After a minute of climbing, my nerve begins to fail me. I am wedged in a dark, tight, vertical well of rock, perched on slippery toe holds and unable to get a firm grasp of the slimy rock with my fingers. The world has been reduced to the beam of a Wheat lamp on my helmet.

I am high enough in this underground shaft that a fall will most certainty hurt and possibly break something. And I have no idea how much higher there is to go -- or how much narrower it will become -- before I am free of its rough, muddy grip. I appreciate the helmet; I've already banged my head a half a dozen times.

Like the beam of my lamp, my bright shiny idea of exploring a cave with Rodger has dimmed in the darkness and the fog of claustrophobia that seems to be rising in my brain. I notice a cave cricket nonchalantly walking on the surpy rock beside me, a foot from my face. This is the first time I've been in a cave in a long time.

Rodger, who began caving before he could legally drive himself to the caves, is somewhere above, confidently on his way to the large room beyond. I begin talking out loud to build my confidence.

"I don't know about this," I say. "This is pretty scary. I'm not sure about this."

Rodger's voice drifts down from above.

"Ah, come on. Annie did this part," he says, referring to his wife, who I believe once climbed Everest solo.

I hate being compared to a girl. It comes from one too many high school coaches whose idea of motivating less-than-great athletes like myself was to shame us into greatness. My reaction then was to lock the doors, turn out the lights, and refuse to try any more -- to give up and go home wearing my shame like a shield.

This time, I decide to climb on. I'll punch Ling out later.

The monsters inside
We have approached this middle Tennessee cave by fording a rain-swollen creek -- unsuccessfully. Our boots and pants are soaked. My socks squish as we scramble over slippery rocks toward the dark gash in the hillside. The rain has reduced to a sprinkle and everything is wet and shiny.

"There was a big room here that collapsed leaving this big opening," explains Rodger, pointing out the depression we are standing in.

The large gash of a cave mouth looms over us. I try to ignore the growing tightness that is creeping through my gut. I've felt it before.

Immediately past the entrance, and past the debris field of the collapse, the floor is soft tan dirt and the walking easier. Off to the side, somewhere in the dark, wild water rushes nosily .

As we leave the entrance and the light fades, so fades with it my sense of spatial orientation. My eyes and brain seek familiar visual clues, but the bream of my head lamp doesn't carry enough information. I stumble over the uneven ground. Finding my way becomes an act of unusual concentration.

I follow Rodger to a massive breakdown, a wall of rock puzzle pieces that has collapsed from the ceiling.

"There's a way through this around here somewhere," he says as he scrambles up into the narrow spaces between the rocks.

Childhood memories are often a series of vivid scenes, and one of my vivid scenes is that of my dad taking me to my first cave. I was probably no more than 6 or 7. We drove a dirt road to the edge of a field.

Dad and I hiked to a big spring at the base of a hillside. The spring water was clear and cold and the rocks covered with little black snail-like creatures. Periwinkles, my dad called them.

We climbed a steep path above the spring and peered through an iron gate into the dark mouth of Ellis Cave. I can still remember its cool breath on my face and how its dark mouth both fascinated and scared me. The gate was there, I was sure, to keep the monsters inside.

There was family story connected with Ellis cave. Found in the 1800s by Abner J. Ellis who farmed the land below it, the cave had been explored on and off by Ellis and others. Soot stains in the front rooms were believed to have been left by the Indians.

My dad and his dad had both been in Ellis Cave and had seen its pools of perfectly still water. My granddad had stepped in one of the those pools as a young man, sometime in the early 1900s. His footprint, explained my dad, was still there, 60 years later, preserved under water that never moved.

We didn't know it then, but Ellis cave, near Sulfur Springs, Alabama, was destined to be developed commercially and renamed Sequoyah Caverns. The family got invited on a preopening tour and excitedly went in search of my granddad's footprint. We didn't find it, but we did find his initials surprisingly far back in the cave.

Seeing the letters made us feel sure that the footprint had been there until the developers had tramped through the cave, disturbing the waters that never moved and erasing the footprint forever.

We climb out of the shaft. Rodger points to the tape on the rock above the hole.

"It would be kind of hard to get lost here," he says with a mixture of amusement and disdain.

Cavers frown on the use of permanent markings. If anything is used to mark the way, it should be temporary and removed on the way out. Besides defacing the delicate environment of the cave, markings take all the sport out of the cave, making it accessible to even novices like myself.

I try to make a mental picture of the area. Without the tape, I wonder, how would I find this way again?

We turn and scramble over more breakdown slabs, working our way into a huge room, over 200 feet across. It strains the power of our head lamps. The beams shoot out like spotlights on a vast stage, turning dust motes in the air into flaring pinpoints of light, and marking weak circles on the distant walls.

"This is one of the biggest underground rooms in Tennessee," says Rodger. It is the first of two other huge rooms.

We sit and turn out our lamps, letting the absolute darkness hug us close. We speculate on whether a single photon could ever bounce this far back from the entrance.

High school cave
You always go caving in high school. It's one of those things you do to go along with the gang, to prove yourself to your peers.

A group of us, 10th and 11th graders from Ider High, go to a cave off the backside of Sand Mountain, Alabama. The knowledgeable cavers of the group, meaning they've been there maybe one time before, call it Saltpeter Cave. Someone says it was mined for saltpeter during the Civil War.

Over a mile down on a long abandoned roadway, Saltpeter Cave begins as a narrow slit in the mountainside. There is no iron gate this time, but there is a metal cable we have to shinny down to the entrance.

I am uneasy for a moment, feeling the same dread fascination I have felt before. But as my companions disappear into the underworld I have to go too. Past the slit is a large room with a crazy floor. It's hard to stand up. Some time in the past the ceiling has collapsed, leaving slabs at all angles like giant broken crackers.

We stand in that room, talking too loudly, laughing, and let our silver Eveready flashlights play over the walls. We see the names of kids we know from other schools. We see the four letter words we use at school with each other, but which our parents don't think we know.

The walls are a graffiti gallery. There is barely enough room to add anything else. But we try anyway. This is a high school cave, where you write on the walls, leave Coke cans on the floor, and maneuver girls into dead end side passages.

Several weeks later my best friend and I return to Saltpeter cave by ourselves. No group of noisy persons this time, just us with our flashlights and ball of string. We go as far in as our string and nerve let us, driven by curiosity and our need to confront the darkness underground.

Knot of fear
Having absorbed the night of the big room long enough Rodger and I turn our lights back on. He suggests that I lead us out.

I made a point of memorizing the location of the hole, and I take us back to the spot. But the hole is gone, and so is the flagging tape.

"I don't think this is it," Rodger says, pointing out the obvious.

I feel bewildered. Only a couple of hundred feet in my first cave since high school, and I'm already lost. I should have brought the ball of string.

It's said that you are not truly a good caver until you have been utterly lost, have felt the small knot of fear that comes with not knowing the way back to the light. Only after you have felt that, dose your perception sharpen to its finest edge.

I admit my humiliating defeat with a shrug. Rodger, sporting a big grin, leads us back to the flagging tape and the hole.

I hesitate before starting down. There is something in the way.

"Wait a second," I say, "there's a string in here."

There is now a string in the shaft that was not there before. And even with the flagging tape and Rodger beside me, my mind rebels for just a second. This can't be right. There was no sting the way we came in.

Then we hear voices from the room above. Someone has come in behind us trailing their sting just like this was a high school cave.

One yard down
Outside, looking back, I realize that if this cave is a football field, I've only gotten to the one yard line, but that's farther than I ever got on a ball field in high school. I'll savor my yard and consider it well earned. Sometimes progress is measured only in inches, especially whenever we face ourselves and the darkness underground.

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Copyright (c) 1995
Terry Hamrick
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