Claustrophobic Spelunker

People have asked me why I chose to spelunk for a living. Those that have known me for years understand that I am marginally afraid of enclosed spaces. Newer acquaintances, when asked what my interests might be, peg me as a naturalist. Although they are technically right, their intended meaning is that I enjoy forests, plains, and anywhere that a sky can be seen.

I can’t tell them why. They would never understand what I experience when I enter a cave. Even those rare friends who I have guided through caves never quite notice the change I feel when I see the first stalactite or white crayfish. So, instead of wasting my time telling them something that I could neither vocalize nor make them understand, I tell them I enjoy the rocks I find or the things I discover that no one else has seen. Bullshit answers that always get the same reaction: a sharp nod of faked understanding mixed with an “Ooooh…I understand".

When I said before that I have a fear of enclosed spaces, I wasn’t kidding. I remember the first time I walked into an elevator, I was four. My mom held me by the hand as we walked into the dead end room. We had talked about what an elevator was on the ride over and why it was a safe thing. No sooner had the doors begun to close did it start. I felt that the coming together of the sliding metal also brought the front of the small room closer to me. I couldn’t move an inch. The walls pushed away the last bit of the outside world felt I would ever be allowed to see again. I began screaming at the top of my lungs that I wanted out of the trap that my mother had placed. I wanted to bang on the doors to let me out but they I couldn’t move to walk to them, they were pressing to hard against me. I couldn’t breath after a short time and my screaming stopped and I looked wide eyed ahead willing the world to come back. Later my mother recounted to story with me so that she both knew that I was okay and to ensure that she would not force that on me again.

And yet, when we are required to take off our helmets and push them ahead because the difference between the ceiling and the floor has gotten too little for even the hard plastic, I am always the first to dive head first into the crack. I don’t fear getting stuck in the cave, never able to move, the only light I can see being the narrow beam of my helmet light disappearing into the blackness. I don’t panic when the mud/dust/random ass spider falls into my mouth and tries to prevent my lungs from filling with the cool air of the cave. I make it through the crack to what is hiding on the other side, to see what wonders the world will never see because they are too scared of what lies beyond the light’s end. I make it through because a world of life filled with rock formations and sounds that fill the senses can be found in these places and nowhere else.

The pictures of life outside, the ones backlit with blue sky and sun, the buildings and natural formations alike are open to the sky, free to exist by how their creators and their viewers see them. To be seen, to these objects, is to be understood. This is not how I want to enjoy life. Sight is the human’s strongest sense and so it is the easiest to misinterpret. I do not want to see what is around me to understand it because what I understand could be wrong.

To me, the other senses must precede sight. They must tell me everything about what I have found, the place untouched by human interaction, before my sight confuses me. Outside where the stars shine and there is never a time without light can never be experienced in this way, I will never find a place where I can spend time simply exploring my discoveries with my ears or nose or skin. The caves are the only place this desire can be removed.

This fact alone is what drives me through the cracks that would normally send my head reeling, my heart pounding, and my extremities so shaken that I would otherwise lose control over their function. I enter my fear to discover a sense that very few can say they have experienced. I dive into cracks that would send me running in any other situation because I must know what awaits my senses on the other side.

A physician once asked me where I had received a cut I had been nursing for the past few weeks. I had gotten too close to a ledge during the brief time that I turn off my head lamp and had desperately reached for anything that would prevent my fall. My flailing arms drew themselves against the tip of a stalagmite before my palm could grasp it. The cut had been deep and would require immediate medical attention, if I ever worked my way back out (the cave was dry and sent dust flying into the air wherever we stepped, and so the cut would have become infected quickly). I was shaken when I finally looked down the ledge to see how far I would have fallen. It wasn’t that deep but the floor was covered in stalagmites similar that I had cut myself on. The doctor stared at me in disbelief before asking me why I had turned my light off. I thought about it for some time, how to tell him that that was how I spelunked, but I settled on telling him about technical malfunctions.

I returned to that cavern later, this time with a different team who wanted to see what had almost killed me. I reached the crack and pointed them in the direction that they needed to go, but didn’t follow. It was the first repeat visit that I had attempted, and I couldn’t bring myself to step into the crack once again. I knew it was because I was scared I would get stuck or that there would be a cave-in, and not because of the pit that I had almost fallen into.

Since then, I have returned to other former exploration sights and discovered the same result: if I have gone through a crack once I become scared to try again. I have discovered what is on the other side; I have sensed it in ways no one else ever will, and I have learned the secrets it wanted to tell me before I made assumptions by using my eyes. Those assumptions have tainted any future visit in such a way that I have no desire to return, and so my fear of enclosed spaces dominates.

My mother worries about me and my father shakes his head, but this is my calling, my life. I desire to experience things before I myself ruin them; and, to do this, I ignore a plaguing fear. I am a claustrophobic spelunker.