures, did my song and dance, and then gave them an offer they couldn't refuse.
It was ridiculous. He came and visited with us in 1994. He said, my father said I would never do anything but dig ditches. He says, I want to create something. different and I want to be known as an artist. And at that time the only thing he had created that we knew of was a heart chamber.
The funny part about it is I've never called it a cave. This is a work of art that you can enter into and view from within and there's not many works of art that you can do that with. It was never finished to my satisfaction. It got 85% finished and then it was good enough for the people I was doing it for.
It was a disappointment. In my estimation, it is completed. I know he could have done other things and had other ideas, but at that point, we were beginning to run out of funds, and it was a commissioned work of art.
Well, when you don't have the authority of being a famous... Artists and then offer people to do the job for laboring wage, it probably doesn't set up an environment of a lot of respect. I wanted to put mirrors in here and without understanding how I wanted to use them, they thought it was too kitschy. We thought it would gild the lily.
We were afraid that it was going to look a little cheaper because everything was so natural inside. And to throw in something that's artificial like a mirror, just it didn't set that well with us. So I came up here on my own, bought the mirrors on my own, and put the mirrors in.
It looked like pools of water, which is what I was trying to do. I believe people who are commissioning a work of art should be able to give some direction. Just like, who is Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel?
Who do you think told him what to do? He knew what he wanted to do, but he was directed by the Cardinals. Hi, I'm Rob. I'm the guy that dug the cave.
Oh, so incredible. It just felt very sacred up there. Uh-huh.
Creative and artistic and even just looking through the windows with the light and there's a little pool in there and a little bowl of water. Yeah, that bowl of water was at the mirror. Oh, was it a mirror?
Well, it looked like water. I was certain it was water, but then I did kind of wonder about that. We had no idea what to expect when we got up there and we looked in the door and we were just like, wow.
It's like a shrine. You know, you think, oh, it's just a caved out place. A bunch of little altar or something. And incense sticks and a couple of dimes and quarters. But it's not bad at all.
Because we've seen those before. When a person walks into these caves for the first time, it's just, they'll say, I had no idea. You know, it's just, wow.
You know, it's just, and they are magical. I think I'm the only one who thought about venue as a psychological tool. These caves are designed as transformative spaces.
The fact that the cave is underground and you feel the earth around you, yet the Sun is pouring in. Those are the juxtapositions of the two metaphors of our life, the inside, the within, and the without. It's a perceptual trick that brings out deep expansive emotionality. These caves don't really have an effectiveness as an exhibit.
I'm like a violin maker who, you know, I just don't want to put my violin on the wall and have it admired. I want somebody to play it. I want people to get a break in the continuity of who they are.
And in that break, a lot of things can happen. Personal insights, access to enthusiasms. I've seen it happen. It's fun to watch.
It keeps me digging. He works so hard. I'd like to see his life be easy, you know, in financial ways, which he doesn't really care about, but he does have a partner in his life.
lives with so there's some you know I'd like to see him be comfortable but that's me that's not him he doesn't really care I don't put any energy into being a success in the world my strategy is to wait for something from heaven to come along and lay it on me, which I think it will happen. I mean, I've been telling my poor dear Paula this. She doesn't even want to listen to it.
I just decided to let him do his thing and I'll do my thing and I don't know. You know, I think everybody has that kind of problem in their relationship where one person is more into security and one person wants to... do what makes him happy and I mean it's hard to find the balance but I do feel a little resentful at times because I would like to have the freedom to go do my thing and have him be the money support for a while it's not easy being a cave diggers wife always being broke month to month you know what are you up to, you know, is it going to help pay the bills?
You know, these are a big dynamic. And then it's the uncertainty of, you know, well, where's, you know, where's your motherfucking legacy? You know, where's our retirement? These aren't easy things. These aren't easy things.
But we're trying to find a middle ground in which things will work, where I can live my self-expressive life and not have it be a burden of... of anxiety and uncertainty. Where are those vases?
Did you use those vases for? Oh no, I took them out. But are they out there?
There's not much to pick. I'll go, I'll go look. We don't have to make a big, we just need one sunflower, that's very important.
A lot of times I do see his point, you know, looking at the bigger picture and I'd get into, well, what about us? You know, and it's-Us being your future. Right, you know, and it's like really, when you look at the world.
It's like we have a great life and nothing to complain about. It's gotta be perfect. What can I say? It's hot out there.
It's the drought. No flowers. Her demands of security are so reasonable that most people would be very sympathetic to Paula's position. I am too.
I am too. But I can't, you know, this is who I am. This is who, you know.
The problem was that everyone else grew up and I didn't. You know, it's Peter, it's the Peter Pan syndrome. This is my backyard. There's our house down there.
As much as I've enjoyed the work under all kinds of circumstances, I'm through working for other people. The psychological issues with the patron, the fact that I end up just paying my bills. The fact that the project is starting to go into a direction that I get excited about and then it's cut short for lack of money or lack of enthusiasm. I don't have enough time to go off on a two or three year project.
This is it. Everything that I've done has been a lead up to this. to the magnum opus.
I've had ideas for ages that I've never gotten to try. I'm starting to get the feel of this, the feel that I'm trying to create here. A juxtaposition of hugeness of these big pillars with the intimacy of space.
I'm about 80% dug and I'm flushing out the shapes of the walls. I'm making it so that the space can be viewed from a lot of different vertical heights. This high area is kind of like a sky run around the center of the space.
With the clay strata as being kind of a cap or a lid on the bottom of the space and these cleaner walls representative of the sky. I had cracking in the material so I did reinforce a pillar with rebar. I opened up the cave too much and there was too much air coming in drying things out too quickly.
Once it's sealed that should solve that problem but this is taking such a long time to dig. For the last year and a half, Paula's been holding me forward as far as bringing in money while I've been working on this. And usually the person that is paying for the cave, I call it their cave.
She wasn't too pleased with me putting Paula's cave. cave on there because her point was, you know, this is my project. So she felt that it was out of control and every once in a while she would have me come and erase this. And then I'd put it on and erase it and put it on and erase it. So finally this is kind of half erased.
Why did you keep putting it back on? The ebb and flow of marital compatibility. This cave in process will probably be the last cave. I mean, realistically.
There's just, you know, physically, there's a finite time in which someone can work almost completely by themselves. Shit. It happened at 3.14. A very exciting process came to a very abrupt conclusion. I had a Volkswagen sized piece fall out of a pillar.
It was very definitive. very definitive that the project is too dangerous. You know, I can't, I no longer have faith in this layered material, and I certainly can't make a place that I'm going to open up to others. I want to...
I'd take the last bit of juice in my life and do something significant. I really thought this billiard project was it. Major cave-in, major structural failure that in this experimental material told me that this was not a place for a cave.
This is geology at its most unpredictable. That evening he was so calm and he just told us, you know, there's good news and there's bad news. And the good news is I'm here to tell about it but the bad news is the cave collapsed and he just did it like that. So it was like, ugh. I was just working right here, putting this piece of rebar on, twisting it, when around the corner was the kaboom.
As you can see, the place that I'd been sitting 20 minutes before, this giant chunk, when I looked around, came down and just, you know, it just, the toothpicks of the 2 by 12s. And immediately I realized what had happened, that the project had ended. If I hadn't owned the property, I would have never gone this far.
I wasn't working with material that I was familiar with, and I took a chance and it didn't work. I was pretty shocked that two years of his work were ruined. I know when I have something mess up that I've been working on even for a couple days, I get really pissed off. Maybe I have a little more attachment to the final product than he obviously does because... he wasn't so upset.
I don't know. It was a shock. All this time that he spent working on it is just over in a blink. I think the next day he was on to something else. The process is something that takes everything I got and it gives me something back while I'm doing it that is intangible so I've not lost that time I've lost the results of that time to have it as a tangible end result I'm not going to have that for that but I could say that for a lot of the other stuff that I've done.
He had always said that this was going to be his last cave so I just figured out. once that collapsed that maybe he would start writing or do something else creative with his time but sure enough he found another place to dig. My wife Nancy and I were sitting at home a few days after he told us about this and I thought I've just got to call him up to console him, make sure that he's not suicidal or something like that.
So I called up and he said, Pierre you've got to see this new site I've got a whole project up in the hills the collapse of that one was just what I needed to get me where I really need to. There you go. Even though he got through it so quick, I'm still processing the collapse of the old cave.
It's a little scary. You know, I know there's going to be times I'll be wondering where he is, and should I go check on him? This is the Ojo Caliente sandstone.
I know what I'm doing in this stuff. You know, I've had 25 years of experience in it. This is the place.
It's the new magnum opus. I'm on a time crunch as far as the aging process, so I'm just going to have to go for it. I can safely say it'll probably take 10 years. The rest of my cave digging life. Today is day one of Dig Day.
October 8th, 2010. All's well that ends. Okay. Here goes bugs.
Magnum Opus take two.