The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  When I first met Covington, late one night, he’d just slouched back into camp after five days underground. His eyes were bloodshot, his blond hair clumped and matted, his skin as blanched and fuzzy as moldy yogurt. He was so tired that he could barely stand, and his clothes reeked of cave funk. Yet he seemed fairly content. “A good caver is one who forgets how bad it really is,” he said. There was more to it than that, though. Covington didn’t feel claustrophobic underground; he felt at home. The rock walls, to him, offered a kind of embrace. As a boy, he told me, he used to flop around so much in his sleep that he often fell on the floor. Rather than climb back up, he’d crawl under the bed and stay till morning. He felt better there, beneath the springs, than he did looking up at the ceiling in his big empty room.

  It was an instinct almost everyone here seemed to share. One of the cavers remembered staring at a slice of rye bread as a child, fascinated by all the air bubbles beneath the crust. He wanted to go down there. Gala was so comfortable in caves that he sometimes felt as if they were made for humans. “The passages are exactly the right size for my body to fit in,” he told me. And his wife, Kasia, who worked as a photo editor in Warsaw, was nearly as happy underground as he. They took turns exploring the cave and taking care of their daughter, Zuzia, up on the surface. Zuzia had spent much of her life watching people disappear into holes and reemerge weeks later. She traversed her first cliff face at the age of four, in Spain’s Picos de Europa mountains, and kept a map above her bed with pirate flags pinned on all the countries she’d visited. When she first came to Mexico, in 2009, she would sometimes cry out in frustration, “It’s so uncomfortable here!” Now she flitted between tents like a forest sprite, half naked in the cold, fencing with corncobs and setting traps for mice. Life at camp had built up her immune system, Gala assured me, and had taught her the “skills of dynamic risk assessment.”

  I wished that I could see Chevé through her eyes. Before her father went underground with Phil Short, for their long hike beyond Camp Four, he’d read to Zuzia from The Hobbit. Chevé was no Lonely Mountain. Yet it had glistening caverns and plummeting boreholes, stalagmites tall as organ pipes and great galleries draped in flowstone, deeper than any goblin lair. And they were right beneath her feet. “When you squeeze through these small holes into these big halls, you feel like you’re the only person on the earth,” Gala said. “It’s like the kingdom of the dwarves.”

  Gala had been exploring Chevé with Stone so long that he could nearly navigate it blindfolded. After a while, he said, you start to create a map of the system in your mind, to memorize each contortion and foothold needed to climb through a passage. On the steepest pitches, certain rocks almost seemed to smile and wave at him, and to reach for his hand. He would grab them, thinking, Old friend! And yet the deeper he went the more unfamiliar the territory became. By the 13th day, the escalating uncertainty—the risk of a careless stumble or a snapped limb so far from the surface—was starting to weigh on him. “The further in you go, the more you begin to doubt and question yourself,” he told me. “What the fuck am I doing here?”

  The sump beyond Camp Four was like nothing Short and Gala had seen before. The three sumps higher up in this system were relatively shallow and less than 500 feet long. This sump was more than 30 feet deep, and it seemed to go on and on. And something more rare: it was beautiful. The water was a luminous turquoise, flowing over pure-white sand; the limestone was streaked with ocher and rust. Most sumps are cloudy, tubelike passages carved by underground streams, but this one had been a dry cave not long ago. The stalactites on its ceiling could only have been formed by slow drip. With its lofty chambers and limpid water, it reminded Gala of the blue holes of Florida and the caves of the Yucatán. Finning through it felt like flying.

  The hazards of cave diving are inseparable from its seductions. Wide-open tunnels can fork into a maze; white sands swirl up to obscure your view. You think that you know the way back only to reach a dead end, with no place to come up for air. “People think that cave diving is an adrenaline sport, but really it’s the opposite,” Short told me. “Whenever you feel your adrenaline racing, you have to slow down. Stop, breathe, think, act, and, in general, abort. That’s the rule in cave diving.”

  Short is one of the sport’s premier practitioners, with experience as far afield as the Sahara and shipwrecks off Guam. His body is a testament to its rigors: long and arachnid, skin taut over bone, head shaved to shed its last encumbrance. With his rapid-fire talk and glasses that seem to magnify his eyes, he could pass for a street preacher or a pamphleteer. But his absurdist wit was a great gift around a campfire, and his diplomacy often took the edge off Stone’s blunt directives. Gala and Short were a good match: one quiet, the other loquacious; one expert at climbing, the other at diving. Just as Gala could pick his way through Chevé by memory and internal gyroscope, Short could divine a sump’s path from half-conscious clues: the flow of current and its fluctuating temperature, the shape of the walls and ripples in the sand. Still, he took no chances. As they swam from chamber to chamber, the beams of their headlamps needling the dark, he unspooled a three-millimeter line behind him, like Theseus in the Labyrinth.

  An hour later, he signaled for Gala to stop. Below them in the sand was the line they’d laid down 15 minutes earlier. The tunnel had led them on a loop. They’d expected the sump to be about 1,000 feet long, but they’d already gone twice that distance, and time was running out. Cave divers like to ration their air supply by a rule of thirds: one part for the way in, another for the way out, and a third in reserve. On a four-hour rebreather, that left them less than half an hour for exploring. The cave was a honeycomb, they realized, with tunnels angling off in every direction and hardly any current to guide them. “There were passages everywhere, everywhere,” Gala recalled. “It was so complex we could spend a year looking.”

  In the end, they just picked a tunnel and hoped for the best. When they’d backtracked around the loop, reeling in their line, they came to a kind of four-way intersection. One passage led back to the beginning of the sump, another to the loop behind them, a third to a dead end they’d explored earlier. That left one unexplored passage. It took them up a short corridor, along a rising slope of terraced mustard-colored flowstone, and into a small domed chamber. There was an air bell at the top about the size of a car trunk, so they swam up and took off their helmets and neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to be at a dead end. They were cold, tired, and disoriented, and their air ration had nearly run out. There was no choice but to head back. “We were just a little overwhelmed by this dive,” Gala told me. Then they heard the waterfall.

  A mile above them, at base camp, Stone was waiting impatiently for their call. This was the pivotal moment in the expedition—the day for which he’d spent four years perfecting gear, recruiting cavers, and raising money. (The total budget for the trip was roughly $350,000, most of it paid for by equipment sponsors and the Discovery Channel.) He had expected Gala and Short’s reconnaissance trip to take less than six hours—two hours to dive the sump, two hours to look around and find a camp site, and another two to swim back and call in—yet nine hours had passed. “There are a bunch of scenarios that could be going on right now,” he told the Discovery cinematographer, Zachary Fink. “Even a one-kilometer swim with fins would take only about an hour. And that was way beyond our limit.”

  Stone looked haggard and thin, his mustache drooping over sallow skin. Weeks of shuttling supplies into the cave had taken a toll on him. He was a strong climber and diver, but he wasn’t a “squeeze freak” like some of the others. His broad, bony shoulders weren’t built for these tunnels. In the tightest fissures he had to take off his helmet just to turn his head, or strip down to his dry suit and wriggle between walls for hundreds of feet. (They called one passage the Contusion Tubes.) “It’s hypothermic as hell down there,” he told me. “The wind is whipping through, the water’s in contact with the rock, and you can just feel the calories being sucked out. It c
an be more dangerous than a high-altitude peak at 25 below.” By the time he’d resurfaced a few days earlier, he was coming down with a flu. Then it rained for three and a half days.

  It was late evening when the call finally came: “Base camp, base camp, base camp!” Stone rushed over to the phone and hit the Talk button. “Tell us what happened,” he said. There was a blast of static, then Short’s clipped British accent came crackling over the line. “We have good news and we have complicated news,” he said. “From a point of view of future exploration, complicated is today’s understatement.”

  The waterfall could mean only one thing, Short and Gala knew. They’d reached the end of the sump and the river was flowing nearby. How to get there? When Gala ducked his head underwater and looked around, the chamber looked sealed off. But when he looked again his headlamp picked up an odd texture in the wall to his right. There was a gap in it just below the waterline—wide enough for a person to squeeze through. Gala could tell that his rebreather wouldn’t fit, so he handed it to Short, along with his mask, helmet, and side tanks. “I left him holding all these things with his teeth and both his hands,” he recalled later. Then he held his breath and dove through.

  When he resurfaced on the other side, he was in a fast-flowing canal of clear water. The walls were formed by ancient breakdown piles, their boulders napped in calcite; the low ceiling was hung with stalactites. As he swam, a wide, airy passage opened up ahead, with a large pool in the distance. It glimmered in his headlight. He hiked over to it and swam across, feeling light and buoyant without his rebreather. He could hear the roar of the waterfall growing louder as he went, but an enormous stalagmite blocked the way, with only a thin gap to one side. He stretched an arm and a leg through the opening and shimmied around, thankful again to be rid of his gear. When he was through, he found himself in a great chamber filled with mist and spray, its floor split by a yawning chasm. The river ran into it from the right and fell farther than his light could follow. Across the chamber, 30 or 40 feet away, a huge borehole stretched into the darkness. This is it, Gala thought, the breakthrough they’d imagined. With any luck, it would take them straight to Chevé’s main passage.

  Stone wasn’t so sure. “Is there any place at all over there that you saw that would be suitable for a camp?” he asked Short over the phone, when the story was done. “Negative. There is not a single flat surface other than the surface of the river.” Stone clutched his head and frowned. The sump was too long. Two thousand feet! They didn’t have enough line down there to rig that distance. Without rigging, most of the team couldn’t dive the sump safely, and without their help Gala and Short couldn’t resupply for the next push. “The whole game had changed,” Stone told me later. “Just diving through wasn’t the game. The game was to get all the support material to the other side. It was like running a war: if you don’t get the food and fuel and ammo to the front line, you’re going to stall out.”

  Only a few dozen people in the world had both the caving expertise and the scuba skills to go this deep in the cave. Of those, 12 had originally agreed to join the expedition. Then the number began to drop. Three died before the expedition began: one on a deep dive in Ireland, another in an underwater crevice in Australia, the third from carbon monoxide poisoning in Cozumel. Three had left early or had not yet arrived. And three had physical limitations: James Brown had gimpy knees, a Mexican diver named Nico Escamilla had a pulled groin muscle, and a veteran diver named Tom Morris had torn a rotator cuff. “It was like getting hit in the head with a two-by-four,” Stone told me. “Oh, crap! We’ve lost most of our divers! The three that are qualified to dive the sump are the two that are down there and me—and, God bless them, Phil and Marcin want to see daylight.”

  It was too late to recruit new divers to the team. The best candidate, a veteran British caver named Jason Mallinson, had joined another expedition, across the river at a cave system called Huautla. “He’s one of the best divers in the world,” Stone told me. “But he has a certain personality—it’s abrasive, and what I really wanted this year was harmony, and I got it.” Stone had planned to join Gala and Short for the last leg of the expedition, to see the very deepest regions of the cave. But without more divers to support them he wasn’t sure it was safe to continue. “They did a fantastic thing there, but it may also be the end of that route,” he said, after Short got off the line. “There is no glory in rushing into something like that and losing a friend. It just is not worth it.”

  Word of Stone’s misgivings filtered down to Gala and Short as they worked their way back up the cave, camping with the support crews. It seemed a kind of betrayal. The yo-yo logistics of deep caving required that they return to the surface to rest and reprovision, but they had every intention of going back down. Yes, the sump was longer than expected, the conditions more challenging. But they’d found exactly what they wanted on the other side. How could they stop now?

  “My thinking was that Bill is just tired with this cave—that this is just an excuse not to come back,” Gala told me. “I think that he spent too much time preparing this expedition, making all these tools, all these deals.” But Stone insists that his reluctance was just a matter of safety and logistics—an equation like any other, balancing risk and reward. On Gala and Short’s first evening back at base camp, the scene around the campfire got so tense that Stone shouted at Zachary Fink to turn off his camera. “It’s always like that at some point in an expedition,” Gala told me. “There’s always a shouting match between Bill and me, with someone almost crying.” But over bourbon that night and coffee the next morning, they slowly hashed out a plan. They would have to work fast, resupplying the camps themselves and exploring the new tunnels without backup divers. If they hung hammocks from the wall beyond Sump Four, they could bivouac there and explore the cave for another three weeks before they ran out of rope. With any luck, they’d reach the Chevé juncture before they were done.

  Stone went underground the next day. Short took five days to rest and heal—half the usual recovery time, after three times the usual stay underground—and by the morning of March 21 he was leading a ragtag team down the mountain. This was just a five-day trip to help prepare the cave for the final push. But with the expedition so undermanned, Short had no choice but to lead the team and to bring two novices along: Patrick van den Berg, a hulking information-security specialist from Holland, and David Rickel, an emergency medical technician from Texas. Van den Berg was a weekend caver in relatively poor shape (“I get most of my exercise moving a mouse around,” he told me). Rickel was the team medic. He had a rock climber’s ropy build, but the closest he’d come to deep caving was working in an iron-ore mine in Australia.

  Short was of two minds about taking them. He knew that one injury could derail the whole expedition, and that the cave ahead would test even the fittest athlete. “You can lift weights and go wall climbing and run a few miles every day, but it’s not the same,” he told me, as we wound our way down the slope. “When you’re 19 days underground, in the cold and wet without a bed, with a 40-pound pack on your back, crawling on your hands and knees or climbing up and down cliffs or diving through sumps, and then you come back and resurface, and four days into your 10-day break some sadist wants to send you back down under, and you end up volunteering to go—most people hear that and they think you’re stark raving mad.” Yet Short was an optimist at heart and an experienced teacher—he gave scuba and cave-diving lessons in England—and he’d seen even novices accomplish unimaginable things. “It’s not the body that breaks, it’s the mind,” he said. “If you compare this to what the British infantry were lugging in the Ardennes in World War I, or what Shackleton’s team did in the Antarctic, this shit is easy. They were trudging up those slopes with old-fashioned ropes and no oxygen, and I’m sitting here complaining about the hole in my antibacterial underwear.”

  Whether van den Berg took any comfort in this wasn’t clear. Less than an hour from camp, he was already red-faced and wheez
ing, sweat streaming down his chest. The altitude was getting to him, he told me. Hiking at 7,000 feet made him feel like he was breathing through a straw. When the team set down its packs for a brief rest, Short came over and crouched beside him. “I’m a little concerned that you’re as tired as you are after just walking down a hill,” he told him. “Your pulse was up to 160, which David tells me is pretty high.” Van den Berg shook his head and insisted that he was fine. He wouldn’t have a problem going down the cave. “But you have to come back out too,” Short told him.

  We were headed toward a cave entrance known as the Last Bash, about a mile from base camp. Discovered in 2005, it was a side entrance to the J2 passage, an hour or so down the slope from the original entrance. It would allow the team to bypass a sump and cut 12 hours out of the trip down, but it was tighter and more punishing than the other entrance—just a crack in the rock 10 feet above the trail, flanked by boulders and elephant-ear vines. If Short hadn’t pointed it out, I would have passed right by it.

  Short’s team peered up at the opening for a moment, then slowly put on their gear. They stepped into their waterproof caving suits and climbing harnesses, attached special ratchets for rappelling down cliffs, and strapped on their helmets and headlamps. “This is not going to be some macho-driven bullshit,” Short assured them. “It’s going to be a slow bumble down the cave, with double dinners when we get to camp.” They made a quick snack of crackers and energy bars, while Rickel checked van den Berg’s heart rate again. It had dropped to 120. “How did you end up here?” van den Berg asked him when he’d finished. Rickel laughed. “A long sequence of poor life choices,” he said. Then they crawled into the crack one by one and disappeared.