5/00
After a dozen years of this, I decided to give it up and actually do the stuff I wanted to do. And first up was caving. Well, second, after eating. A dozen years of hunger really lets you put away the Hydroxes.
I found the Northern New Jersey Grotto on the Internet, and they were more than happy to find new cavers. Most people switch the terms caver and spelunker; technically the difference is that spelunkers aren't prepared for unforeseen dangers, and cavers are. The NNJG are cavers, and proud of it.
I knew a little about the equipment I was going to need before I actually hit the cave. I knew I needed several light sources, since without light you're just some idiot in a hole. I needed old clothes, since caves are like mail order knives: jagged and dirty. And I needed a helmet, since I will always find a way to bang my head. I should have probably kept wearing that helmet after I got out of the cave, save me some boo boos.
My ride to the cave and primary bumee of gear was Andrew Foord, a very nice guy who also lives in Jersey City. I was tempted to blow a couple hundred bucks on brand new gear, but I also wanted to buy a trombone during that brief period in fourth grade I played trombone. Better to borrow this first time, to make sure this would be worth it. Lucky for me the grotto's generous with their equipment, and were all too happy to let me use it.
I came prepared with three light sources: a cigarette lighter from a tattoo parlor (I don't smoke or have any tattoos; how I got the lighter, I don't know), an Indiglo watch, and a light saber. I thought of bringing Wintergreen LifeSafers to crunch and make that green spark, but that seemed like a stupid light source. Andrew saw my sources, refrained from saying anything, and quickly got me hooked up with a decent carbide lamp and helmet.
A carbide lamp uses carbide rocks and a slow drip of water to release acetlyne gas, which is lit in a mirror cup that gives off a lot of light. You'd think battery flashlights would be better, but they just put out a tight beam of concentrated light, while the carbide gives you a widespread glow. The carbide/electric battle is like the PC/Mac debates that are simultaneously funny and pathetic so long as you don't care which way the fight goes.
I had thought ahead to wear old clothes, but not far ahead to realize I'd need a second set of clothes to wear when I came out of the cave. Also, all I brought were cotton clothes, which are bad. I never thought this would happen, but I found a practical use for polyester clothes. Synthetic fabrics don't soak up water, and keeping warm is a big concern in caves since it's perpetually 52 degrees in there. I had to bum an old set of coveralls off someone else there, although I wasn't doing his washer any favors when I gave it back to him.
Andrew and I blasted our way to Surprise Cave (the name of the cave we were going to, somewhere in Sullivan County, New York) Sunday morning in his 1973 Alfa Romeo. Riding in style is very enjoyable; I'm used to a 1990 Dodge Shadow with a big round dent by a door. We made good time, getting there before the other cavers.
The cave entrance was near the top of a steep incline, which was tough in the coveralls. Doing something like that in wetsuits for a water cave must be hell. Most caves, in the interest of safety or land/bat preservation, have locks on them, and keys are kept by the owner of the land and anyone he trusts or can make a dupe of that key. This system works fine until someone takes the lock, in which case the cave goes back to the hole in the ground it was, only with a metal frame door around it.
The first couple hundred feet of cave looked like a rockslide: big boulders thrown on top of each other, and you're scurrying down through the crevices. It opened into a huge room with a slanting ceiling and a stream that I heard was the driest anyone had seen it. Plenty of room to move around in; this caving stuff was a cinch so far. I was afraid it would be nonstop crawling through passages the size of light sockets, but everything was human sized.
We made two big circular trips in my stay. The first started from the big room, with about half the assembled cavers. I wish I could say the exact path I took, or the names of the people I was with, but I was 50% stunned from actually being underground, and 50% just plain climbing, which left 0% to figure out directions or get polite with names. I've seen the map of Surprise, and unless you're a map expert, it ain't going to help you.
The train of us, me about third from the front, slid over a big flat rock I dubbed the Patio Table, then went into a shrinking passage riddled with fossils. Stupid me thought any trace of light colored rock was a fossil, ignoring the tiny indentations in the passages. I thought I was looking at giant twenty foot long bones, wondering why no one tried excavating these before.
Then we went through the sand squeezeway. It's a downhill sandy slope you slide down headfirst, which turns into a tight left upwards turn. I thought it was completely insane to go into something this cramped, but since everyone else did it without questioning the sanity of it, I went along.
You have to get your right arm out to make it through the tightest part of the squeeze. Me, not knowing this, led with my left arm, and got stuck in the turn. Since it was sand, I couldn't get a grip anywhere, and had to work the arm up a bit at a time, feeling like it was going to pop off the joint half the time. Every little move was exhausting me, but I had to move, since the line of people were waiting patiently behind me. I could see that once I got out of the turn, I had a big uphill sand crawl, and very little energy left.
That was it. I was done with caving. This sucked. I was for all purposes stuck, holding up the line, dog tired, on what was supposed to be fun. I kept repeating my mantra, "Thank God I'm not claustrophobic. Thank God I'm not claustrophobic." Then my carbide went out.
There was enough light from the top of the crawl so I could climb without having to relight it. I hadn't yet and still haven't mastered the art of carbide lighting, (I can't even snap efficiently) and didn't want to spend any more time in the pinch then necessary.
Somehow I pulled myself out, and got to experience the underrated luxury of standing again. Everyone else followed suit out the squeezeway pretty quickly, none of them complaining or even seeming to be miffed by it. I guess cavers are used to tight squeezes. We got to a small pool to a side, where a frog was found last time. How a frog got this far underground was a mystery to me; maybe it was the WB frog trying to find where his ratings were hiding. Wherever he came from, he went back, since there was nothing alive in the water.
I thought myself to be in rather decent shape before this. I always take the stairs when I can, I don't usually get out of breath doing lifting, and thanks to genetically creative ligament arrangements, I can touch my toes and put my palms on the ground with juat a modicum of pain. But caving is a full aerobic workout, and a long one at that. So after an hour or so of nonstop crawling, I was getting tired. Not enough to quit or anything, but enough to know I'd be waking up sore the next day.
We ran into another grotto group while climbing up from the pool. Now would be the time to throw everyone's names in, but I'm lousy at remembering people's names the first time around, especially in large groups. Plus, it's not like you (the e-mail people reading this) know any of them (caving guys).
A group of us climbed up to Heaven, a small dead end room with a lot of formations. Formations are stalactites, stalagmites, gypsum deposits, and anything interesting to look at that only happens in caves. (Stalactites hang down, stalagmites point up, by the way.) I was warned not to knock my head on the stalactites coming into Heaven; it'd be a shame if thousands of years of formation would be destroyed by my big stupid head. The star attraction in Heaven is, of course, the four foot stalagmite that looks like a penis.
We started the second circular trip, going through the bottoms of two very high waterfall pits. The second one actually had a little water coming out of it, where I feebly attempted to wash the mud off Andrew's borrowed gloves.
We tried to find what would be the best way out of our neck of the woods. Going only by the map and the people who had been in Surprise before, we sorta got a little lost. But just sorta. After a dead end, the leaders (God knows I was just following the rest of the guys) came to a way out. It was another squeezeway. Two of the guys we were with decided to turn around, thinking they wouldn't make it through because of the pinch at the end. And they weren't fat or anything. I'm not Jabba the Hutt, but I'm still 185, and not one of those people who can pull themselves through a tennis racket. Andrew was going through, and he didn't see any size restriction I wouldn't pass, so I went in behind him. If the crawl was the quickest way out, I'd take it. All I wanted to do was see sunlight and sleep again.
The crawl made a turn to the left, shrinking like the pipe in that Road Runner cartoon. Too bad I wasn't shrinking as well. I couldn't imagine what the first guy who went through this was thinking, not even knowing if this passage went anywhere. I thought the best part of caving would be exploring the unexplored regions, until I realized most of that exploring would be seeing if passages like this went anywhere. Knowing mine led out was the primary thing fueling me.
With the helmet restricting my head movements, all I could really do was look at the pebbles beneath me. I saw a mealworm. How he got down in the squeezeway was beyond me. Maybe he hitched a ride from a frog. Then I saw a button. "Hey Andrew, did you lose a button?"
"Maybe. Just stick it in your mouth." It seemed like a stupid way to get something out, sucking on a muddy button that might have had a mealworm crawling on it, but I couldn't hold it any other way. So in my mouth it went.
"Make sure you've got your flashlight outside your coveralls," he shouted back. I was sure I misheard, and that he meant to keep the little backup flashlight INSIDE the coveralls. After all, getting it outside would mean getting it all muddy and scraped up, plus the chain around my neck might break. It'd be a pain to do it in the cramped conditions I was currently in, so I left it inside.
Then I found out what Andrew was talking about with the flashlight. The roof of the pinch drops down lower and lower until it barely allows your helmet through. It was flat and rocky, so I could get a foothold and push through it, but at the roof's lowest a big jut of stone comes out of the floor. It was the tightest squeeze I'd seen, tighter than the sand one. And my flashlight inside my coveralls wedged my chest in. There wasn't enough arm movement to get it out, so I'd have to go through the pinch with the light inside. It was an effort. A huge push, of which I didn't have many left in me, and I was only an inch closer. Andrew was only a few feet away, encouraging me to make it through, but I still couldn't lift my head to see how big the room he was in was.
Inch by inch, push by push, I made it through. I really had to suck it in to get the flashlight over the hump, which made a sore spot on my chest for a few days, but I got through. I pulled myself into the luxury of kneeling space, and then the poshness of stooping space, and finally the glory of standing room. The passage opened back into the first big one I came into. As thanks for getting me through, I gave Andrew his button back.
After a long rest which I felt could go on for hours, we met up with the guys who took the longer non-crawl way out, and went back to the surface. Going back through the rockslide was tough, since I was pretty much spent. Twenty feet from outside, and I couldn't get a leghold to get out of this one crevice. I knew it must have been frustrating to the other people stuck in the cave by my exhaustion, so I got out as fast as my inept body would allow.
That was several weeks ago. While in the cave, I figured that this was a wee bit too exhausting to do on a regular basis. But now that I'm topside again and not trapped in a straw, I want to go back. The washer didn't get some of the mud out of the socks, so those are my caving socks, my first piece of official gear. I had been wanting to go caving for the past decade, and now that I've done it, I want to do it again. Just keep the passages big.