The Best American Sports Writing 2015

by Wright Thompson

  The rains were getting to be a serious concern now. The tunnels below the Last Bash weren’t known to flood, but neither were the tunnels above it before 2009. Then some gravel got clogged in a fissure at the bottom of a pool, flooding the chamber behind it and trapping seven people in the cave below. Five were able to dive out, but the other two, Nikki Green and David Ochel, had to sit and wait, not knowing if the tunnel would clear. “We had no food for five days, just watching the water,” Green told me. In the end, the rain abated long enough for them to climb out, and then the cave flooded for the rest of the season. “We stayed too long,” Green said.

  A neighboring cave, known as Charco, had an even more unpleasant history. In 2001, a team of six cavers was heading back to the surface there, after a week of surveying, when they noticed the underground stream starting to rise. It had been raining for two days by then, and the tunnel was so tight that it began to flood. Charco is a place to make even cavers claustrophobic: the first camp is a 12-hour crawl from the surface, mostly on your belly. By the time the last team member neared the entrance, the water in the tunnel was inches from the ceiling. As he treaded water, lifting his face up to breathe, bits of soft white debris drifted toward his mouth and got caught in his hair. But it wasn’t debris, as it turned out. A cow had died in the entrance that spring. Its belly was infested with maggots and the rains had washed them into the cave.

  If there was an advantage to going deep, it was that the cave was fairly sterile. In the lower reaches of J2, the only signs of life were a few translucent crustaceans and bits of refuse that washed down from above. (In the Huautla system, teams sometimes found Popsicle sticks a mile belowground.) By early April, the camps were reprovisioned, Rickel and van den Berg were safely back on the surface with Stone, and Gala and Short were alone once again at Camp Four. The sump beyond it, once the dark side of the moon, now seemed comfortingly familiar. Short had discovered a larger opening in the chamber at the end, which allowed them to dive out with their rebreathers and equipment. When they had swum down the canal on the other side and followed the tunnel to the misty chamber with the waterfall, it was as if they’d arrived at another beginning. “Now we were in truly dry, unexplored cave,” Short told me. “Our lights were the first light that had fallen on this place since it had been created.”

  Two promising passages lay ahead: the fossil gallery where the river had once flowed, and the canyonlike fissure where it now fell. They took a moment to gather themselves at the top of the falls and to make a pot of hot chocolate. But Gala couldn’t bear to wait. While Short tended the stove, he free-climbed the 40 feet to the other side of the canyon—ropes would come later. Then he shouted at Short to join him.

  It was just as they’d hoped: a cavernous passage, perhaps 15 feet high by 30 feet wide, with a packed mud floor. There was even a flat spot ahead where they could set up a camp. The gallery followed the path of the tunnel behind them at first, then meandered left and right, up and down. Gala and Short took surveyor’s notes as they went, one man walking ahead and holding up a saucepan lid while the other shot a laser at it to get the distance. They used a compass and a clinometer to measure the tunnel’s direction and slope, marked the numbers with a Sharpie onto a waterproof sheet, then copied them onto a piece of colored tape and tied the tape to the reference point. (Back at base camp, Stone would enter the data on his laptop to create 3-D maps of the cave.) This was standard practice in new tunnels and could add hours to a trip. But not here: after 300 or 400 feet, the passage abruptly ended. Rather than drop down to rejoin the stream, it had circled back on itself like the oxbow in the sump, ending in a large chamber walled with flowstone. It would take them no farther.

  Gala and Short trudged back the way they’d come, their spirits deflated. A dry fossil gallery is the caver’s version of a superhighway: the fastest, safest way underground. But at least they had another option. “There was still the waterfall,” Gala told me, “and it had to go further down.” He and Short strapped on their climbing harnesses and unpacked their rigging. The hammer drill had gone dead after the battery got wet—the fuel cells had all met the same fate—so Gala had to knot the rope around a rock to anchor it. But it held firm as they rappelled down the chasm. Forty feet below, the water thundered into a shallow pool, then slipped down a stair-step streambed to another, much larger pool below. They’d left their dry suits at the top of the falls to air out, so they had no choice but to swim across in their thermal underwear. The water here was a few degrees warmer than higher up in the cave, but still close to 40 degrees below body temperature, and the sopping cloth kept it close to their skin. Yet they kept moving forward. “Expedition fever had bitten us,” Short says.

  When they reached the far shore, the water cascaded down to yet another pool, 20 feet below. They rigged ropes for the descent, scrabbled down, and swam across, their limbs trembling as the cold sank into them. In the distance, the dusty beam of Gala’s headlamp picked out a pile of boulders in their path, but this only quickened his pulse. It reminded him so clearly of a passage higher up, where a series of pools led to a breakdown pile along a fault line, and then a wide-open tunnel beyond it. “I had this feeling that we were almost done,” he told me. “We will climb these boulders. We will find a huge borehole, and that will open the way to Chevé.”

  It was not to be. When Gala and Short arrived at the breakdown pile, it was just the back end of a small sealed chamber—another cul-de-sac. Its boulders were bound together with flowstone, the holes between them no larger than your hand. “There was no air, no anything,” Gala recalls. As for the river, it had found a long crack in the floor less than an inch wide, and spooled through it like an endless bolt of turquoise cloth.

  They stood there for a moment in shock, not quite believing that they’d reached the end. They knew that the cave kept on going below, gathering the waters of Chevé beneath them. Yet there was no way forward. Like the cavers in Krubera before the side tunnel was discovered, they had yet to unlock the system’s secret door. Gala looked over at Short—he was shaking uncontrollably now, his wiry limbs lacking all insulation—and was grateful, once again, to have him at his side. “It’s like a friendship during war,” he told me. “So strong an experience, it ties souls together.” He clasped Short’s shoulder and told him to go make some hot drinks while he finished surveying. Then they packed up their gear and began the long climb back to the surface.

  Deep caving has no end. Every depth record is provisional, every barrier a false conclusion. Every cave system is a jigsaw puzzle, groped at blindly in the dark. A mountain climber can at least pretend to some mastery over the planet. But cavers know better. When they’re done, no windy overlook awaits them, no sea of salmon-tinted clouds. Just a blank wall or an impassable sump and the knowledge that there are tunnels upon tunnels beyond it. The earth goes on without them. “People often misunderstand,” Short told me. “All you find is cave. There is nothing else down there.”

  When I spoke to Stone recently, he was already planning his next trip to Chevé. His team had brought back some intriguing data, he said. Gala’s survey showed that the end of J2 lies directly below a cave entrance discovered in the early 1990s. The tunnel beyond it is fairly cramped, but there’s enough air blowing through to suggest that it leads to a larger passage—one that could bypass the blockage in J2. If Stone’s team can connect the two tunnels, then drop down into the main Chevé passage, they might still stitch the whole system together. “Where did the water go a million years ago? That’s what you have to ask yourself,” Stone said. “As a cave diver, you have to think four-dimensionally.” In the meantime, this spring, he was joining an expedition across the river to Huautla, where Jason Mallinson had managed to reach a depth of more than 5,000 feet—a new record for the Western Hemisphere. Huautla can never go as deep as Krubera, Stone said, much less the full Chevé system. But it could well be the longest deep cave in the world. Why not see how far it goes?

  That was as good a reason
as any. For most of the team, though, it wasn’t the chance at a record that would bring them back, or even the lure of virgin cave. It was the camaraderie underground—the deep fellowship of shared misery. The camps down there were just a few damp tents on rubble, clustered around a propane flame. The food was the same dehydrated stuff they ate up top. A trip to the latrine could be a life-threatening experience—a squat on slippery rocks above a thundering chasm. But after weeks underground, even that smell could lift your spirits. It held the promise of dry clothes and hot coffee, black humor and noisy sex, drowned out by sing-alongs. Gala and Short spent one very good night hollering “C Is for Cookie” until they were hoarse.

  On their 21st day underground, when they finally emerged from the cave’s rocky clutch, they blinked up at the sun like newborns. Their skin was ashen, their eyes owl-wide and dilated. “I had these mixed emotions,” Gala told me. “I understood that this is the end of J2—nine years of my life, of the most beautiful exploration of my life. It was a sad story.” Yet it had also been the longest and hardest trip he’d ever taken, and it made the return to the surface all the sweeter. The green of the forest, so luminous and deep, seemed nearly psychedelic after weeks of dun-colored earth and the pale wash of his headlamp. The smell of leaves and rain and the workings of sunlight were almost overwhelming.

  “It is beautiful here, isn’t it?” Gala had told me when we first met, on a gray, drizzly morning at base camp. “Listen to these strange birds! When I’m back on the surface, just by contrast, I enjoy every piece of my life. Everything is fantastic.” He laughed. “Some people say that all this caving is just for a better taste of tea.”

  WELLS TOWER

  Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?

  FROM GQ

  IT IS JUST before dawn at a hunting camp in Botswana’s game-rich northern savanna, and Robyn Waldrip is donning an ammunition belt that could double as a hernia girdle. “You can’t help but feel like sort of a badass when you strap this thing on,” she says. Robyn, a Texan in her midthirties, seems to stand about six feet two, with piercing eyes of glacial blue shaded by about 12 swooping inches of eyelash. She’s a competitive bodybuilder and does those tractor-tire and sledgehammer workouts, and there is no part of her body, from the look of it, that you couldn’t crack a walnut on. In her audition video for a reality-television show called Ammo & Attitude, Robyn described herself as a stay-at-home mom whose “typical Friday-night date with [her] husband is going to the shooting range, burning through some ammo, smelling the gunpowder, going out for a rib-eye steak, and calling it a night.”

  Robyn Waldrip could kick my ass, and also your ass, hopping on one leg. Her extensive résumé of exotic kills includes a kudu, a zebra, a warthog, and a giraffe. But she has never shot a Loxodonta africana, or African elephant, so before she sets out, her American guide, a professional hunter named Jeff Rann, conducts a three-minute tutorial on the art of killing the world’s largest land animal.

  “You want to hit him on this line between his ear holes, four to six inches below his eyes,” Jeff explains, indicating the lethal horizontal on a textbook illustration of an elephant’s face. The ammo Robyn will be using is a .500 slug about the size of a Concord grape, propelled from a shell not quite as large as Shaquille O’Neal’s middle finger. About three feet of bone and skin insulate the elephant’s brain from the light of day, and it can take more than one head shot to effect a kill. “If he doesn’t go down on your second shot, I’ll break his hip and you can finish him off.”

  “Anything else I need to know?” Robyn asks.

  “That’s it,” says Jeff.

  “Just start shooting when they all come at us?”

  “The main thing is, just stay with the guns,” Jeff tells the rest of the party, which includes Robyn’s husband, Will Waldrip, two trackers, this journalist, a videographer who chronicles Jeff’s hunts for a television program, Deadliest Hunts, and a government game scout whose job it is to ensure that the hunt goes according to code. The bunch of us pile into the open bed of a Land Cruiser and set off into the savanna, the guides and the Waldrips peering into the lavender predawn for an elephant to shoot.

  If you are the sort of person who harbors prejudices against people who blow sums greater than America’s median yearly income to shoot rare animals for sport, let me say that Will and Robyn Waldrip are very easy people to like. They didn’t grow up doing this sort of thing. Robyn’s dad was a fireman who took her squirrel hunting because it was a cheap source of fun and meat. Will’s father was a park ranger. In his twenties, Will went into the architectural-steel business, and now he co-owns a company worth many millions of dollars. They look like models from a Cabela’s catalog. They are companionable and jolly, and part of the pleasure of their company is the feeling that you’ve been welcomed into a kind of America where no one is ever fat or weak or ugly or gets sad about things.

  The Waldrips arrived in Rann’s camp on the eighth of July, and they’ve allotted 10 days for the hunt. But it is unlikely to take that long to find their trophy. Botswana contains somewhere in the neighborhood of 154,000 elephants, most of them concentrated in this 4,000-square-mile stretch of northern bushland where the Kalahari Desert meets the Okavango Delta.

  In addition to airfare, ammo, and equipment costs (the antique double-barreled Holland & Holland rifle Robyn bought for the trip typically sells for about $80,000), the Waldrips are paying Jeff Rann $60,000 for the privilege of shooting the animal, at least $10,000 of which goes to the Botswana government. In September 2013, a ban on elephant hunting goes into effect in Botswana, making the Waldrips’ hunt one of the last legal kills. It is a precious, expensive experience, and Robyn wants to take her time to find big ivory, not to simply blast away at the first elephant that wanders past her sights.

  Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of Africa. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team. A softhearted or lazy dog who lets the prey escape can catch a serious ass-kicking from the rest of the heavies in the pack. What’s that, Mr. Wild Dog? You’re on the endangered-species list? Well, karma is a bitch. Let’s move along.

  Now here is a pair of water buffalo. Charming they are not. They scowl sullenly from beneath scabrous plates of unmajestic, drooping horn. “Hostile, illiterate” are the descriptors I jot on my notepad.

  And there is the southern yellow-billed hornbill, and there the lilac-breasted roller, which, yes, are weird and beautiful to look upon, but if you had birds jabbering like that outside your window every morning, would you not spray them with a can of Raid?

  Say what? I’m unfairly harshing the fauna? Yes, I know I am. I’m sorry. To the extent that I’ve discussed it with Jeff Rann and the Waldrips and other blood-sport folk I know, I believe that hunters are being sincere when they say they harbor no ill will toward the animals they shoot. Not being a hunter myself, I subscribe to an admittedly sissyish philosophy whereby I only wish brain-piercing bullets upon creatures I dislike. I’ve truthfully promised Jeff Rann that I’m not here to write an anti-hunting screed, merely to chronicle the hunt coolly and transparently. But the thing is, I’m a little worried that some unprofessional, bleeding-heart sympathies might fog my lens when the elephant gets his bullet. So I’m trying to muster up some prophylactic loathing for the animals out here.

  Perhaps out of a kind of kindred impulse, Will and Robyn Waldrip are quick to point out the violences elephants have inflicted on the local landscape. And it’s true, the Loxodonta africana isn’t shy about destroying trees. We are standing in an acreage of bare earth ringi
ng a watering hole Jeff Rann maintains. It looks like a feedlot on the moon. Where there is not a broken tree or a giant dooky bolus, there is a crater where an elephant started eating the earth.

  “Man, [the elephants] have just destroyed the ecosystem,” Will says. “People who oppose hunting ought to see this.” Will is a bow-hunter. Elephants aren’t his bag. And while he has no reservations about Robyn shooting the elephant, he is doing, I think, some version of the hunt-justifying psych-up going on in my own head. He wants to feel like it’s a good deed his wife is doing out here, a Lorax-ly hit in the name of the trees.

  It’s midafternoon before we spy a candidate for one of Robyn’s Concord grapes. In the shade of a very large tree, a couple of hundred yards from the jeep trail, is something that does not at first register as an animal, more a form of gray weather. We dismount and huddle before setting off into the brush.

  The elephant appears to be a trophy-caliber animal, but at this distance, it’s hard to say for sure. “One thing,” Jeff says to Robyn. “If it charges, we have to shoot him.”

  “If he charges, I’m gonna shoot him,” Robyn says.

  The entourage begins a dainty heel-to-toe march into the spiky undergrowth. As it turns out, it is not one elephant but two. One is the big, old, shootable bull. The other is a younger male. Elephants never stop growing, a meliorative aspect of which (elephant-hunt-misgivings-wise) is that the mongo bulls that hunters most want to shoot also happen to be the oldest animals, usually within five or so years of mandatory retirement, when elephants lose their last set of molars and starve to death.