The Fall Line | Hard News | The Purification Ceremony

The Real Labyrinth

Looked at in cross-section, the cave was a series of stacked hourglasses. We were in the upper-most chamber, backs pressed against one mud-slick wall, feet jammed against another, our butts hanging in space over a chasm that fell away twenty-five feet through jagged limestone teeth to a rushing cataract. As we moved sideways through that treacherous passage, the mud avalanched.

We were hours inside the Mammoth Cave complex of central Kentucky, negotiating the connection route between Salts and Unknown Caves. Well, everyone else was negotiating. I was just trying to survive the ordeal, telling myself it was all for the good of the story.

I make my living as a novelist and take pride in the fact that many of my books are based on research in which I have immersed myself in an unfamiliar culture. To write "The Fall Line," I lived and skied with extreme skiers in the Sierras and the Rockies. To put together "Hard News," I relied on my experiences as an investigative reporter in Southern California. To research "The Purification Ceremony," I apprenticed under expert deer trackers and spent months traversing remote forests in Maine, Montana and Alberta.

Mark hanging in Neversink Cave while researching Labyrinth

But nothing I'd ever done prepared me for the unforgiving world of hardcore caving, the subject of my latest novel, LABYRINTH, (Atria, August 2002). Indeed, when I set out four years ago to write a thriller set underground, the extent of my caving experience was a two hour tour inside Mammoth when I was ten years old. Somewhere on the tour, I saw a real caver - filthy, tough, wearing a helmet fitted with an old miner's lamp - crawling out of what seemed an impossibly narrow passage. That image seared itself in my brain and nagged at me for nearly thirty years. Whenever I thought about that scene, I got nervous and excited.

For a mystery-suspense writer anything that provokes those sensations is fertile ground. So finally, a week before my fortieth birthday, I set out to become a caver.

Luckily, I stumbled onto the fact that Roger Brucker, founding director of the Cave Research Foundation and author of many books, including "The Longest Cave," teaches a course in subterranean exploration at Mammoth Cave. I signed up.

I arrived at the cave research center one sultry afternoon in mid June with a brand new helmet, headlamp, cave suit and pack and, frankly, no idea what I was getting myself into. Eleven others had signed up for the course. All of them professed years of caving experience and were looking to go to the next level.

"I want to go where no man has before," Marty Brown told me "I want to find my own cave and explore it."

Brown's motivation, one I heard again and again among hardcore cavers during my research, became one of the central themes of LABYRINTH. Indeed, I came to think of cave explorers as similar in psyche to astronauts, adventurers willing to take tremendous physical risks to be the first, to walk where no man has before. They're also sticklers about the technical aspects of their avocation.

"Too many novels about caves are flawed from a technical point of view," Brucker told me shortly after I arrived at Mammoth. "The authors just don't understand how caves and cavers work."

Of course, I did not have a full appreciation for what Brucker was saying when I showed up for his course. Nor did I understand how intense the experience of deep caving could be. I figured that one out the next morning when we entered Unknown Cave through the famous Austin Entrance. Brucker was sixty-nine at the time, but once we were underground, he moved like a man in his twenties. I had to struggle to keep up with him. For hours we moved deeper into the cave while Brucker taught us how to read the scalloping on the walls as a guide to how the passages formed and where new ones might be found.

We crawled up narrow ladders through holes in the cave roofs, then free-climbed a massive "breakdown pile," debris from a roof collapse tens of thousands of years ago. We were six or seven miles from the entrance at that point and I was about to get another lesson about the nature of hardcore cavers.

One member of our group, whom I'll call Sally, had assured everyone that she'd had a great deal of experience caving. But it was soon apparent that she was in over her head physically and mentally. At the bottom of the breakdown pile, she collapsed and said she could not go on. Brucker sent us back toward the surface with his wife, Lynn. We exited the cave in the pitch dark after ten punishing hours underground. While Lynn went back in to help Brucker bring Sally out, the rest of the group took a vote not to let her go back in the cave during the rest of the week's trips. Later, after Sally emerged from the cave virtually delirious, I asked why.

C. Phillip Henry, a long-time caver from Ohio, looked me straight in the eye and said, "She couldn't have just gotten herself killed, she could have gotten us all killed. In this type of situation you have to be able to rely on the people you're caving with."

The issue of self-reliance would become another major theme of LABYRINTH.

The rest of the week was even more grueling. The third day of the course we learned how to negotiate the connections between cave systems. We began at eight in the morning with a forced march through Colossal Cave heading toward Salts Cavern. We were soaking wet most of the time. My body became scrimshawed with bruises. It was most brutal in the connection routes, which I came to describe as slithering down a sewer pipe lined with barbed wire.

We dropped down vertical drains, then waded and crawled through water to get to Salts. Much later that day, after exploring the interior of Salts Cave we connected back into the Unknown system once again. That route was an adventure I'll never forget as long as I live. We endured mud avalanches, then slithered and yanked our way across sharp scallops for nearly three hours before bellying one by one under Guillotine Rock, which, as the name suggests, would have crushed us if we'd dislodged the little rock that held the massive boulder up.

"The vast majority of cavers have never gone through a connection route and now you've done two in one day," Brucker said after we staggered out of Unknown fifteen hours after we'd entered Colossal. "You guys have what it takes. To be a cave explorer you have to be willing to go underground for long, long periods with little rest and you have to be willing and eager to go down the drains. That's the only way to find big cave."

I would go on to learn dozens of other lessons the other hardcore cavers who took me under their wing while researching LABYRINTH. I would study rope techniques with Bruce Smith and Allen Padgett and rappel into cave pits in Tennessee and Alabama. I'd enter ice caves in Vermont and learn about methods of cave rescue. In the end, however, it was the initial awesome experience of following Brucker through the largest cave in the world that influenced every moment in the novel.    

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