Sparks from the Fire

(If you are looking the first installment of this article, simply visit In God We Trusted-Part 1)

So there we were, in total blackness.  The bottom half of my body still wedged into the tightness of the 2’x3’ crawl space tunnel and the top half sticking out into some unknown space, me on my back, laying in an underground stream, with my four friends still in the tunnel behind me.  It’s amazing how your other senses take over when one sense is dysfunctional.

The Way Out

I could not see, but the smell of the space had changed.  It was no longer of rock and stale air, but now of clean, pure air with a strong hint of mineral water.  It was a good smell, a freeing smell.  The first thing I did was to elicit a loud but short “Ah” into the darkness.  The return of the reverb totally surprised me.  It told me that I was in a huge room.  I took my flashlight from my belt and shined it into the darkness, but the room was so big that its beam found nothing but empty space.  I whispered excitedly back to my spelunking buddies, “Pass me a flare.”

I lit the flare over my head as I lay prone on my back so as not to catch fire from the flare.  As the flare flared in its brilliant redness, I shut my eyes to protect them from the sparks from the fire (no pun intended).  The sudden light took long moments to get used to, my eyes being accustomed to the blackness of the cave tunnel.

When I could finally see, the room was bathed in red.  The top half of my body was sticking out of a hole in the wall of this room about 40 feet up the wall as the stream trickled down the wall beneath me.  In rainier times, the trickle would probably turn into a waterfall with a 40 foot drop.  I did not feel precarious; rather I felt freed from the claustrophobia of the tunnel.

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We lay there on our backs in a line, I in the lead.  The water in the stream wherein we lay was only an inch and a half deep and had slowed to a trickle beneath us, but it was cold, icy cold.  It was so dark, there being no light whatsoever, that we had given up trying to see anything long ago.  The walls of the passageway in which we lay had narrowed down to a claustrophobic six inches on either side of us.  But it was the ceiling, the ceiling of that cave in which we lay, that was so overwhelmingly awesome in its presence.

That ceiling of dirt and rock had narrowed down to only six inches above my face.  I had had to turn onto my back and push myself forward with my feet, inching myself forward through the ever-narrowing tunnel.  I stopped and grunted, “Hold” to my other four companions, breathing in the dank, stale air of the underground passage.  I thought of the rope tied amateurishly around my ankle running back to the next guy’s ankle and so on to the next.  My buddies could always pull me out.

I did what no professional cave explorer would ever do.  I thought about it.  I thought about the walls, the floor, the ceiling.  I imagined the earth above me slightly shifting and the great expanse of rock above me simply settling to fill this narrow worm-hole, crushing my body beneath its weight.  The waves of claustrophobia began to wash over me.  I suddenly could see, but it was only an imagined redness of fear.

The single word “Pull” burned into my mind, but what came out was a blurt of panic, “Just a sec.”  One of my buddies, sensing my fear, called out, “Are you all right, Pete?”  I couldn’t answer.  The feeling of that ceiling pressing down on me had grown so that the words would no longer form in the tangle of my mind.  My fear began to spread among the other four.

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