MONTREAL – While thousands of Canadians were trapped in their homes at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, one Quebec woman decided to do the same—but in a cave in France.
Mariana Lacon was underground in the cave for 40 days without access to the outside world.
“We’ve all been living COVID-19 and most people are trapped in their apartments and their homes, you know, that’s super hard. Like the cave, we had more space we could walk around and we didn’t have restrictions,” she explained.
Lancon was one of seven women and eight men of different ages and backgrounds who volunteered for the Deep Time research project led by the Human Adaptation Institute in France.
The project was to scale how humans adapt to extreme environments without the ability to measure time or connect to the rest of the world.
“We’re not going to see the sunlight again, right? We have no more watch, no more phones, no more internet. We’re completely disconnected. No more news from the outside, so we really focused on our group and what was going on in this environment.”
A Montreal outdoor adventure guide by trade, Lancon said she wasn’t nervous to be trapped in a cave for so long. She says there was beauty in being disconnected.
“There was this sense of freedom that is unique, you know? Removing time, removing all these obligations, we’re just living each day really the present moment actually,” she told CityNews.
“We didn’t have all that we have in a normal society. We didn’t have TV, Netflix, but we had really simple stuff and we took time to really enjoy them.”
Participants had to live in cold, wet, and extremely humid conditions without natural light.
Each person had their own tasks and dedicated over two hours to scientific data tracking.
The experiment forced volunteers to go back to basics.
“Sometimes we’d be having like a discussion with other people and talking about something and we were like, ‘Oh, we don’t have the answer. Oh, let’s Google it!’ But we don’t have Google anymore, we cannot Google it, we don’t have the information. So the only information we had is what we brought with us.”
After several weeks of hearing the echoes of her violin through the caves of southwestern France to crawling through muddy nooks to fetch water, coming back to reality isn’t as great as it would seem.
“I think the hardest thing is to readapt to this. Like, to take the time to think what we lived through, what was the experience, what did we experience and take a step back and readapt to the world.”
