by Tim Cahill
Here, though, is a tiny nubbin, a pimple on the polished surface, and I can just get the very tips of two fingers on it, while the toe of my boot falls on another nubbin, giving me just enough height to reach up and grab the ledge. I pull myself up and half-sit, half-lie on the burning rock while my heart bangs away at my rib cage and my breath comes in great superheated blasts. There is something at the back of my throat that tastes of blood and bile. Below, Yosemite Valley stands out all green and hard-edged in that peculiar penetrating vision one acquires while the noradrenaline is pumping. For the moment, I am one of the Gods. Invulnerable.
When I get my wind back, Doug starts climbing again. I have three more pitches like the last one until I can honorably get off the rock, and the adrenaline is beginning to take over from the noradrenaline. I was a fool to ever agree to start this climb. I want off—off!—and lying there on my back, it is my full desire to whimper like a beaten dog.
May 13, 11:45 P.M.,
The Mountain Bar, Yosemite National Park
I am working on my fourth beer. Something very curious is going on: Despite the fact that I spent half the afternoon promising myself never to get on a wall with Doug Robinson again, the two of us are planning tomorrow’s climb. I feel very good indeed. At present there is nothing to be anxious about, and my exceptionally high spirits probably have to do with an excess of noradrenaline in my system.
All around us, others are planning their own climbs. Most everyone in the place is a climber. According to Doug, there are about thirteen hundred of them in residence, and about two-thirds of them are here tonight. A few of them probably went out and scared themselves badly today. The others, like Doug, did a few easy practice climbs, in preparation, no doubt, for other, more fearsome attempts. For every climber, no matter how accomplished, there is a climb somewhere that is just at the limit of his or her abilities.
They are lucky that way. In sports like football, an athlete who has competed in his event a hundred or more times must “psych” himself up to get the adrenal hormones flowing. This problem of diminishing hormonal returns is called habituation. When scientists subjected rats to stress applied repeatedly and in a rhythmic manner, the levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline in the blood dropped consistently. In this regard—I don’t want to hear about any others—I am like those rats. I was, for instance, nowhere near as frightened on my tenth skydive as I was on my first.
Habituation forces the true adrenaline junkies to continually push their abilities to the limit. That is why the best climbers are always looking for a more difficult route to the top of this or that peak, and why divers risk nitrogen narcosis and the bends to set deep-diving records, and why the Federation sends the Starship Enterprise out into the void with instructions to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”
All around me, climbers are frightening themselves with tales of their most nearly fatal climbs, or remembering friends who perished on some godforsaken wall: typical adrenaline-junkie talk. I’ve been asking around about knuckle jams: I know I can get a sweet, sharp rush if someone tells me about losing a finger that way.
It is midnight and the bartender calls time. No one wants to leave and it is getting rowdy in this den of addicts. Eventually the Park Police step in to clear out the bar. Their attitude toward the climbers is the attitude of all police toward all junkies.
And so we step out into the brisk night air, shouting and shoving one another, regarding the police with amused tolerance. People who spend the best part of their lives confronting the first fear aren’t much frightened by uniforms.
Into the Eyewall
“A little nervous?” the master sergeant asked.
“Scared’s more like it,” I said.
My notes were spread out on the table in the briefing room at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and my eye kept falling on the least-reassuring bits of information I had collected. Like this sentence: “In a single day a moderately intense hurricane often releases as much heat energy as would be released by the simultaneous detonation of 400 twenty-megaton hydrogen bombs.”
“Listen,” the master sergeant said, “I flew my first penetration in 1976, and it was like my first combat mission. If it wasn’t for them five other guys I woulda stood in bed.”
“It can be pretty terrifying,” a captain said, “but oh God, when you’ve got one of those well-defined babies out there …”
“A classic, like Allen or Camille or Freddy …”
“And you’re banging through the eyewall for that first fix, you feel like a kid climbing to the top for the first drop on his first roller-coaster ride.”
“Horrifying.”
“But beautiful, some of them.”
“Next to sex,” the master sergeant said, “its the best thing going.”
I was sitting around the table with members of the 920th Weather Reconnaissance Group and their flight arm, the 815th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, the men and women known as the Stormtrackers. In another hour I’d fly with the 815th, and they’d get a fix on Hurricane Frances—her precise location, size, intensity, and internal barometric pressure. We’d fly directly into the eye of the hurricane.
“We’re accident-free and fatality-free,” a lieutenant colonel said. “Fortunately, we’ve had a precisely equal number of takeoffs and landings.”
“But what about this Frances?” I asked. “You think she could be a killer?”
“That’s what we’re going out there to find out.”
Every year between June and November an average of one to three hurricanes hit the United States. They spawn over warm tropical water in the Atlantic, sometimes as far east as the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa. Photos from the satellites GOES 1 and 2 initially show a central dense overcast. This is an area of intense low pressure, and it pulls the surrounding air to it the way gravity pulls water down a hill. But because of the spinning of the earth, the Coriolis effect, the inward-rushing air begins hooking in a counterclockwise direction. (Take a globe and set it spinning. Now, using a marker, try drawing straight lines on it, north to south and south to north. The curvature of the lines is the result of the spinning of the globe, and it is more pronounced at the equator, over those warm waters where hurricanes are born.)
The winds want to fall into that low-pressure hole and fill it up, but because of the Coriolis effect, they end up veering off to one side and spinning around the most intense area of low pressure, like a satellite around the earth. As the system becomes closed, circular, the spinning wall of wind can reach speeds in excess of two hundred miles an hour. And this “eyewall” is, in effect, a solid bank of thunderstorm cells several miles thick. The area of utter calm inside the eyewall is the eye of the hurricane, an area of such intense low pressure that it draws the eyewall to it, tighter and tighter, making it move faster and faster. (For example, a whirling ice skater: With arms outstretched he moves slowly, but with arms pulled in, he is a spinning blur.)
Full-blown hurricanes look exactly like a child’s pinwheel in photos transmitted from the satellites. But scientists working with the photos can only compute the storm’s position to within forty or fifty miles, not well enough to provide adequate warning to residents of an area where the hurricane may come ashore. And that is where the Stormtrackers come in. Their job is to provide the information scientists need to predict accurately what the hurricane will do. They must penetrate the eyewall and take the barometric pressure within the eye; the lower it is, of course, the more intense the hurricane is likely to be. They pinpoint the exact location of the beast and measure its intensity. As one lieutenant colonel said, “It’s like they told you there’s a big mean bear in a cave; then they give you a thermometer and say, ‘Here, go take its temperature.’ ”
The bear’s temperature is the information that allows scientists to predict, within about a hundred miles, where the hurricane will hit, giving residents twenty-four hours to evacuate. A real killer hurricane can drive a fifty-mile-long d
ome of water twenty to twenty-five feet high before it. At the turn of the century—long before the Stormtrackers got into the business of taking the bear’s temperature—a storm surge estimated to be in excess of twenty feet hit Galveston and killed more than six thousand people. By contrast, a surge from Camille, which hit the Gulf Coast in 1969, killed only three hundred, many of whom had simply ignored the order to evacuate.
Now Frances was forming and becoming more intense out in the Atlantic, and we were preparing for the first fix. The plane was a weather-modified WC-130H, a turboprop cargo carrier with a reputation for near-indestructibility. We took off at 3:30 A.M., threading our way between twenty-thousand-foot-high pillars of stratocumulus clouds. By 5:30 the sun was beginning to rise above Frances: We could see the curve of the earth below, but half the horizon was a raging, churning black cloud, its top fringed with pink.
The plane dropped to ten thousand feet, the altitude at which we’d make the penetration. Now we were making our way through the feeder bands, the outer arms of the pinwheel: great curving lines of thunderstorm cells. The sky was blue in the spaces between the bands, but occasionally we had to break through one of them. At those points the pilot asked the navigator to find him a “soft spot.” The thunderstorm cells were composed of updrafts and downdrafts that could lift or drop a plane seven hundred feet in seconds, that could sheer off a wing or crumple the plane. The navigator read his radar, looking for a cell less bright than those around it. A soft spot.
We burst through the soft spot with a terrific jolt, and lightning crashed all about us. The wall cloud, that spinning mass of thundercloud cells several miles deep, was only twenty miles ahead. Just for a moment I could see the ocean below, and it was webbed with long, thin streamers of bright green. The weather officer estimated—by the condition of the water—that the winds down there were blowing at a hundred miles an hour.
We hit the eyewall at 183 miles an hour, the exact speed needed for penetration, given the current weight of the plane. The pilot wanted to keep the left wing of the plane pointed directly into the wind. To get twisted about and to fly nose-first into the wind would cause a stall, and a stall would be fatal.
Sometimes the eyewall will simply spit the plane out, like a penny dropped on a spinning 75-rpm record. But we hit the wall right at 183 miles an hour, our left wing into the wind. And then there was no way the pilot could read his instruments, because we were all being hurled in every direction at once. The bite of the seatbelts against our shoulders and waists was painful. There was a deafening clatter, like the sound of an ice cube dropped into a blender. Outside, a ghostly light, St. Elmo’s fire on the wing, glittered obscenely in the darkness. Lightning exploded, freezing us all in a single stroboscopic burst. Our faces were wide-eyed, contorted, and white as death.
And then we were through the eyewall, into the eye, and there was no more turbulence, none at all, but I heard several seconds of heavy breathing in my earphones before the pilot could make himself sound professional and unconcerned. “Piece of cake,” he said.
There was blue sky above, blue mirror-calm below, and a single pink cloud floating peacefully at about four thousand feet. The sun, still low in the east, lit the west eyewall, a terrifying, churning mass of darkness showing tinges of pink and crimson and gold. The eye itself was elliptical in shape, ten miles by fifteen, and some of the southern wall had sheared off. Not at all a tight or classic formation. An instrument dropped into the eye on a parachute showed the barometric pressure to be 960, nowhere near the 911 of Allen. The winds in the wall had not exceeded 140 miles an hour. Though she was no lady, Frances wasn’t shaping up as a killer, either.
Several days later a high pressure dome north of Frances dissolved. The hurricane made an abrupt right turn and blew itself out over the cold waters of the North Atlantic.
Over My Head
No Laughs in Satan’s Silt Hole
In a recent edition of the magazine Underwater Speleology, there is a cartoon by H. V. Grey labeled “Open Water Certification.” It shows five scuba divers, just the tops of their heads and their snorkels protruding from the water. Four of the divers, apparently, have just completed the necessary classroom and pool work and are about to make their first dive. The instructor, who has chosen a submerged cave for the certification dive, is saying, “Okay, here’s the dive plan: You guys go in first, then I’ll follow and tie the ski rope to the big warning sign. Then we’ll leave when the last person reaches the reserve on his J valve. Is there at least one light for every three people? Good, then let’s all see Satan’s Silt Hole.”
Now, I like to think I have a good sense of scuba humor, and it bothers me when jokes swim right by without so much as a friendly wave. So I asked a certified cave diver named Steve Hudson to explain H. V. Grey’s joke. Hudson, a Georgia executive who is active in underwater cave rescue, said, “Well, it’s sort of a sick joke, one of those things you laugh at because it’s too true.”
All the divers in the cartoon, he said, are about to die. They are going to have an inevitable and exceedingly dumb accident, something along the lines of stepping into an open elevator shaft or backing the station wagon over the lip of the Grand Canyon. A laughable death.
I still didn’t get it, and Hudson offered to take me cave diving. Half an hour inside a water-filled cave, Hudson said, and I’d be able to appreciate the deadly serious nature of H. V. Grey’s humor.
In the two decades between 1960 and 1980, 234 people have died diving the dark waters of Florida’s caves. That’s a little more than eleven deaths a year, making cave diving the most dangerous risk sport in America. Of the 156,000 people who dived Florida caves in 1979, there were five fatalities, a bit under average, but still one death for every 31,000 divers. Deaths have been reported in other areas—in Texas, California, and elsewhere—but the situation has gotten so bad in northern Florida that several counties, tired of the waste of lives and the risk inherent in recovering the bodies, have contemplated closing the caves to divers.
Among certified cave divers, those who have completed a National Speleological Society (NSS) course, there has been only a single fatality. But many certified cave divers—Steve Hudson estimates there are no more than a thousand of them in the country—have been called upon to recover bodies from the underwater caves. This is grim work, and the NSS Rescue Recovery Team has installed warning signs at the mouths of certain underwater caves: PREVENT YOUR DEATH, BE TRAINED IN CAVE DIVING OR DON’T GO FURTHER. MANY CERTIFIED DIVERS—EVEN INSTRUCTORS—HAVE DIED HERE DUE TO IGNORANCE OF CAVE-DIVING PROCEDURES. PLEASE LISTEN.
The instructor and the students in Grey’s cartoon plan to ignore what seems to be a persuasive warning.
We arrived around dusk. The ‘Bama Blue Hole was little more than a limestone pond: a depression sunk deep into the wooded Alabama countryside. The water was green with midsummer algae. At the far end of the pond was a limestone cliff with a bit of an arch rising above the scummy surface of the pond. I could see where the water disappeared into what looked like a deep, wide passage in the limestone wall. Beyond that, darkness.
Steve Hudson helped me suit up for the dive. I wore a hooded wet suit, weights, a forearm knife, a buoyancy compensator, mask, fins, a pressure gauge, a depth gauge, a diving watch, three separate powerful underwater lights in waterproof housings, and an outsized steel hundred-cubic-inch tank with a dual valve and two complete regulator systems, one of which had a five-foot hose. The whole rig weighed well over 100 pounds. Steve Hudson wore two steel tanks—double 100s—and carried a plexiglass reel that contained several hundred feet of nylon line. His outfit weighed in excess of 150 pounds. We waddled to the warm water like a pair of extraterrestrials crushed by the curse of unfamiliar gravity.
Hudson briefed me on certain signals new to open-water divers: I was to make a circle with my light to catch his attention, for instance. I was breathing from the regulator on the long hose. The short one hung from a loop around my neck. If Steve signaled that he was
out of air, I was to give him the long hose and breathe from the short one. He’d do the same if I signaled. “You want to prevent panic,” Hudson said. “The short hose might have silt or weeds in it, but you know the long hose works. If an out-of-air diver doesn’t get a functioning regulator right away, he can easily panic.” We practiced buddy breathing in this way, then set out for the arch in the limestone.
There was a submerged tree at the entrance to the cave. At about thirty feet, we saw a length of 180-pound test nylon line tied to a stout branch. It led into the absolute darkness of the cave. Following Hudson, I drained the air from my buoyancy compensator and descended to the line.
Unfortunately, I had calculated my weights for the superior buoyancy of salt water, and I sank like a stone into the darkness. In open water this is no problem. You just blow a little more air into the buoyancy compensator and float up to the level you want. Or kick a little if you like.
Ten feet inside the entrance to the hole, I kicked a bit and my right fin hit bottom. Silt, like an underwater dust storm, rose around my feet. I ascended to the line, and Hudson motioned urgently. He wanted me to “Okay the nylon.” I circled my thumb and forefinger around the line—okayed the nylon—as silt blossomed below us. Our lights broke and scattered against the suspended particles. We waited, ready to call the dive, but the cloud didn’t rise as high as the line.
The silt, composed of fine particles of clay, fine as talc, is marbled throughout the limestone, and it covers the floor of every passage. Hudson had told me of three divers who’d died in a Florida cave. “There were fin marks four inches deep on the floor of the cave,” he said. The three men, all veteran military divers with little cave-diving experience, must have panicked and lost the line in a zero-visibility silt-out. (The NSS Cave Diving Manual suggests that a prospective diver simulate the view in a silt-out as follows: Splash through a mud puddle, then put on a face mask and look into the water.)