Pecked to death by ducks (38 page)

Halfway down Burt can see that it's really two pits, one a little higher than the other, and the water is falling out of the higher pit into the lower one. Burt can just see the end of his rope on flat

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rocky ground, right next to where the water from the fall disappears into the ground. Even on the ground, safe, Burt thinks the pit is haunted.

He's thinking, Buddy must have some way to rescue people in a place like this. Maybe they could practice that on me, and I wouldn't have to climb out. The climbing part, man. Awful. And, sure enough, that's when it happened, climbing out.

Sitting right next to Burt at dinner is Buddy Lane. He's eating a hamburger steak. Something soft and easy to chew. Buddy's face is split down the middle, from the bridge of his nose, down one side to his upper and lower lip. There are stitches all over the guy's face, thirty or forty of them, like Frankenstein's monster.

When it happened, Buddy was climbing out, hanging on the rope maybe forty feet from the top of the pit. Burt Grossman was on the other rope, about five feet from Buddy. Suddenly, everyone up top started yelling, "Rock, rock, rock!" But when Burt looked up, it wasn't a rock at all; it was a big tree limb, about the size of a fullback's thigh, and it was coming down the pit, getting bigger real fast, like a 3-D movie. It hit the wall, flipped over, and one end nailed Buddy in the face.

It was Burt's first big pit, and when he glanced over at his instructor, the guy who was supposed to save him if something went wrong, the whole lower half of the guy's face was blood, and his upper lip was . . . gone. Buddy shouted something that sounded like "Clisssshhh."

"I was trying," Buddy explained at dinner, "to say 'climb.' We didn't know what else was coming down, maybe the whole tree was going to come down, and we needed to get out of there. It's just, you can't say m and b with no upper lip."

"So he's, zoom, up the rope," Burt told the editor. "I'm hanging there thinking, Well, this sure is a lot of fun. I'm dead."

"But you weren't scared," the writer pointed out.

"Oh, no. This seemed real normal to me. Hang from a rope above a haunted pit full of poisonous snakes, and trees fall out of the sky on you. Normal day in Tennessee."

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"So what happened after you climbed out of the pit?" the writer asked.

Burt said, "I get to the top, people are talking about, let's go back down into the pit, see if we can find Buddy's lip. And this caver up top, he's a third-year medical student, he says, 'No, Buddy's lip is all here. He just severed some muscles, the other muscles pulled it apart,' and that's why Buddy looked like the damn elephant man. And I was amazed. Really amazed that a guy smart enough to be in medical school, man, he would do something like this."

Burt climbs out of the pit alone. One of the cavers up top has already driven Buddy to the hospital, so Burt gets to ride back to his motel in Trick's truck. Later, at the motel, the writer calls, says that Burt can do what he wants, call the whole thing off.

"Hell no," Burt says. "Show me the Rambo pit. Take me to the bat cave. I want to see Grandpa Munster hanging upside down."

So the next day, the cavers act as if Burt is one of them. Because it's Monday, a workday, there's only four of them now: the writer, the photographer, Trick, and Roger Ling. They all seem real happy that Burt didn't go home when he had the chance. They gear him up with knee pads, elbow pads, leather gloves, and a helmet with a light on it. The place is a commercial cave. You walk through a store where they sell Dr Pepper and Moon Pies right into a big underground room with stone icicles that hang down and ones that stick up out of the floor. Hidden lights— green and red—illuminate the formations. It looks like a room in a porno motel in hell.

Burt gets the idea that they're taking him on a real easy cave walk, but ten minutes later they're out of the lit-up commercial part of the cave, and Burt's crawling on his hands and knees. It's pretty obvious no one goes beyond the motel-room part of the cave. No one but cavers. The light on his helmet is on, and all he can see is the backside of the guy crawling in front of him. Burt feels like a quarterback.

And he has to squeeze through holes and crawl along this ledge that's like the ledge on the outside of building, that narrow, ex-

cept that it's dark in the cave, and the ledge is muddy, and there's a drop of forty feet to some sharp rocks below. The cavers seem relieved when Burt gets to the end of this narrow crawl.

"That's Death Ledge," Trick says. In the light from Burt's headlamp he can see the words come out of Trick's mouth in little puffs of fog. "Sometimes people freeze up on Death Ledge."

Way past Death Ledge and beyond Danger Canyon, they all stop to rest in a little room. Everyone turns his headlamp off to save batteries. Stick says the cave goes on for miles. There's the big commercial room, then miles of wild cave. Stick says this as if he expects Burt to stand up and shout "Whoopee."

Funny thing though: Burt realizes he isn't afraid of the dark at all. These are pretty much okay guys, and Burt gets the idea that they've decided not to throw him off of one of the forty-story pits because his first experience was such a bummer. They don't come right out and say that, though. In fact, no mention is made of pits at all.

And the deal is, you can sit in the dark with these guys and talk. If anyone got hurt, they'd get him out. It's a kind of team, and Burt understands teams. In the dark you can't see anyone's face, and maybe that makes it easier to talk too.

"Burt, yesterday, before the pit, you were yawning. Does this bore you?" The writer's asking a serious question.

"No," Burt answers. "That's me, I guess. My girlfriend says that too. Says she never knows what I'm thinking. And before a game, I like to lie down on the bench by my locker. And I yawn. I bet I yawn forty times in the hour before the game. My teammates used to get on me about it, but then they saw that it works for me, that I produce." Usually, when people ask Burt about football, he tells them that he gets paid big-time, and that's why he plays. In the dark Burt heard himself actually talking about football. Saying un-Burtlike stuff, like how he loves the game, the mystical part of it.

"I might look big compared to the average guy," Burt says, "but for a defensive end, I'm really small, six-six, two-seventy. And there's guys that can bench a lot more. ..."

"But you do a four-point-six forty," the writer says.

"There are guys that are quicker."

There was a long silence, and then Burt heard himself getting all transcendental. "There's like a trance you get into. I don't know how to explain it. I don't hear the crowd, and I don't really look at anything in particular. I can see how they're lined up, and I might glance at the quarterback. I might see how my guy's got his feet set. Check his hands, maybe. But you can't plan anything: Every time you plan something out, it doesn't work. So I'm a counterpuncher. They do something; I react. There's no time to think about it. They say I'm a smart player, but what I do isn't really like thinking. It's a flow you get into. A trance."

"What about fear?" the writer asks. Does Burt use fear to psyche himself up for games?

"No. I mean, that's why this is sort of a stupid idea for an article. Football: What's there to be afraid of? It's a sunny afternoon, there're seventy thousand people watching you. Here, in the cave, you've got every fear known to man. Darkness, drowning, falling, freezing to death. I mean, nobody I know would enjoy this. I'm never going into a cave again. Ever."

Next day Burt's wading through waist-deep water in a cold cave with a river running through it, and he's working hard enough that steam is actually rising off the part of his body that isn't under water. The same four guys are trudging along with him, and he's telling them that he wants to go "back to San Diego where people drive actual cars and don't live in houses made out of old beer cans." They're all laughing. Like they don't believe him. Like these cave guys actually think he enjoys this.

They're walking through a round passage with a four-foot-wide shallow river running through it. The water is milky greenish blue, and the passage echoes with curses and laughter. You can see the helmet lights swaying in the dark. It's like those movies where the cops are chasing some serial killer through the sewers.

Burt's thinking aloud. What if you shrunk a guy down to, like, the size of a pinhead? He could rappel down a normal person's throat on a length of sewing thread. Ha. And instead of trees, you

could have little pieces of crackers come bombing down him. Cracker bombs.

The cavers are laughing. Trick explains that, after a while, caves tend to make you silly. "Yeah," the writer agrees, "caves sure do snap the thread of linear thought."

And maybe Burt's getting a little used to the caves. The passage, for instance, finally opens up above, and there are these striated, curving walls, all yellow and orange. It's a canyon. Like a little Grand Canyon, only underground, with a milky blue-green river running through it. On one ledge that sticks out overhead there are about fifty bats hanging upside down. With their wings folded, they look like little mice. Burt passes under them, and a couple take off for the entrance. Trick and Roger behind him duck and wave their arms around, just the way anybody else would. These guys have stickers on their trucks— bats need friends too —but they're human beings. Human beings don't like flying rodents in their faces.

And there's a stalactite ahead of him. Burt has learned that stalactites hang "tight" to the ceiling. It's a little thing, two inches long, about as big around as a pencil, and there is a silver drop of water hanging from its tip. "How long does it take to make one of these?" Burt asks.

"Some people say about an inch a century," Roger Ling says.

Burt touches the formation with a big finger, touches it the way you might touch a newborn kitten. "You mean this thing is two hundred years old?"

And they give him the lecture for about the seven-hundredth time: how caves are fragile, and people have to be educated about the beauties and the dangers; they tell him about what a pain it is to have to pull dead people out of the caves on rescue missions. Dead people really gripe the cavers if they died because they didn't educate themselves about the beauties and the dangers. . . .

This lecture goes on and on.

Burt's thinking about the eraser. Yesterday, sitting deep in the wild part of the cave, he felt this strange rock and dug it up. It turned out to be a pencil eraser. He thought he was going where

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no man had gone before, and he finds an eraser. It was aggravating. Burt understands why the cavers always pick up trash and carry it out of the caves.

"Hey, Trick," Burt calls, "you spray-painting your name on the wall again?"

Which is the last thing cave dorks would do. They treat a cave like a church, and won't even take a leak inside one. World's biggest bladders, man.

And, in a way, it's almost sweet. The cavers want him to like their caves. Burt, natch, is not going to do anything anyone really wants him to do. It's not his way.

Trick and Roger are up ahead, setting up a photo and leaving Burt alone for a moment. There's a pool that is greenish blue in the light, and above it the underground river flows down over a series of rocky stair steps, bubbling up at the narrow spots. Above him there are horizontal ledges coming off both walls: ledges like giant stone platters. Hobbit seats. Stalactites everywhere. And colors. Real subtle, but they stand out after being in the cave awhile: orange and yellow and strange glowing green. It's like an elf garden or something: a real pretty grotto.

Burt motions for the writer. "Hey, look at that."

The writer stares at it for a long time; then he turns around with a big smile on his face. As if he caught Burt.

"Hey. I don't appreciate this," Burt says gruffly. "Just thought I'd show it to someone who might."

And the writer's like, Uh-huh, sure Burt.

Later everyone's sitting in the dark, and no one's saying anything. In a few hours they'll be done, have dinner in a restaurant, and Burt can go home the next morning. He's thinking, Nobody is going to believe this. No one would believe the pit or the underground river. Or Trick, man. The guy's getting paid to help the photographer, and he's going to donate part of the money he's making to the National Speleological Society. Let them use it for education, use it to clean up trash in caves. Trick lives in a converted school bus with his wife. The guy lives in a school bus and wants to throw his money into a hole in the ground. It's not Burt's way, but he kinda admires Trick, Trick's way.

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Caves, man. Sit in the dark and let the linear thread snap, think about the things that people love. Why they love them. Sit in the dark and think, Why me? Like maybe there was a reason.

It was nearly five thousand years ago, in the Diyala region of Sumer, when some Iacocca type improved the performance characteristics of his oxen-driven plow by getting rid of the plow and yoking his team up to a platform on wheels. The new vehicle— the first chariot—was a novel source of fun for a couple of centuries until people began to realize that these chariots would go no faster than an ox could lumber. About 2500 B.C., folks began importing onagers—wild asses—from western India and yoking them up to the new chariots. The history of the chariot from that time onward has been a steady quest for speed. There have been, over the years, quite a few of these wild-ass innovations.

As horses became domesticated, around 2000 B.C., they took the place of the asses. About that time, somebody invented the spoked wheel, which was a lot faster and safer than rounds cut off logs.

In the next thousand or so years the use of chariots spread to China, India, Greece, Rome, and the British Isles. British and Celtic chariots used against the Romans in battle had swords extending from their axles for a fast, nasty run through enemy infantry ranks.