Needle in a Haystack

Can�t say that any more. The Straddle Canyon Cave cleanup took that clean bill of health from me, and made me visit the doctor�s because of caving. Twice, actually, for unrelated reasons.

The cleanup wasn�t of Straddle Canyon Cave itself, but other pits in the same geologic formation. What made a big cave on one part of the Straddle Canyon property made deep pits in other parts, and it was in these pits that the garbage had been dumped. The property�s in Schoharie County, home to many big caves and many old farms that don�t want to pay garbage disposal fees. Nearby Baugh Cave was so full of garbage the damn cave was convex, a mound of sediment instead of a hole in the ground.

The Northeastern Cave Conservancy was hosting the cleanup effort for this on July 19. Having done multiple cleanups at Baugh Cave, I knew that the fun big stuff would be hauled out during this first cleanup, whenever possible. (Other big stuff, most notably the stationary bike buried right-side up in Baugh, took months to extricate.)

Art Rafferty and I rode up early Sunday morning in Art�s big truck. Art had noble plans to get started on a changing room outside Onesquethaw Cave, similar to the one that was recently built outside Clarksville. I�d assist Art however I could during construction on Sunday, and we�d both work on the cleanup on Saturday. This was a work weekend for us.

We got to the cave site and saw a healthy amount of cars lined up on the road. The more hands, the better. The Straddle Canyon cave was a few hundred yards from the road, following a muddy road around a cornfield. I walked there in my shorts and T-shirt, seeing what I should wear for this work and what gear I should bring. It was a hot day, and I didn�t want to haul anything around that would go unused.

The cave site was just to the left of a giant pile of rusted metal. This was the debris removed from just the initial effort of cleaning this cave. Mattress springs, bent pieces of sheet metal and assorted car body parts weighed down a pile that was bigger in volume than most of New Jersey�s caves. The cave site was an open gash in the earth, made of dirt and garbage. It ran 50 feet across, dipping down 12 feet at its lowest, with mossy rock walls that show their scalloped erosure. The bottom of the canyon was spongy from the hollow spaces in the garbage. Deep in one pocket was a small passage that went out of sight, a wall of packed garbage its roof. THAT was all that was left of this cave.

A dozen people were hauling debris out of the cave. I recognized Wayne Russell and his fianc�e Julie Roselius, Rick Orben and Christa Hay. Mike Chu and some guys I didn�t know were at the bottom of the pit, freeing the bigger pieces of debris so they could be added to the metal pile. There were still big ugly hunks of metal half-buried in the pit. Most people were wearing jeans, gloves and their worst t-shirt. I didn�t want to get my regular clothes filthy doing this, so I walked back to change.

Inside my plastic tub of cave gear were two sets of coveralls: new red and old orange. This was a job for old orange: they were already beat up, I had no plans to wear them anyplace else in the near future, and I didn�t mind if they got more ripped or more ragged. I also dug out a decent pair of gloves, and strapped my helmet on. I was sweating before I even tied my shoes, but the cave was full of sharp garbage and I had head-to-toe puncture-resistant nylon to combat it.

Back at the pit, the crew managed to get the hood of the car out. It was a Nash. There was also a fender, a wheel rim, and assorted other frame parts in the pit. There was a good chance the entire car was in disposed here, piece by piece. A 1958 license plate would later be found, specifying the garbage dump date better than any carbon dating.

The pit was somewhat like an archeological site, since everything organic had turned to soil. That soil was fine in the pit, and didn�t need to be hauled out. Leave it in the pit, and during the next rain it will naturally wash down the natural cave passage. Amongst this dirt like blueberries in a muffin was the non-organic garbage: Metal cans, glass bottles, ceramics, linoleum. There was so much of this non-organic garbage that the floor of the pit was spongy and unstable.

Only big metal chunks were being recycled this day. There were plenty of intact glass bottles, but they were dirty and so weren�t being recycled. Ditto for rusty metal cans. There were no plastic bottles, since the dumpers did so from a time where plastic was not that common. So no plastic bottles, no plastic bags, no plastic anything but an odd piece of Bakelite.

I worked my way into the pit and began pulling out stuff to fill a spackle bucket. At first there�s an excitement when you discover anything identifiable. "Hey, a little glass bottle!" That excitement lessens when you notice there are thousands of little glass bottles in the pit, and twice as much as that in broken glass. Finding half a broken coffee cup does not get an announcement, nor does finding the other half of the coffee cup five minutes later.

Finding a sealed mason jar full of jam, that gets an announcement. The jar was brown with age and the color of the sloshing jelly inside could only be identified as "dark." Bets were placed about who�d get the first taste.

There were too many workers to efficiently work on the pit, so I and some others walked 30 feet away to a second pit, in even worse condition. There were rusted metal drums, empty gallon jugs from cheap wine, and a half-buried car door. There wasn�t a crowd at this one, so we got to start freeing the bigger metal pieces.

My first trip in this second pit was to fill a spackle bucket full of glass bottles. They weren�t getting recyced, but some of them would get a second chance at life thanks to Aaron, a local caver, who was starting up a glass collection. He was taking any intact bottles of note. Soda bottles with the writing on them, anything with a textured surface, and mason jars with working tops were his big scores. We happily passed whatever we found onto him. He was grateful for anything unusual, but was projecting his interest in the bottles onto everyone else and so almost felt guilty when presented with anything unusual. No, Aaron, that 50-year-old Nehi bottle�s all yours, we don�t want it.

(Aaron also had a vintage 1958 car to his name. There�s a Woodstock movie being planed, and aaron i hoping to be in it. The producers said he was perfect, except for his car having modern license plates. You better beleive he was happy when the 1958 license plate was uncovered.)

Back at the first pit, a mesh metal net was found folded under layers of dirt and garbage. Someone secured a thick hook around one end of the net, tied the other end to a truck bumper, and began tugging the net away. The first tug snapped the hook loose and sent it flying into a tree. Wow, I wasn�t expecting my helmet to actually be needed here. On the second try - after a loud chorus of warnings - the hook uprooted the layers of garbage without ay extra drama, freeing up a bunch of loose garbage for the pit and the entire metal net for the recycling heap.

Someone found a brass elephant. Someone found a road sign. I found an intact barbecue grill, one soild piece of rusted metal.

There were dozens of small glass pharmaceutical bottles in the pits, particularly the second pit. Did a pharmacy dump its garbage here? Were these veterinary drugs? In retrospect, I should have gotten wary when I saw them. Where there�s some medical debris, there�s other medical debris.

The second pit had numerous long sections of aluminum buried in the pit. Pulling each one out unearthed another strata of bottles, cans and dirt. Mixed with this were ridiculously long lengths of thick metal cable, close to an inch thick. Wayne figured these put together were once a grain silo. They were so tangled and unwieldy, some portable metal saws were dug out to cut them up into removable pieces.

I cleared a place to sit in the second pit, then began filling a sturdy contractor bag with small debris. There was no point in standing and picking, since there was so much within arms� reach: broken glass, rusty cans, more broken glass, more rusty cans. If you ever ran out, just brush back the dirt, and there was another stratum of broken glass and rusty cans.

I tossed something from my left into the bag on my lap, and rested my arm gently on my right. I felt a puncture on my wrist. I pulled my arm back, looked, and saw a tiny silver needle sticking straight out from the dirt. It was the first piece of stainless steel I had seen all day. I cleared away the dirt around it, and sure enough, it was a hypodermic syringe, facing straight up like a rocket ship on a launch pad. Christ.

I pulled it out and stared at it. A giant glass chamber with a depressed plunger. It made sense with so many little pharmaceutical bottles around. Christ.

So what the hell did I just infect myself with? What could I have infected myself with? What do I do now? Christ.

It�s ironic that I was the only person to find a needle, since I was the only person who had bothered to put on a full cave suit for this. I had head-to-toe ballistic nylon on, and I found the needle in my wrist, one of the only areas not covered by the suit.

I warned the people around me that there were syringes in here. I passed the syringe to Aaron, who added it (carefully) to his glass collection. No one here had explicit medical training, but there were enough amateur opinions to speculate about the safety of a needle stick. Most stuff on the needle would be dead. Tetanus would still be a consideration, and maybe hepatitis.

There was no discussion about AIDS. No one wanted to broach that one with a caving acquaintance. AIDS and HIV die with exposure to air, I had heard. And it�s only been around since, what, the 70s? I�ve got archeological proof that this needle comes from 1958. Everything from the Eisenhower era�s been cured by now, right? Right?

My worries were eased by several minutes of mad cow jokes. Since this might be veterinary equipment, mad cow was the first disease that sprang to people�s minds. "You know, I�m pretty sure I don�t have ... MOO!" I said, not able to resist a dumb joke.

The cleanup ended a few minutes after that. I was still in the pit, looking to do enough work to justify the diesel burned in getting me up here. (Logic question: is it an environmental net gain to burn a tank of gas to drive 200 miles to pick up a can?) I should have been hightailing it to the hospital, but since no one was panicking, I wasn�t panicking. Most people didn�t even know I had been stuck. I warned the people around me about the needle stick, but I didn�t bang a gong or anything.

We headed to the Schoharie cabin, where a feast of spam, Twinkies and Pabst Blue Ribbon awaited us. This was the White Trash Bar-B-Q, where several dishes from the White Trash cookbook were made. One dish had spam, lemon Jello and Tabasco sauce. I would literaly rather eat that unearthed mason jar full of mystery goo.

One or two people asked me if I was OK after the needle stick, and I told them I was a bit worried but felt fine. There wasn�t an injury from the stick itself. But was this the start of something else? Who knew? Sunday�s noble goals ended up being a wash. Art felt terrible that morning, in no shape to hammer wood. We still went to the Clarksville site, took some measurements of that changing area, and then scoped out the Onesquethaw area. Art�s a natural for this sort of work. It�s take me weeks to figure out. Art just needs half an hour inside a Lowe�s, and he could build it blindfolded. But not sick.

I got back to New Jersey mid-afternoon, and met up with my girlfriend Jen. I slowly told her the story, mentioning the needle stick toward the end not to worry but I got a needle stick. Half an hour later, we were looking up doctors� offices that were open in the area. Half an hour later, we found no one and so drove to the emergency room.

I as nevous about the needle stick, but I was also aware that I had a good story to tell a doctor. I wouldn�t get a whole episode of ER devoted to me, but maybe I�d get an amusing minute of some doctor (not to mention Jen) trying to figure out why I was in a 50-year-old garbage dump. Let�s hope I didn�t get a whole episode: those are devoted to the people that come in with a hangnail and die from hangnail-itis within the hour.

There were a dozen patients in the waiting room, but after maybe two minuts I got called in from there. The admitting nurse asked me what was wrong, and I gave her my story. She smiled, said that no good deed went unpunished, and sent me to an exam room.

The doctor who looked at me had heard why I was there, and said the one thing I really wanted to here: "I�m not going to lie to you: this story�s going to make the rounds." I was now clinically interesting to ER doctors, and for caving-related stuff to boot. Nice. I was afraid I would need a stalactice puncturing a lung to merit that.

The docotor confirmed for me that anything viral on a needle so old is "almost guaranteed dead." That includes HIV and AIDS. Phew. Tetanus was a real risk, though, and since I hadn�t had a booster recently I�d get one now. (For all I knew, that needle in the garbage was a discarded tetanus booster.) It was lucky that I got a hepatitus B vaccine for Over the next five days I took the antibiotic and watched as the tiny red dot on my wrist completely faded. If there was any infection from it, the wrist would have swolen or not healed so quickly. I think.

Telling my mom about this turned out to not be terrible, since my mom works in health care and deals with staff members getting needle sticks on a regular basis. Still wasn�t much fun: breaking medical news to your mom is never a happy phone call.

I�m deferred from giving blood for one year from the needle stick. uly 19, 2009, I�ll be ready to get a pint drained. I live off those bloodmobile cookies.

As my worries over the neede stick faded, a giant red rash spread across my ankles. I couldnt blame a needle for that: it was good ol� poison ivy. It ended up being the worst case in my life, covering both ankles and working its way up my legs. I normlly can tolrate poison ivy without even calamine lotion, but this time I was slathering the calamine on and the rash was just spreading and growing itchier. And that caused me, for the first time in my life, to visit the doctor�s for poison ivy. I got loaded down with prescriptions creams, a steroid, and antihistimine tablets. Writing this several weeks later, I�ve still got poison ivy.

So those are my two (so far) doctors� visits on behalf of the Straddle Canyon Cave cleanup. I may hang back home the next time a cleanup effort happens. Technically, I�ve already promised both my mom and girlfriend to stay away from them like the plague - which I�d probably catch if I go there for another outing.

I don�t want to discourage anyone from participating in cave cleanups in the future, but be warned about what�s in there.