Caving Journal: Roppel, Daleo Entrance, KY
Got signed up for this by a sweet, happy-go-lucky (got bit twice on the face by the same lizard) woman who I had 5 minutes before told my name to and who immediately added us both to the "Level 4+ Strenuous 7 Hour" trip (possibly flirting.)
Overnight someone (probably went on the previous day's trip) annotated the sign up sheet with stuff like NOPE and NO WAY and IMPOSSIBLE. I was: NERVOUS. We rescued a turtle on the drive in.
Lush, lush outcrops and valleys swimming into view between low clouds, like a tree-draped chinese landscape with faded wooden signs reading HELL IS REAL and HORSE CAVE CITY scattered in it. The trip leader found four four-leafed clovers and pocketed them. She unlocked the gate at the bottom of the meadow (clover, wolf spiders carrying their babies) and said: "Welcome to the longest cave in the world!" Then she slammed the gate shut, explained how to open it from the inside, and said: "Three miles walk, ten miles crawl, if you ain't been fucked by Roppel then you've never been fucked at all." We all wrote our names in a ragged dirty notebook, went down the first rusted ladder. We started stemming the canyons: arms braced on the walls to either side, feet on bad, sloping holds, pretty much always at the edge of my reach (I'm sure this is not so hard if one is either: taller then me (nearly everyone) or has any climbing experience beyond: guess I'll figure it out as I go) and definitely not thinking 'You stopped bouldering in the gym after the accident cause you got too scared and you have replaced it with something that is unequivocally more dangerous'. Mostly I was thinking: 'you could die here,' or 'slow down' or 'do not think about this too much'.
The trip leader said, "This is the birth canal! Go head first, catch yourself on the ground with your hands, it will hold you." She was wise, she was making sure everyone could do the first impossible thing here by the cave entrance. I didn't think I could but I braced my legs against the walls and slid neatly into the underworld. She fed us all sour gummy worms, right into the mouth like baby birds, after this.
We crawled into holes so tight I had to clip my bag to the rope loop around my ankle and drag it behind me, inchworm, army crawl. We walked under an enormous boulder wedged into the canyon above, the real Levitated Mass. I crept across canyons with 80 ft of dark between my legs, trying to guess which route would get me through: sit on one side, both feet on the other? One foot on each side, hands on the walls? I don't like this, I have to back up. Sorry I'm slowing everyone down. Thinking someone's name over and over, in the darkest place in the earth. Is this tiny rock enough to hold on to, they'd call it a jug in the gym but I'm wearing muddy gloves and the rock's wet and is it even attached to anything and below me is forever, it's eternity down there. Don't look at it too much. Keep moving. Slow down.
The slope opens up: HUP Dome (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle Dome, I can't remember why: record of caver confusion or a nested relation of some other named room)(memory of finding the long deleted list of place names in lechuguilla on wikipedia, like a string of poems, and now here I am in one looking at myself through the glass.) We sat on the slope eating snacks. Dark above and below. A polite gesture: all the girls go into the next room first so the two boys can piss off the edge, into the mystery void, if they would like.
A traverse, in a room that seemed daylit in the headlamps (too small for dark to gather), still big enough that the floor is too far to think about. The wall is pocked and eroded, the footholds wide enough to get half a foot on. Water cascading down red brown rocks, filling the sunny air with spray, dripping on my face as I manage a foot swap, several smooth wet holds, a hand jam, and then I am resting on the other side, moaning, thinking, I love this, this is awful. I love this.
We crossed the most exposed spot: a momentary relief, followed by the immediate realization that "most, worst exposure" meant that its only about 10% worse than all the other things we'd be doing all the way to the very end. So: the very next thing, as we rested on a mud slope next to the narrowing canyon we'd just moments ago had to not fall into, The trip leader said "Take this handline, clip your pack on, lower it down. It's 20 ft to the bottom. There's no handholds, no footholds. Use your body to brace against the walls. You can hold onto the line but don't put any weight on it" I thought, oh no. I watched someone do it, watched their head sink out of view, into the dark slot in the floor, two walls close together but they're not that close, and thought: impossible. It was my turn, lower my pack, do not think about this just get in the hole. Back on the wall, knees on the wall, squirming down, looking at the wet flat rock, not calm exactly but no thoughts, least thoughts in my head of my entire fucking life.
Every time we passed one of these gateways there were beautiful things. A cricket, overcome by fungus, lying white on a shelf. Little fairy forests of columns set into niches in the walls. Someone says, hey try to pick up that trash when it comes by and there, inexplicably, is a lit green glowstick floating down the shallows right to you. A long pale hall with walls curved and swirling like those windswept arches in Utah, the floor soft sand sparkling with gypsum. At the end, a fan coral fossil spread out dark against the wall as wide as my arms could reach.
We sat on soft sand, dark halls before and behind, eating cheese and sandwiches and gummy bears. We got up to go, not through them, but into a tiny hole head first. I tied my pack to my ankle and inched forward, pushing with my toes, a long hot crawl. On the other side the landscape changed: manganese. A round black rock with a sort of smiling face on it: the trip leader said, "That's Mr. Roppel" and we all said thank you, walking by.
Round dark rocks resting in the perfect circles they had weathered themselves, swirling in water, trapped for how long? Smooth curves grown complicated, dark: broken waves, baroque. We walked ankle deep in warm water through a straight narrow corridor which curved to a point above like a gothic arch, like a stained glass window with no glass only the dark complexity of carving: foliate, fractal. Stepping through window after window all in a row, dark decorated doorways.
The Black River, rolling soft at knees, at waist, sand underfoot. Crayfish, cave fish. More canyons: I try crawling on a sloping ledge, think, I don't like this, back up, stretch my leg to the other side. But how to cross over? The path on my side of the gap ends. So: slide down the sloping edge, watch your feet as they aim for the opposite side, now you are bridging the gap. Turn over, face the ledge. Get one leg back on the side with your hands. Now, somehow, stand up and shift your weight and both hands to the new side. Do your best to find some handholds over there. They will be muddy, insufficient. Now push with the left-behind leg, with enough force to tip your body over and far enough up the slope that you stay on it.
And then face the next thing: a twisting squeeze up a chimney (delightful), climb up a shaky rusted ladder tied to a rock (1. how long has this been down here? 2. How the fuck did they get it down here?) and into the next hall, the next room. Up ahead, a rock breaks, the trip leader shouts. She went down on her knees and when I catch up she is sitting on the floor and wrapping a third set of bandages around one leg. We give her all the painkillers we have and she books it out while she can still walk; we have half an hour to go, there is another girl in the group who was in here last year and thinks she knows the way out.
We get on the kangaroo trail (because you have to hop over many voids, which undersells how wide the hops are, the darkness in them, how tired you are by now) The new guide, just ahead of me, slips after jumping, catches herself, says "ope!" and then, "I've got exit fever" and keeps going, not any discernibly slower. I am calm, calm, calm.
And we all get out, into the misty evening meadow, green under a quiet sky, humming with insect and bird song. We lay down in the grass with the clover and the wolf spiders and look up at white clouds turning peach with sunset. I thought, I'd better not do that again. Probably. And then we drove back to Lonestar and I had a beer and someone gave me a sip of moonshine from a jam jar ("I made this in memory of a friend of mine who died", he said) and danced in the pavilion til midnight. And now its two days later and all I can think about is that river.How you walk the narrow canyon and turn with each step as the walls curve towards you or away, like you are dancing with them, like you are the water that carved the way come again, and the still blades of rock run along your throat harmless and you kiss the cave wall whispering I love you I love you, beautiful dark, thank you for keeping me safe.
