Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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The Edge of the World / Joy Kennedy

Abstract: “The Edge of the World” tells a true story of a mapping expedition in the second longest cave in Texas. When her survey group becomes lost inside the cave, the author uses the experience to propel questions of the duplicity of maps and the ambiguities of human perception. Detailed are the gritty nuances of caving that the average tourist never experiences: the tightness of squeezes, digging for air flow, and pushing for passages. The author finally questions if the blank spaces on maps should really be filled in with new discoveries, for perhaps something is being lost in the process.

He discovers deep things out of darkness and brings out to light the shadow of death. (Job 12:22)

<1> It seems almost every place on the planet has already been discovered. We walk where others have walked, see what has already been seen, and congratulate ourselves when we “conquer” that which we know has already been explored.

<2> But down in the dark, in the black voids of caves, you can truly be the first to set foot in a place. And this time my group was lost. Our map showed miles of mazes and passages in Powell’s Cave, the second longest cave in Texas. Since the 1960s, Texas cavers (affiliated with the National Speleological Society and the Texas Speleological Association) have volunteered to come to this cave, often three times a year, to survey. Over 2,600 survey shots were put in to make the current map, with many trips typically including 8 to 13 hour pushes. The map is a testimony to the determination and grit of the cavers who drew it. But if you’re lost in the cave, the map of Powell’s seems only an abstract black and white design of squiggly curves, wavy topographical lines, and straight directional lines. You can unfold it out again and again – revealing seventeen miles of charted passage. Where are you in all this?

<3> It’s a popular belief that old maps bore the phrase “here there be dragons” when the mapmakers reached the edge of their knowledge. Although cartographers disagree that there ever was such wording, it is true that this “edge space,” terra incognita, was often decorated with strange animals and mythological beasts. The unknown has always been terrifying to some. And a world, perhaps having an edge that might be approached unawares, must have been a terribly frightening conception. (Although over two thousand years before Columbus, by the sixth century B.C., sailors and cartographers knew the earth was round, not flat.) Perhaps fanciful drawings were drawn on map edges because the mapmakers, artists in their own rights, just couldn’t stand the negative space. They drew in spouting sea serpents and open-mouthed monsters. Like the margins of notebook paper in homeroom, something about empty spaces on maps just cries out to be filled in, whether with facts or flights of fancy. Consider Jonathan Swift’s satirical observation:

So Geographers, in Afric-maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps;
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
(On Poetry)

Our map of Powell’s Cave, too, had an edge space. It was white and blank, an enticement for cartographical prognostication. Two known passageways extended like fingers pointing toward each other; a caver had surmised there could be a hidden connection in the blank space between. If we could find this secret connection, future exploration times would be cut in half from using this short cut.

The Descent:

<4> Descending down into a cave is coming into contact with a primal part of your self. Almost everyone looks at a dark space and feels a strange, half-tingling urge – if not to explore, then at least to speculate. What’s down there? As Thoreau remarked in Walden, “Who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestors which still survived in us.” A cave calls to everyone, whispering dim secrets of dark space and mysteries.

<5> The inside of a cave, near the entrance, is called the twilight zone. The zone suspends light and shadow, hanging them like a formless gray gauze. The air smells like moist potting soil, the skin of potatoes . . . the damp chalk of limestone. Life abounds here: scorpions, beetles, perhaps a few snakes, ticks, fleas, salamanders. If it is a bat cave, hundreds of tiny wings flapping and the bats’ soft ch-ch-ch twitterings will sound like distant water moving. They provide a mirage to the ear, not to the eye, of rapids crashing like static in the far recesses of the cave. I was once convinced by the sound that I was about to find water, until I was engulfed in a bat flight. A Mexican free-tail bat flew to my helmet and clung upside down on the rim, looking straight into my eyes. We were only two inches apart, probably looking at each other cross-eyed. I didn’t breathe, blink, or move. He was no bigger than a fuzzy field mouse. He yawned. Wriggled. Then he ran his pink tongue out to groom one soft, extended wing, eyeing it carefully, like a man checking his sleeve length.

<6> You can be caught up in miracles in this twilight zone. It’s easy. Sometimes the light outside penetrates the shadows in shafts, and dust motes float in the silence, flying like fairies . . . or miracles. If you rappel down through the zone you may find yourself suspended with no sensation of moving, and yet feeling strangely that the cave is coming up to meet you. Caves are wells of magic and illusion. But the twilight zone is just the beginning of the cave. You have to move on. You press downward into deeper darkness.

<7> Signs of life diminish as you go further. No moss, lichen, or animal scat. Only rock. There is no sound except that of your movement – perhaps the sound of your denim jeans shuffing on rock, or your knee pad catching on a snag. Do your joints creak? You’ll hear them. If you exert yourself hard enough, you’ll hear your own heartbeat thudding. Stop and rest and you’ll hear perfect silence – along with the whine of your ears ringing, buzzing your brain that this can’t be right, there must be something to hear! Toss a pebble and clink! The angry whine goes away, appeased, if only for a moment. Shut off your light long enough and your eyes will zing your brain into seeing shadows, lights, and kaleidoscopic colors. It’s sensory deprivation, a rare luxury in our modern world of cell phones, sound bites, and information highways.

<8> In Powell’s Cave the twilight zone leads the way into a maze. The cave lies faulted in east-to-west joints, like a huge sheet of cracked peanut brittle. Crawlways run as straight as dark directional lines, meeting others in mazy routes that confuse even the most observant caver. Our team climbed down breakdown, rocks and slabs of long ago collapsed ceiling. For hours we crawled, climbed, squirmed, and walked through passages. The places on the map where we thought we were became less and less recognizable.

<9> “Here’s the maze passage, and that’s the stream passage . . .” our team leader murmured as he traced the delineations with a muddy finger. We had unrolled the unfinished version of the map and adjusted our helmet lights to shine on its laminated surface. We had been walking stooped over, “duck-walking,” for the past half-hour in a cramped passage, and welcomed sitting down in this place where the floor of the cave had a fine powder of limestone. It was cool and soft as flour. The slopes of the walls fit easily to our backs, and we sipped water and ate granola, fingering the powder absent-mindedly. It would make a fine little warren, I thought, for Peter Rabbit. If he were lost too.

<10> “So we must be . . . hmmm,” our leader murmured. We looked at the map earnestly.

<11> But truthfully, we had no idea. We could have taken a hundred wrong turns.

<12> What difference does a map make when you’re lost? Often, not much. It’s like looking up a word when you don’t know how to spell it. A map is just a half repre-sentation of a place, a half truth. It only reveals someone else’s interpretations of the place, not our own.

<13> For example, imagine mapping your own bedroom. What would you include? Would you start from a bird’s-eye view or draw a profile? You would probably draw your bed, the dresser, the closet. Would you carefully measure the room? In meters or feet? What would you not include? Would you draw the items in your closet, or the things in your dresser? Would you include a label of “closet” or include an international symbol – something you have made up to stand for closet? Would you include the landscape outside? The elevation of your house? GPS coordinates? Would you draw in your pets? Would you draw yourself, as a little stick figure, for scale?

<14> What you leave out of a map tells just as much about yourself, and what you value, as what you include. My good friend who is an archaeologist says that she can always tell who draws the various gravesite maps during digs. “Our hand and foot guy always draws in the metacarpals and phalanges. The guy who likes teeth has arrows pointing to all the incisors, and the anthropologist just draws square outlines with labels of ‘miscellaneous bones.’”

<15> No map has everything. Our map didn’t have all the new survey points included, so we couldn’t match our old data to the new survey tapes that dangled in the passages, left there by previous teams last year. We had no idea how far we had traveled, or still had to go.

The Push:

<16> We felt pressured to accomplish something. Six other teams were already at work in other parts of the cave system, presumably on target and less geographically challenged. Some were in wet suits, surveying an underground stream passage. The stream passage ranged from knee-deep muck, wriggling belly crawls, to waist-deep water. Cavers who brave the stream surveys balance a fine line between over-heating while getting to the water in a full wet-suit, or becoming hypothermic in the stream by not having a suit. Other teams, acting as controls for accuracy, were braving the 98º Texas heat topside with transmitters to receive radio-locations from cavers underground. Our team had shovels, a pickaxe, survey tape, geologist hammers, a dig bag, “pee bottles,” and Saran wrap for any solid wastes (which would have to be carried back out with us to keep the cave pristine). We were to push a lead, as it’s called. If we found a good one, such as discovering a walking passage, we would be willing to work all day and night for it. Such troglodytic madness is defined as digging fever or mud in the blood.

<17> But how do you find something, like a new passage or cave room, when you’re not sure one is there? Ancient Pacific islanders had surprisingly accurate maps made out of palm fronds, with shells marking positions of islands. But from an outrigger canoe, islands could only be seen from a few miles away. Like the West Texas plain, the ocean must have stretched to a lonely and infinite horizon. The wooden hulls of the canoes would have bobbed on the desert of water, lapped by waves repeating and repeating the vastness of the earth in soft undulations. The edge of the world pitched on blue meridians. Yet the navigators found new islands, miles and miles apart, by ingeniously observing the relationship between the main waves and the secondary, converging waves. Such choppy interferences told them an island was beyond their sight. Cavers do something similar by looking for small signs: leftover debris from water movement or airflow.

<18> Airflow is a sign of something larger down below, since caves “breathe.” As the barometric pressure outside shifts, caves equalize by breathing either in or out. It’s the same as stepping into a foyer of a building and feeling the gust of air-conditioning when you open the door. Even the temperature in a cave is constant – the average of the yearly temperatures. (For Texas, it’s a pleasant 68 to 75 degrees, with 95 to 100% humidity.) Several years ago a landowner dislodged a small pebble in a sinkhole and felt a tiny gust of air from the hole. After several days of digging, we opened an entire cave, never entered, where my footprint across the muddy floor was as startling as Armstrong’s on the moon. Airflow is nature’s nudge to a caver, an invisible breath from a presence nearby. How many people would notice such a small thing? How many people would notice small waves cresting on Pacific seas, and steer for a hidden island? And how many places are still hidden from us, because we can’t recognize the clues to reach their edges?

<19> In Powell’s Cave, the airflow where we were was nominal, but we felt compelled to dig anyway. We contorted our bodies into narrow shelves, feeling for air movement. A squeeze requires you have to exhale the air from your lungs and push your body through a narrow space. One person digs with hands outstretched overhead, scooping dirt and rocks into a dig bag by his head, and someone else pulls the bag out along side his body by a rope. We tried this process for a short while but made little progress. There was no hidden passage here. We were still in the wrong place to dig. We were still lost.

<20> “It’s late,” someone said. “We should start heading back.” If we couldn’t remember precisely the way we had come in, we would be lost a long, long time. I felt my water bottle gingerly, weighing its level. Somewhere, far above us, the smells of the grasses were floating and the cloud shadows were passing like quiet, lumbering prayers across the plains. Daylight felt a million miles above and away.

<21> Looking at the map, I again realized its inherent duplicity. Laden with tidy arrows and benign names like “the root route,” “Pete’s crawl,” and “the Hilton room,” everything had been “claimed” by someone. A map alludes to a type of ownership, a false control over the natural world. As Wallace Stegner says in his essay “Thoughts in a Dry Land,” “perception, like art and literature, like history, is an artifact, a human creation.” Not only do maps show what is valued by the mapmakers, like the archaeologists’ different grave- site maps, the place names show how limited we are by our own perceptions and language. Because we so struggle to understand the mysteries of nature, we easily personify them or cast them as metaphor. Even names of cave formations reveal this process: cave popcorn, cave bacon, draperies, soda straws, cave pearls, fried eggs. These formations look like what their names suggest (in luminous earth-tones), yet they are infinitely more beautiful.

<22> It’s all a self-made deception. Like the two-year old who looks up to a luminous full moon and proclaims “ball!” we are limited, not only by our frail grasp of under-standing, but by our language as well. The natural world is far more beautiful than the poor pictures our adjectives, nouns, and metaphors can portray, however well-chosen the words might be. And it’s a two-fold duplicity. For not everyone sees giants in the Hall of the Giants at Carlsbad Caverns. How would you navigate a map that read “turn right at the giant”? Would you see it? In this sense, cave maps with fanciful place names can be particularly dangerous. Cavers are taught to look back when they explore, because upon exiting, the features of the cave will look different. A single source of light, from a different angle, could turn a formation called “the dwarf” into something totally unrecognizable.

<23> But even after realizing these two deceptions, there is a darker secret to be discovered. What we see in the cave with our lights is not the true cave. Even a precise map, with survey shots and topographical information, does not show the true cave. I’ve been lost in a cave with no working lights and I know. The true cave is as dark and one-dimensional as a piece of black construction paper. Our lights are foreign substances to it. The true cave is formless. It is blank. It is supremely indifferent to our perceptions of it.

The Edge:

<24> We had reached the edge of our limits and the edge of the map. We were too tired to dig anymore and started the long process out. We traced our footsteps back through the soft, Peter Rabbit warren; slogged through mud-like clay; walked along a crevice; followed the joints and fractures of the cave back to the maze; and clamored up the breakdown boulders.

<25> When nearing the exit of a cave, the first thing to notice is the air movement, cool and fresh. Then the twilight zone emerges, hazy and soft, like the light you see when you’re caught between being half awake and still half-submerged in a dream. Climb topside and your senses, which have been deprived for so long, suddenly bombard you with beauty.

<26> The air smells different – alive with a thousand variations of grass, dirt, and breeze smells. The view will have changed. Shadows will have grown longer, or clouds may have formed. Stars may have come out or the moon may be so full and heavy-laden on the horizon that you think it could roll down into your arms. After a day of silence, the sounds outside descend upon the ears in a symphonic scale. A lone cicada will sound as loud and true as any brass practicing in an empty concert hall.

<27> We climbed up the cable ladder to the surface of Powell’s, regretful we hadn’t accomplished much, yet supremely grateful to be surfacing.

<28> But long after midnight, we discovered a team hadn’t exited the cave.
“Where is Team 6?”
“They haven’t come up yet.”
“They must have found a good lead.”
“Or got lost.”
There was gentle laughter edged with nervousness.
“Where were they going?”
“They were looking for a connection between HH47 and TCB20, near Hell-Hole.” These survey marker names were pointed to on the map, and the possible routes of the team were traced and highlighted.
“Team 2 said there’s really bad air at the bottom of the dig next to the stream passage. They had to turn around.”
“Well . . .” someone murmured. “We’ll wait another hour or so, then I guess we’ll have to go down and see what they’re up to.”

<29> We huddled up top by the cave entrance, a seven meter vertical shaft in the flat plain. The air was still, almost oppressive. A summer night in west Texas is like being on a vast, earthy plate still cooling from an oven. Stars splash above it in vivid patterns you swear you have never seen before, or think you never will again. When the coyotes howl it seems they are beyond the edge of the world, surely falling . . . or leaping over the plate’s rim, taking their sad decrescendos with them.

<30> On the western horizon, we saw a blackness eating at the stars. A storm was moving in.

<31> Again, the map was unrolled. And again, I felt fearful of its duplicity. I wondered if Team 6 had had the same unfinished map as our team had. Perhaps their survey marks weren’t included. Or perhaps they had a hand-written note using place names such as “turn left at the Totem Pole” only the formation looked more like the “Witch’s Finger” to them.

<32> But at 1:00 a.m., I heard movement far below us and the sound of muffled voices. Team 6 finally emerged, popping their heads up to the surface just as the storm was approaching.

<33> The smell of dirt and sweat came up with them. They smiled exuberantly while mud clung to their hair in clumps, lined the crevices of their ears, nostrils, the rims of their helmets. The fine, white limestone powder of the cave’s upper level had crusted over the earlier-acquired darker dirt, giving their skin the appearance of burnt biscuits rolled in sugar.
“We got lost but found a new lead and dug it until we hit a sump.”
“Looks like you were digging with your face, man.”

<34> There was good-natured ribbing while the teams walked quietly through the night to their tents. Someone pointed a flashlight straight to the sky, enticing moths to flutter through the beam. Eastern pipistrelle bats began to swoop down, as surprising as moon shadows, to snatch at the meal and disappear by the time I could blink.

<35> “Twelve more survey shots were put in,” I heard someone murmur. “The south passage is going past the crevice . . .” “It looks good,” someone added. “It’s definitely still going.”

<36> Quick sketches were made on the open draft. If the cave was going, it meant the new leads were working out and the known cave length getting longer. These new survey shots would be added to a computer-generated map of the cave, done by a program called WALLS. This cave surveying program creates multi-color plots, draws in the cave walls, adds 3-D views, and implements a statistical system to troubleshoot difficult surveys. It is accurate, scientific, and coldly mechanical. There are no doodles of sea serpents in unnamed oceans or elephants in the blank spaces of Africa’s interior. No warnings of dragons. No shells on palm fronds, marking far-away islands floating like dreams under blue Pacific skies.

<37> And I felt a sadness. The blank spaces on maps are already filled with things we can’t see – the grand mysteries of the world. We need a few dragons. We need to leave some things unnamed. Searching for such spaces may be fine and well, some may say even noble, but what is truly noble is recognizing our smallness in the world. Gusts of air may guide us to hidden secrets. Computer programs may spout out map after map. Satellites whirling in orbit at 17,000 miles per hour may zing our coordinates to a computer chip held in our palms. Locations and lines and roads and radio waves are webbing all over the world – a luminous weave running astray. But what is the earth itself but a small life-ship spinning through an endless space of unmapped voids? The universe itself is blank. Dark. Supremely indifferent. Where are we in this?

<38> Those blank spaces on maps, what few there are remaining, should teach us to recognize our false control over our environment. They are testaments to our frailty, and demand humility. They need to stay empty, unknown . . . and sacred.

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