Edited in Paint

This is about my second caving trip, from last November, way before the time of the previous text. I had also started writing this way before the previous article, but it didn't quite fit together, and I wanted to write about SRT while the memory was still reasonably fresh. Also a note - the above picture, apart from the editing, isn't mine, unfortunately I didn't take my camera to that caving trip. And as a final explanation - the last sentence of this text has no particular meaning apart from its sounding intriguing.

Sparks draw white, orange, and green space-time diagrams across the faces of the figures encircling the bonfire. With the twist of a wrist on a mouse, someone’s editing a brown, autumn photograph in Paint. He or she is using such warm colors that the heat of the subtly shaded flames dries the continuously pouring rain even as it reaches our jackets.

That day we had visited a cave popular in Victorian times. The floor, once caressed by hundreds of hands and feet, now slid away from us in cold, slippery disgust. We slide down on a huge slab called “the tombstone”, into the depths of the underworld, laughing as we go.

Presently it is time for the lamb. Roasted whole above the second, smaller fire – how can I adore these animals when they appear in the spring, so naive and beautiful, and adore the taste of that cold lamb burger? But oh, it is so good, so primitive; I rip it to shreds with my carnivorous teeth, the ritual of fat on fingers and succulent roughness between fangs. The ritual of fire.

The fire is something like twice my height. It hypnotizes. Like a television set, you can’t help but stare in its direction. Waves of heat hit me; behind me the rain pours in an endless wall of movement; I am standing on – or rather forming – a boundary between two opposing worlds; the flames fly up in an endless wall of movement.

The next day we went through a “duck”. My newly acquired understanding of the meaning of the word did nothing to lessen my wetness behind the ears in matters of caving – for a “duck” (a partially submerged passage) tends to get one’s ears completely wet (one ear on the way in and one on the way out)...

Some more ridiculously tight tunnels and an amusing spirally slide-staircase type thing. Then – someone edited a brown, caving photograph in Paint. He or she must have been dreaming of Christmas. White, glistening icicles, patches of crystalized snow carpeting the ground...

The world is so unreal that either it was edited in Paint or...?

Dangle from a Tangle (of Hellish Enjoyment)

Something between parachuting and skiing. You’re suspended between nothingness and nothingness, like when parachuting. But you can stop almost when you want to, like when skiing. If the rope breaks, you die, like in a parachute. But the chances of it breaking are closer to the chances of your falling off a cliff when skiing than of your falling off a parachute when parachuting.

That was just about the worst metaphor I had ever thought of. It came to my mind when doing the thing it describes – single rope technique. Which is as good a demonstration as any of the sort of experience SRT is – it’s scary. It gives you weird thoughts.

Why parachuting? Probably because I had never done it. Why skiing? Because my family happened to be in Austria doing just that while I dangled from a rope somewhere below the mountains in Wales.

But my adventure with SRT started not in Wales, but in England, in my own lovely Oxford (yes, that claim of ownership is almost completely unfounded). It began on a gloomy Saturday afternoon on Wolvercotte Bridge. “Gloomy” being a bit of a euphemism (and “a bit” being a euphemism also), as there was howling wind and a fair amount of rain. But I didn’t really notice. I was too preoccupied with putting on a fiendishly complicated harness and attaching some loathsome caribiners and other such confusing thingamajigs onto it.

Three months and n miles later, time had erased any grasp of single ropes I might have acquired on that Saturday afternoon. But this time I learned more quickly – for caves tend to be more fun than bridges, and contrary to the beliefs of countless soulless teachers, one does learn better while having fun.

“I can see you’re enjoying yourself” – says Tim at the end of my descent. Enjoying myself? Suspended somewhere between amazement and terror, hatred and love, hysterical laughter and tears of relief, swinging to and fro between these emotions on a thirty-metre long rope – yes, I am enjoying myself like hell.

Thanks, Tim, for that reassurance. Nothing makes me enjoy myself more than someone who tells me that I am clearly enjoying myself – and lately people seem to be telling me that quite a lot in situations in which they are clearly both absolutely right and sorely mistaken. Just the day before coming to Wales, my philosophy tutor greeted me with the joyous reassurance of “I can see you are enjoying this logic course very much”. After half the night spent on a ridiculously difficult problem set, followed by that indescribable dawn of new ideas sometime around daybreak, when like sunrays of enlightenment and trills of freshly awoken birds, the only possible solution sprang to mind without warning – yes, I was enjoying the logic course like hell.

Where was I? Ah, above the thirty-metre drop already, clambering out of the cave as fast as possible. Why the rush? We were due to miss our callout – the time we said we would be back, and the time after which those back in the hut could begin to organize a rescue party. Darn, how’d that happen?

If it weren’t that stressful, getting out at such a speed and such levels of adrenaline would have been great fun. As it actually was that stressful, the above sentence is really rather meaningless, and it was great fun nonetheless. At least for me, probably not for the leaders, for whom it really was that stressful.

The sky was so clear, the silence and starriness so intense that I thought for a moment that it would have been a better idea to have spent the day above ground, in the magnificent mountainous rooftops of the caves we had been exploring, below their own ceiling of blue sky. But then there have been many mountains and blue skies in my life, and only one first-ever SRT, only one hell of tangled up enjoyment.

Squishy, squelchy, unfun fun

Ha, I actually managed to write something about Oxford - well, not about Oxford itself, but about its caving club. This is a description of my first caving trip - down Swildon's Hole. Unfortunately caving isn't a very good pastime for taking pictures, so there's nothing I can attach to this text; but there are some cool photos of the place around the internet.

“It only starts being really fun when it almost stops being fun” – the oh-so-deep thought hit me in my third hour underground.

Actually, it was really fun from the very start, from the moment we put on our ridiculous caving clothes – the fleecy, one-part, baby-garment-like undersuits; the brightly coloured oversuits, blue ones like blue builders’ coats, yellow-and-red ones like yellow-and-red clowns’ uniforms; the wellies that were sometimes two sizes too large and from two different pairs; the helmets that I can conjure no humorous description of. So there we were, dressed in our ridiculous caving clothes, surreal specks of colour walking across a brown field in Mendip. And there we came to an inconspicuous hole in the ground. One by one, the specks of colour disappeared from the surface of the earth, entering a world whose surrealness rivalled their own.

And then it started being really, really fun. We waded in an underground river, squishing, squashing, squelching, splashing in squishy, squashy, squelchy, mushy waters. Water in our wellies, mud on our hands and faces and hair – a child is happiest when dirty, an adult is happiest when her resemblance to a dirty child becomes almost too uncomfortable to bear. It only starts being really fun when it almost stops being fun.

Down onto your face and cram your body into a tightly cramped tunnel, walls jam, ram, slam into you from all sides, you in a little tunnel of air surrounded by infinite expanses of stone. Unable to move your head, all you see are the wellies of your predecessor kicking furiously inches ahead of your nose, and on and on you crawl – nay, slither! – thrashing your legs about likewise. Then the scenery changes – velvety expanses of undiscovered darkness, spacious emptiness that fills your insides with shudders of awe. Below – a waterfall, trickling, murmuring, drippety-drip-dripping... Next to it a ladder, a spindly, frail affair, swinging to and fro as you come down, the water eternally rushing past, its wet, cool indifference deeply reassuring.

That emptiness, that something which turns your insides upside down, that something which is nothing, which is perhaps an illusion and is all the more powerful for it – that is the biggest treasure one can find in a cave. My feet begin to ache, I have bruises all over my elbows, I don’t know whether I am really enjoying myself anymore. But I know that when I come out, these will be the moments I shall remember as true happiness. “This is it, there is nothing else – and isn’t it the best it could possibly be?” I tell myself, and I think I know what I mean.

We scramble, scurry and scuttle up and down in the most ridiculous places and poses. Hands on rough stone, feet somewhere miles away, I carefully think of a way of getting down without falling. The caver’s motto goes: “Why use your hands and feet when you can use your bottom?” – indeed, caving is a wonderfully undignified game.

In that third hour underground I stop noticing things around me. It takes most of the effort I can muster to keep on going – I mechanically lift my feet, look for footholds, mechanically shiver in the cold underground stream. But I am so content, how good to feel so bad! That was the moment when it started being really, really, really fun.

And then came the moment most fun of all – the moment when it absolutely stopped being fun. The moment of the sump. Which is the technical term for a passage completely submerged under water.

First you have to lie down in the icy cold, frightfully freezing water. God, God, God it’s cold! Everything inside you tells you to get out and run away – instead, you search with your numb fingers for the rope by which you are to pull yourself through the water, and you submerge your helmeted, crazy head. Oh my God, oh my God, I’m gonna die... Long milliseconds... Can’t b-b-brrrreathe... Solid rock above me, what if I won’t make it?!... Made it.

“How was it?” “Oh. My. God.” Grins from ear to ear, shudders from tip to toe, we’re as happy and as terrified, cold and exhausted as can be.

But the scariest part was yet to come... A realization was shaping itself in my mind... “Are we going back the way we came?” Of course, I already knew the dreaded reply. Those fifteen minutes of further exploration, knowing that once we turned back I would have to go through that hell again, and that now diving was not a matter of bravery, but of necessity – now that’s what fear is...

The second time itself was much less scary than the first. Cold, in, out, shiver-shiver and time to leave.

When we came out after five hours, how amazing seemed the sky, by now specked with sparkly stars! How amazing the dry clothes, how amazing the fireplace in the hut and the tea, the hot, delicious tea! This is it, there is nothing else, hot tea is as happy as you can get.