Airman’s Cave. We had been spelunking before, but it was nothing compared to the adventure on which we were about to embark. It was something about our group of friends. People had died there – gone in but were never allowed the luxury of escape. And that’s what made it so appealing, I guess. But first we had to find it.
It was a beautiful Saturday morning – 2 pm – and I was fast asleep. Suddenly the soothing tones of my cell phone pierced through the rapid-eye movement phase of unconsciousness and my hand fumbled for the phone as my brain remembered this thing called motor control. Finally, the phone reached my ear.
“Yeah?” I spotted Austin on the caller ID so my greeting wasn’t as elegant as it could have been.
“Hey dude. Jake and I were just hanging out and we decided to go cave diving. We’re gonna hit Airman’s Cave.”
“Cave diving?” I half-asked, since I knew his intentions but I was still in the process of waking up.
“Yeah, cave diving. I’m gonna see if Ty wants to go too.”
“Cool.”
“Be over in a bit.”
“Cool.”
After that witty repartee, I hung up the phone and started assembling some gear. One rechargeable Maglite with an extra battery, one Mini-mag with a few extra sets of AAs, a few bottles of water, and some extra layers of clothing just in case.
Austin and Jake arrived shortly and started to do the same. I threw on some jeans and an old t-shirt I hadn’t worn with any regularity in years. Ty showed up in the midst of this, so we all got prepared and headed out. On the way we called our friend Matt and he would meet us at the parking lot next to the entrance to the Greenbelt which held our great cave of destiny.
Our directions were vague at best, so we asked a group of rock climbers if they had any knowledge of the entrance, but they only support they could give was to inform us that we were indeed in the general vicinity. So we picked a direction, and headed south to find yon cave.
After discovering the presumed land mark at least three times over, we spotted a giant rock mountain to our right, along with some perforations that turned out to be the entrance, or three. We did some observation, second-guessed ourselves, and found the true entrance. The entrance is known as “the keyhole” or “the birth canal”, and after wriggling through this miniature passageway, I came to the conclusion that these nicknames were apt.
Fortunately the entry tunnel was only about six feet long and there was a large (by our greatly modified standards) room just ahead. Matt announced his necessary departure then and there, so he did the birth canal yet again, and left our party with three remaining members.
There were a few more crawl spaces, and then it opened up into a huge room that led in both directions. We were debating our path when Ty focused his light on an organic formation hanging from the roof of the cave.
“Is that what I think it is?” he asked, inching his was closer with caution.
Of course, all our curiosities were piqued, but Austin and Jake were checking out the path to the left, so I arrived shortly behind Ty.
“Is that a bat?” Ty asked.
“I think so,” I said, not really wanting to believe my words.
By this time Jake and Austin were right behind us, and they confirmed Ty’s finding.
“Yeah, that’s a bat,” Austin said, almost with a touch of humor in his voice.
“I think that’s a dead end anyway,” I said.
I wasn’t just trying to get away from the bat; I sincerely thought the path to the right was blocked off. In retrospect, once we got home and found a real map of the place, it turned out to be the proper route.
Unknowingly, we took the path to the left, and we found another crawl space, through still not as cramped as the birth canal. In this space, Austin located a skull of a yet unidentified animal, most likely a raccoon or squirrel, but then all skulls look the same.
Past this space we encountered the largest open space yet, but we were confronted with several paths, neither of them showing any promise. There were also a couple more bats on the ceiling, to which Austin observed that the mud on which we had been crawling all this time was most likely not mud but bat dung. If anything will raise moral, it’s the knowledge that you’re covered head to toe in the fecal matter of another animal. Be that as it may, we took our delay as an opportunity to do some documentation.
Austin was brave enough to get a super-micro shot of one of the sleeping bats from a range of mere inches. Well, bats aren’t blind, and this one reacted quite keenly to the light from the flash. The bat hath awoken. Much to my discomfort, it began to fly around the cave and all rational thought fled from my brain. The next few minutes I sat perfectly still; a feat that for all the previous years of my life I had yet to accomplish before that day. Eventually, it did settle down after only a couple waves of terror, and we decided to turn back.
The trip back was mostly uneventful, except that the birth canal is a bit harder to squeeze out of then to squeeze into. This was mostly due to the lack of a foothold, which meant we had to pull ourselves up by our arms. Even though I am perfection incarnate when it comes to the physical specimen, this was still exhausting.
We exited the cave approximately one hour after we entered it, having only explored a small fraction of it. But this is only one tale; rest assured there will be others.
*Dialogue is written as best as I could remember it, and is by no means verbatim. My sincerest apologies in advance for those victims of my misquoting.