With a stream of work contracts, Chris was now making a comfortable living. He and Sue started talking about buying some land, rather than renting property as they now did. “Chris, we’re only in our twenties, and we have no real assets, just this mobile home. What bank is going to lend us the money?” Sue asked.
“Well, we’ll just have to look for some other way to finance it. Maybe a finance company, or even somebody who’s selling their property and who’ll finance it for us.”
Chris and Sue were fortunate and found a seller willing to finance the sale of his remote, eight-acre wooded property. Chris would have plenty of room for his heavy machinery and even a separate workshop. Sue liked the property because it was very much like the rural area where she grew up. And both of them would be close enough to their parents to maintain their family ties, yet far enough away to feel that they were now on their own. They moved their trailer home to the property.
Bolstered by the property loan and the perceived confidence that a stranger had placed in him, Chris decided to make a bid for a huge excavation job, a site that had to be leveled before a vast home center and hardware supply complex could be built. In an ingenious scheme, Chris proposed that his only compensation come in the form of dirt and rock produced by leveling and excavating the hilly terrain. As he saw it, the raw material he removed would be worth a small fortune as landfill. Chris won the bid, then went out and bought a bulldozer to add to his growing fleet of construction vehicles.
Chris earned enough money from the home center job to pay off all the loans on his heavy machinery and still put money in the bank. The local home center and hardware supply company newsletter featured an article titled “The Man Who Moved a Mountain.” On the first page, Chris was pictured sitting atop his bulldozer, almost dwarfed by the rocky mountain he would excavate next. His reputation spread. Chris had gambled and won.
It had taken them thirteen years, but now Chris and Sue had a respectable bank account, a thriving business, and a son who was just starting his teenage years. Chris wanted to indulge himself by buying a private plane. Sue forbade it. “I’ve never said no to you before, Chris,” she told him, “but I want a house. You’re not buying that plane until we have a house. I’m tired of being trailer trash.”
“Okay, well, I guess we’re gonna have to build a house then,” Chris said promptly. “You and Chrissy will have to help too. I can’t do this alone!”
“Of course we’ll help. Nobody’s saying you’ve got to do it alone. We’ve always done everything together, Chris.”
Not only had Chris and Sue done everything together, but Chris also made sure to include Chrissy in his and Sue’s activities—and even in his excavation business—as much as possible. Chris confided to Sue that he was looking forward to working alongside Chrissy; he thought Chrissy would eventually take over the business. “If Chrissy wants to, he’ll have a business and won’t have to experience a boss holding him back, or breathing over his shoulder, like I did,” Chris told Sue. Chrissy loved working with his father, and especially driving the bulldozer, which he learned to do when he was twelve. And he greatly admired his father’s seemingly effortless ability to fix anything and everything, especially the heavy machinery that Chrissy liked so much to ride.
In 1983, the Rouses began building a home on their wooded property. In order to afford the house, Chris bartered work with other contractors in the area for things he could not do himself, like installing plumbing, or electrical wiring. As if erecting his own house while running a burgeoning excavation business was not enough of a challenge, Chris made a deal with his friend Ken Reinhart. “You’ve wanted a house for a while. Come on, we’ll build our houses together. I’ll help you with yours, you’ll help me with mine.” It was too generous an offer for Ken to refuse. Over the next few years, as the two men built their houses together, the friendship between them deepened.
Chrissy was thirteen years old when his father dug the foundation; he helped with the construction, as did Sue. Though it was sometimes frustrating for the Rouses to work on their house after long hours spent earning a living at their jobs, and on weekends, when they should have had free time to relax and enjoy life, the experience strengthened the family, and as their house took shape, their confidence in each other and in their ability to work hard together developed a solid foundation. It was as if the Reinhart and the Rouse families were pioneers in the Old West, building their homesteads together.
It took the family two years to build their new home. Once their house was completed, Chris bought that private plane. On a day when Ken had a flying class to teach and couldn’t accompany him to inspect a Cessna advertised for sale, Chris went anyway—and bought it on the spot. By the time Ken got back from his class, Chris was a proud airplane owner. His friend’s abrupt decision surprised Ken, who had thought Chris was only exploring options, not that he was ready to lay down money. Ken now perceived a new side of Chris: Here was a man who could spend two years building a house and thirteen years constructing a business, and who could also make a snap decision to spend fifty thousand dollars in ten minutes.
Happily ensconced in their home, the owners of an airplane, and all certified divers, in 1988 the Rouses indulged in a warm-water vacation; they went to Bonaire, a small Caribbean island in the Netherlands Antilles, off Venezuela, renowned for its diving. The water was comfortable, clear, and swimming with life. Long before environmental tourism became trendy, Bonaire’s government had seen the merits of creating a national underwater park, where corals remained undisturbed and fishing was not allowed. Divers flocked to the pristine underwater environment.
Most divers saw a warm-water diving trip as a chance to kick back, enjoy two easy dives a day, and spend time sunning on the beach with friends while knocking back a few tropical drinks. The Rouses just dived. In five days, Chris conducted twenty-two dives, accompanied mostly by Sue and Chrissy. After returning from Bonaire, they were back at the quarry the very next weekend. But not for long. An article about the Ginnie Springs dive shop and campground in north-central Florida caught Chris’s attention. Ginnie was the site of the Devil’s Cave System. He set off in a private plane with Ken Reinhart and another pilot to check it out.
The three men drove through the flat, Florida farmland, the odor of cows and horses hanging in the air, to the sprawling Ginnie Springs property. As they approached it Chris Rouse was immediately intrigued by a large billboard depicting a slim young girl with flowing, curly blond hair sitting on a riverbank with one leg in the water. It was like a picture in a fairy-tale book. Her skin looked silky and lightly tanned. Only her angled leg and arm provided her a little modesty. She regarded a deep-red cardinal sitting on a branch. Ginnie, the water nymph, the sign seemed to imply, was an innocent and benign creature.
Chris, Ken, and their pilot friend turned at the billboard and soon the paved road gave way to a sandy trail. A one-story building sat at the far left corner of the field, marking the start of the Ginnie Springs campground. The structure—well proportioned, spacious, and constructed out of wood that allowed it to fit perfectly with its surroundings—pleased the builder in Chris. The dive shop’s walls and several racks were filled with neatly laid-out noncorrosive brass clips, for clipping equipment to the dive harness, as well as an assortment of various-size diving hoses, buckles, harnesses, lights, and other equipment. Chris was awed. He had never seen a place like this. The dive shops back home were not as large or as well equipped, nor did they have the unusual types of diving gear displayed at Ginnie. As he wandered through the building, he noted a classroom, a general store, a merchandise shop offering colorful beach towels, T-shirts with various Ginnie Springs and cave-diving logos and artwork, an equipment repair shop, offices, and a rental facility. For the first time, Chris was witnessing a community created by and for divers. It was a place made just for him.
As Chris and Ken paid their entrance fees and signed in for diving, showing their certification cards, each man was given a form that
required his signature; it was a statement that he had been warned of the dangers of diving here. Because they were only open-water divers, in the Devil’s Cave System they were prohibited from carrying underwater lights: Without lights they would not be tempted to go beyond the cavern zone in which sunlight makes the way to the surface clearly visible. If they did use lights they would be subject to immediate expulsion. They could carry lights at Ginnie Springs cavern itself, because a heavy metal grate had been installed at the entrance to the tunnel system and they would not be able to physically enter the area where they could no longer see light.
Outside the dive shop, Chris found myriad winding, sandy trails leading from the main path through the campground; along the trails smaller camping areas had been cleared, but each one had numerous trees to provide both shade and privacy. His family would love to camp here. He and his friends continued walking to the Santa Fe River, whose lazy, winding course acts as the natural border along one side of the property. Turtles sunned themselves on the branches of trees that had fallen into the river. The river’s murky water was joined by the steady outflow of gin-clear water from the spring systems, which added to the river’s volume to provide a smooth, steady flow for the enjoyment of people in canoes or floating on tire inner tubes. At Ginnie Springs, fish darted about, clearly visible in the translucent waters. Chris was captivated. He’d never seen anything like it; the canoes looked as though they were floating on air rather than water. Bonaire, though its water was reasonably clear, was nothing like this. What would it be like to dive in transparent water? He couldn’t wait to find out.
That afternoon, Chris and Ken made their first dive in Ginnie Springs. They descended into the mouth of the spring, through a narrow gap between the sand and the rock. Just beyond lay a large underwater room. With the small underwater lights they were allowed to carry into this cavern, their eyes adjusted to the dim light and they could see that the water’s constant flow had molded the rocks into eerie shapes. Some rocks looked like animals, some like the face of a screaming person. The entire landscape was like a scene on a science-fiction planet.
As they descended to 55 feet, they came across a solid metal grate, which had been installed many years earlier to block the entrance to the main tunnel system. When Chris swam near the grate, the force of the tunnel water rammed him in the chest. Surprised and a little indignant, he pulled himself close to the bars. He felt like a prisoner, unable to reach the freedom of the mysterious cave beyond him. The water blew his short hair straight back and the water rushing against his face made his skin tingle. It was refreshing—almost like a cool breeze on a hot day. And when he let go of the grate, he was blown backward like an autumn leaf.
When they surfaced, Chris was exhilarated. He insisted the men move on to dive at the Devil’s Cave System—another spring on the property, but one that had no grate over the cave tunnel. When they arrived, the large yellow warning sign on the riverbank opposite the entrance steps caused Ken some alarm. He read the sign carefully: WARNING! CAVE DIVING REQUIRES SPECIAL TRAINING AND EQUIPMENT. DIVERS CAN AND HAVE DIED HERE. Rules for safe cave diving were posted, and Ken, the veteran flight instructor, paid heed.
Many divers are not as cautious as Reinhart. The urge to “boldly go where no man has gone before” is so compelling a human drive it often defies the instinct for self-preservation. Many a bravado-besotted diver will still enter the Devil’s Cave System even when his lack of skills, training, and equipment ensures his death.
Florida’s limestone caves are not simple caverns or short tunnels in the earth where a person can go inside, turn around, and get out. They are labyrinths formed when rainwater carrying weak acids seeps through and eats away the porous stone, then descends to harder rock areas that finally prevent further downward movement. Always seeking the path of least resistance, the water rushes horizontally in twisting, turning underground rivers stretching for miles beneath the surface landscape. Eventually, the earth disgorges the water at various spring systems, where it bursts forth into swimming spots and feeds the state’s rivers. In other parts of the world, water creates cave systems that snake through lava fields, or through cracks and bedding planes of various rocks that are far harder than limestone. Ironically, some of the largest subterranean lakes and cave systems have been found in Africa, a continent that also contains vast expanses of desert. The complete extent of the world’s cave systems is still a mystery, but they seem to act as our water planet’s arteries, filtering water of impurities and returning it to the surface, where it nourishes animals, plants, and humans.
A diver is like a cat, curious to see what is inside a partially opened box. Just as curiosity can kill a cat, so too can curiosity kill the untrained cave explorer. Some are lucky: Like Christopher Columbus the diver without cave training may stumble forward for at least several cave dives, not knowing what danger he’s really courting, before disaster overtakes him. It was Vasco da Gama, not Columbus, who—applying Prince Henry the Navigator’s principles and using the maps of previous successful explorers—found the prized sea route to India. The savvy cave diver will also rely on the experience, and the paths, of others who have gone before him. Where Columbus blindly stumbled forward and got lucky in finding a mass of land, da Gama used discipline and methodology to systematically reach his destination. So will the cave diver who wants to live to tell his grandchildren he explored the Devil’s Cave System.
When Chris and Ken dived into the Devil’s Cave System that day, they saw a sign very similar to the one that stands there now. Inside the system, at the point where natural light casts its last, faint glow, is a stark black-on-white warning. The sign depicts the Grim Reaper, complete with sickle, and a group of skeletons in dive gear lying at his feet. In large, bold, black letters are these words:
STOP
PREVENT YOUR DEATH!
GO NO FURTHER.
FACT: More than 300 divers, including open water scuba instructors, have died in caves just like this one.
FACT: You needed training to dive. You need cave training and cave equipment to cave dive.
FACT: Without cave training and cave equipment, divers can die here.
FACT: It CAN happen to YOU!
THERE’S NOTHING IN THIS CAVE WORTH
DYING FOR!
DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT.
One two-buddy team, untrained in cave diving, ignored the sign and ventured into the Devil’s Cave System with two masks, one tank, and one set of swim fins between them. One diver “piggy-backed” on the other diver, breathing from an extra regulator attached to the one tank. They swam into the cave just to see it, driven by their curiosity. But they got lost and couldn’t get back out. Had they been trained for cave diving, they would have known to pay out the special white nylon guideline from the reel that cave divers carry for just this purpose. They would have been able to follow the white nylon to the exit, as if following a thread out of a maze. Both divers were found dead, wedged inside a small passage. Around their corpses were signs of terror: They had kicked frantically and left marks in the silt on the cave floor and their fingernails had clawed at the cave ceiling as they breathed their last breaths, trying to dig themselves out through tons of rock.
In the Florida caves, the deadly facts of the foolhardy are fiercer than fiction. Another untrained diver who went in alone, without a guideline, got hopelessly lost and used his knife to carve a last message into his single tank of air: I GOT LOST. I’M SORRY. MOM I LOVE YOU.
Some untrained divers do go into the caves with guidelines, thinking that a guideline is all you need. One pair went to a cave dive shop to purchase a guideline reel—but trained cave divers carry not one but several on every dive. The store owner wanted to see proof of their cave-diving training, and when the two could not produce it, he refused to sell them any cave diving–related equipment at all. Undeterred, the pair went to a local sporting goods store and bought a reel of clear, monofilament fishing line. Their bodies were found inside a cave s
ystem, hopelessly entangled in the strong, clear line. Their arms were tightly pinned against their bodies, their breathing regulators dangling away from their anguished faces and gaping mouths.
The reports of deaths like these in Ginnie Springs spurred an even more gruesome rumor. A story circulated involving a team of three untrained divers, at least one of whom ran out of air in the black tunnels. In their struggle for survival, the divers supposedly began stabbing one another with their dive knives, just to secure a few more breaths from the others’ tanks. All three died inside the cave. The horror of an underwater knife fight while in the throes of suffocating panic is too much to fathom, even for the hard-core cave diver. Fortunately, the tale is untrue. The truth behind the story is that three brothers went into the Devil’s Cave System, got lost, and died—a fate gruesome enough even without the knives. Apparently, a nondiver had seen the bodies being brought out of the water and noticed rips in the dead divers’ suits. That was enough to set his imagination in motion. The nondiver never bothered to find out why the suits were torn. The rips were the result of getting the divers’ death-bloated bodies out of the cave’s confines.
As Chris looked past the underwater warning sign in the Devil’s Cave System, he saw a vast tunnel that disappeared into the darkness. It was all he could do to prevent himself from swimming forward to try to see what lay beyond. He was rapt. When he surfaced with Ken, Chris insisted they immediately take a cavern-diving course. The first step in learning to cave-dive is a cavern-diving course. (Technically a cave is an underground area beyond the reach of sunlight where there is no direct ascent to the surface.)
Ken as well as Chris was awed by the underwater landscape he had just seen. But the warning signs weighed heavily on his mind.
“C’mon,” Chris prodded him. “Let’s take at least the first course. It’ll make us better divers. Think of what we’ll learn!” Reluctantly, Ken agreed.
The Last Dive Page 5