The Caving List

I found this a couple of months ago. It's from back when I was in college, and a bunch of us drove up to Tennessee to go spelunking. It's... well, it's old enough to be printed on dot matrix. And if we're being completely honest, it was a very old-fashioned approach to caving even then: three people, two lights per (at least), and old clothes. The complete lack of helmets and any other safety equipment tends to freak out more modern spelunkers.

So this is what I told people to bring. My commentary is in italics.



Things YOU should have with you when you go caving:

1. A pair of heavy pants: jeans, army surplus, something solid and DURABLE and expendable

2. A T-shirt and shorts: These can be worn under your caving clothes, or you can change into them when you get out of the cave.

3. A sweater of sweatshirt: Preferable old and expendable, but it needs to be something Warm. Caves maintain a year-round temperature of fifty-four degrees, and when your feet get wet, you'll get cold very quickly.

4. Thick socks: They won't actually help keep you warm, but they'll help when you get pebbles in your shoes (more padding).

5. A pair of lace-up, ankle-length shoes: Hiking boots, high-tops, or possibly combat bots. Do NOT use low sided tennis shoes as they tend to come off; do NOT use cowboy boots either, once you get water in them you'll never get it out.

6. A tough jacket: Jeans jacket, army surplus; something you can afford to get dirty, something fairly tough and tear-resistant. Leather is Not recommended, as it is fairly heavy and tends to get heavier when it's wet. This should be something loose enough that you can wear it over a sweater or sweatshirt and still move in it when it gets wet.

7. (optional): While a pair of gloves is next to useless, you might find that a pair of old mittens will help keep your fingers warm when you're not climbing anything or crawling through water or wriggling through small holes.

8. A flashlight: This is VITAL.

9. Extra batteries for the flashlight: This is also VITAL.

10. Also in the VITAL category: one OTHER source of light: a cigarette lighter and candles in a ziplock bag, a second flashlight, a glow-stick... Something.

11. (optional) A hat, bandana, or other object for protecting your hair and keeping it out of your way. If you're worried about hitting your head, helmets should be available.

12. (optional but recommended, not vital) Knee and elbow pads.

So there you have it. That was quite a trip, actually, and I might have to tell some stories from it. For that matter, I have some fairly humorous caving stories too. Hm...

Doggies Gone Wild

Last Friday after work, I joined my wife, both boys, and my in-laws at the neighborhood pool. After we finished swimming, we had a nice picnic dinner, including beer. (There are a great many things to admire about my father-in-law.) After we finished eating, we loaded the boys up and headed home.

I’d come directly from work, so we had two separate cars. My wife took Secondborn (who isn’t quite three months old yet), while I took Firstborn (who just turned four). We all live within a single city block, so it was a short drive through a residential neighborhood. As we were making our way back home, I came upon wife’s car. It was stopped at a T-intersection, and parked at a peculiar angle in the street. Creeping up on it, I saw why she had stopped: there were a pair of small dogs running around in the street.

Another car, coming the other way, stopped on the other side of the street. The driver, a woman who might have been a few years older than me, got out. She approached the two dogs, and picked one up. It came easily; it was limping a little, and looked at her as if to say, “Oh, you want to carry me? Great!”

So my wife approached the second dog, and it - perhaps predictably - fled down the sidewalk. An older man - probably not that much older than me, but with white hair combed back in a mullet - got out of the other car, and came over to help.

Well, by that time I had gotten out of my own car. My wife got back into hers and went on her way; she had the baby, and there were three adults (plus, arguably, our four-year-old) to capture the remaining dog. So we moved around, trying to get the dog into a position where one of us could pick him up. The dogs were long-haired dachshunds, small and fuzzy and cute.

The remaining dog was having none of it. He dodged, fled, showed his teeth, and feinted at nipping if anyone got too close. So I collected the first dog, and put him in the back seat with Firstborn. (Firstborn was happy to hold the dog, and the dog was happy to be held.) Then I started the car, and followed them halfway up the block, to where the second dog had now run.

This time, when I got out of the car, I picked up my towel - because, really, you should always know where your towel is. (Also, because I’d seen the second dog snap at the other guy who was trying to pick him up.)

Now, bear in mind that I’m still wearing my swimsuit. I’m not wearing a shirt, and I’m barefoot. But I cut back to where the dog is, and chase along beside him until he’s pretty well sprinting. The problem is, I’m also sprinting, and it’s been a long time since I’ve done this sort of thing. He can keep this up a lot longer than I can.

But, I took my position just behind him and to the left, and I got him going to where he couldn’t change directions easily, and I reached out with the towel, and cast it.

It fell over him, and he skidded to a stop and started whining. I reached down, and scooped up dog and towel together. Then, very cautiously, I pulled the towel back from the dog’s face. That way, he could see, and my hand was on the back of his neck. He kind of glanced around, and then he settled. It was perfect - just exactly as if I knew what I was doing. One quick move with the towel, one captured dog.

So I put him in my back seat (along with Firstborn and the first dog), and drove back to the corner where we’d found them. The second dog had run up to one particular house, but they weren’t answering the doorbell... but their neighbor was just coming out the front door. I accosted him and explained the problem. He wasn’t looking for his dogs; he was just out for an evening constitutional. However, while I was talking to him, the other couple honked behind me. A woman was coming around the corner, and she was looking for some lost dogs.

To make a long story short, she was the puppy-mommy. She reclaimed them, and took them home; and I exchanged thanks and compliments with the other car; and we all went home and lived happily ever after.

The End.

(Don't mind me. I'm just going to stand here for a few more minutes, savoring how perfectly that maneuver worked. 'Cause, y'know, damn.)

Knowing things that you shouldn't

I had a roommate in college. Actually, I had several, but this one was easily the most memorable. Mark* was a bit taller than me, lean-bordering-on-skinny, and basically a nice guy. Unfortunately, he was intensely ADHD: he couldn't sit still to save his life, and he had the attention span of a mosquito on crack. He wore on your nerves after a while, not because he was mean or inconsiderate, but because he was so perpetually wound up that it was impossible to relax around him.


Now, I didn't have much room to criticize him; I was a bit of a mess myself, though for different reasons. I was just getting over the discovery that my first serious relationship was an utter failure, and that in trying to keep it going I had not only made some mistakes, but actually behaved quite badly.** I was isolated, nearly nocturnal, and - if we're going to get technical - clinically depressed. The only real upside was that I finally had my feet under me again, and I was trying to rebuild my goals and self-image. I was majoring in Spanish at the time, mainly because the University had forced me to pick something, but instead of doing the usual study abroad (in Spain) for my senior year, I decided to join the Medieval Studies trip, which would visit more or less everywhere in Europe except Spain.


So when I say that I was less than thrilled to discover that Mark was also coming on the Medieval Studies trip, it's important to understand that I didn't really dislike him. It was more that having him around was hard on my peace of mind, and peace of mind was something of a rare commodity for me. I asked for - and received - a guarantee from the organizers that I wouldn't have to room with him, and that was good enough.


Or, well, it should have been.

There were two Universities involved in the program. The one I was attending was a fairly high-powered academic environment, with a heavy emphasis on the liberal arts, populated mainly by upper class and upper-middle class students, and set on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. The other was fairly similar, but set in a more urban environment: Memphis. The students were about evenly split between the two colleges. The program would begin in the summer, on my home ground atop the mountain, where we would spend a month going over background and history before we left for Europe. This was designed to give us some context for, and understanding of, the things we would be seeing later.


It also gave us time to get to know each other. So, during that first month, we spent our days on academics and background; and we spent our evenings and weekends on beer, camping, and related activities. I was recovering from a case of mononucleosis (among other things), so I didn't participate too much. Mostly, I kept my distance.***

I paid no attention whatsoever to what Mark was doing. In fact, I only noticed that he'd missed a couple of days of class because I happened to overhear someone else asking about it. I was aware that he showed back up, and that his story about why he'd been he'd been absent changed a couple of times: at first, he said he'd been camping and rolled over onto the fire; later, he retracted that and said that a waitress at the local all-night diner had accidentally poured coffee in his lap. Again, I only learned about this because other people had remarked on it; it existed way out on the dim periphery of my awareness.

Until I talked to one of my friends... let's call her Robin. Robin was not part of the program; she was up at the college over the summer as part of her own studies. Robin asked me if I knew what had happened to Mark, and (after some consideration) I realized that, yes, something did seem to be going on with him.

So Robin told me a story. One of Mark's fraternity brothers had run into him just after we'd all arrived, and found Mark hanging out with a couple of girls from another college. A bit later, the same frat brother had found Mark lying on the couch at their frat house, with an ice pack pressed to his... crotch. Mark's explanation was that he had slept with one of the two girls, and that she had later told him that she had genital warts. In a panic, he had gone to the Health Center, and gotten something that was supposed to help.

Now, I don't normally put much stock in thirdhand stories. (Everybody knows the game of whispers - somebody whispers something to the person beside them, who passes it on the next person, etc., and by the time it goes around the circle it's something entirely different.) But in this case, the story had been passed on almost verbatim; the details were so precise that I recognized the two girls. On top of that, the whole thing was so perfectly in character for Mark that I couldn't really doubt it.

I could almost see him showing up at the Health Center in a panic, and hanging around until they (probably out of sheer exasperation) finally gave him a cream for genital warts. I could picture him rushing home, thinking that if he had caught something, it would be better to treat it early. It was no stretch at all to imagine him smearing himself with cream, and hoping that would take care of it. And, of course, he wouldn't have read the label; he wouldn't have listened to (or remembered clearly) any instructions he'd been given. It would never have occurred to him that the cream was designed to remove genital warts, not prevent them; that it was, basically, an acid.

His frat brother had asked how bad it was. The answer involved skin grafts.

My first reaction was a sort of appalled disbelief, with an edge of (slightly hysterical) humor. Seriously? He'd... Seriously? But I could see it. I could see it so perfectly. And it explained not only why he'd been out, but why his story kept changing.

(So how did Robin know this? Her roommate, who was down in Texas, was dating the frat brother. So, to be clear: frat brother had gotten the story from Mark. Robin's roommate had gotten the story from frat brother, and Robin had gotten the story from her roommate... and passed it along to me.)

So there I was, in possession of a very interesting bit of information which I had no desire to share with anyone else. I'm sure Robin thought it was okay to tell me, because I'd been Mark's roommate for the previous year; normal people would consider that some sort of social connection. That didn't apply to anyone else on the trip, so I decided not to mention it - partly because I felt like it wasn't any of my business, but mostly because I just didn't want to get involved.

At the end of the preparatory study, there was short break. (After that, we would get on the plane and fly up to Yorkshire for the next phase of study, and after that we would mostly be traveling.) The break was about four days long. It was enough time for people to go home, and most of them did.

Three of us stayed at the University: me; a tall, likable fellow whom I'll call "Pete"; and The Girl. Yes, that girl: the one Mark had slept with, the one who had told him she had genital warts.

So, being the only three students remaining - and lacking any sort of wheeled transportation - we decided to walk over to the beer/burgers/pizza joint in town. And as we were walking down the hill, Pete - who happened to be walking in the middle - asked whether anybody knew what had actually happened with Mark, because "that whole thing was kind of weird, you know?"

And before I could stop myself, I said: "Yes."

I was acutely aware that, on the other side of Pete, the girl had just stopped breathing. Honestly, if she hadn't been there, I probably wouldn't have said anything; but the setup was just too tempting. The impish part of my sense of humor just couldn't resist. Pete was walking between us and looking at me; I don't think he noticed her reaction.

So we walked down the hill, and I told them an abbreviated version of the story. I left out identifying details, and I warned them that I hadn't gotten it firsthand. Pete listened attentively, but that was nothing like the level of attention I was getting from the girl beside him. She was... taut. Somewhere in there, I met her eyes, and I could see her sort of relax as she realized that, yes, I knew it was her; and no, I wasn't going to say anything if she wasn't.

And we finished our walk and had a very nice dinner, talking about other things entirely.

The next day she came to my room and gave me her side of the story. This struck me as both odd and funny, since I felt that if I'd made anything clear in the previous night's story, it was that I really didn't care. She said, basically, that after sleeping with Mark she realized that she'd made a mistake; and that she wasn't sure how to get rid of him (Mark was neither subtle nor quiet). In mild desperation, she'd looked up a list of STDs, chosen the one that seemed the most harmless, and told him that she had that. She assured me that she didn't actually have anything (which was ironic****, if true), and I assured her that I believed her.

And that was more or less it. With one exception, I don't know what became of any of these people, and there's no larger point to this story. It's just something that sticks in my mind, an especially strange part of an already-strange time in my life.

Well, okay... I know a little more about events during the trip, and for the sake of completion I'll add what I know. Later in the trip, while we were staying in Oxford, Mark met and slept with a French girl, thereby establishing that he hadn't done himself any permanent harm. A little while after that, Pete and The Girl became a couple, and seemed pretty happy about it. Whether they stayed together after the trip was over, I couldn't tell you; I transferred to another University for the following semester... but that's another story.

* Names have been changed to protect the guilty.


** Badly enough that if I ever run into that particular girl again, I need to offer profuse apologies from a comfortably safe distance.

*** This was actually a deliberate strategy. I was trying to see if I could live without people, and I was considering the possibility of transferring to another college. I wanted to see if I could go through life without dealing with people. So I made a rule for myself: I would only speak under two conditions. The first was if someone addressed me directly; the second was if I felt I had something reasonably important to contribute. Greetings, casual exchanges, gossip, trivia, and anecdotes were right out. My eventual conclusion was that while I could live without interacting any more than necessary, it wasn't pleasant enough to be worthwhile.

**** In the colloquial use of the word.

Back when I was cool...

In the overall course of my life, I have very seldom been "cool". As a youth, my interests were geeky, and my fashion sense was... idiosyncratic. I was reasonably athletic, but I had a deep aversion to team sports. I read books - all the time - and I was generally very quiet.

So I wasn't really a target for teasing - not much, anyway - and I did have friends. But to a lot of people, I was sort of invisible. (In eight grade, I had a girl look at me and say, "I remember you. You're the one who was always sitting in the back of the class, reading those huge books." My reaction was something like, Yes, we've had classes together for years, and you're just now figuring out who I am? She was right about the books, though - one of the teachers had given me his old D'n'D manuals, and those things were huge.)

Occasionally, though, I did get a chance to be cool. When I did, I savored it. And every once in a while, I like to dust off those memories and take a look at them.

This one actually took place in graduate school. I was getting ready to graduate, and I'd dropped by the Registrar's office for... I don't remember. Something I needed.

Now, the Registrar himself was an older man, tall and a little gangly. He was quite friendly, and extremely willing to help. His secretary, by contrast, was the dragon guarding the castle gate: unfriendly, unhelpful, and always trying to send people elsewhere. At the time, I thought her presence was the result of some sort of law of Conservation of Bureaucracy: a counterbalance for his essential helpfulness. Looking back, I think she was probably just trying to make sure that he could get some of his own work done.

So I approached her desk with some trepidation, and was relieved to find it empty. Not entirely relieved, because it was really empty - there was nobody there at all. Now, the Registrar's office was set up with the secretary's desk out front, separated from the public by a middlin' tall counter. If you were standing at the counter, the desk was in front of you, and the door to the Registrar's office was behind the counter, on your right.

So, I kind of leaned over the counter and looked back into the main office. The Registrar wasn't there either, but there was a trio of undergrads, holding papers and deep in conversation. I was so relieved at not having to deal with the Dragon that I decided not to interrupt them - at least, not immediately.

While I'm standing there waiting, there comes a very loud POP! A wall of thick, grey smoke starts curling up from behind the screen of the monitor on the secretary's desk. This, clearly, calls for immediate action, so I lean around the counter again, and call in through the doorway: "Pardon me, but your computer's on fire."

A nicely dressed young man comes out of the office and takes his place behind the counter. He has clearly failed to notice the smoke. He asks: "What can I do for you?"

Well, what could I say? I smiled, met his eyes, and said: "No, really. I wasn't kidding. Your computer's on fire." And I gesture at the desk behind him.

He turns around and sort of freaks out: startles visibly, and then rushes over to the desk and starts scrambling around on his knees, looking for the power cord under the desk.

I decide that this is getting out of hand. I'm not sure just how much of a fire hazard the thing really is, but it can't be doing any good to leave it sitting there smoking. So I come around the counter, grab the power cable at the back of the monitor, and pull it out. The smoke stops, and the kid stands back up, looking relieved.

I stepped back around the counter, and he got me whatever it was I needed. While he was doing that, the other two came out and stood around the monitor, probably trying to figure out what to do with it. I took my whatever, and rode off into the sunset.

And that, my children, is one of the very few times when I was actually cool.