Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  Hudson and I okayed the line and moved out of the rising silt, farther into the depth of the cave. The green water of the pond suddenly turned cold, and visibility expanded to seventy feet; in our lights, the water was crystal blue. We swam along the line, against the wall of the passage. There were no formations: The stalagmites and stalactites had been dissolved by the naturally acidic surface water. The passage seemed friendly, enclosing, womblike. It curved around to the right and opened out into a huge underwater cavern. Hudson clipped the line from his reel onto the nylon lifeline, and we moved out into the center of the room, unreeling line as we went, exploring what may have been a virgin cave and staying high to avoid silting the room.

  We swam with our knees bent, so that the turbulence from our fins was directed backward and not down. We might have used another silt-avoidance technique called the “fly walk.” This involves swimming upside down and moving hand over hand along the ceiling, which in our case was right there, four or five feet above us. With the ceiling so close, I assumed that we couldn’t be very deep. The depth gauge showed we were already at ninety feet.

  Such deception is a big killer in Florida’s caves. Rapture of the deep, or nitrogen narcosis—the effects of concentrated nitrogen accumulating in the fatty tissue—can be roughly calculated by depth: Every thirty-three feet is equal to one martini on an empty stomach. We were down around three martinis. Some divers die at the ten-martini level: Unwittingly dropping to that dangerous depth, they become confused or panicky in their narcosis, lose the lifeline in a silt-out, and drown.

  I checked my pressure gauge and found I had 1,400 pounds per square inch left. According to the “rule of thirds,” this was our turn-back point. I had started with 2,100 pounds. The first 700 pounds were used for penetration, and the next 1,400 pounds—two-thirds of my air—would remain for the trip out.

  The divers in Grey’s cartoon will depend entirely on the reserve air in their J valves: a couple of hundred pounds of air, which lasts only a few minutes at ninety feet. In open water, the J valve reserve is enough for an easy ascent, but someone who has used 2,000 pounds of air to penetrate a cave is not going to make it back out on a mere 400.

  Hudson and I followed the line back to the point at which it joined the main length of nylon. At the junction of the lines, Steve had placed a small arrow, pointing out. In case of silt-out, or disorientation, or the improbable failure of all six of our lights, we’d be able to feel the line and the arrow pointing to the nearest exit. Steve reeled in his line behind me, and we swam slowly out of the cavern and back into the passage.

  Swimming along the rot-proof nylon, I inadvertently let myself go negative and dropped below the line. No problem. Don’t kick, though: Don’t silt-out the passage. Just put some air into the compensator and rise … directly into the nylon line, which got tangled with the valve on my tank. Turning to extricate myself, I got my reserve lights caught up.

  It took the two of us perhaps thirty seconds to get everything unwound. There was a moment then of, well, call it intense anxiety. Hudson had warned me not to get below the line. “Every time you come up, you tend to get tangled,” he said. I wondered how the fictional divers in Grey’s cartoon could possibly avoid getting entangled in a ski rope: a floating line that, unlike slowly sinking nylon, would rise above them at the slightest slack.

  I could envision them—the doomed cartoon divers—running out of air deep in the cave. After kicking silt-outs at every turn on the way in, one of the new divers becomes disoriented: He has no light, and he swims deep into the cave, looking for an exit, the narcosis spinning in his brain. The instructor can’t follow: He is perilously low on air, and the maze of passages looks entirely different now, coming back. Where’s the line? In the inevitable silt-out, no one has bothered to okay the ski rope, and it is floating on the ceiling, unseen and useless. One of the students, in a typical panic reaction, tries to grab a light from another, and there is an underwater fight. The effort involved causes both to run out of air. Soon the third student runs out of air. The instructor attempts to buddy breathe with three students, but there is a terror in the silt-stained darkness: a fight for the only functioning regulator. All three of the students and the instructor pass out there, in the darkness, fighting for air, dying of stupidity. Rescue workers find the last, lost student, tanks empty, at 280 feet.

  Typical fatalities: An analysis of cave-diving accidents by the NSS Cave Diving Section shows that almost all deaths can be traced to one of three causes: The diver didn’t have a line, didn’t follow the rule of thirds, or went too deep. Often the accidents involve a combination of these errors.

  Hudson and I swam through the suspended silt I had kicked up at the mouth of the cave. We hung off, decompressing at twenty feet for a few minutes, then surfaced into an Alabama summer night and the sound of crickets. There were fireflies in the trees.

  Steve Hudson wanted to know if I understood H. V. Grey’s cartoon now. Well, sure, I said, but like any real knee-slapper, it seemed to lose a few laughs in the explanation.

  Caving in Kentucky

  Anyone who has ever tried to crowbar a little subterranean information out of people who habitually stumble around in caves—cavers—knows that these people are, by and large, a closed-mouthed, introverted, even slightly hostile group. I was thinking about this late one Sunday evening recently while I was standing waist-deep in a slate-green body of water called Dread Pool, which is two hours deep into a twenty-three-mile-long cave network in central Kentucky. The waters were thick, glassy, ghostly, and cold. To get to some interesting caverns deeper down, one must wade through Dread Pool, and, in certain seasons, the water may reach up to one’s chest. About an hour into the cave you start thinking about how cold the water is going to be and you spend the following sixty minutes dreading the pool. Hence the name.

  Bad enough to wade through the pool. Worse to stand there, motionless. Posing for a photograph.

  Some months previous, a set of remarkable photographs had come into the office. Taken in the same Kentucky cave by a young Ohio businessman and commercial photographer named Jeff Thompson, they were unlike anything I had ever seen. The images were weirdly striking, contorted, vast. They looked the way the Viking’s photos of Mars should have looked.

  I called Jeff, and we made arrangements to see the cave. Thompson described himself as a “soft-core, weekend caver,” then launched into a series of relatively hard-core conditions. According to Jeff’s instructions, I spent three days at Yosemite sharpening my rock-climbing skills, and a day practicing rappels—a method of descent using a rope with mechanical aids.

  I read the books he recommended. I figured I knew every esoteric cave danger encountered by man from time immemorial. Lightning, for instance, can strike deep into a cave, and when such a bolt hits an accumulation of bat excrement—guano—an enormous explosion can result.

  Exploding bat shit I was prepared for. Cave photography was another thing altogether. It is, of course, totally dark inside a cave. This means you can leave the shutter open on a camera, then strobe-light dozens of different specific areas around your central subject. It takes time to effect such stygian chiaroscuro. The human subject in such a photo must stand stock still. When the human subject is waist deep in the frigid waters of Dread Pool, he tends to become cranky. He wonders why cavers, as a whole, treasure these experiences, and why they are so secretive. Jeff, for instance, didn’t want me to mention the name of the cave in my article. Did he really expect one day to crawl, creepy-damp, through this cave, and find seventy or eighty people lolling around in Dread Pool?

  They breathe, caves do, and, depending on the barometric pressure, they inhale or exhale. When we approached Minton Hollow—one of sixteen entrances to this cave, which is one of the twenty longest in the world—I could feel that cold, dark breath on me at fifty yards. The entrance, positioned on the side of a knoll, was surrounded by ferns and looked like a huge, baronial limestone hearth.

  We walked, for t
he first few minutes, through spacious passages, well lit by the miners’ lamps we wore. There were five of us: Jeff; myself; Jeff’s business associate, Chip Northrup; Mike Davis, a media specialist; and Jon Luzio, a dog warden. Jon, with distressing regularity, kept pointing out wet green leaves stuck in the overhangs at the top of the cave. The cave had been completely flooded, recently, and Jon had read that this low section near Minton Hollow could fill within forty-five minutes.

  Twenty yards into the cave, there was no way to know what was going on outside, whether, in fact, a freak rainstorm had burst out of a clear blue sky. If the water began to rise around our feet, we would have to go back the way we came, likely bucking a stream growing geometrically in power. If the water began to rise when we were several hours in, we’d have to look for a high, dry dome—some rise one hundred feet, and more—and climb to a safe spot. If the walls could not be scaled, we’d have to wait in a high room and tread water until it rose to a climbable section of wall.

  Experienced cavers have died during unexpected floods. They retreated to the highest rooms, and the water simply continued to rise: to their waists, to their chests, to their necks. In the end—the idea is horrifying—they must have lain back in the water, lips against the cold rock ceiling, and taken one last breath before the room filled completely.

  Because of the danger of flooding, Jeff marked the location of the highest dry domes on his map.

  Twenty minutes or so in from the entrance, the ceilings began to drop and we adapted a variety of stoop walks. In a passage five feet seven inches high, a six-footer like myself can walk with slightly bended knees. But this is very tiring. Better to tilt the head so that the ear rests very nearly on one’s shoulder. A person walking rapidly in this position tends to look slightly psychotic, like Terence Stamp in The Collector.

  In shallower passages, cavers are obliged to double over, bowing from the waist. One cannot, however, stare only at the passing floor because a slight irregularity in the ceiling can cause a concussion. So one tilts the head up in a comical, neck-straining posture. Technically, such passages are referred to as “Groucho walks.”

  Passages can get considerably tighter, but only once in twenty hours of heavy caving did I get seriously stuck. There was a narrow hole in the ceiling of a passage leading to a higher room. A slick pile of mud with a single foothold led to the hole. My arms went through first, like a diver’s, but just as I pushed my triceps through, I lost the foothold and hung there, absurdly, with my feet dangling below and my arms pinned over my head.

  I tried to deal with the panic in a rational manner. I am not, ordinarily, a claustrophobic person, but it seemed to me that I would remain stuck for, oh, ten days at the most, by which time I’d have lost enough weight to slide out of the hole. Of course, there was always the danger of flood during those ten days. The idea of an earthquake—shit, even a minor settling of the stone—was terrifying. I’d end up all bulgy-eyed with my swollen tongue sticking out of my mouth, looking like a gruesome photo in some sleazy tabloid captioned: “Garbage Man Crushed to Death in Own Truck!”

  Mike pointed out, in an excessively calm voice, that there was a handhold to my immediate right and that, if I so desired, perhaps I could reach over and pull myself up. Unless, of course, I wanted to rest some more. There was no hurry. This process is called “talking through,” and even veteran cavers sometimes catch the fear and have to be talked through tough spots.

  For every tight spot, there are dozens of crawlways: nearly oval tubes with fluted walls and ceilings. It was Jon’s contention that certain crawls resembled birth canals. Sometimes, so Jon says, the Earth Mother is good, and the floor is sandy. Sometimes she is a bitch, and the floor is covered with sharp baseball-sized rocks that bite right through your mandatory basketball kneepads.

  For some reason, the birth-canal analogy offends me, but even more repulsive is the phrase “bowels of the earth.” If you consider a certain passage to be a section of bowel, and carry the metaphor to its unfortunate conclusion, then cavers, moving as they do through the bowels, become …

  Enough.

  Jeff says caving scratches his explorer’s itch. Where he lives, the land has been given over to farms for more than a century. But precious few people have ever set foot deep into the caverns he loves; and, amazingly, new, virgin caves are being discovered every year.

  While Jeff is pragmatic about his romanticism—Stanley and Livingstone in the netherworld—I prefer to let my imagination take control. We had, for instance, been following the sound of falling water for some time when we came to an unnamed waterfall. The dark green river erupted out of an upper passage and tumbled down a twenty-foot pit. It shone green, then silver in our lights. The walls of the pit were striated in browns and greens and ghostly whites. Two smaller streams poured out of a lower passage through formations that looked like nothing so much as balcony windows. On either side of the windows strange, twisted gargoyle shapes stood patient guard. Opposite the falls there was a gnarled, pulpitlike affair, and one could imagine foul rituals, and obscene sermons shrieked through the silent canyons.

  The formations had the look of something otherworldly, yet man-made, elegant relics of some twisted culture predating the Ice Age: a culture that had flourished, and decayed. I wanted to imagine a people given to the worship of dark things: cruel dwarf gods and evil warlocks could be seen in the flawed and contorted sculptures before us.

  Sitting in front of that waterfall, I got as goofy as I’ve ever been, dead sober. I had just run through a fantasy about ebony and albino warriors and their revolt against the evil king and his necromaniac rituals, and was working on the one about the torchlit masked ball in the Thunder Room; sautéed eyeless fish, batwing soup, a weird, discordant melody echoing off cold stone, when it occurred to me that this was a very vulnerable fantasy. None of it would be any good if there were some old candy-bar wrappers and a broken RC Cola bottle on the floor.

  And I got my first dim glimmering of why cavers are not evangelistic about their sport.

  Millions of years ago this area of Kentucky lay submerged beneath a shallow sea. Uncounted billions of marine plants and animals lived, absorbed calcium compounds from the sea, died, sank to the bottom, and formed thick beds of limestone. The sea retreated and, to the east, the Appalachian Mountains punched up out of the earth, wrinkling the landscape of Kentucky, forming ridges and low, rolling hills. Many of the valleys here have no surface drainage system: no rivers or creeks.

  The water goes underground, and, in so doing, it carves out caves. Rainwater percolating through topsoil absorbs carbon dioxide and becomes carbonic acid. Limestone is soluble in carbonic acid. The weakly acidic water finds cracks and fissures in the stone. Sometimes it carves out huge vertical shafts, pits, and chimneys. Then again, the water may flow horizontally, hollowing out oval tubes, some the size of a straw, some eighty feet in diameter.

  As the water table sinks—because of drought, or the shifting of the earth’s crust, or simply because the nearby river has carved itself a deeper valley—the tubes and pits are left relatively dry. In the rainy season, water, seeking its own level, roars abrasively through the tubes, carving out canyons. Eventually, most of the water makes it way through the maze of underground caverns and empties into a major surface lake or river.

  Meanwhile, especially in the big rooms, water is still seeping through small fissures. It may enter the room through a drop-sized crack in the ceiling. Because cave air is almost devoid of carbon dioxide, the acidic water wants to reach chemical equilibrium by giving off CO2. The water loses its carbonic acid and the dissolved limestone it carries will solidify. Over hundreds of years, limestone deposits, released from a single-drop fissure, can form a spectacular stalactite (these icicle-shaped formations hang tight to the ceiling). Water dropping from the tip of a stalactite may form a corresponding formation on the floor (you might walk into a stalagmite).

  When water runs down the side wall of a big room, it can form fantasti
c draperies; and when a thin sheet of water runs along the floor of a cave, it forms flowstone, which looks very much like a river frozen into stone. Permanent pools often contain thin stone “lilypads” held on the surface by water tension.

  Sometimes passage containing no formations at all have a special beauty. The ceiling may often be covered with closely spaced hanging water drops that, in miners’ lights, look like molten silver studs. A bat, hanging upside down in sleep there, may be covered with drops, shining silver in your light.

  In certain rooms, bats congregate by the thousands, and they hang there in one vast furry silver gray colony. At dusk, they leave the cave to feed outside, belching up out of the earth like a mass of swooping, swirling refugees from some Baptist preacher’s hellfire sermon.

  Chip and Mike and Jeff like to tell a bat story on Jon, who was a biology major in college. It seems they were making their way through a narrow passage when a number of bats in exit swooped by. Jon told everyone to remain still. Bats, he explained, send out high-pitched squeaks—inaudible to the human ear—receive the echoes, and fly by an amazingly accurate sonar system. No way could one hit you. At this point, a bat flew directly into Jon’s neck and fluttered there, frantically. The bat screeched, audibly. So did Jon. It was hard to tell which was which.

  Bats, Jon found out later, switch off most of their sonar in the familiar confines of their home cave and fly by memory. Unfamiliar objects, like cavers, confuse them. The audible sound the bat made, like the audible sound Jon made, was an expression of surprise and horror.