Trapped
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o
one of us by the half cry, half sigh we would make. At 10
feet, we knew our bodies were locking in rigidity. "Better
cut out a ledge here and just sit it out," Jim said. We took
turns with the knife, hacking away a shallow indentation
with enough room for the three of us to perch on.
"The rescuers will find us soon," Bill said when we
scrambled on our shelf. We nodded and dozed off for a
while. We couldn't judge how long we'd been under the
mountain now. By all the trouble we'd encountered, by our
hunger and beard growth, we figured it must be around
late Saturday night. That meant our fraternity and fam
ilies Jim's and Bill's in Atlanta and mine in Ormond
Beach, Fla. must have realized we were in danger. They'd
be after us first thing Sunday. That wouldn't be long, so we
sang fraternity and folk songs to pass the time.
But time didn't pass. It lay as heavily around us as the
clammy darkness. My thoughts went back to the rope.
"You know," I said, "I think I could climb that rope if it
were at an angle rather than straight up and down. Why
don't we pull it over to the bank and hold it taut between
us and that outcropping of ceiling? That would give me
about 20 feet of sloping rope to get a start on."
I knew, too, that there was a splice mark at the 20-foot
mark. I could rest there. Another 20 feet up was a shelf of
rock where I could get another breather.
It seemed like a good idea until Jim pointed out a draw
back. The way the rope would be held placed a climber
above some jagged stalagmites that jutted from the floor of
the pool like pikes. If I fell, I could be impaled.
We "didn't debate it for long, though. Two of our flash
lights were soaked and dimming to a dull yellow. Only
Bill's would be working soon, and if that went we'd be lost
in a deaf and blind world, left only with a groping sense
of touch that could lead us in deadly directions.
Jim and Bill pulled the rope as horizontal as possible, and
I started up. The exertion felt wonderful, pumping warmth
into me and stretching taut muscles. Bill moved his beam
of light just ahead of me as if drawing me upward, and
Jim called hoarsely, "You got it, boy. Keep going!" I
reached out with blistering hands for the knot and clung
tight. By now, my lungs were seared, and my arms felt as
if somebody were wringing them out like a piece of wet
wash. I didn't look down, but I could sense those stalag
mites, their spiked snoots sticking up under me.
I got within three feet of the ledge when I realized feel
ing was draining from my hands. "You okay?" Bill called.
"Slide back if not. Don't chance a fall." I thought that over,
but as I did the light picked up the shadowy ledge. It was
just out of reach. I was almost out of this pit, and I could
never start over again. Take it easy, I told myself, it's
only a few feet now. But my muscles seemed to be pulling
apart, and I could hear my breath come in explosive gasps.
Numbness spread up my forearm, and I couldn't be sure
I was gripping the rope. I tried to flex feeling back into
my hands, but they were dead. I started slipping back, the
ledge fading in the darkness. Feeling rushed back into my
hands now the searing feeling of rope burn.
THE plunge was black and dizzying. Helpless, I plum
meted down sideways, most of my body exposed to the
rocks below. But I smashed into shallow water and sank
against the cushion of mud beneath. Off balance, I bobbed
up and staggered only a couple of feet before I struck the
knife-sharp edge of crusty rock.
"I'm okay," I managed to call. Bill and Jim moved to
my side. Some of the light reflected on their faces, and I
saw real fright written in the thin lines of their lips and
the set of their jaws. We had come close to the worst, and
the thought left us more helpless than ever.
We didn't say much to each other. We just clawed our
way back to our ledge and fell limply across one another.
There was fitful dozing, broken only by little animal sounds
Family Weekly. July . 1962
William Bnrlec
ames Mason, Jr.
as a cramp hit us or as some phantom sound alerted, then
disappointed, us. What time was it now? At least Sunday
afternoon, we decided. We'd been missed for sure. Rescuers
might be right above us!
"Let's give them something to hear!" Bill said with the
first vigor we'd managed since my fall. We yelled wildly at
first, then common sense told us to organize ourselves. We
would count to three, then bellow.
The moment we would stop, all sound would choke off,
not fade away as normally. Crushed, we would lapse into
a silence as deep as this underworld. The slightest foreign
noise, however, would set us on a yelling binge again.
Once we heard what sounded like a firecracker explod
ing, and we almost fell off our perch shouting. Then came
another loud pop, and we realized it had come from the pool.
"Bubbles," Jim said disgustedly. "Air bubbles from the
ground popping on the pool's surface." We slumped -back,
angry at the cruel trick.
It was after our 48-hour estimate, a very conservative
one, that Bill Bartee laid down the rules for the thing we
had never mentioned dying here. We never doubted we'd
be rescued, but obviously something had gone wrong above,
and just in case the wrong wasn't righted in time, we
wanted to make sure our last moments were not a horror.
THE colder and weaker we got, the harder it was to stay
awake. We locked arms around one another to prevent
a sleeper from tumbling down, and we made sure at least
two of us were always on alert for any sound. During my
turn at sleep, I felt Bill and Jim go tense as if they'd just
taken a shock. They strained forward in the darkness, hold
ing their breath. More listening, I thought sourly.
But something intruded on the pure stillness. A shuffling
sound, prolonged, not short and curt like the others. "Let's
give it a try," Jim said.
We yelled again, then fell silent. I listened so hard in that
muteness that my ears seemed to Tium. We shouted again,
a little frantic now. But this time we heard an answer a
long, subdued call. We shouted, paused, shouted, paused.
Soon we heard: "Keep yelling. We're getting closer."
Old friends had picked up our shouts Ed Seagraves and
Dick Shuptrine, ATO fraternity brothers, and Harry
Lange, who had spelunked with Jim before. They were part
of a 150-man rescue effort that had been bogged down in a
vast expanse of cave we had never realized was so big.
"You fellows all right?" a rescuer called down. "Need
anything?" Yes. We needed something to see, hear, smell
but most of all we needed to orient ourselves with time
again. We had never realized what a limbo life becomes
without a sense of passing time.
"It's about 4 p.m.," somebody told us. "Monday."
Just short of three days, and now I could safely admit I
thought we'd been trapped closer to a week. Army Rangers
and spclunkers from the Atlanta Grotto of the National
Speleological Society soon had looped ropes around us and
were dragging us up to the cave. When we finally emerged,
blinking, into the outside world, somebody asked Bill if he
would ever go into that cave gain. "Nope," he replied.
"That was my 12th look inside. The 13th might be unlucky."
We laughed but we haven't been back to Lookout.
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