You probably hate her already. Too bad, since she's a nice person, and cute as a basket of kittens to boot. I figured the Clarksville and Onesquethaw day trip would be best to suit her needs, so I got her on it. She invited her roommate Ro, and scheduled a photographer for the trip. The plan was to do Clarksville first, and then Onesquethaw. Writing a story about Onesquethaw required a series of regulations (among which: no naming of the cave, over-views of cave safety and cave conservation, mentioning both the National Speleological Society and the Northeast Cave Conservancy). Clarksville had none of this. Nothing on the list was bad, but it was a short article, and the focus of the article was not going to be regional cave politics. We intended on going in both caves, but we were bushed after a good Clarksville run, and cutting the day off at that would give Anne all the material she needed, with none of the requirements.
I knew it wouldn't be, but I couldn't help thinking that this would be my chance to be famous. I'd get my picture in a magazine. Never mind that I probably wouldn't be in any of these pictures. Never mind that if I would, I'd be a tiny orange and brown blob with no caption. Never mind that I currently work for a magazine, and write about 40% of it. I was going to be famous! Millionaires would ask for my autograph, then invite me to Tahiti for long weekends.
The trip's photographer was Kevin Downey. Just try to find an issue of the NSS News without a picture of his. Kevin had been in Clarksville tons of times before, so he became the impromptu trip leader. I had never been in Clarksville before, and to date still haven't found a map of the damn place, so I was useless in terms of being a trip leader.
We met at the Sheraton, where 15 people eventually came together. This was a big trip, with a lot of new cavers. Steve Sanbeg alone brought five from the Rutgers outdoors group. I got ragged on a bit for actually being early. I was twenty minutes late once, ONCE, and I get the rep as the guy who's not on time. (Technically this is correct, since the last Clarksville trip I was a flat out no show, and not 'late'.) My car already had Anne and Ro in it, so we only picked up one passenger, Ray. The caravan got to Clarksville with the usual amount of lost cars and detours, none of which are interesting.
Anne got into her shiny new teal coveralls, and Kevin got a couple 'before' pictures in the parking lot outside Clarksville. For contrast, he wanted the dirtiest cavers to surround her for one of them. Since there were so many new people caving, there were only three of us with suits: Bubbles, Allen Rush and me. Luckily none of us washed our suits since the last trip. So we gathered around Anne and tried not to stain her. That picture's currently my best shot of being famous.
A 16-person photography trip would be brutally insane (15 Sheraton people plus Kevin), so Kevin broke off in a small group to take the shots. Anne, Kevin, Ro and I went into the main Clarksville entrance a minute or two before the huge swarm that'd be tromping through it simultaneously. I climbed down after the girls, and immediately couldn't find them. I was in a small room that led down, and they weren't there. I'd make a wonderful parole officer. Anne and Ro had crawled up left and around a bend, into a room we weren't going to just yet. We crawled back down and into a larger room, with a little crawlway that would be the site of Anne's first in-cave photos. It didn't matter where the crawl went, so long as it looked nice to have Anne crawling out of it.
I was hoping to have some hand in the photo process. I really wanted to see how it was done. Kevin needed someone to hold back flashes, so I became that guy. Back flashes add more depth to shots, let people see more of the cave. A regular flash can only give so much light, but a second one behind the subject can give a shot a clearly viewed foreground and background.
Kevin's equipment was idiot-proof. The flashes were attached to devices called slaves that automatically went off when someone set off a flash from a regular camera. Kevin takes a picture and my flash goes off simultaneously. All I have to do is pop the flash bulbs out (the size of outdoor Christmas lights) and put new ones in.
Naturally I messed this up three times before the first real picture got taken. I had three bulbs in my hand, and took my glove off so I wouldn't accidentally drop one. In the process, I accidentally dropped one. Turned out the bulbs are very sturdy. Kevin explained to me that the bulb only goes off when a flash is activated. As I fiddled with the bulb, it went off in my hand. Turned out Wayne Russell was nearby with his camera, and that flash set off mine. To keep that from happening again, I didn't put a new flash bulb in until Kevin took his first picture. Turns out that first shot got taken with an empty back flash.
Cave photography is not a quick art. It's not just snapping a picture of the waterfall as you get to it. Readying fragile equipment and transporting it from location to location becomes a primary objective. Kevin's bag weighed around 35 pounds, and was the size of a sheet cake that fed a hundred. There are many areas he can't get the bag through. It takes several minutes to get all equipment ready for shots, even with assistants. And Kevin's about the best in the world at this, so he knows every shortcut.
The water level was way down, from what I was told: most of the stream passage was barely at ankle level. Anne was wondering how well her aqua socks were working so she took a glove off and dabbled her fingers in the water. She then praised aqua socks for a good long time. This was only my second time caving with them, and the first time using them with any real water. How did I ever cave without them?
We found a few bats hibernating of the ceiling, and an instant consensus was reached that they were tiny and cute. During time as a camp counselor, Anne somehow had a bat land and cling in her hair, so the admission was a bigger step for her than for Ro.
The stream passage made a quick dip in length and went around a sharp left turn. This way led to the Lake Room, and Anne would get some water pictures here. I took my equipment and crouched around the corner. The water was up to my knees, and the ceiling ended around mid-thigh. By holding the flashes up toward the ceiling and turning my body into the number 7, I could avoid the slaves dipping in the water. This water was very low, I heard, so I was glad I only had to wait in water up to my kneecaps.
It was a bigger passage to shoot, so Kevin gave me medium bulbs, the size of golf balls. I had two flashes and slaves, one for white bulbs, one for blue. They gave off different qualities of light. The tunnel has natural shelves made for temporary flash bulb storage, so I used one. Anne was also knee deep in the water, staying still between pictures so the water would be smooth. Ro was dry and up on the bank, playing with clay. I pointed both flashes at the barely visible (from my perspective) back of Anne, and Kevin clicked. Only one flash went off, the white one. I replaced both bulbs, in case the blue one was a dud, and pointed both again. Again, only the white.
Through trail and error, Kevin and I figured the flash holding the blue bulbs was not working, and the individual bulbs were fine. Dual white and blue back flashes weren't in the cards, so they became single back flash shots. We got one of our water shoots, done, so we moved to dry land to let the huge other group pass through and visit the Lake Room. I passed out granola bars, which Anne and Ro responded to with noises I've never heard associated toward granola before. "This is the best food ever!" Ro said. It didn't feel like it, but we had been in the cave for about two hours.
Anne, Ro and I wanted to see the Lake Room as much as the other Clarksville novices, and we were planning to see it after our second water shots, but since we weren't shooting, we might as well do it right then. So we splashed through, in water that crested at my mid-thigh and Anne and Ro's waists. The Lake was nice to look at, but the price was going right back the way we came. My back was killing me from folding like a car seat, and Anne and Ro would spend the rest of the day in 42 degree underwear. Sometimes it's good to be tall, sometimes it's good to be short, and in that tunnel it sucks to be both.
Kevin wasn't going to subject him and his bag to the crawl to the Mail Slot, so he picked out of it only what he needed. He gave me a bag of light bulbs to sherpa through. A tiny passageway and me with a big bag of fragility. This was a Three Stooges episode just waiting to happen. I tucked the bag under my arm like a football and crawled through like a three-legged dog. He said there was a special thing up in the ceiling that most people don't notice when they pass. I wanted to see this special thing, but Kevin wasn't giving any hints, and turning to look up was awkward with a bag of shifting glass. I checked periodically for formations, but never saw anything.
The passageway ended at the Mail Slot, a small horizontal crack Anne and Ro were sure no human would ever get through. But they boosted themselves in, Anne first, and slowly wormed their way up. I followed suit, my crawling experience balanced with me being at least 50 pounds bigger than either one of them. Anne wanted her suit dirty, and slithering through muddy puddles here got the job done.
We came out into a room that led to an entrance out. I couldn't feel any air blowing, although I felt it just fine coming through the Mail Slot. We were just far enough away to make shouting back to Kevin a royal pain, and there wasn't a lot of collective energy for excess exploration, so we went back through the Slot, and Anne got another round of crawling pictures in.
Around here I began hoping the other trip was taking its time, for Ray's sake. Ray was with the other group, which was presumably outside by now. He didn't see where I hid the key, and his dry clothes were in my trunk. As the trip stretched longer and longer, I was dreading coming back to a Raysicle by my trunk in ice-covered clothes, politely saying he'd been out there for two hours now.
We came back through to the stream passage, me still with the light bulbs, and still not seeing anything. What we missed both ways was a cave drawing done in the 30s. It was with the same primitive materials as the Lascaux paintings, so it should be around for the next. Nowadays it's considered vandalism, so it's not done any more.
Ro and Kevin were last to leave the tunnel, and Ro's light went out. Kevin swapped some of his camera's flash batteries with Ro's, but it didn't take. They both brought extra lights, but they were all with me in my pack. When Ro crawled out with Kevin and his light close behind, Anne took her extra Petzl off her helmet and stuck in on Ro's head, an easy fix.
We worked our way back to that first room Anne and Ro mistakenly went in. We purposefully went there now, and followed it to the Birth Canal. This was one of the room names that really stuck in Anne and Ro's heads, and it was an apt name. A mini Sarlacc pit dropped down into tunnels that Kevin advised were best taken feet first. I slid down first, finding half the time I liked headfirst. After an upclimb to a dead end, I went feet first through a tiny dark space in the floor, and slid out into an echoing stream passage. Ro popped through a minute later, squealing "I'm being born!". Anne had some trouble finding the tiny hole, but our directions to "go left" and "go the other way" weren't crystal clear.
Anne and Ro were both trying to be macho about the cave, but it was taking a toll. "It's the most exhilarating thing, and at the same time it's my worst nightmare!" Ro said. A quick decision was made that there'd be no Onesquethaw in our future that day. No one wanted to be the wimp who backed out, but I wasn�t going to let either one of them do another four hours of caving after getting so cold from the first trip.
Kevin skipped the Birth Canal entirely (it's no fun with a 35 pound sheet cake) and ducked through the Bathtub to meet up with us. Anne's last cave shots were in the Bathtub. The Bathtub lip was just low enough I could stand completely out of the water and hold the flash. Anne was ducking under a ceiling in thigh-deep water, and wasn't thrilled to find out I got to stand high and dry for the pictures.
We crawled out the same entrance we came in after five hours underground. I wanted them to experience the surprise joy of seeing daylight for the first time as they neared the entrance, but I stupidly announced the daylight as soon as I saw it, killing their surprise.
Anne came out second to last, and Kevin snapped a few pictures of her emergence. Ro came out last. Anne looked at her in the daylight and started laughing, for a full minute. "You look so pathetic!" she managed to get out. She did: her gray sweatshirt had soaked up lots of mud, there was dirt on her face, and the pride of her outfit, leopard print gloves, were now chocolate print. On the plus side, her jeans were now genuinely clay washed.
Kevin got a few shots of Anne triumphantly out, muddy from head to toe. Anne took her helmet off to get her muddy hair in the shot. It was Ro's turn to laugh for a full minute, complete with pointing. It was typical helmet head, but Anne's hair was just long enough to be completely misshapen.
As soon as I got back to the car, I turned it on, cranked the heat to full blast, and looked for a frozen Ray. He was waiting in a van, having borrowed clothes from a variety of people to make a full dry set. I apologized, he shrugged it off, and he got back in his own dry clothes, as did the rest of us. Anne stood in the water longer than anyone else, and Ro was wearing cotton jeans and a sweatshirt, so both of them had real reasons to be colder than the average caver.
There was no restaurant nearby, but there had to be one between Clarksville and the entrance ramp for the Thruway. "I'm a quasi-vegetarian, and I'll eat a *$%@# T-bone right now," Anne said. We found a slightly fancy restaurant after ten minutes of driving: it actually had frogs' legs on the menu. We weren't the best fit for it: my hair looked like Wolverine, and the first thing the girls did upon entering was go to the bathroom to throw out their frigid muddy underwear. Anne insisted that Jane pick up the tab for our dinner, and none of us could find an objection. She also got me a tank of gas on the way home, so my day was completely free.
I blasted the heat on the whole way home. Despite both of them having fleeces and sweatshirts, neither Anne nor Ro brought an actual jacket. I was sweating, and still would hear a small voice in the back saying "Could you turn the heat up?" I found 100.1, a great radio station in the Kingston area, and got to listen to it for the full drive through its broadcast radius. I suggested changing my name to O, so the people in the car would be Ray, Ro, Anne, O. For some reason no one thought this hugely clever bit of wordplay was funny.
The pictures won't be in the magazine until the October issue, so I've got some months to contemplate my future celebrity status. In the meantime, Anne wants to cave again. She's got the suit for it, a nice challenging trip under her belt, and has realized that grotto people are funny ha-ha in addition to funny strange. If you see her underground, latch onto her trip. She's your ticket to fame.