Cave Diving Quotes

Both in cave diving and in life, the darkness of uncertainty was beckoning. I was scared, but I knew that if I could be brave enough to step over the brink into the blackness, my eyes would adjust and new possibilities would be revealed.

The Stranger Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart of the street to the river walking the rivers of the avenues feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt watching the lights turn on in the towers walking as I’ve walked before like a man, like a woman, in the city my visionary anger cleansing my sight and the detailed perceptions of mercy flowering from that anger if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light and hear them talking a dead language if they ask me my identity what can I say but I am the androgyne I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms. Not

From my youth upwards My Spirit walked not with the souls of men, Nor looked upon the earth with human eyes; The thirst of their ambition was not mine, The aim of their existence was not mine; My joy was in the wilderness—to breathe the difficult air of the iced mountain's top, Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing. These were my pastimes, and to be alone; For if the beings, of whom I was one—Hating to be so—crossed me in my path, I felt myself degraded back to them, And was all clay again. And then I dived, In my lone wanderings, to the caves of Death, Searching its cause in its effect; and drew from withered bones, and skulls, and heaped up dust conclusions most forbidden.

That mental strength under pressure is absolutely critical for the long, deep dives that Rick and John tackle. When you are hundreds of yards into a sump, you are so isolated from the basic needs of survival that you may as well be on the surface of the moon. It’s no wonder, then, that sump divers seem to possess the same qualities as astronauts: the ability to prepare thoroughly, solve problems quickly, and keep cool in an emergency.

Now let me tell you something. I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things. But— All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.

Barnacles stud the smooth dark skin, and crabs scurry across it. That black back must be slippery, treacherous like rock … But you see the hole in its back, the breath going in and out, and you think of all the blowholes along this coast; how a clever man can slip into them, fly inland one moment, back to ocean the next. Always curious, always brave, you take one step and the whale is underfoot. Two steps more and you are sliding, sliding deep into a dark and breathing cave that resonates with whale song. Beside you beats a blood-filled heart so warm it could be fire. Plunge your hands into that whale heart, lean into it and squeeze and let your voice join the whale’s roar. Sing that song your father taught you as the whale dives, down, deep. How dark it is beneath the sea, and looking through the whale’s eyes you see bubbles slide past you like … But there was none of that. Bobby was only imagining, only writing. Held in the sky on a rocky headland, Bobby drew chalk circles on slate, drew bubbles. Bubelz. Roze a wail. He erased the marks with the heel of his hand. It wasn’t true, it was just an old story, and he couldn’t even remember the proper song.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard E. Byrd. Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks. Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih. It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates, comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermit-only chat groups. My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time. Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.

SEA” Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur “SEA” Cherson! Cherson! You aint just whistlin Dixie, Sea— Cherson! Cherson! We calcimine fathers here below! Kitchen lights on— Sea Engines from Russia seabirding here below— When rocks outsea froth I’ll know Hawaii cracked up & scramble up my doublelegged cliff to the silt of a million years— Shoo—Shaw—Shirsh— Go on die salt light You billion yeared rock knocker Gavroom Seabird Gabroobird Sad as wife & hill Loved as mother & fog Oh! Oh! Oh! Sea! Osh! Where’s yr little Neppytune tonight? These gentle tree pulp pages which’ve nothing to do with yr crash roar, liar sea, ah, were made for rock tumble seabird digdown footstep hollow weed move bedarvaling crash? Ah again? Wine is salt here? Tidal wave kitchen? Engines of Russia in yr soft talk— Les poissons de la mer parle Breton— Mon nom es Lebris de Keroack— Parle, Poissons, Loti, parle— Parlning Ocean sanding crash the billion rocks— Ker plotsch— Shore—shoe— god—brash— The headland looks like a longnosed Collie sleeping with his light on his nose, as the ocean, obeying its accomodations of mind, crashes in rhythm which could & will intrude, in thy rhythm of sand thought— —Big frigging shoulders on that sonofabitch Parle, O, parle, mer, parle, Sea speak to me, speak to me, your silver you light Where hole opened up in Alaska Gray—shh—wind in The canyon wind in the rain Wind in the rolling rash Moving and t wedel Sea sea Diving sea O bird—la vengeance De la roche Cossez Ah Rare, he rammed the gate rare over by Cherson, Cherson, we calcify fathers here below —a watery cross, with weeds entwined—This grins restoredly, low sleep—Wave—Oh, no, shush—Shirk—Boom plop Neptune now his arms extends while one millions of souls sit lit in caves of darkness —What old bark? The dog mountain? Down by the Sea Engines? God rush—Shore— Shaw—Shoo—Oh soft sigh we wait hair twined like larks—Pissit—Rest not —Plottit, bisp tesh, cashes, re tav, plo, aravow, shirsh,—Who’s whispering over there—the silly earthen creek! The fog thunders—We put silver light on face—We took the heroes in—A billion years aint nothing— O the cities here below! The men with a thousand arms! the stanchions of their upward gaze! the coral of their poetry! the sea dragons tenderized, meat for fleshy fish— Navark, navark, the fishes of the Sea speak Breton— wash as soft as people’s dreams—We got peoples in & out the shore, they call it shore, sea call it pish rip plosh—The 5 billion years since earth we saw substantial chan—Chinese are the waves—the woods are dreaming

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen's handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads. Linda's Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul's first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them. Because of Linda's Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda's inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection. Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with- maybe- a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the "fat-free" cheese that she'd tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol. No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn't help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where the cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children's-book blue sky with puffy white clouds. Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she'd ever had. She'd tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, "Cheese can change your life!" The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it. The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

For example, since there was no such thing as a means to control your buoyancy, the earliest buoyancy compensators were plastic milk jugs. To keep themselves out of the silt that obscured visibility, cave divers took the regulators out of their mouths, shot air into the jugs, and clung to them or clipped them off on their belts to give themselves more buoyancy. After that they started using jerry cans. First they tied them to their arms but found it tiring to have their arms lifted, but nothing else. So they put them back on their waist. Then they decided to use two for balance, attaching them to a military style cartridge web belt. About the time cave divers were saying there had to be a better way, the dive industry came out with what was to be called a “buoyancy compensator

The biggest downfall of the cave divers in the 60s and early 70s was deep diving,” said Wes Skiles. “We’d figured out all the other things about the dangers of incorrectly using lines and lights, the air rules, and we now had pressure gauges. We had no excuse. When I came into the sport in 1973, there was really no reason not to operate safely. But deep diving they hadn’t figured out. A number of trained cave divers—all in a short period of time—lost their lives in caves.

Has my profession disfigured my mind, the endless hours of constant attentiveness, my ear for hire and open to all comers, my face painted with the glare of projected fantasies? The French have a term for it: deformation professionelle, the idea that all forms of work twist the mind away from reality. Hence a backfiring car sends the soldier diving for cover in a shrub. Litigators dart and cower in forests of imagined liabilities. For the detective and inspector, every testimony or confession is a network of lies and concealments. How could my work not have deformed me, all those long hours spent squinting into the soul's lightless recesses? How could I not have become some moon-eyed, cave-adapted creature, for whom ordinary daylight is an unendurable affliction?

The End of What Begun by Maisie Aletha Smikle All that begun Have spun Time has come Thread is always broken at the end Teeth clatter Fowls flutter All that matter Went clitter clatter Mountains shuddered and fled To roaring river beds Valleys climbed up instead Rocks flew topsy turvy hitting everybody's head Trees took refuge in caves Sparrows flew by and waved Bringing news of a tidal wave Into caves splashed the waves Caves caved in And there was no inn The inns caved in And waves dived in Grasping tree trunks Carried by the waves Floating on the ebb of the tide Animals and all glide and took a ride A ride to hide from an end Which has come For what had begun Has spun reaching it's broken end

Both in cave diving and in life, the darkness of uncertainty was beckoning. I was scared, but I knew that if I could be brave enough to step over the brink into the blackness, my eyes would adjust and new possibilities would be revealed. I had moved to a new country once before, and it felt easier the second time around. The

solo dive

What’s there that’s so great? Internet? Television? Department stores? Fast food?” Richard leaned forward and began counting on his fingers. “Medicine, clean water, sanitation, midwifery, roads, transport, everything that pulled this world out of the dark ages and took the nasty, brutish, and short out of life.” He rabbit-eared his fingers. “You think that ‘going back to nature’ is going to make your life more enjoyable? You’re a fantasist, Ed, and a selfish one. What about your kids and your wife? You think they’d be all right? You think you could really support them and protect them? You probably couldn’t even keep a cactus alive, let alone feed your family from a vegetable patch.” “And what’s that supposed to mean?” I said. “I’m saying society has evolved, Ed. It’s not what it used to be for one very good reason: it was shit and people weren’t very good at staying alive. We got sick and died daily. Childbirth usually ended in death for the child, the mother, or both. Pain, filth, famine, and war were everywhere, and you were lucky to reach thirty without being stabbed, shot, tortured, decapitated, hung, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, or thrown in a dungeon to rot. People didn’t live in some blissful utopia where everyone had an allotment and looked after one another. We killed each other because we were starving and terrified most of the time. The last two hundred years have seen us grow, understand, build systems and infrastructures that keep us healthy and happy. We can dive to the bottom of the ocean, fly around the world, go to the moon, Mars, beyond. And all you want to do is go live in a cave. We’re not supposed to live in the fucking dirt, Ed. We’re not.

What was this future we were flailing toward, with its fires and floods? Its rolling blackouts and tornadoes? Where was the reboot on this? The plot twist, the science fiction dream turned real scientific breakthrough, that would make everything okay? Where were the venture capitalists with their cold fusion and their wind farms? Their plastic-digesting bacteria? Their CRISPR-driven vaccination platforms? Their cancer-curing pills? Were we all really just going to keep fumbling along through these storms of the centuries of the weeks? What would it look like when the power went out for the last time? When there was no one left to put the poles and wires back up? All those empty unlit rooms, all the rats and pigeons starving, and the subway tunnels full of water, a new species of blind shark taking dominion of the thousands of miles of man-made sea caves, reefs in the stalled cars whose windows had shattered under the pressure of all that water, and the broken glass worn smooth by time, and all the subway stairs become oyster beds, anemone tendrils adrift in the current—all those gorgeous impossible colors, a true new Eden, except of course that it would all be happening in absolute darkness, with nobody there to bear it witness, to register the beauty and terror of nature repairing itself. Who would rub the condensation from his dive mask and stare stupefied? Who would catch the silver gleam of scale or white teeth full of bloody shredded spoil in a dive-rated flashlight’s sun-bright beam? I got out of the pool, dried off, went downstairs, took a quick rinse, drank some water, and got into bed, whereupon I fell fast asleep and into uneasy chlorine dreams.

When I certify a student at any level of diving, I ask myself if that person is capable of self-rescue and capable of buddy-rescue in conditions similar to or perhaps worse those of their certification level. I can sign them off on their behavior and performance at a given level, but must rely on them to continue to make good choices in the future.

Annie looked up. “What rhyme?” she said. “Let me see.” Jack took the shell from her and turned it over. On the other side was a poem. Jack read the poem aloud: Before night falls on this long summer day, A shining sword must find its way Into your hands and out of the gloom— Or Camelot’s king shall meet his doom. To begin your quest for this Sword of Light, Call for the help of the Water Knight. Then pass through the Cave of the Spider Queen— “Spider Queen?” Annie interrupted. She frowned. Spiders were about the only thing she was afraid of. “Don’t think about it now,” said Jack. “Let’s keep going.” He read on: …pass through the Cave of the Spider Queen And swim with a selkie clothed in green. Enter the Cove of the Stormy Coast, Dive ’neath the Cloak of the Old Gray Ghost—

Peace was the nothingness, the void of everything, the great empty. He just had to find that place. Dive into it like a black cave. You had to fall past despair and doubt to get there. But once you did, you gave yourself to it, found solace in the oblivion.

The Bounded Boundless In the haven of solitude, the heart is on fire, For beneath the layers, there begins the explosion, deep in the soul, the heavenly hush, the holy communion. The world may wonder, 'Is this loneliness?' No, no! Have you heard of aloneness? The luminous solitude where silence strikes a fire; The contemplative cave, where a person is burned In the flames of longing, only to be a seeker and sage. As a moth to a flame, there the soul dives, In the sea of solitude, to hunt the pearls that lie deep within. The moment arrives when the vision travels inward, Leaving the world outside, you find a new world inside. Is this the world of luminous stillness, the enlightening solitude, the heart of heaven? In the heart of silence, you go deep to find, in the world outside, you were nobody, but, in the world inside, you are somebody! Somebody with identity, and there begins the divine alchemy. You, the moth, find your wings in the longing for flames, burning in the fire, you find your flight. You, the seeker, soar above the finite to infinity, The bliss in burning. 'I Sense My Thirst'....Excerpt Jayita Bhattacharjee

but inside she could feel herself starting to scream, or rather, she could feel, and see, the diving line between not-screaming and screaming. It was like opening your eyes in a cave bigger than the earth