A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  tional Park where we yo-yoed the half-mile-high face of the mountain called El Capitan. That, however, is not the longest rappel ever made. In 1980, a team that included Nick Nichols and Kent Ballew yo-yoed a 3,200 foot drop off Mt. Thor, on Baffin Island. That accomplishment is the longest single rope rappel ever made—PMI supplied a mile-long rope for the effort—but the Guinness Book of World Records refused to sanction the record. The editors felt people might die trying to outdo the cavers.

  SRT, however, was developed in caves, in complete darkness, for the purposes of exploration in an underground wilderness, and this fact was what brought me to Georgia and Ellison's Cave. Discovered in 1912, the cave was virtually ignored until the winters of 1968 and 1969 when Delia McGuffin and Richard Schreiber decided to push a few passages. In so doing they discovered the two deepest free-fall pits in America: Fantastic Pit, at 600 feet, and Incredible Pit, at 440 feet. A caver making the connection in Ellison's must negotiate both pits.

  Five of us—Nick Nichols, Kent Ballew, Smokey Caldwell, myself, and Jim Youmans, an Atlanta high-rise contractor—rappeled about eighty feet into a vegetation-choked sinkhole high on the west side of Pigeon Mountain. It was a place of sloping dirt walls and copperheads that brought us to a 100-foot-long horizontal passage leading into Ellison's Cave proper. The passage ended in a tight steep canyon called the Stairstep Entrance: another short rappel. At the bottom there was a long belly crawl: a nose in the water crawl so painfully difficult that it is called The Misery. Happily, some enterprising cavers long ago dug through a wall of breakdown— a mound of rock that had fallen from the ceiling of the cave—and created a jaunty walk-through passage straight to the lip of Incredible Pit. The passage there is very narrow, and people stand single file, waiting their turn on the rope, which is anchored into the rock at several different points.

  I had had a small crisis of courage on the lip, but now, secure in the fact that I hadn't death rigged myself, I was taking my time, enjoying the view and feeling an eerie dreamlike calm: this can't be real. I tightened the bars on my rack in order to slow down. A hot shot like Kent Ballew can take this 440-foot drop in about five minutes. I wanted to make my descent last, to spend half an hour savoring Incredible Pit. The walls, scoured by centuries of acidic falling water, were smooth, like the barrel of a shotgun. There was a monumental symmetry to the pit that sent the soul spinning: it was a cathedral crafted of stone and darkness.

  At times, the rope hung so far from the wall that there was nothing to be seen but a shimmering twilight at the periphery of my light. At such times it was possible to feel something of what astronauts must feel on spacewalks: a sense that you have never been so alone, so exhilarated.

  In time I could see my light reflecting off the calm pool at the bottom of Incredible Pit. I hung off there for a time, took a flashgun from my pack, and waited for Kent and Smokey to get on the rope. They would position themselves at certain intervals, then we would all turn off our lights and Nick would open the lens on his camera. At a signal, everyone would flash, and, in the development of time, we'd have a photographic idea of the enormity of the pit. And so we hung there for half an hour or more, coordinating flashes for different shots, then dropped onto the floor of the cave. We had another twelve hours of hard travel in front of us until we hit Fantastic Pit.

  I recall moving through a world of spaghetti passages snaking every which way. The maze rose to a high walkthrough passage, and from there it was just under a mile, as the bat flies, to Fantastic Pit. There was a lot of climbing and crawling and sweating so that when we stopped, the cold began working at us and it was better to move than sit.

  Five or six hours later, square in the gut of the mountain, I was led down a keyhole-shaped passage about ten feet high. Off to the right was a clear, almost transparent formation that dropped about three feet from the ceiling, and

  there were glassy bubbles in it. It looked like ice, as if it might melt, and it is called the North Pole for that reason. Some of the ice had fallen to the floor. I found it tasted like Epsom salts. "Looks like a chandelier, doesn't it?" Nick Nichols asked me. "I mean, if there was ever to be a chandelier in here, this would be it. I think this is the most beautiful cave formation in the South. Maybe in the country."

  It may be, but just past the North Pole is a passage that leads down to a room completely filled with spun glass and crystal-clear needles and cotton candy. These Epsomite flowers bloom in Angel's Paradise, a cavern about ten feet square and five feet high. Because there is no way to get to these exquisitely delicate formations without dropping Fantastic or Incredible Pit, they are little visited. Even so, curious cavers carry dust in with them, the dust coats the delicate structures, and the rule is: "if you've seen it before, don't go again." I was directed to the cavern and given fifteen minutes alone, in Angel's Paradise. It was a pristine underground wilderness, and for the nonce, it was mine alone and I felt dizzy with fatigue and privilege.

  Nearby there were great striated walls, and it was possible to see where the mountain had moved, where the walls had grumbled and slid, one against the other, in an area called the Slick and Slides. After that, the passages got smaller and more profuse, like an anthill on about three different levels. We emerged into a dry sandy streambed, ate some lunch, then moved down a narrow passage and climbed over what Nick called "this horrible thing," which was a slick, muddy rock that blocks the tunnel. About eight feet up the Horrible Thing there was a small opening you take head first. If you can get up. I needed help getting up the Horrible Thing, and I was thinking about how helpless I really was in the face of such obstacles—how perfectly dead I'd be alone here—when I tumbled eight feet down the other side of the damn Horrible Thing and found myself on the floor of a room 250 feet long and 600 feet high.

  Tag Hall is the floor of Fantastic Pit, the deepest dome pit in America. The pit itself is a beautiful oval and its floor is smooth, pebbled, almost perfectly flat, as if groomed.

  Smokey had rigged two ropes earlier, and they hung from a balcony 510 feet above. Nick started first, Smokey followed while Kent Ballew and I climbed the second rope. I found I could climb about 40 or 50 steps (40 or 50 feet), kicking out with each step to help the Gibbs ascender bite into the rope, before I needed to push the top Jumar up the rope and sit, breathless, in my seat harness. Below, I could feel a rhythmic jerking on the rope as Kent climbed.

  At the 400-foot level, there was a boulder the size of a small house hanging from the smooth bore of wall. My instructions were to sit there and wait for more instructions. Nick Nichols was up top already, working on a picture. It took some time, preparing the shot, and I must have sat motionless for fifteen minutes, feeling again the odd liquid sensation of being suspended, alone in space, at peace, serene in a hostile world. I was sweating profusely in the chill, and my entire body was leaking heat, was literally steaming. The smooth ovoid walls that enveloped me shimmered and glittered in the shafts my light threw into the steam, which was the stuff of my own life. There was a sense of a connection made, an Angel's Paradise of the soul to be savored.

  And then we switched off our lights, set off the flares and flashes, not to mention a magnesium explosion on the floor of the pit, all for Nick's camera. Fifteen minutes later, I pulled myself over the lip of the balcony, fifty stories above the pebbled floor below.

  We were almost out: from there it was a simple misery to belly up a streambed, claw up over another horrible thing, then crawl on our hands and knees for fifteen minutes until we got to another fixed rope slung off a wall eighteen feet high. Having just spent an hour climbing 510 feet, gearing up for this climb was a pain in the ass, which is why Smokey calls it the Nuisance Drop. At the top, we found ourselves in the Rectum, a round upward-sloping passage of slippery and unpleasantly suggestive mud, which empties into the Warm-Up Pit: a 125-foot rope climb. At the top of the pit is the Agony, a 1,500-foot belly crawl. This is the natural exit but, some years ago, cavers discovered a stand-up pas-

  sa
ge leading up a stream bed to a small hole that they dug out, forming a new exit. This exit bypasses the Agony and is called the Ecstasy.

  So we walked out of the Ecstasy fifteen hours after bypassing the Misery. We had dropped Incredible and passed under the North Pole. We had sat for a time in Angel's Paradise, braved a couple of horrible things, struggled up the throat of Fantastic, and made the connection with something we knew with our first breath and have not entirely forgotten.

  cides, generates his intensity in three dimensions ... at the expense of the fourth. Of course, he thinks, everything is relative, and it's just a theory, but what if a man could ski fast enough to stop time dead? Energy would equal, what, mass times . . .

  "This time," the instructor is saying, "we're going to try something pretty complicated. It's called the snowplow turn. . . . Hey, Al! You still with us, buddy? Earth to Al . . ."

  Al is not paying strict attention to the instructor. He is thinking that it's pretty damn funny the way time has no dominion over a man skiing the raggedy edge.

  a A e've all experienced it: some spate of events that

  I S M poleaxed time.

  Ifll It seems to start in the belly. Remember the mm mm last time you were driving along the freeway, ^m ^y no cars out front, none behind, nobody in sight anywhere. It's just you and the radio and some vague daydreams about taking a shower with the one you haven't seen in too long and suddenly RIGHT BEHIND YOU there is a great blast of sound, as of some massive juggernaut bearing down on you from behind, some eighteen wheeler out of control and howling in rage and warning . . . where is it? where is it? . . . and you feel an instantaneous jolt in the belly that snaps your spine straight. Suddenly, without thinking about it, you can see all directions at once: to the empty road ahead and the empty road behind, to the total lack of vehicles on all sides. And slowly, yes, you come to understand that the intrusive sound comes not from the road, but from a highballing freight train that runs parallel to the freeway.

  That feeling is gone from your belly, you are covered with a fine glaze of sweat, and your hands shake a bit on the wheel. The jackhammer inside your chest begins to sound more like your old familiar heart. How long did that all take: ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour? No, probably less

  than five seconds all told: less than five seconds from full alert to anticlimax, with no time at all elapsed between the scream of the train and the jolt in your belly.

  It's a chemical reaction, pure and simple, that cripples time in your mind. Each of us possesses adrenal glands, two penny-sized hunks of specialized meat perched atop each kidney, and it is the inner ten percent of this gland, the medulla, that controls, among other things, our perception of time when the body is at stress. The adrenal medulla— given properly stressful situations—secretes adrenaline and noradrenaline. Both hormones pump the body up to full capacity: they increase respiration, make the heart beat faster, and pump the blood away from those areas that don't need it (like the belly) and funnel it to those that do (like the hands).

  Only recently have scientist been able to differentiate between the effects of adrenaline and noradrenaline. In a typical rat torture study, psychologists have discovered that you can scare rats stupid with a sudden and obscenely loud blast of noise, a noise like the howl of a highballing freight train. Rats that are scared at random intervals exhibit high levels of anxiety, and their blood is found to contain extraordinary amounts of both adrenaline and noradrenaline. But rats blasted by sound at regular intervals exhibit less anxiety. They seem to be able to prepare themselves for the regularity of terror, and their blood shows low levels of adrenaline and high levels of noradrenaline.

  Noradrenaline is the good stuff. Adrenaline is associated with fear and anxiety, while noradrenaline affects those systems in the brain that are concerned with emotion: especially euphoria, well-being, and alertness. A man or woman can increase levels of noradrenaline in the system by subjecting the body to the stress of sustained exercise. Runners who are able to push themselves for half an hour or more

  sometimes experience "runner's high." The constant stress on the body has set noradrenaline sloshing about in the brain. These runners talk about a kind of euphoria, about a feeling of well-being, and a near-supernatural alertness, a perception of our world so intense, so encompassing, that time is no longer of the essence.

  Cross-country skiers and racers, of course, regularly experience runner's high, but downhillers often describe similar sensations. The feeling is most often associated with a kind of stress we define as danger, or perceived danger: call it fear. Ski long enough at the limit of your abilities, and time slips into low gear.

  The trick here is training. Sure, that once-impossible slope is still scary—it will get the anxiety-producing adrenaline pumping—but practice reduces adrenaline levels and diminishes terror. Like rats subjected to regular sound-blasting, the trained skier should exhibit higher levels of the good stuff, of the noradrenaline, which produces both euphoria and that preternatural alertness that begins to coagulate time itself.

  Filmmakers have known that slow is fast since at least 1954. Before that, directors tried to suggest supernatural speed by filming a sequence in fast motion. I am think of F. W. Murnau's 1922 classic, Nosferatu, with Max Schreck starring as the most horrid Dracula ever. Schreck, rising from his coffin, the long fingers, gnarled in front of his splendidly terrific face as if they were talons, is enough to send the faint-hearted running blindly out of the theater. But the scene in which Nosferatu's black horse-drawn coach makes supernatural time along a mountain trail generally draws laughs from modern audiences. Fast motion is funny. Horses run ridiculously. Cornering is jerky. Fast motion is Chaplinesque. Subjectively, it just doesn't feel right.

  In 1954, Akira Kurosawa tackled the problem of filming incredibly fast action in Seven Samurai. When the bandits rode into that fictional sixteenth-century village, the seven samurai chopped 'em up in slow motion. And it worked.

  Other directors began to catch on: ah so, they seemed to say in unison, slow is fast.

  In 1969, Sam Peckinpah used slow-motion techniques in The Wild Bunch. The final slaughter in a Mexican village, circa 1913, is a symphony of violence, and like most deadly violence, it happens with a rapidity so intense that the most horrifying sequences are realized in slow motion.

  In the seventies, the idea that slow is fast came to television in two successful series: "Kung Fu" and "The Six Million Dollar Man." Inching into the eighties, a series called "The Incredible Hulk" presented the physiologically sound idea that a man under enormous stress might call on unimagined wells of strength. Like those women you read about who lift Camaros off their trapped babies, the Hulk only tore down buildings when that mother, Necessity, dictated. And he did it in slow motion.

  These filmic techniques work because everyone has suffered through some degree of strong stress. Everyone knows, at least subconsciously, that time seems to slow down when we endure intense experience. Our bodies remember: slow is fast, slow is strong.

  We don't actually think: hey, let's maximize regularized stress to stimulate the old noradrenaline secretions, get high, and watch time decelerate. What we do is push it right to the raggedy edge because it's fun, because it makes us feel good.

  What we do is think: I can ski this slope. We think, I'll really burn up the hill this time. What we do is take calculated chances because they make us feel good.

  I'm at the top of a good run called Pierre's Knob, at Bridger Bowl outside Bozeman, Montana. It's a little after four and the lifts are scheduled to close at 4:15, but if I tear down the knob and cut over to the middle lift down the short, steep expert slope called White Lightning, I can probably make one more run.

  Now, I know this is a dicey situation. I've been skiing straight since ten this morning, with no time off for lunch. My legs are a little shaky. The big sky is glacial and gray, and it's getting difficult to see the bumps. This, I know, is

  the time of day when people get hurt. They get
hurt doing exactly what I am doing. They get hurt skiing right up to the edge of their ability when they are tired and it is late and the light has gone bad on them.

  No matter. Here I am, blasting down Pierre's Knob— best run of the day, I'm really burning—building up a head of steam for the short flat before White Lightning and ohoh, a little shot in the belly because I almost lost it there . . . but, yes, I've got it back, I'm in control and I can see all the way to the lip of White Lightning. My mind's eye can see the way I'll take it. No stopping at the top to read the slope: I'll just bang right over the lip in a shower of snow and be down to the lift before caution can assert itself.

  The run is so steep that you can't really see it until you are right on top of it, and I am contemplating the line I'll take in my mind as I roar up onto the lip. Time begins inching toward freeze-frame because something is terribly wrong here. Something is dangerously askew. Ah, there it is, right on the lip of White Lightning: the top of a small bush or tree is sticking four or five inches up out of the snow. I have the leisure to notice that it looks like a juniper and to reflect that they are sturdy little suckers. Microseconds inflate into minutes. It is plainly evident that I am going to hit that juniper. I am already skiing the raggedy edge. I am going to crash and burn unless I can somehow adjust for treacherous vegetation.

  Time, fortunately, has run up against a sea of noradrenaline and is struggling against it like a mastodon in a tar pit. I'll just put all my weight over onto the right ski like this; and I'll lift the left ski over the juniper. Plenty of time: the bush is approaching at a single frame a second. Slow motion city. There is time to feel the wind on my face, to realize that it will probably snow this night. I am looking at the juniper, but I can see the lift below and half a dozen people waiting in line. I know that I will make the last run. I have all the time in eternity to lift my left ski. . . .