The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015

by Rebecca Skloot

  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 21st 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 nineteen days underground, in the cold and wet without a bed, with a forty-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 ten-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 wheezing, 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 one-sixty, 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.

  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 a 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 ’90s. 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.”

  SHEILA WEBSTER BONEHAM

  A Question of Corvids

  FROM Prime Number Magazine

  1. Corvidae Corvus brachyrhynchos

  If men had wings and bore black feathers,

  few of them would be clever enough to be crows.

  —Henry Ward Beecher

  Birds are everywhere here on the Carolina coast. Pelicans skim the blue-bellied rollers, bank for advantage, plummet and rise. Sanderlings and stilts drill for morsels in the sand while egrets stalk the marshes. Birds are everywhere. They are hungry, and they come to dine on the veranda of this inn on the beach. Flocks of gulls hang heavy-bodied over the tables long enough to check for an unguarded bit of fish or bread or meat, and the bold ones find the thing they all want. I watched a herring gull last October pluck a fillet from between two halves of a tourist’s bun and rise on the same wingbeat. Laughing gulls, with their black bonnets and chuckling calls, are less common, but they do come, mostly in spring. Other birds, too. Pigeons, of course. Grackles and cowbirds. Dozens of the hard-to-name wee guys that birders call LBJs—“little brown jobs”—flit here and scur
ry there for crumbs and handouts.

  Crows. If gulls are the berserkers of birdkind, swooping and screaming and plundering, then corvids, including crows, are the strategists. They watch. Face a crow at close quarters and you see that you are the one under study. With an eye sharper than his pointed bill, the crow pins down your moves and knows you better than you know him. Scientists have documented what farmers have said through the ages: crows can count. They communicate. Consummate mimics, they even copy human speech.

  Picture this: you are sitting on the hotel veranda with a friend, tucked under a huge red umbrella, gazing through dark lenses across dunes and beach to the glittering blue Atlantic. You chatter, you listen. Your lunch arrives. And a big black bird. He, or perhaps she, perches on the back of the chair directly across the table and tilts his head. “Hello,” you say. You smile at the bird. You fancy that he smiles back. You and your friend watch him and laugh. He hops onto the table, tilts his head, and eyes you again. You ask, in your clever human way, “Are you hungry?”

  And the bird says Yeeees.

  His voice scrapes your eardrum, and his enunciation could use some work, but there’s no mistaking the word. Just to be sure, you ask, “Would you like something to eat?” and again he says, Yeeees. Who could say no to that?