My heart leaped. This was great news. An undived local cave! It was a dream come true. “Let me know if you need any help with anything, even carrying tanks and stuff,” I said. In the wake of the Doria mission, a mixed blessing of an accomplishment for me, I too was feeling landlocked. And I knew how rare an undived cave was and how the significance associated with it could bring a diver more accolades and acclaim than a thousand dishes. Such an expedition could really make a diver’s name.
“Bernie, wouldn’t it be cool if we found some new life forms and we got to name them?”
“Yeah,” I breathed. “What a rush that would be.”
Chrissy wasn’t just being grandiose. In the past, divers had made startling discoveries inside caves and had even brought back specimens of completely new and previously undocumented species. As had long been the tradition, when someone discovers a new species, or a new, previously unexplored area above or below the earth, the honor of naming it is theirs.
One of the most dramatic discoveries of new life forms in recent years had occurred in Romania, at the edge of the Black Sea. In 1985, while starting the foundation for a new power plant, workers revealed an opening in the earth’s crust. The government needed to know what lay underneath the great yawning vein where the foundation was to be laid. Christian Lascu, a geologist from the Emil Racovita Speleological Institute in Bucharest, was called in to inspect the opening, which he called Movile Cave. Lascu used a rope to rappel into the shaft, then found a maze of cave passages. He crawled 328 feet through one passage until he was stopped by a body of water. Further exploration would require diving gear. Lascu called on his friends in the Group for Underwater and Speleological Explorations, which he had helped form in Bucharest in 1981. Among its founding members was Serban Sarbu, a local high school biology teacher and cave diver. After preliminary exploration and measurements of the cave passages, Lascu and Sarbu rappelled into the cave in 1986, accompanied by their teammates, who carried the diving gear.
Lascu and Sarbu’s discovery became the stuff of the most fanciful dreams of people like Chris and Chrissy Rouse, me, and cave divers everywhere. The two men dived into the water, swam a short distance through a tunnel, and then came to an air bell, an area where the tunnel was not completely flooded but partially filled with air, resembling a half-flooded subway tunnel. There was not much of interest to the divers here, but the air bell indicated the possibility of other cave rooms. They swam farther, through another completely flooded tunnel, and entered a second air bell. Here they found an alien environment unlike any they had ever witnessed, or even read about—except in science fiction: an environment whose walls and water literally crawled with strange insects. As they looked around in awe, they saw a bug smaller than a pea with numerous legs and long antennae crawling along the cave’s wall, probing the rock surface for something to eat. One of the bug’s antennae brushed against the antennae of an exotic-looking centipede, which was unfortunate for the bug: The two-and-a-half-inch centipede lunged at the bug, caught it in its jaws, and shredded it. In the water near the two men, an aquatic scorpion swam toward them. They watched as it sought out a bug in the water, grabbed it with its two long front legs, impaled the bug on its beak, and sucked out the bug’s blood and other juices while the victim struggled in its death throes.
As Sarbu and Lascu turned to look at each other in astonishment and exultant triumph, they saw that they were each covered with a thin, white film, like wet toilet paper. Clearly, this cave was special. It warranted sustained inquiry, and it would establish the two divers as celebrated pioneer-naturalists. On subsequent dives, the two men documented forty-seven species living in the air bell, including thirty-two species previously unknown.
Further research unveiled something else: The gas in the second air bell was not air as we know it on the surface. It consisted of only 10 percent oxygen and contained over 3 percent carbon dioxide and a little under 1 percent methane. Surface life forms would not survive under these circumstances, yet an entire self-contained ecosystem thrived in air bell number two. Not only that, but a high concentration of hydrogen sulfide and methane rose to the water’s surface from a hot-water vent leading deep into the earth. These gases were actually metabolized by a micro-thin film of bacteria—the substance that covered Lascu and Sarbu whenever they ventured into the cave. The bacteria’s metabolic processes released hydrogen sulfide, an acid that reacted with the limestone walls, eating away at them to create the cave. Though speleologists had speculated that such a process of cave formation was possible, it had never before been documented. Movile Cave was proof of a chemoautotrophically formed system—that is, a self-contained cave created as the direct result of the interaction of chemicals and life forms with the rock.
In addition to the acid they emitted, the bacteria produced glucose, an organic compound that was used as the building block for the rest of the organic compounds: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. The microbial mat was at once the catalyst for the cave’s formation, and the base of the food chain. Lascu and Sarbu became the first surface dwellers to enter the sealed cave system since its formation over a five-million-year period.
The discovery breathed new life into Sarbu. In 1987, he defected from then Communist Romania and made his way to the United States, where he used his work in Movile Cave as the basis for his doctorate in cave biology at the University of Cincinnati. He received a Fulbright scholarship, and after the Communist government fell in Romania, he returned periodically to continue his study of Movile Cave’s fantastic world. He has become a legend among the cave-diving elite, who are inspired by Sarbu’s discoveries to press on in the hopes that they, too, can make startling discoveries like Movile Cave.
Although Serban Sarbu’s discoveries were significant, they were not widely known to the general public until the mid-nineties. Twenty years earlier, the discovery of new life forms along deep ocean vents had made headlines and captured news spots around the world. At that time, Robert Ballard—the man who would later go on to discover the deep-water resting places of such famous ships as Titanic, Bismarck, and Yorktown—was working on his doctorate, trying to show the usefulness of deep-submersible vehicles, minisubmarines that could go far deeper than their full-size military counterparts. During two National Geographic Society research expeditions, he and other scientists discovered several unique phenomena at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, west of Ecuador. Here, one and a half miles below the surface, a vast vent in the ocean spewed forth molten lava, augmenting the ocean floor. Further research revealed an entire ecosystem that included giant clams, tube worms, and crabs from a family of previously unknown crustaceans. At the base of the food chain were bacteria that metabolized hydrogen sulfide spewed from the earth’s core. This was the first discovered example of chemosynthesis, life forms’ use of chemicals instead of sunlight to produce energy. Scientists had previously thought the deep ocean too inhospitable for extensive ecosystems. But the National Geographic expeditions brought back still and film images and specimens of creatures that thrived on the edges of the deep ocean vent.
The discoveries invigorated people who believe that life in our universe takes many forms. Some people had been smug in the notion that unique life forms would be found only in outer space, but we now had proof that our own planet still concealed many mysteries of life. What else would we discover underwater?
Even as our technological development allowed us to put a man on the Moon in 1969, in 1991 we still could not put a man in a suit on the bottom of the ocean because of the crushing water pressure. Exploration and research in the deep ocean was possible only inside highly specialized minisubmersibles. But diving-suit design was progressing: The Newtsuit, designed by Canada’s Phil Nuytten, could now take divers down to 1,500 feet surrounded by a surface-pressure environment, which meant they could rise immediately back to the surface without having to decompress. For deeper explorations, humans had to content themselves with brief forays in submersibles, where the best they
could do was peer through small, thick glass portholes at the alien world outside the vehicle. If they wished to touch something, or retrieve a sample from the outside and bring it to the surface, they had to do so through painstaking movements of a mechanical claw attached to the submersible.
Closer to home and far more accessible to sport divers than either the work or person of Serban Sarbu or Dr. Robert Ballard was Rob Palmer, a British cave diver whose 1990 book Deep into Blue Holes described his scuba explorations of Bahamian caves. Palmer frequently gave talks at various diving conferences, where the gregarious Englishman mingled with other divers at social events. He enjoyed the admiration of the masses attending the conferences, and he glowed in the spotlight. Rob Palmer stood in contrast to Billy Deans and Sheck Exley, two men who felt more comfortable in very small group settings and who shied away from the attention offered them at the large diving conferences.
Palmer’s book cover showed divers in a deep cave system, the distances obviously vast as they swam through a massive underwater room. “Did you get Palmer’s book?” Chris asked me over the phone one day. “Oh, did you see that great cover shot? Wow, what a cave that must be! Wouldn’t you just love to explore it?” I agreed. Chrissy, Chris, and I were all equally enthralled.
Both of the Rouses and I were impressed with the spirit of exploration that had guided Palmer from the cold, murky caves of his native island nation to the fantastic discoveries of caves and life forms in the warm-water, clear caves throughout the Bahamas. Many of the life forms found on Palmer’s expeditions were thought to have been extinct for centuries and offered scientists a chance to examine these creatures, as well as learn more about how life developed on the planet and how it continues to adapt. The caves themselves offered enormous and—in scuba-diving terms—often very deep systems to explore. Oddly, tides seemed to move through these caves—another phenomenon neither obvious nor previously known.
Inspired by discoveries of new life forms and by divers like Exley, Deans, Dr. Bill Stone, and Rob Palmer, the Rouses went back to Lahaska—the cave that started underneath the Pennsylvania well house—several days after they had first dived it. The visibility was only 10 feet: The silt remained suspended from their previous exploratory probing of the dark-brown, mud-covered walls to find passages that led farther. There was no current to carry away the silt as there was in the spring systems in Florida. Undeterred by the low visibility, the Rouses pushed on. Chris and Chrissy decided to split up, with each of them exploring different areas of what they dubbed “the Big Room.” They each found passageways that led them out of the room, and they extended their maximum penetration into Lahaska Cave to 200 linear feet. It was slow going, but promising, just as Florida’s cave-diving pioneers had experienced in the systems they discovered in the fifties and sixties. The Rouses’ explorations were yielding new passageways, which elated them and raised their hopes of finding ever more extensive tunnels. Maybe they would find new life forms somewhere in this cave after all?
Lahaska’s low ceilings meant that the two explorers would need a different equipment configuration to allow at least one of the Rouses to continue pushing the discovery forward. The lack of large tunnels filled with crystal-clear water meant that their diving in Lahaska Cave would be safer if they dived alone, and they decided that each one would explore a different area of the cave and independently probe for continuing passageways. During their second exploration of the cave, Chrissy used an advanced tank setup known as sidemounting, where the tanks are worn at the diver’s side and not on the back, as they normally are. This was perfect for wide but low systems, such as Lahaska Cave.
Sidemounting had itself been developed by British cave explorers, who frequently encountered sumps, bodies of water blocking their progress in otherwise dry cave passages. The sidemount rigs allowed the cavers to penetrate the sump and swim to another section of dry cave passage, where they would continue exploring. Rob Palmer was well versed in this form of diving, and pictures of him in sidemount configuration appeared in his book.
Chris and Chrissy were excited about their new cave, but the adrenaline rush it provided them would soon be shut off, and for mundane reasons: The cave’s water supplied a seasonal motel, and when the owner opened one of the faucets in the motel after the Rouses dived it in late July and found murky water flowing out, he was understandably frustrated. The silt that the Rouses stirred in Lahaska Cave was not filtered out of the well system. The owner did not want his guests to experience muddy-water showers, so he told the Rouses that they could explore the cave only during the winter, late fall, and early spring.
Luckily, cave systems’ water temperatures do not change drastically from season to season the way the air temperature does, but remain within a few degrees of the region’s average yearly temperature. In late July, when the Rouses first dived the system, the water temperature was 52 degrees Fahrenheit; the Rouses could comfort themselves that even in the dead of winter, the water temperature would not drop drastically lower than that. Still, their high aspirations were thwarted, at least temporarily, and they were both back at their jobs and at the quarry, with nothing to show for their efforts but words and hope. That was not easy for men whose ambitions—and competitiveness—kept pushing them further and deeper.
With Lahaska Cave exploration cut off until the late fall, the Rouses made time for their instructor friends at Underwater World, and they often continued to assist classes during final checkout dives for certification at Dutch Springs quarry. Cathie Cush, one of the instructors who worked for Underwater World, had been teaching since 1986 and had met the Rouses when they first started diving in 1988. When the store’s owner asked Chrissy to help Cathie with her students during spring checkouts in 1989, her first impression of Chrissy indicated a generational difference between the eighteen-year-old and the woman who was closer to his mother’s age: She thought Chrissy was overimpressed with himself, strutting with the confidence of youth.
In spite of her first impression, Cathie grew to value Chrissy as an excellent assistant because he was always willing to lend a hand and efficiently helped the students with their equipment. As Chrissy’s diving skills developed, Cathie came to rely on the younger man’s expertise, and she appreciated his examining her equipment and fixing anything that did not work flawlessly. She especially valued the way he suggested changes to her setup that made her more streamlined and efficient in the water: He never made her feel that she was inadequate or that he was trying to show her up in front of her students. She now felt so confident with Chrissy’s expertise that she actually felt uncomfortable if the young man did not inspect her regulators and gear setup before she went in the water.
Cathie had developed a good friendship with all three Rouses, including Sue, who liked Cathie’s relaxed, trustworthy, and non-threatening manner. Cathie admired the Rouses’ passion for the sport, as well as the confidence that the wife and mother displayed in her two men, who engaged in such a daring exploit as cave diving. Cathie also identified with Sue’s participation in cave diving, and marveled that the three of them enjoyed such a hazardous sport as a family activity. The Rouses’ passion for diving especially came across whenever they told any story about their diving adventures. When any of the Rouses told a story, they were as enthusiastic as children telling their friends what they got for their birthday. During one party, Chris sat next to Cathie and proceeded to hold her spellbound with his stories of cave diving. Chris casually recalled swimming at night on the surface, toward an underwater cave, and asking his buddy what all the red lights on the shore were. Chris simply nodded and smiled as he told Cathie that his friend had answered, “Gator eyes.” Cathie couldn’t imagine being so casual about swimming at night with alligators onshore—even if it was in full scuba gear. She was also moved by the story about Chrissy searching for the lost line while his mother waited alone for her son to return and bring her to the line leading out of the cave. Cathie could only think how anxious Sue must have felt. That night
with Chris, even though Cathie knew she should be sociable and talk with the other guests, she was glued to her chair, unable to get up even for another drink or to visit the bathroom.
Cathie’s friendship with Chrissy developed as much out of fascination with his passion for the sport as it did out of admiration for his youthful self-assurance and masterful diving skills. She also enjoyed the flirtatious interaction with a younger man. One evening, after Chrissy helped Cathie at the quarry, he drove her home in his car, a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle whose backseats he had removed to make room for the racks that secured scuba tanks. As they arrived at her house, Chrissy parked the car and casually reached into the back. From among the melee of scuba tanks and bags of diving equipment, he pulled a slice of pizza out of a box. It was frozen pizza—but it had defrosted and had never been heated. Cathie looked at him with alarm. “You can’t eat that!”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s frozen pizza right out of the box. You’re supposed to heat it, that’s why!”
Chrissy contemplated the pizza. “Nah, it looks fine. It’s been sitting in the car over a week. It’s not frozen now.” He took a bite and moaned in appreciation.
Cathie was shocked, amused, and a little worried. Her young friend wasn’t disgusting her—he was recklessly courting food poisoning. Chrissy swallowed his pizza, looked at Cathie, and blurted out, “You know, I’ve always had this fantasy of being with an older woman.”
Cathie was stunned more than ever. She didn’t know what to say. Chrissy’s youthful, long-haired look and nonchalant manner belied his seriousness, but she knew a come-on when she heard one. “Chrissy, your mom would tear my eyes out!”
Chrissy’s face drooped into sadness. He looked away briefly. Suddenly, he turned to look at Cathie, his eyes sparkling like a child’s on Christmas Day. “Yeah, but my dad would say, ‘Go for it!’”
The Last Dive Page 20
