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Joshua Dennis squinted hard at the first faint glow.

Light. The 10-year-old had almost forgotten about light during those five days on a ledge deep within the Oquirrh Mountains.

Curled up in a 6-foot-wide, 25-foot-deep ore cavity 2,000 feet inside Tooele County's abandoned Hidden Treasure Mine, and enveloped by utter darkness, he had waited, prayed, slept, called for help and daydreamed deliriously about juicy hamburgers at his Kearns elementary school cafeteria even as he tasted what seemed like cotton balls.

When would someone come for him?

Someone was trying. Mine rescuers from Utah Power & Light who hadn't given up hope since he went missing on a Friday in September 1989 were exploring shafts and walking nearly 20 miles of tunnels, desperately trying to find Joshua.

That's when the boy saw the glow. Ray Guymon and Gary Christensen were close. Joshua called out. The men yelled back.

"This person asked me to slide down because he couldn't actually see me from where I was," Joshua Dennis, now 26 and a newlywed, said Wednesday.

It was Christensen. ''He couldn't believe he had found me. He held me tight and said, 'We're going to take you to your mom and dad.' ''

"My daddy's outside but my momma's at home," Joshua replied, trying to explain to the two men that he was on a camping trip with his father and some guys from Boy Scout Troop 845.

"Do you know what day it is?" one of the men asked.

"Sunday?" Joshua guessed.

''He said, 'It's Wednesday. Today's Wednesday.''

The boy couldn't believe it. He had been gone for one, two . . . five days. But it didn't feel that long.

"I didn't have a concept of time," he said. "I don't understand what happened with all that time."

Things were getting more curious by the minute. Joshua's rescuers were frantic with worry, yet he wasn't afraid. He had never been afraid, not for a moment.

"I was 10. There were a lot of things I didn't know," he said. "Like, I didn't know the mine had tons of mine shafts that drop for hundreds of feet, or that people supposedly could survive without water for about three days before they died of dehydration. I think that's one of the things that definitely preserved my life. I didn't focus on those types of things."

The only frustrating thing was waiting, knowing that he had just a handful of licorice Nibs to last him until he was found.

It was what happened after that bothered him most.

There were the talk shows and the newspaper interviews, the one-year anniversary visits to the site, the LDS Church firesides, the speaking engagements, ''Inside Edition'' with Bill O'Reilly. Too many lights.

"I've had to live the story over and over again, and so it's permanently burned in my memory," Dennis said.

The publicity left him dazed for years - seven, to be exact.

Dennis said he couldn't figure out what the country was so interested in, what great feat he had accomplished, why his classmates would whisper his name in the school's hallways as if he were some sort of hero. Mostly, he wondered why he just wasn't allowed to move on.

Only now is it making sense, Dennis said. His really was an amazing story. He's not avoiding interviews anymore. And he wants to reach out to others, like Brennan Hawkins, who have been lost and found.

His advice: Hang in there. Don't be reluctant to share your story. Maybe it will change someone's life.