The Dive Evangelist

Polina had already taken the Intro to Cave course with Paul some months before and the two had become friends. In truth, it's hard not to make fast friends with Paul. He's a modest, smiling dude with eyes that laugh and a voice that easily follows suit. Far from being the stern and severe drillmaster I'd expected of someone with his venerable history, he bounces rather than stomps and laughs with you at your mistakes rather than scolds. He’s unashamed to howl showtunes into the woods at all hours of the night and knows more about Star Trek than I do, which is saying something.

"I brought some leftovers for you, Paul," Polina twittered excitedly upon arrival.

She, Anna, and Larry checked into the sumptuous accommodations of the doublewide trailer right in the heart of fabulous, downtown Lauraville two days after I had already settled into a routine of groping around in the dark along with Jim (not like that you pervo… in the caves during lights-out drills), the final character addition to our tale. Jim is a tall fella with a Tennessee drawl and a logbook full of diving in the Keys that would make anyone envious. Predictably, not just Polina, but the whole crew were as excited as can be and ready to get wet.

Paul ate the leftovers of whatever meal her expert-chef friend had cooked up while the new check-ins unloaded, layed out, and assembled gear. Most of it, anyway. Anna's gear had been shipped by the airline to Limbo. We talked planning: the next day we would go to Peacock Springs to start our Apprentice Cave course.

Jim and I had already been to Peacock with Paul in the preceding days. It's a quiet, pretty place, a state park of old woods dripping with Spanish Moss and raw pecans. The pecans actually don’t “drip” so much as they “drop.” Loudly. I never knew raw pecans are so big. For all the possible danger of cave diving, I’m far more afraid of getting a concussion from a falling pecan.

Incidentally, my mom hates that picture.

As you drive the single, sandy lane that winds through the trees, you think of the thousands of feet of passage just below your tires and wonder whether there might be a diver 80 feet under your car that very moment. You park in a small lot with high-seated benches to make gear-up particularly easy and walk the blessed boardwalks to a sinkhole.

Beneath the creepy duckweed on the surface is the clearest water you can imagine. From the surface you can see every inch of the bottom, every fish regarding your shiny boltsnaps curiously, and every turtle you scared the crap out of by giant striding off those steps. Most importantly... you can see the hole. Just down there, behind the tangle of trees that have fallen into the sink, there's a hole in the wall.

The previous few days were primarily for me because both Jim and Polina were a bit further along the curriculum than I. Jim was along for practice and some refresher work before moving on. So we swam together into that hole and went over the basics of Cave Diving.

First off: the gear you trundle down the boardwalk and stairs is different from recreational dive gear. The first thing anyone notices is: it's heavier. Way heavier. One notices this again and with much more clarity after a relaxing dive when one must climb out of the water and walk up a bunch of stairs wearing it. One will often put this off as long as possible until one is in danger of rupturing one’s bladder in one’s drysuit. Other differences include: you're wearing two tanks instead of one. Your primary second stage is on a 7 foot hose wrapped around your body like a friendly anaconda while you wear your alternate like a necklace. And, you have flashlights strapped all over your body.

You kick differently in a cave, that's one of the biggies. Because the springs have had thousands and thousands of years to lay down the sediment they have worn away from the walls, there is silt covering the floors of all but the fastest flowing passages. You do NOT want to piss that silt off. If you kick it... no, if you even kick wrong anywhere near it there billows up a cloud that can fill the cave in seconds and drop the near limitless visibility to near total darkness. So when you kick, you kick like a frog with the appropriately named "frog kick," which directs the force of the water directly behind you instead of down at that latently angry silt. You leave it alone, it leaves you alone.

That said, the smooth curves of undisturbed clay slipping and rolling through the limestone formations seem to be made of melted velvet. I saw one place where, for geologic reasons beyond me, a section of floor had sloughed away, exposing a parfait of thousands of years worth of layered color. More than just to maintain viz, you want to leave it alone because it is beautiful.

Because of the threat of that viz-dropping silt, along with the fact that even the best map of a cave would be confounding to even the greatest of all possible cartographers, one always has, within immediate reach, a guideline which one can follow all the way back out to open water. Sometimes the line is already there, a permanent tour guide of the cave, sometimes you need to lay out your own, using a dive reel. Laying that line logically, safely, and with a path polite to other divers is as much an art as a skill. I hope to get better over time.

Another notable difference between recreational diving and cave diving is that instead of diving with a buddy, the arguably optimum squad for a cave dive is a three person team. With Polina having joined the class we were really getting our swerve on. We moved into working laying out more of our own line than Jim and I had been. We worked on planning what is called a circuit, which is when, over the course of two dives, you lay out a circular path instead of simply swimming in, then retracing your steps precisely back to your starting point. We made a dive where we popped in through one hole, came up mid-dive in another some 1000 feet away, before dropping back down to exit right where we'd come in.

It was a great day.

That night we all collapsed into bed with exhaustion from the day's exertion and the next morning awoke bright-eyed and excited-tailed. Anna's gear had even been returned from Bali or Camden or The Moon or Whereverthehell Continental had sent it. The morning was cool and sunny. It was going to be another great day.

"Hey Paul! What are we... what the hell is wrong with you?"

Paul staggered into the trailer looking as hang-dog as a hanged dog and slumped into a chair holding his stomach with a look of tired pain.


Dum, dum, DUUUUUMMMMM…