Sparks from the Fire » cave exploring

In God We Trusted – Part 2 Island In The Blackness

Peter Link — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:26:57 +0000

(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.

I clung to the rock and leaned my head back still upside down to get more of a view of the room and saw a sight that I shall never forget. The room was the size of a train station. I had never seen a larger room in a cave. On the far side an underground river rolled through the room feeding the lake that filled the room 40 feet below. In the middle of the lake rose a tiny island, barren, no palm trees, no monkey jungles – just barren rock and mud.

It was a spectacular sight in all its virginal redness. My first words back to the guys were, “You’re not going to believe this.”

But first we had to figure out how to get down. Most fortunately there was a shelf of rock about 35 feet below us, probably the result of centuries of mineral accumulation of the drippings of our underground stream. As we were already tied together ankle to ankle by our nylon rope, the decent was actually pretty easy. We simply untied the rope from our ankles and lowered each guy down the 35 foot drop to the shelf below. We were able to secure the rope at the top around a rock and in a crevice so that the last guy could get down as well. The rope would stay attached leaving us a way to get out.

We stood on our little shelf with all our gear – food, water, flare bag, emergency kit, sleeping bags in watertight cases, extra socks, extra rope, lanterns, hard hats, etc. all which we had dragged behind us through the tunnel.

What now? The air was cool, but not cold. We were all shivering and soaked from lying in the underground stream for the last hour. We tested the temperature of the lake. Cold! Then we decided to do what only five teenage boys could do. We decided we had to swim to the island. It really wasn’t that far – maybe 30 yards, but the water would be ice cold and who knew what lay below the surface of the water. Also we’d have to swim all our gear across. But first we had to work up the nerve to get in and just swim. We stripped, still shivering, down to our skivvies.

Artie was first in, the second rope tied around his waist, just in case some underground sea monster decided to eat Artie for lunch. We could pull him back and perhaps use him as bait and catch us a sea monster for dinner.

He swam for his life and we all stood on the shore and shouted him on like penguins at the ice hole. He made it! He had swum so hard he had swum right out of his shorts, never stopping to pull them up. He stood on the shore of the island, stark naked, shivering and triumphant as we all celebrated his amazing courageous journey. All of this, please remember, took place bathed in the surrealistic red glow of our 30 minute flare.

We set up a ridiculously limited and amateur camp on the island and actually lived there for 2 days exploring our surroundings. We learned that one lantern lit was enough to give us light to live by. We went back and forth between lanterns and flares, sometimes just laughing and deciding to make our world red. Sometimes we would just sit in the utter darkness and talk. We never knew what time it was. Our sleep patterns completely changed in 2 days. We felt obliged to go to sleep at midnight, but then decided there was no point to it and just slept when we got tired. With no sun to show us the way, we were sub-strata human life forms living in a world so different that we could just make it up as we went along.

However, after 2 days, we had had enough. The inconveniences, which were staggeringly many, began to far outweigh the novelty of the adventure and the long return trip out of the cave began to seem daunting. We never really dried off in the dankness of the wet air and our sleeping bags, though protected by watertight casings, still were not prepared for these extremes. We slept the second ‘night’ in soggy discomfort.

But most of all we began to miss the light. Oh how fortunate we all are to live in the light of our sun. We take this wondrous miracle so for granted. Take the sun away and we cannot exist as human beings. We decided that light was more vital to life than food.

The story of how we eventually got out is another story for another time. Suffice it to say that we ended up traveling the underground river and cutting off a half day of slogging through already explored paths.

Looking back I can’t believe we did this, although I remember it like it was yesterday. Were we crazy to take such chances? You bet! Were we protected the entire way by The Force? Totally! Did we all make it home in one piece? Almost. But that too is another story.

We had spent a total of five and a half days underground in that cave never seeing the sun. When at last we emerged through the last hole in the ground into the afternoon sun, you could hear the Zarathustra by Richard Strauss playing in the background. Ta ta, Ta ta, Ta daaaaah!

And the light poured into our lives once more.

Even More Inspiration

In God We Trusted-Part 1

Peter Link — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:34:06 +0000

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.

We were teenage amateur spelunkers (cave explorers), the five of us. Why our naïve parents let us do this is beyond me. It was 1960 though – a time of innocence, pre-drug, pre-Viet Nam and the end of the Eisenhower years. The atom bomb hung over heads – instant annihilation – so what was the danger in a little cave exploring for the boys.

My four friends and I would take off every chance we got and head for Onondaga Cave country in Missouri, south of St. Louis where we lived. These boyhood adventures would sometimes last a week where we would find and explore a cave, never coming out. We were fascinated with the great adventures of these dramatic underground house caverns of earth and rock and once we got over our initial fears, took chances that make me shudder today.

We thought we were pros. After all, we had bought hard hats with little lights perched on the fronts. We carried nylon rope with us and wore special boots. Truth is, looking back, we didn’t have a clue and it was only by the grace of God that I live today to tell this story.

Up until this moment I had been respectful of my surroundings, but excitedly fearless. My natural teenage buoyancy carried me far past any claustrophobic warnings. Claustrophobia, up until this moment, had never been an issue. But now it came roaring forward in all its magnificence. I became scared to death I was going to die and it began to spread rapidly to the other four.

“Let’s go back,” whispered Artie. At the same moment we all realized that we could push ourselves forward with our legs, but this method would not work in reverse. Amateurs. We would have to go forward.

One of the other guys said, “Maybe we should pray.” At that moment, for each of us, it was the only choice. I closed my eyes to the fear and went to that child-like place in my imagination – that place of safety, that place of soft bed, warm sheets, Mom close by, and sweet trust that I was in the presence of God.

In an instant it no longer mattered if the earth caved in. It no longer mattered that the water was freezing. I was in that place of innocence, that sweet safety of the smile of God. No biblical passages jumped to mind. No logic of intelligence took control. I simply went to that space within that was to me “in the presence of God”. There was no other choice. If I couldn’t get there now, if I couldn’t exercise what I had been taught now, when could I?

And it was easy. I simply went there. And it was instant; once there, the fear vanished. The claustrophobia was no more. It did not subside; it was instantly gone because God was here and in the presence of God there is no fear.

At that, I spoke to my friends reassuringly, “All right, let’s go” and started to push myself forward. There in that tunnel, we all later agreed, we had each found God in our own individual ways and that re-discovery for each of us had allowed us to move on. The time it had taken was less than a minute, but what a minute! For each of us it was a lesson and a memory that would last a lifetime.

Within 15 yards I suddenly felt nothing beneath my head and as I pushed my body forward still on my back, then nothing beneath my shoulders. The sound of the space changed dramatically and I knew that the top half of my body had entered another space, a much bigger space, another room. I stopped. We were through the tunnel.

The blackness was total, but the air and sound had changed dramatically. The adventure would continue.

This is a two part series. Tune in tomorrow for the finish. )