Excerpts of a Memoir: I Can’t Breathe

“So basically, we’re at the part of the tour where we’re going to weed out the men from the boys…”

There was no question in my mind, even on the cusp of turning fourteen, I was still a boy. I knew that before I begged my mother to let me join the Science Club at the end of my eighth-grade year so I could secure a spot on the coveted post-school year spelunking trip. I knew it on the bus ride through North Georgia, heading up to the Sweetwater, Tennessee area, my first solo trip out of state without my family. I knew it when I was clearly out of my league in terms of the other students in the club who had all been charter members and had close bonds before I budged my way in, in an attempt to make more friends in a place that still felt foreign and weird to me. And I most assuredly knew it when we finally arrived and made our way down into the Craighead Caverns to tour the caves and spend the night underground.

During the entire excursion, I was constantly asking myself why in the hell I thought that this would be a good idea. I was not one of those kids who loved nature or physical activity. I’d spent years putting up with my father dragging me out on grueling (to me) hikes through the woods, or for the two years when he convinced me to join the local Indian Guides chapter in Orlando which resulted in some of my worst memories of my father. There was one Indian Guides camp outing that took place in this huge hundred-acre preserve with what seemed like thousands of other campers. I ended up getting lost when he escorted me to the porta-potty city at the center of this gargantuan maze of campsites and then he left me to find my own way back. It took me hours to find the site again and at 8 years old I was a sobbing mess of tears and snot stuffed inside a fake bear-skin vest when I finally found my father. I can still hear him laughing at me almost 40 years later.

This post-8th grade trip to the Lost Sea Caverns was an effort to prove to myself that I had grown up and matured since my embarrassing Indian Guides days. I had hoped that in the relative safety of being surrounded by classmates, my eighth-grade science teacher, two parental chaperones, and the Lost Sea tour guide, there would be little chance of finding myself stranded or in any real danger. Yet at the same time, I was still traveling almost two hundred miles away from my parents and the comfort of the first week of summer vacation laid out on my bed with a stack of X-Men comic books and Tolkien fantasy novels. I was going to another state by myself and doing something adventurous like spelunking. I had hoped that my father would acknowledge this bravery and maybe stop giving me that look like he’d wished I was anything other than the fat little kid who preferred reading, watching cartoons, and collecting toys. As the tour guide had stated, this is where we were going to weed out the men from the boys.

This caving trip was the culmination of my first year living in the North Georgia suburb of Lawrenceville, a year of relative stability after ping-ponging up and down the East Coast over the previous two years. In 1989 my father received an offer as part of a promotion at Siliconix, the technology solutions firm he’d been a salesman with for almost a decade, to pull up stakes from Central Florida and to become a sales manager at a new office being set up in Nashua, New Hampshire. This was a huge opportunity for him in terms of take-home salary and benefits, and it would allow my parents to be closer to their families that were spread across New England, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Growing up I was never super close to any of my extended family, only meeting most of my cousins, aunts, and uncles once when they bunked up with us on their family vacations to Disney World, which was practically in our backyard. For my parents, the thought of moving back up north seemed to be a great one for the family. I had other feelings. I’d already been through a move when I was six when we’d previously relocated for my father’s work from Tampa to Orlando. Having to say goodbye to all of my friends was hard then, and now at twelve, it was worse. On top of the stress of the move was the fact that my sister had decided that she was staying in Florida having just started college. Losing my best friend at the time and constant contact with my sister was too much. But it wasn’t like I had any say in the matter. Over the Christmas/New Year break in 1989/90, we pulled up stakes and started the process of moving to New Hampshire.

As we waited for a new house to be built in Nashua, we ended up in Lowell, Massachusetts in an apartment for three months. Since it was just over the border, my mom would drive me to my new middle school in Nashua every morning, and then my father would pick me up in the afternoons. It was super lonely in that apartment as there were no other kids, and the new school situation was even worse. I’d just gotten used to being in the middle rung of the junior high hierarchy in Florida as the schools down there were separated into 6th through 8th grade. But the middle school I attended in New Hampshire was 7th through 9th. So not only was I a peon again, but I was also a transplant wearing nothing but surf and skateboarding t-shirts in a climate that seemed to support neither. I was an outcast from day one, and it was rough.

Then, as soon as I started to find some semblance of stability in the Nashua suburb around the time my 7th-grade year was ending, Siliconix shuttered the New Hampshire office and gave my father a choice of being laid off or transferring down to Atlanta. In a whirlwind, we sold the new house, bought yet another new, under-construction home in the small town of Lawrenceville, Georgia, and repeated the process of being displaced for months on end while we waited for this new house to be built. Instead of an apartment, we ended up at an extended stay suite where I slept on a pull-out couch for two months. I’d barely turned thirteen and the expected teenage angst that was setting in was more of a form of nihilism. I was becoming numb to the constant instability.

By the end of my eighth-grade year, I’d managed to make a couple of friends, but I was still feeling super insecure and for the first time in my life at that point, I was actively trying to court friendships. There was a kid in my science class named Glen who seemed to have the same hunger in his eyes for kinship. Glen was a head shorter than me, an only child with an unkempt mop of dark curly hair, and was one of those kids who was just happy to be included. You could see his eyes brighten when anyone responded to his jokes or would pay any amount of attention to him. I felt a magnetic pull to him if only because deep down I understood how much he just wanted to find a place where he belonged. I ended up spending the night over at his house where I quickly discovered that we had very little in common. Whereas I was hip-deep into bands like Metallica and Faith No More, he took pains to showcase his love for Color Me Badd on that sleepover. He had a VHS tape of their videos he’d recorded off of MTV, and there was a continuous soundtrack that evening of their debut album on cassette. When he wasn’t expounding on the creative genius of I Wanna Sex You Up, he was giving me a crash course in modern professional wrestling, another blind spot in my pop culture existence in 1991.

Even though our Venn diagram of interests wasn’t much more than a minnow-sized sliver, I still sat next to him in science class and as the school year was coming to a close, he began hard-selling me on joining the Science Club. He was looking forward to an after-graduation Club trip that would take the 12 or so students, the teacher, and a couple of chaperones to Sweetwater, Tennessee to visit the caves at The Lost Sea.  I could tell that he really wanted someone to pal around with on the trip as he really didn’t have anyone else in the club that wasn’t already paired off or part of a group of geeky friends. So even though I wasn’t super excited about the idea of spending two nights and three days camping and exploring underground caverns, I acquiesced and joined the club. Looking back, I think a large part of my decision was based on feelings of loneliness and having no control over where I lived. I think that by taking hold of an adventure like this I was exerting a level of control over something, even if it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Any sense of control I felt though, was short-lived.

The club trip was broken up into two separate camping activities over the weekend. We left Georgia on a Friday afternoon, 12 young boys and three adults crammed into one of those short, yellow school buses, and drove up to a lakeside campsite that evening somewhere near the border of Tennessee. I stuck with Glen, whose father ended up coming along as one of the chaperones for the trip, and I ended up bunking down with the two of them in their tent that night. There were a few other kids on the trip that I sort of vaguely knew, a stoner named Josh and a couple of nerdy best friends, Jeff and Kevin, all of whom intimidated me as they were very clearly better students, or in Josh’s case, just way cooler than I’d ever be. That year I’d been invited to birthday parties for both Jeff and Josh and though I was glad to be included, I definitely felt like an outsider at both events. Josh seemed to know everyone and his taste in music seemed extremely cool and dangerous to me at the time. He was into punk, ska, and eclectic stuff like the Pixies, Devo, and the Talking Heads. He was also huge into anime with a library of bootleg VHS tapes including Akira, Appleseed, and Vampire Hunter D. Jeff and Kevin, along with their friends Scott and Bryan (who weren’t in the Science Club) were this tight nit group of nerds who’d been friends since early elementary school. During Jeff’s birthday sleepover, they introduced me to role-playing games like Battletech and Robotech. After his parents nodded off for the evening, we ended up watching a couple of episodes of HBO’s Real Sex on his basement TV. These were the guys I was hoping to make better friends with on this trip, but as it turned out, Glen, though his heart was in the right place, was very possessive of my time.

That first night one of the chaperones organized a snipe hunt, a ritual for newbie campers that I somehow managed to avoid in my years in the Indian Guides. For those unaware, snipe hunts are a prank to convince gullible kids that there are flightless birds, sort of like chickens, that populate the forest at night. The kids are urged to run out into the woods looking for these mythical creatures and then those in the know would quietly fade back, leaving the kids to get lost and scared in the woods at night. Luckily in a moment of compassion, Josh pulled me aside and explained the whole thing to me so that I could join him on pranking the rest of the club. Some of the other kids were hip to this ruse, but there were enough falling for the idea that it went off without a hitch. This was a transitional moment for me, on being included, which I didn’t appreciate at the time, but now realize was the only thing I was hoping to achieve on this trip. Any high I felt with this inclusion would not last the weekend though.

The next morning, we packed up our meager gear and loaded ourselves back on the short bus to head to the Lost Sea Park at Craighead Caverns. At the time, there were two main tours in the caves, the basic one lasted a couple of hours and included an easy guided tour of the caverns where one saw old Civil War-era saltpeter distilleries, jaguar dens, interesting rock formations and a glass-bottom boat tour of the underground lake that’s stocked with carp and trout. The second tour, the one our science club had opted for, was a combination of the first and a second one dubbed the “Wild Cave Tour” which included camping in the cave overnight and a more rugged, hands-on experience in the caves where you were guaranteed to get super muddy. I’d been on a similar “wild tour” in the swamps of Florida a few years prior for a school field trip where we trudged through a “mud-walk” that found us up to our chests in dark, thick swampland. I’d come through that experience mostly unphased, only losing one of my Converse high tops in the process, but reassured by the controlled atmosphere of the tour guides out in the “wild”. So the way this caving tour was sold to me wasn’t frightening.

But as soon as we readied our party to enter the caves, something felt a little off to me, there was a sense of danger that I hadn’t expected right from the start. There were two entrances to the caves, the main one was welcoming, a brightly lit yellow tunnel with a gradual flat descent into the main cavern of the Lost Sea. This was the one that the standard tour groups used to get in and out of the caves and had a fairly constant flow of folks going in and out of the caverns during the daily tour schedule. The second entrance was reserved for the participants of the Wild Cave Tour and was pretty much the exact opposite of what we saw in the main touring area. This one was a small opening on the side of the campus that led down a set of like a couple hundred, hand-carved steps that were wet with ever-present condensation. The steps winded down, steeply into the main cavern, and there were some metal handrails along the way, but I found the descent to be kind of treacherous while I was laden with a backpack, a small cooler, and my sleeping bag. By the time we made it to base camp, I was winded, freezing (it was a constant 58 degrees in the caves), and starting to feel a little overwhelmed. We were given about 20 minutes to stow our gear and organize into a group to begin the afternoon with the Wild Tour.

We’d been warned about the chill in the caves, and I’d brought my favorite jacket with me, a grey and aqua Billabong Surfing jacket that was light denim and buttoned up the front. I’d received it for Christmas in 1988 along with a custom-built, silver Mike McGill Powell Peralta skateboard, a navy-blue Tracker Trucks painter’s cap, and a genuine desire to become a cool, slacker skater. The jacket had become a sort of security blanket during the two big moves my family made during the previous few years and I always looked for an excuse to wear it, even in the baking, humid Georgia summer.

As we approached the entrance to the “Wild Cave Tour” I knew that I’d gotten myself in over my head. The guide that was assigned to us was sort of stern and resembled every gym teacher I’ve ever had. He had a young assistant who looked like he wasn’t all that much older than our 13-year-old group of boys. They led us away from the base camp and took up some curving pathways and more hand-carved stairs to an area that felt a little ominous. I’d already lost my sense of direction in the caverns with the dim lighting and the sense of silence that you can only really get when you’re a couple of hundred feet underground. The two of them edged us close to a hole in the rock that was about 10 feet across and right next to the base of the wall where we were going to enter the tour. They explained to us that we needed to be very careful on this tour, that there were real dangers, and that if we ended up falling in a hole like this one there would be no one to help rescue us for possibly days. They described the hole as half a mile deep, winding back and forth, and nearly impossible to repel down into. The hole was surrounded by a shin-high length of chain that was pegged into the rock intermittently, forming a laughable guard rail against falling in.

I was now approaching a state of terror at the thought of how easily I could fall into this hole. Just as soon as they were done scaring me to the core they moved the group over to a hole in the wall off to the left of the death chasm we’d just been warned off falling into. And this is when I knew that I was well and truly fucked and that I’d assuredly made a horrible decision to go on this science club trip as the main guide said…

“So basically, we’re at the part of the tour where we’re going to weed out the men from the boys…”

The hole in the wall had about a 3-foot diameter, was also about three or four feet off the ground, and was the entrance to the first leg of the Wild Cave Tour. There was a sign next to the hole that listed a handful of “crawls” we’d be undertaking, the first of which was called the Test Crawl. I watched as the assistant and the rest of my classmates and chaperones scrambled up into the hole, their flashlights illuminating the larger cavern on the other side. I was the last to pull myself up into the hole and found that I couldn’t quite hoist myself up. The burly gym teacher of a guide sighed heavily and helped push me up into the hole. I felt like somewhere, wherever my father was he was laughing as I found my footing in the hole and passed through to the next part of the cave. This wasn’t even the test yet and I was having trouble traversing the tour.

The test crawl is where I really began to freak out. Along the opposite wall of this new cavern was a small incline and a long crevasse that was about two and a half feet tall from top to bottom. The tour guide pointed to it and instructed us to go head-first inside and then to shimmy on our stomachs forward for about 20 feet, taking care to have our hands and flashlights out in front of us. He explained that this was a test to see if we had what was needed to complete the tour as there would be more tight spaces and shimming ahead. He also let us know that we shouldn’t try and flip over while we made our way through the crevasse as we might get stuck, to just keep moving forward until we reached the next cavern at the other side of the test crawl.

This time I wasn’t the last to crawl inside as the adults went in last, but I was behind all of the other science club members who all seemed to be hooting and enjoying the shit out of this caving experience. I on the other hand was in a mild state of shock. I’d never experienced any real sense of claustrophobia before, but the 20-foot crawl through the crevasse was pushing me to the limits of my comfort zone. I was terrified as I slowly crawled, and I could feel the rock above me oppressively restrain my movements as I couldn’t help but want to flip over. I forced myself to shift back onto my belly and push forward. It wasn’t until I made it through that I realized there was also a pathway alongside the crevasse that the adults used to walk through the pass hunched over with relative ease.

As I shimmied out of the crack in the wall on the other side there were congratulations all around, but inside my head, I was in a state of shock. That short crawl was utterly terrifying to me, and the thought of having to do anything even remotely similar on the rest of the tour had me shaken. Before I had a chance to collect my thoughts we were instructed to sit in a circle and one by one we were told to turn off our flashlights. This cavern was purposely not lit with hanging lamps so that tour groups could experience the utter and complete lack of light. Total darkness, which our guide let us know was something that couldn’t really be achieved topside as there was always some form of light whether it was from a city, traffic, or even the stars in the moonless sky. As the last of the flashlights were extinguished, I began to quietly panic as suddenly the calm and pitch-black quiet made the air feel thick and hard to breathe.

Having no frame of reference for this sensation, I just kept my mouth shut and concentrated on trying to get air into my lungs. The group was then ushered out of the dark room and into a winding passage that led back into another large and decently lit cavern with more hand-carved stairs going down in one direction and a large hole in the opposite wall leading towards the rest of the tour. At this point, I began to freak out and I pulled the main guide aside and said that I was feeling sick and that I needed to go back to the base camp. He gave me a gruff smile, pointed toward the stairs, and said, just follow that path and it’ll get you there. With that, he turned and followed my classmates as they all disappeared into the large hole in the wall.

As the group left me and I was suddenly all alone I started to hyperventilate. I couldn’t force my lungs to take in enough air and I started sweating profusely. I started to make my way over to the stairs, shaking my hands in front of me in a crazed sort of reverse jazz-hands motion to try and calm myself. I’d never felt this scared or confused before. Nothing looked familiar as I made my way down the stairs hoping to see the giant cavern of the base camp just ahead. For the life of me, I could not get my bearing in these caves and there were no clear signs pointing to the campsite.

At this point, all I could think of to do was to retrace my steps back to where we’d left the dark room and try and find the hole in the wall so I could catch back up with my group, but when I made it back up to that spot, I couldn’t hear them anywhere. It’s only been a couple of minutes, but it felt like hours as I kept gasping, trying to catch my breath. For the first time in my life, I actually felt like I might die, and the idea of doing it in this cold, damp cavern was freaking me out even more. I started to cry in frustration, which didn’t help my breathing as it was a deep sobbing, ugly cry.

I was about to give up and felt like I might faint when I heard a voice behind me ask if I needed any help. There was a woman sitting in one of those rainbow-colored, mesh-knit folding chairs off in the corner of this cavern beckoning me over. She was wearing one of those visors with the clear green plastic bills, and a bright purple windbreaker with khaki shorts, knee-high socks, and white tennis shoes. She looked like the perfect image of a 90s-era soccer mom, and just the sight of her was calming even though I didn’t know her from Eve. I quickly walked over to her and she motioned for me to take the empty folding chair next to her.

“You lost? My husband is on this tour, we’ve done it a few times before, and I know it’ll let out just over there in about an hour. You can sit with me and wait for your group if you want.”

I didn’t say anything, just nodded my head and sat down next to her. I spent the next hour calming myself and keeping my eyes closed, just concentrating on getting my breathing back to normal. Even though my beloved Billabong jacket I could still feel the chill of this place as I managed to calm myself down.

When my science club finally made its way back into this cavern, I quietly thanked the woman and rejoined my tour. No one even seemed to notice that I’d been absent, even Glen didn’t ask me where I’d been. We just resumed the tour, switching gears to the regular basic, safe, path that ended with a short ride in the glass-bottom boats. By this point, I was finding myself numb to the whole situation, yet wanting desperately to leave and be on the road back home. As we drifted on the under-lit lake, I dipped my fingers into the water alongside the boat letting the huge fish nibble at my fingers. I had hoped to find a little bit of control on this trip, control over a life that was dictated by my father’s career, control over the loneliness that comes with constant uprooting, and some sense of control while entering into my teen years and starting to think about becoming a man. But the only thing I really learned was that control is not really something we can achieve through sheer will alone.

32 years later I look back and realize that there wasn’t a whole lot of controlling anything going on in my household. My father, though sometimes blinded by how his job aspirations were affecting his family, didn’t have a whole lot of say in how his company was yoyo-ing him around the country. Two years after the Lost Sea trip my father was laid off from his position and never made it back into the industry he’d built a career around for the previous 25 years.

I also look back at the spelunking experience and realize that so much of my fear and anxiety during that night in the cave was stoked by fear of the unknown and some unfortunate tour guides who were just trying to scare some kids while they were bored at work. From what I came to understand after talking with friends who completed the Wild Caving experience, the roughest part was the Test Crawl. The rest of the pathways were fairly easy to traverse and there were no more super tight spaces. It was less of a test and more of a form of hazing. Similarly, the hole near the star of the tour, though probably deep, wasn’t the half mile the guides claimed it to be. Any library and internet search will clearly illustrate that the deepest caves in the United States were about 500-600 feet deep.

Of course, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever set foot in a cave ever again. Fuck that shit.