Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

by Tim Cahill

  Bats have precious little company in caves. Near the entrances you may find common spiders and salamanders and some nesting birds. In the deeper caverns, far from the twilight world of the entrances, we saw white, eyeless crickets. They had antennae longer than their bodies and they moved surely, in braille. A number of pools contained eyeless, albino crayfish. There are also albino fish in some of the lakes, and where the eyes would be on these fish, there is only smooth, white flesh.

  On the whole, however, nothing much lived deep in the limestone caverns we explored, and the air there was cool, sterile. It was without the scent and stench of life and death. There was no mustiness, no dankness. It was unexpectedly fresh and pleasant and primitive, and it tasted, I imagined, much the way the atmosphere of the earth must have when it was newly formed.

  The saga of the West Virginia Death Cave is not something Jeff Thompson likes to talk about, but the tale does have its cautionary aspects. “It was about four years ago,” Jeff told me. “We were beginners—a real buncha nerds.” In a retarded-sounding drawl he added, “Well, shit-fire buddy, we read two whole books. We figured we knew it all.”

  Jeff and Jon and Jon’s wife, Ronnie—who wrote up an account of the ordeal for me—had entered the cave about noon on a Saturday. The only smart thing they did that day was to tell some fellow cavers they would see them for a party that night around eight.

  The first few hours were pretty routine: Groucho walks, crawls, careful climbs over breakdowns, where the ceiling of a big room had caved in. No one thing was very difficult in itself; but, in total, it was exhausting work, especially when done with little rest and at the impatient pace Jeff and Jon cultivated in those days. Fatigue colored their judgment and they began to make mistakes, deadly mistakes.

  Five hours in, at the point they should have turned back, they met another group of cavers, coming the other way. That meant there was a connection to be made from where they were, a way out without retracing their steps. They didn’t carry maps or compasses at that time, so they listened to a complicated series of instructions, then started off to make the connection. “We thought we had come through the worst of it,” Ronnie wrote, “and that it would only get easier. We didn’t recognize that the other cavers were very tired.”

  They stepped up the pace a bit. The party was scheduled for eight. A low, two-foot crawl dropped to one foot. They had to remove their helmets and push them along ahead. Feet wouldn’t fit unless they were splayed out sideways. It was a real nose-to-the-limestone, three-hundred-foot squashed bellycrawl over sharp rocks. And now they were lost.

  There was a hands-and-knees grotto at the end and two passages leading off from that. “One was an easy crawl over a soft mud floor,” Jon said, “and the other was much lower. That easy passage just sucked us in.” Jeff tried the passage to see if it would go, returned, and then Jon pushed it for forty-five minutes, while Jeff and Ronnie knelt in the windy grotto. Jon returned and said that he had taken the passage to a series of short climbs that would probably take them to the surface. Ronnie noticed that Jon was very wet. She remembered the other cavers being dry.

  Jeff led the wet, muddy crawl, then pushed over the short climbs through a small hole that should have led to the surface. “Oh no,” Ronnie heard him moan. Her heart sank. She emerged into a pit surrounded by unclimbable twenty-foot walls.

  It was now 6:30. They were scared, lost, exhausted, and freezing to death. The temperature in the cave was perhaps fifty-two degrees, and there was a slight breeze, say five miles per hour, which put the wind-chill factor at about twenty degrees. Worse, they were wet, and water chill is an even more efficient killer than wind chill. Jeff, who had been a medic in the army, diagnosed hypothermia, that deadly dropping of the body’s core temperature, sometimes called exposure. In its first stages symptoms of hypothermia include controlled shivering and goose bumps. Then comes uncontrolled shivering, followed by acute confusion and a lowered pulse and heart rate. When the body’s core temperature drops below seventy-eight degrees, death comes quickly.

  There was no good rest in that pit. Lying on the rocks was suicide: the cold wetness of the stone sucked the heat from their bodies. So they formed a standing tripod. “I never believed I could sleep on my feet,” Jon said. But he did and almost instantly rescuers were there and he was whisked out of the cave and into a grassy West Virginia field under the warm West Virginia sun, drinking a nice warm cup of soup. Suddenly his knees buckled and he woke from his dream into a cold, dark, living nightmare. Jon was shivering uncontrollably; shivering so badly, in fact, that he pulled a muscle in his stomach.

  Jon and Jeff, who had twice tried to make connections by crawling through half a foot of water, were the worst off. Jeff figured the two of them had about thirty hours to live. Ronnie, who was drier, might go forty-eight. Maybe the cavers they had talked to would notice that they hadn’t turned up for the party. Maybe. But more likely their absence wouldn’t be noted until they didn’t show up for work on Monday, thirty-six hours in the future.

  At half-hour intervals they did five minutes of jumping jacks in order to maintain their temperature. Jon’s pulse never rose above an ominous sixty-two. They were dead. It was absurd. Here they were, young and in the best of shape, and they could expect death in a day and a half.

  Jon switched on his miner’s lamp, the only functioning light they had left, and Jeff saw a sad, bitter thing in the sudden brilliance. The cave was sucking away the heat he built up exercising. Steam rose from his hand; rose in five straight shafts from the tips of his fingers. “I’m watching myself die,” he said.

  They had been hearing the sounds of running water all night, but now it seemed there was something more than water. If you held your breath and listened hard … yes, it was the muffled sounds of voices. They called out. They shouted themselves hoarse, and waited for a reply; but the only sound was the distant mumble of running water.

  They slept, woke from pleasant wishful dreams of sunlight into their nightmare of frigid darkness. Again they exercised, and watched the cave suck the life out of them. Jeff found his bank book in one pocket, and that was pretty funny. Pretty goddamn funny. They talked about their values and their lives, and the things they had left undone. They resigned themselves to death.

  Ronnie had a Timex watch, and as sunrise approached their spirits lifted. It had been no use looking for an exit in the dark. In the daytime they could switch off Jon’s lamp and look for a shaft of light from above. At dawn, they started back down the agonizing series of crawls that had trapped them. They dead-ended, backtracked, and finally found a series of climbs that brought them to a big ledge.

  Jon spotted a daddy-longlegs spider, an entrance dweller. And they could smell air: real living air, humid and heavy with the scent of wildflowers. There had to be an exit nearby, but when Jon snapped off his lamp it was, as before, absolutely black. The final desperate crawl had sapped the last of their strength. They sat down on the cold rocks and waited to die.

  Which is when the members of the Monongahela and Pittsburgh grottos (chapters) of the National Speleological Society found them. They were fifty feet from a rabbit-hole exit; but, in their exhaustion, they might never have made the necessary traverse of a thirty-foot pit to find the exit that was hidden behind a large pile of breakdown.

  The rescue operation had been launched at midnight after Jeff and Jon and Ronnie failed to show for the party. “They spent eight hours searching for us,” Ronnie wrote, “and I want to thank them publicly.”

  “We were,” Jeff said, “literally born again. When they found us and discovered that no one was seriously hurt, we had to listen to a lot of lectures about what a bunch of nerds we were. Well, we were. I mean, that had been proven. But it didn’t matter. I was as happy as I’ve ever been in my life and the feeling lasted for days. I was a nerd, all right, but I was a living nerd.”

  Early one afternoon we rappelled down a narrow twenty-five-foot-deep hole called the Post Office entrance. What happen
ed that day is a good example of how decisions are made in caves.

  We pushed through a tight, muddy, painful crawl to a ten-foot drop into a muddy lower level, then walked for some time through a shallow, flowing stream. We climbed some breakdown before coming to a tight hole Jeff persisted in calling a “whoop-de-do.” Imagine a vertical “S” curve of basketball hoops eight feet long. Now imagine squeezing through it feet first. I would estimate that it took me a three-mile jog’s worth of energy to squeeze my 210 pounds through Jeff’s whoop-de-do.

  We crawled to a waterfall so high we could see it from both an upper and a lower passage. The water fell in a silver circle around a perfectly symmetrical stone column the width of an old redwood tree. The circular waterfall emptied into a placid pool whose edges glittered like a pane of opaque green glass.

  After a short rest, we pushed on. Our goal was to connect with either Screamin’ Willy’s entrance or Scowlin’ Tom’s. According to the map, we would pass through a big room, a lake room, a massive meeting of passageways called Echo Junction, and finally, Grand Central Spaghetti, a bewildering maze of interconnecting passages on several different levels.

  An upward-sloping, tube-type crawl ended at a porthole overlooking the Big Room. We were thirty feet up a sixty-foot wall. There was a rope ladder at the end of the tube, but the rope looked old and there were some awful nasty-looking rocks below, not to mention a dull green lake, and no one was willing to bet his life on the ladder. Jeff drove a new expansion bolt into the rock and we rigged a rappel to a ledge twelve feet below. We pulled our doubled rope down after us and followed the ledge to a pile of breakdown, then climbed over into the main section of the Big Room. We found ourselves facing a flooded passage. A heavy rock tossed into the lake confirmed what we already knew. Deep water.

  We were only three hours into the cave. I wanted to see Echo Junction and Grand Central Spaghetti: I had connection fever. It seemed to me that doubling back the way we came would be an admission of defeat.

  I proposed a plan: at its narrowest point, the lake was fifty yards across; we had that much rope. Since I was relatively certain that there was nothing in the lake that bit or leeched blood, and since I had spent a dozen years of my life engaged in serious competitive swimming, I offered to swim the rope across. I’d tie it off on my end, they’d tie it off on theirs, and they could hand-over-hand to my side of the drink.

  A beautiful plan. Mike and Chip and Jeff and Jon were very patient. They never once called me a nerd. They simply pointed out, quite logically, why it would be dangerous and stupid to push on.

  Point one: the map showed that parts of Grand Central Spaghetti were at the same elevation as the Big Room. That meant that essential connecting tubes and crawlways were likely to be completely flooded, top to bottom, and totally impassable without scuba gear.

  Point two: inevitably, we’d get lost. If we got seriously lost, it could be deadly. We’d left word on the outside, but would rescuers assume that we swam the lake? There we’d be, soaked to the skin in some windy passage, dying of hypothermia and every few minutes I’d find myself saying, “Gosh, you know I’m really sorry about this, guys.”

  Point three: our lights and batteries were good for twelve hours. We could, conceivably, push on for three more hours. But then, if we didn’t make the connection, we could double back and hit the Post Office entrance in twelve hours even. That left no margin for rest or error.

  Point four: we’d already made a minor error. (Most cave accidents seem to be built on a foundation of minor errors.) We had brought the rope down after us. We should have left the rope, climbed the breakdown, and examined the Big Room first. Now we’d have to climb from the ledge to the overlook without the aid of the rope.

  Luckily, Mike had fastened his etrier to the expansion bolt and left it hanging from the overlook. An etrier is a long, strong piece of nylon webbing tied into two stirrups, one above the other. Like the rest of us, Mike had figured that we’d make the connection. He left the etrier, a sacrifice to an imaginary emergency that had just developed.

  We trekked back over the ledge to the point just below the overlook. Mike tied into the rope and Chip put him on belay. If Mike fell, Chip could hold him easily. But say he fell from the mouth of the tube: he’d plummet twelve feet to the ledge, then probably twelve more feet to the end of the rope. A total of twenty-four feet. A fall like that means nasty cuts and abrasions, perhaps even a broken bone, and would leave poor Mike dangling there in agony. We’d have to hoist him up to the ledge where Jeff could put a splint on him. Someone else would have to climb the etrier. Then we’d have to pull Mike up to the overlook, get him down the tube, through the crawls, up the whoop-de-do, and finally pull him twenty-five feet up to the Post Office entrance.

  So it was with some trepidation that we watched Mike make the first move around a large boulder on the ledge. There was room for more than half your foot, and the handholds were good. It’s just that the concave shape of the boulder forced ones ass into the abyss and, at this point, the heart refused to beat in a regular fashion. On the second move Mike got hold of the etrier, and on the third he placed his left foot in the lower stirrup. He searched for a high handhold, found one, put his right foot into the upper stirrup and did a pushup into the safety of the tube.

  Mike belayed the rest of us from above, and this arrangement limited any potential fall to three or four feet. We each accomplished the climb with relative degrees of ease, and started the three-hour hike, climb, squeeze, crawl back.

  In the tight crawl between the whoop-de-do and the entrance, we heared the muffled sounds of what seemed to be a child screaming in terror and agony. The screams came from the entrance, the twenty-five-foot drop we had made on rappel. From below, we saw a five-year-old boy halfway up the drop. He was hanging there on a rope which was wrapped painfully around his chest and tied, dangerously, with an ordinary square knot. The rope itself was a wonder: frayed black plastic clothesline. The kid was being hauled out of the pit by an unseen force above and he was thumping against ledges and outcropping with painful regularity.

  On the surface, we met the unseen force, who turned out to be the boy’s father, a pleasant, sandy-haired thirty-year-old I’ll call Bob. It turned out that Bob had done some backpacking and river running, and now he was interested in learning a bit about caving. Clearly, he wasn’t the sort of pimple who’d snap off a hundred-year-old stalactite for a souvenir, or go around spray painting his name on walls, or leaving empty tins of Vienna sausage in some pristine grotto. But he was dangerously unprepared, and Jeff had no idea what to say to him.

  Bob obviously had no technical rock-climbing experience. Swinging the kid around on that idiot rope was likely to put a permanent end to father-and-son outings. Between the two of them, the boy and the man, they had one source of light, a number that fell five short of minimum safety standards. The kid had no helmet, and since there were rockfalls inside, and because everybody cracks his head in a cave, he was risking serious concussion. Bob had no map, no compass. The kid had no coveralls. He’d have to crawl through flowing streams in a thin cotton T-shirt, then stand around in a twenty-degree wind chill while Bob tried to figure out where they were.

  Bob chatted pleasantly. Jeff didn’t say much. He was thinking: Should I tell them about the West Virginia Death Cave? Can I really give this guy a stiff safety lecture in front of his kid? If he did, Bob would think he was an arrogant, condescending turd.

  “What you ought to do,” Jeff said, “is join the National Speleological Society. They have a grotto here.…”

  “I heard about them,” Bob said, “but first I want to see if I really like caving. Isn’t there an easier entrance around here?”

  Chip and Mike and Jon faded away from the conversation and got real busy coiling muddy rope. Jeff hesitated way too long and the fellow looked at him strangely. Someday Bob would tell his friends that cavers are, by and large, closed-mouthed, introverted, even vaguely hostile people.

  “
My boy really wants to see the cave,” Bob prodded.

  Jeff worked hard on a smile and gave the two of them directions to a distant, empty, caveless field.

  Shark Dive

  “This,” Jack McKenney said, “is your shark club.” It was a broom handle with a nail in the end and I was supposed to use it underwater, while scuba diving, to whap the menacing sharks we hoped to attract and thus convince them, Jack explained, that we weren’t to be considered appetizers. I said that a broom handle seemed somewhat fragile for the task at hand.

  “Well,” Jack said reasonably, “you won’t have to use it if you don’t get out of the cage.”

  We were standing on the stern of a dive boat called the Atlantis, which was drifting out in the channel between San Pedro Harbor and Catalina, near a place called 14 Mile Bank. The water was glassy blue, under blue skies on a nearly windless day. Off half a mile in the distance, dense clouds of sea birds were whirling and diving above several city blocks’ worth of ocean that seemed to be in full boil. Tony, the captain of the Atlantis, figured that bait fish were being driven to the surface by marauding sharks. I was looking at an acre or so of pure terror.

  The shark cage sat on the deck. It was tied to a boom that would lower it ten feet into the water. I had always supposed that such a cage would be constructed of heavy metal, that it would be made of wrist-thick prison-type bars. The contraption in question, however, was constructed, for the most part, from wire, the kind of stuff used as bedsprings in cots.

  “How many sharks will we get?” I asked Jack.

  “Hard to tell,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll be skunked. If we’re lucky, we could have as many as twenty.”

  “Oh boy,” I said with a singular lack of enthusiasm that seemed lost on Jack McKenney.

  “Yeah,” he said, “it could be a good one. Problem is: it’s too nice a day.”

  “Just our rotten luck, all right.”