Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 3        Caving

Morphing into early adolescence, my body grew strong and I was able to do physical things for long periods without tiring.
I rode a bike continually and walked long miles in the woods exploring and bring home salamanders, and once captured a 4-foot black snake on chilly day, only to have him escape our garage overnight.

My inquiry the next day, if anybody had seen my snake, caused a bright response from my mother who didn’t know a snake was at her house. Mom issued orders-from-headquarters: no more snakes, lol.

My mom always supported her four children. She allowed us to roam free.
She knew we were good people. She played a typical role in my life when some boys from high school decided to skip-out and go to Coon cave instead.

I was a regular in the southern Indiana caves, going practically every weekend (but I had reoccurring nightmares about those black holes).

To mastermind the skip-day cave trip, I volunteered my spelunker’s lanterns and equipment.
Just before school, two guys stopped by and we snuck the caving equipment out to the car. But, ah-ha, my mom spied the goings-on.
She cornered me saying she would call the principal (who coincidently lived three doors down with her dyke partner and two Cadillacs) to make sure I was at school.

Mom didn’t care if the other boys went caving on a school day; She made it clear that I wasn’t going too.

She later confided that she never called the school, fearing it might begat trouble.
And sure enough trouble was begot, but not because of her.
She never called and I went to school, but the other fellows went to the cave and scraped 2 paper bags full of bats off the ceiling in ‘sand room’ then turned everything loose in the school hallways.

The janitors were running around swinging brooms. The kids were ordered to stay behind closed doors. And the previously absent boys, who curiously showed up in the middle of Chemistry class laughing as the incident unfolded, were forwarded to the office and given 3 days off.

Incidents like this lead to good memories don’t they?

Later that year I led a group of boys into Wayne’s Cave.
It was a private honor because I was a fringe person socially.
Someone got the whole group excited about caving, and I knew the caves and had the equipment, so we went.

The only choice was Wayne’s Cave.
Any schoolmarm could crawl through Buckner’s or Salamander, but Wayne’s Cave was hard. It was hard to find and hard to travel, and paid off when you got deep inside with its oversized tunnels and boulders and huge rooms filled with breakdown from the ceiling and passageways squirreling off in every direction.
Wayne’s was the masterpiece.

Years earlier, Wayne’s became a local news story after somebody excavated mud from a tunnel and opened a new part of the cave.
The US Geological Survey explored and mapped the entire thing, and they left a half mile of telephone wire stretching back to Camp I.

Unlike many caves, Wayne’s was relatively 'safe' with no danger of flash flood or pockets of explosive gas so it was okay taking inexperienced people, plus we didn’t have to take the most dangerous route to enjoy the day .

Secretly I liked being the ‘expert’ that day. I was excited and had read all the books on caves and cave lore.

We drove past the airport a few miles and parked along the road, but no other cars were there that day.
Nobody would be in the cave to bail us out. The six of us descended two ten foot pits and adjusted our acetylene lamps in the darkness before gathering up 100 yards down where the crawlway started. One by one we stooped over and started crawling hands and knees in the mud and rock.
 
I didn’t lead. It wasn’t my cave, it belonged to everybody and I was proud to share it. If it was more dangerous I would’ve started off first, but we were there that day for hard work and fun.

The crawlway at Wayne’s is twelve hundred feet long, and low in some places. Once place you have to slither through with your head turned sideways. The crawlway eventually pops out on the side of a large white limestone tunnel, leaving you suspended 20 feet above the floor.

From there it’s a short belly crawl down a sloping ledge to get to the first large chamber, where Wayne’s becomes awe-inspiring with passageways thirty and forty feet high, going off in multiple directions, and some places towering three tiers high. You can feel ‘time’ carved in the sculpted walls formed from millions of years of carbonic erosion … but in most places you are brought back to the human experience, as visitor after visitor has scrawled their mark over the top of every man that came before them. 

Our great cave outing lasted one day and gave memories for a lifetime, but we almost lost John up on the third tier. Read story Read another
He crawled out along a sloping ledge that got steeper the further he went. He was using his legs as friction to hold his weight while moving forward, but when he wanted to come back, there wasn’t enough friction to reverse position. He was going to slide and fall off. I saw it and jumped across the crevice, followed by another guy.

Reaching out over a boulder, John and I locked arms while the third guy held fast onto my belt. We reeled John in off the ledge and back to comparable safety, and that was dam close but nobody said anything and we went on exploring.

Years later John returned home from the military. He called, thanking me for saving his life that day. I bet he had more than one nightmare about sliding off and falling into that black hole to the broken rubble below.

Today all those caves are closed.

For decades they had a rescue squad on call, but it was probably hard work searching for lost people and pulling half broken bodies through those tunnels. The county government closed everything for public safety.

The last time I went caving turned out to be a cancelled trip to Salamander the same day three novice cavers drown there.
They got caught in a ‘flash’ flood and probably tried to make the entrance when they should have stayed in the big room. I know exactly where they found them, in the lone high spot along the stream channel.

What happens along that passageway is the stream goes into smaller and smaller crevices, and the water backs up. Once it starts filling the tunnel, the cavers can’t go back because the current is too strong., and you can't go forward because the tunnel is flooded.
I shudder to imagine how many times we risked that same fate. We used to watch the weather reports, but anything can happen. We were just lucky.

The newspaper wrote that ‘two girls and a boy scratched the stone ceiling’ where they clawed their fingers to bone fighting the pitch black water before they drown.

But it was John’s call that sparked my recollection of our day in Wayne’s. Without it I might have forgotten one of life’s small adventures. I guess everyone forgets the magnificent time they spent alive … and I maybe that’s the purpose of this book, to rebuild those memories inside me and spark anew the desire to contribute.

Chapter 4) Rock throwers and bayonet boy
Index of chapters