A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (35 page)

F
ive of us—Nick Nichols, Kent Ballew, Smokey Caldwell, myself, and Jim Youmans, an Atlanta high-rise contractor—rappeled about eighty feet into a vegetation-choked sinkhole high on the west side of Pigeon Mountain. It was a place of sloping dirt walls and copperheads that brought us to a 100-foot-long horizontal passage leading into Ellison’s Cave proper. The passage ended in a tight steep canyon called the Stairstep Entrance: another short rappel. At the bottom there was a long belly crawl: a nose in the water crawl so painfully difficult that it is called The Misery. Happily, some enterprising cavers long ago dug through a wall of breakdown—a mound of rock that had fallen from the ceiling of the cave—and created a jaunty walk-through passage straight to the lip of Incredible Pit. The passage there is very narrow, and people stand single file, waiting their turn on the rope, which is anchored into the rock at several different points.

I had had a small crisis of courage on the lip, but now, secure in the fact that I hadn’t death rigged myself, I was taking my time, enjoying the view and feeling an eerie dreamlike calm: this can’t be real. I tightened the bars on my rack in order to slow down. A hot shot like Kent Ballew can take this 440-foot drop in about five minutes. I wanted to make my descent last, to spend half an hour savoring Incredible Pit. The walls, scoured by centuries of acidic falling water, were smooth, like the barrel of a shotgun. There was a monumental symmetry to the pit that sent the soul spinning: it was a cathedral crafted of stone and darkness.

At times, the rope hung so far from the wall that there was nothing to be seen but a shimmering twilight at the periphery of my light. At such times it was possible to feel something of what astronauts must feel on spacewalks: a sense that you have never been so alone, so exhilarated.

In time I could see my light reflecting off the calm pool at the bottom of Incredible Pit. I hung off there for a time, took a flashgun from my pack, and waited for Kent and Smokey to get on the rope. They would position themselves at certain intervals, then we would all turn off our lights and Nick would open the lens on his camera. At a signal, everyone would flash, and, in the development of time, we’d have a photographic idea of the enormity of the pit. And so we hung there for half an hour or more, coordinating flashes for different shots, then dropped onto the floor of the cave. We had another twelve hours of hard travel in front of us until we hit Fantastic Pit.

I recall moving through a world of spaghetti passages snaking every which way. The maze rose to a high walk-through passage, and from there it was just under a mile, as the bat flies, to Fantastic Pit. There was a lot of climbing and crawling and sweating so that when we stopped, the cold began working at us and it was better to move than sit.

Five or six hours later, square in the gut of the mountain, I was led down a keyhole-shaped passage about ten feet high. Off to the right was a clear, almost transparent formation that dropped about three feet from the ceiling, and
there were glassy bubbles in it. It looked like ice, as if it might melt, and it is called the North Pole for that reason. Some of the ice had fallen to the floor. I found it tasted like Epsom salts. “Looks like a chandelier, doesn’t it?” Nick Nichols asked me. “I mean, if there was ever to be a chandelier in here, this would be it. I think this is the most beautiful cave formation in the South. Maybe in the country.”

It may be, but just past the North Pole is a passage that leads down to a room completely filled with spun glass and crystal-clear needles and cotton candy. These Epsomite flowers bloom in Angel’s Paradise, a cavern about ten feet square and five feet high. Because there is no way to get to these exquisitely delicate formations without dropping Fantastic or Incredible Pit, they are little visited. Even so, curious cavers carry dust in with them, the dust coats the delicate structures, and the rule is: “if you’ve seen it before, don’t go again.” I was directed to the cavern and given fifteen minutes alone, in Angel’s Paradise. It was a pristine underground wilderness, and for the nonce, it was mine alone and I felt dizzy with fatigue and privilege.

Nearby there were great striated walls, and it was possible to see where the mountain had moved, where the walls had grumbled and slid, one against the other, in an area called the Slick and Slides. After that, the passages got smaller and more profuse, like an anthill on about three different levels. We emerged into a dry sandy streambed, ate some lunch, then moved down a narrow passage and climbed over what Nick called “this horrible thing,” which was a slick, muddy rock that blocks the tunnel. About eight feet up the Horrible Thing there was a small opening you take head first. If you can get up. I needed help getting up the Horrible Thing, and I was thinking about how helpless I really was in the face of such obstacles—how perfectly dead I’d be alone here—when I tumbled eight feet down the other side of the damn Horrible Thing and found myself on the floor of a room 250 feet long and 600 feet high.

Tag Hall is the floor of Fantastic Pit, the deepest dome pit in America. The pit itself is a beautiful oval and its floor is smooth, pebbled, almost perfectly flat, as if groomed.
Smokey had rigged two ropes earlier, and they hung from a balcony 510 feet above. Nick started first, Smokey followed while Kent Ballew and I climbed the second rope. I found I could climb about 40 or 50 steps (40 or 50 feet), kicking out with each step to help the Gibbs ascender bite into the rope, before I needed to push the top Jumar up the rope and sit, breathless, in my seat harness. Below, I could feel a rhythmic jerking on the rope as Kent climbed.

At the 400-foot level, there was a boulder the size of a small house hanging from the smooth bore of wall. My instructions were to sit there and wait for more instructions. Nick Nichols was up top already, working on a picture. It took some time, preparing the shot, and I must have sat motionless for fifteen minutes, feeling again the odd liquid sensation of being suspended, alone in space, at peace, serene in a hostile world. I was sweating profusely in the chill, and my entire body was leaking heat, was literally steaming. The smooth ovoid walls that enveloped me shimmered and glittered in the shafts my light threw into the steam, which was the stuff of my own life. There was a sense of a connection made, an Angel’s Paradise of the soul to be savored.

And then we switched off our lights, set off the flares and flashes, not to mention a magnesium explosion on the floor of the pit, all for Nick’s camera. Fifteen minutes later, I pulled myself over the lip of the balcony, fifty stories above the pebbled floor below.

We were almost out: from there it was a simple misery to belly up a streambed, claw up over another horrible thing, then crawl on our hands and knees for fifteen minutes until we got to another fixed rope slung off a wall eighteen feet high. Having just spent an hour climbing 510 feet, gearing up for this climb was a pain in the ass, which is why Smokey calls it the Nuisance Drop. At the top, we found ourselves in the Rectum, a round upward-sloping passage of slippery and unpleasantly suggestive mud, which empties into the Warm-Up Pit: a 125-foot rope climb. At the top of the pit is the Agony, a 1,500-foot belly crawl. This is the natural exit but, some years ago, cavers discovered a stand-up passage
leading up a stream bed to a small hole that they dug out, forming a new exit. This exit bypasses the Agony and is called the Ecstasy.

So we walked out of the Ecstasy fifteen hours after bypassing the Misery. We had dropped Incredible and passed under the North Pole. We had sat for a time in Angel’s Paradise, braved a couple of horrible things, struggled up the throat of Fantastic, and made the connection with something we knew with our first breath and have not entirely forgotten.

I
have a strange vision: I see Albert Einstein on skis. I see those deep, haunting eyes behind yellow goggles, the errant, absentminded mien, hair bursting out from under an idiotic tasseled wool cap; I see Albert Einstein on skis with old beartrap bindings. He is wearing some motley admixture of motheaten woolens, not entirely chic, you understand, but there he is on the bunny slope, burning up his first run, tearing down the hill, lickety-split, just about as fast as a child can walk. Pipe stem arms are windmilling this way and that—whoaaaaa to the right, whooooo to the left—until the frail old body finally settles into that Samurai warrior stance everyone assumes on the first run.

Here’s Albert Einstein at the bottom of the hill with a tanned instructor saying: “Okay, Al, now what I want you to do is try to get your weight forward a little.…”

But Al is scratching his head through the old woolen cap with the dangling tassel. The eyes are far way, the awesome mind at work. He was a minute and a half on the slope, but he
felt
as if he lived a full hour through his senses. The world expanded inside his chest and time swam slowly by, as if through a sea of custard. Skiing, Albert Einstein decides,
generates his intensity in three dimensions … at the expense of the fourth. Of course, he thinks, everything is relative, and it’s just a theory, but what if a man could ski fast enough to stop time dead? Energy would equal, what, mass times …

“This time,” the instructor is saying, “we’re going to try something pretty complicated. It’s called the snowplow turn.… Hey, Al! You still with us, buddy? Earth to Al …”

Al is not paying strict attention to the instructor. He is thinking that it’s pretty damn funny the way time has no dominion over a man skiing the raggedy edge.

W
e’ve all experienced it: some spate of events that poleaxed time.

It seems to start in the belly. Remember the last time you were driving along the freeway, no cars out front, none behind, nobody in sight anywhere. It’s just you and the radio and some vague daydreams about taking a shower with the one you haven’t seen in too long and suddenly RIGHT BEHIND YOU there is a great blast of sound, as of some massive juggernaut bearing down on you from behind, some eighteen wheeler out of control and howling in rage and warning … where is it? where is it? … and you feel an instantaneous jolt in the belly that snaps your spine straight. Suddenly, without thinking about it, you can see all directions at once: to the empty road ahead and the empty road behind, to the total lack of vehicles on all sides. And slowly, yes, you come to understand that the intrusive sound comes not from the road, but from a highballing freight train that runs parallel to the freeway.

That feeling is gone from your belly, you are covered with a fine glaze of sweat, and your hands shake a bit on the wheel. The jackhammer inside your chest begins to sound more like your old familiar heart. How long did that all take: ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour? No, probably less
than five seconds all told: less than five seconds from full alert to anticlimax, with no time at all elapsed between the scream of the train and the jolt in your belly.

It’s a chemical reaction, pure and simple, that cripples time in your mind. Each of us possesses adrenal glands, two penny-sized hunks of specialized meat perched atop each kidney, and it is the inner ten percent of this gland, the medulla, that controls, among other things, our perception of time when the body is at stress. The adrenal medulla—given properly stressful situations—secretes adrenaline and noradrenaline. Both hormones pump the body up to full capacity: they increase respiration, make the heart beat faster, and pump the blood away from those areas that don’t need it (like the belly) and funnel it to those that do (like the hands).

O
nly recently have scientist been able to differentiate between the effects of adrenaline and noradrenaline. In a typical rat torture study, psychologists have discovered that you can scare rats stupid with a sudden and obscenely loud blast of noise, a noise like the howl of a highballing freight train. Rats that are scared at random intervals exhibit high levels of anxiety, and their blood is found to contain extraordinary amounts of both adrenaline and noradrenaline. But rats blasted by sound at regular intervals exhibit less anxiety. They seem to be able to prepare themselves for the regularity of terror, and their blood shows low levels of adrenaline and high levels of noradrenaline.

Noradrenaline is the good stuff. Adrenaline is associated with fear and anxiety, while noradrenaline affects those systems in the brain that are concerned with emotion: especially euphoria, well-being, and alertness. A man or woman can increase levels of noradrenaline in the system by subjecting the body to the stress of sustained exercise. Runners who are able to push themselves for half an hour or more
sometimes experience “runner’s high.” The constant stress on the body has set noradrenaline sloshing about in the brain. These runners talk about a kind of euphoria, about a feeling of well-being, and a near-supernatural alertness, a perception of our world so intense, so encompassing, that time is no longer of the essence.

Cross-country skiers and racers, of course, regularly experience runner’s high, but downhillers often describe similar sensations. The feeling is most often associated with a kind of stress we define as danger, or perceived danger: call it fear. Ski long enough at the limit of your abilities, and time slips into low gear.