The Cave

France, Pyrenees mountains, many, many moons ago.

A group of us pull up at the entrance to the limestone caves in the west-central part of the Pyrenees, west of the famous and infamous town of Lourdes.

Two hundred years ago a half insane starving fourteen year old girl claimed she had a vision of “the holy virgin Mary” near a mountain spring whilst out and about gathering firewood. She became famous, became a nun and was declared a saint. She never worked another day in her life. The town of Lourdes found that, miraculously, the water of the spring cured any and all diseases, although, inexplicably, only ever in the absence of any medical research personnel or otherwise reliable and credible witnesses. It went on to sell untold millions of flagons of holy water to a never-ending stream of poor hopeless afflicted people flocking to it in hope of salvation and deliverance from their predicament, disabled, debilitated, deformed and terminally ill. They willingly part with their money and go away exactly the same as they came there, and the town continues to grow millionaires. It is fully legal, and a fine case example of religion and entrepreneurial predatory capitalism happily walking hand in hand to the bank vaults.

We weren’t there for the holy water, rosaries and snake-oil. The entire mountain range to the west of the ill-begotten place is shot through with limestone caves, like a Swiss cheese. Carved by ancient rivers over hundreds of thousands of years, forcing their way through cracks and fissures, there are cave systems of tunnels, passageways, massive caverns, underground rivers and waterfalls that stretch for kilometres away into the dark. Many of them have never fully been explored.

We were going to do some exploring of our own. At the time I was living in France as an illegal alien, working on the wind swept beaches of the south-west coast at whatever work no one else wanted to do, drinking and playing hard and generally having a good time pissing it up the wall. During my random aimless travels across the face of the earth I had met a girl there and had decided to stay with her.

In keeping with time-honoured tradition the night before had been a big one on the piss, and we were a bit shaky as we staggered out of the car. There was no such thing as an early night, and a day without alcohol was roundly considered to have been a complete waste of a perfectly good day. We had a bloke there we had teamed up with who had been there before and was going to show us around a bit, and then we were going to press on far into the dark interior of these caves. He gave us helmets with mounted lights, and away we went, crawling through a low-lying entrance between a rocky overhang and some thorny scrub. We flashed our torch light ahead of us into the darkness. It was impenetrable. We elbowed each other and cracked a few jokes. As we shuffled further down the local bloke issued us with instructions: there’s a ledge down there, drop over it with your feet first, and then move to the left as soon as you feel the rock, and hold on tight with your hands to the outcroppy bits. Be careful, there’s a bit of a drop behind it.

No worries mate. We’ve got this. We’re ten foot tall and bullet proof.

My mate goes in first, slides on his gut down the ridge, finds the ledge, shuffles sideways. My turn next. I’m flexible, strong, agile and fit, in spite of spending at least four days a week being blind drunk, legless off my face. I lower myself over the edge, push my feet down, find the ledge. Run my hands over the surface of dark brown rock in front of me, dancing in the light of my headtorch, and latch onto the little cracks and crevices there. Take a breath, prepare for the next move to the left along the ledge, invisible in the dark below my feet.

And step back.

Into the void.

Darkness all around me, and the world slows down to slow-motion. I teeter backwards, find nothing to put my feet on, stumble. My hands scramble across the rock face, and my fingers slip from the slimy holds.

I fall backwards.

There’s nothing around me, thin air. Black, dark, cold. A massive shaft opens up below me, a gaping black hole straight into the bowels of the earth. Surrounded by rock walls.

I fall and gather speed as my momentum increases. I’m weightless until my head starts banging against the vertical walls of the shaft on all four sides of me. BANG. Left hand side. BANG. Right hand side. Bang bang bang. Left right left right, forwards, back. Like a ragdoll flopping and lolling about. The flash of my headtorch paints schizoid furtive dashes of light on the walls as I bash my head on the way down, a cascade of black shimmering shiny hardness, diamonds of stone, shards of razorsharp dark teeth snapping at my skull.

I sail backwards through the air and land, hard, flat on my back on a flat slab. THUD.

The wind goes right out of me, and the stuffing too. Aaaarrrrghhhh. What the fuck??!!

I lie there, unable to move, unable to think. What the fuck was that.

Consternation all around. Shouts of panic and distress. Not mine. Voices echoing up and down the cave walls. Someone’s calling down. Are you all right? Are you alive?

I think they’re talking to me. I move my mouth. It seems to work. I wiggle my jaws, push myself up on my elbows, shaking my head, trying to clear the fluffy cloud from inside of my head.

I call back. Yes, I’m all right. All good, no worries. Still alive. Took a bit of bark off.

Someone’s coming down on a rope. My mate is abseiling down to where I am. Years later I will think if there was a fucking rope why weren’t we using it in the first place. How dumb can you fucking be.

I get up, scrambling and scuttling on flat, smooth rock. I look around. I’m on a flat ledge, a slab of horizontal rock in a vertical tunnel, a shaft, a chimney. There’s not a great deal of room on it. My mate lands next to me and helps me up. I’m all right. We stand up, and peer over the edge of the slab we’re standing on. The shaft continues down. Out of sight. Can’t see the bottom. We swear creatively and imaginatively at length with feeling, gusto and relief. It looks like the hole continues downwards for a bloody long time.

We use the rope and haul ourselves up again, one at a time. We make it somehow, although we still don’t have any harnesses, carabiners, belay devices or any other no-brainer basic 101 safety equipment you would never dream of going anywhere like this without. At the top we scramble over the edge and, this time, finally, actually go left.

The rest of the crew are there waiting for us and terror is written all over their faces. Even in the dark they are white as ghosts, and some of the girls are crying. They thought I was dead. So, admittedly, did I for a while there. We discuss the event, take second and third guesses. Find a few bits of loose gravel and pebbles and toss them over the edge. Shine our lights down. In the twilight inroads our torches make on the thick under-mountain darkness we estimate the drop to my life-saving slab is at least ten metres. We listen to the dropping of our pebbles and count. One... two ... three .... four .... We aim for the dark hole next to my slab, and keep counting. There is a considerable amount of counts before we hear the tell-tale tinkle of the bottom.

It’s hard to be sure in the darkness, but it seems that there’s at least another ten metres worth of drop next to the ledge where I fetched up. A sobering thought. Surviving that would be considerably less likely.

We shiver and shudder, and collect our thoughts. Debate our options. What do we want to do? Should we go on with our planned trip into the nether regions of the earth, or should we abort our mission, pull the pin and go to hospital for a check-up?

We had been planning this trip for weeks, had rousted up excitement and curiosity among our mates, and had pooled and organised resources. Had left the coast the day before, and spent the night in the foothills. Did we want to give it up so readily.

I shook my head. No, I’m fine. Yes, I’m good to keep going. No, I’m not hurt anywhere. Really, seriously.

All right. You sure? I’m sure.

So we turned towards the rest of the cave system, looked at it appraisingly, and pushed on. We spent the entire rest of that day hundreds and hundreds of metres below the surface of the earth, under the mountains, like dwarves in the Lord Of The Rings. We crawled through limestone crud, slithered through icecold bubbling water, scrambled up and down muddy slopes, squeezed through passages just barely wide enough to get a head through. Felt the weight of the entire mountain range crush us, pin us down, literally, squash the living air out of us.

We tumbled out of another opening in the hide of the mountain close to dusk. Covered in limestone mud and crud we peeled out of the last tunnel one by one, then rolled over and lay in the grass, buggered. I looked up at the sky, where the first stars were starting to make themselves known, and smelled the fresh, beautiful, clean mountain air. I looked at my hands, and realised for the first time that not only were they covered in scratches and gouges, but also that they were shaking. And had been the whole day under the ground.

We piled into our cars and drove off, making straight for our natural habitat, The Pub. There’s no experience, no matter how traumatising, that cannot be drowned in sufficient amounts of beer, accompanied by the laughter and banter of good friends.

The next day I went to hospital. Got twenty-four x-rays.

There was not a scratch on me. Not a bruised, cracked or fractured bone within coo-ee. There’s a special kind of luck reserved for fools and drunkards.

Or so they say.

***

Many, many moons later. Margaret River, Western Australia.

“Here’s one, go for this one, come on, party wave!”

I call out to my friend Miss Galore, First Lady Of The Night, sometimes known as Tandem Girl. She puts her head down and paddles hard, and side by side we slide down into the hole, drop down onto what is admittedly not a very big wave at all, hence the Party Call, and we jump up. I’m up first and stand up and grin widely. I love sharing waves with mates. It’s the best feeling. Miss Galore jumps up, and then, with a turning of the wind and a twisting of her board on a bump in the surface of the water, she loses her footing and falls over. Her board careers out of control and slams into mine. I lose my balance and go over backwards, as our boards cross over each other and form a fibreglass sandwich. I laugh out loud under water, which is both an intensely challenging as well as a remarkably stupid thing to do, since you end up with a lung full of salt water, so I stick my head out of the water coughing and wheezing and snorting and sneezing.

Next thing I know my board comes ricocheting back at me. Our legropes have got tangled up around each other, and maybe as a result, maybe not at all because of that, my board is bungeeing straight back at me. I have just enough time to register what’s happening and to think I should probably cover up, but not to actually do it, when the big long fin of my longboard flashes through the water in front of me like a shark with Human Breakfast gleaming in his left eye, and knifes me in the ribs. Ouch. Ow. That hurt.

Miss Galore comes popping up as well, we fish each other out of the water, drag ourselves back onto our boards, and have a good laugh at our own expense. This is what I like about surfing. It’s not just the amazing feeling of flying down a moving wall of glass-water at a hundred miles an hour, but the friendship and companionship that comes from sharing the experience with like-minded people, and the bond it creates.

We catch another wave and continue on down the line, sometimes sharing and sometimes watching each other and our mates catch waves, ride, perform gravity defying switch-footing tricks and tiptoeing ballet-stunts, and, sometimes, stack it. Good times.

The weeks pass and my rib doesn’t heal. It gets worse every time I paddle out, strangely enough. It hurts to lie down on the board, and after about three quarters of an hour or so in the water it gets very hard to sit up in between waves, let alone paddle and pop up onto one.

Then one morning I run on the beach in the twilight hour before sunrise, accompanied by the moon and the stars and the yawning pied oyster catchers, trying to shake sleep out of their feathers. I drop down at the end to do sit-ups, and all of a sudden an area directly below my right shoulder blade goes into spasm and I can’t breathe. It is agony, my upper body stiffens like a codfish coming up frozen out of the water in a Greenland winter blizzard, and I’m momentarily paralysed. Or so it feels, at any rate.

I get my breath back and roll over, face down in the sand. What the fuck was that.

I drag my feet through the day, avoiding any upper body movement. Go to see a quack. Get an opinion, and, if at all possible, a treatment.

Three of my ribs are sprained at the joints where they lock into my spine. The muscles in-between the ribs spasm every time my chest expands with a deep breath, and the ones connecting my shoulder blades are tied into a massive rock hard knot.

Turns out that copping a longboard fin-slam to the front has not only busted or at least fractured a rib at the front, but has also pushed the whole ribcage unit at that point backwards and sprained the corresponding back ribs.

Why?

X-rays only show bone damage. They reveal nothing about soft tissue damage. About the stretching, pushing, bending, stressing and rupturing of the tissue connecting the bones, of ligaments and tendons. Would anyone expect to fall backwards ten metres onto a rock slab without sustaining some sort of injury?

There’s a special kind of luck for fools and drunkards.

Or so they say.