Remember when I mentioned there was a good adventury book about cave divers coming out in June? Well, June’s here and so is Blind Descent by James Tabor. If you read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, this is very similar, just…opposite. The two teams of climbers in Into Thin Air headed up the same mountain, to a known goal, an established elevation, along prepared paths. The two teams of cave divers in Blind Descent search for their own caves on opposite of the globes, looking for new routes to greater and greater depths, with no way of knowing if the dead end would come within 10 feet or 1000 feet.
Another contrast I found interesting is that the struggle for the Everest climbers seemed to be mostly physical — the body simply isn’t designed to operate well at that altitude, with so little oxygen, and the combination of the physical strain and the mountain storms brought even the fittest athletes to the edge of survival. But the cave divers face something else — not simply the physical effort of climbing down thousands of feet, but the psychological weight of stepping off into thousand foot drops, with nothing but a rope and harness holding one in place. The divers would dig paths through channels so narrow one arm had to be extended straight forward to dig out the dirt, the other arm wedged tight against the body, or swim through underground lakes with a solid rock ceiling extending to the water’s surface, pulling 100+ pounds of equipment with them, the disturbed silt making visibility no further than arm’s reach.
I don’t want to reveal anything about the personalities and efforts of the two teams — that’s the great pleasure of the book, really, finding out what kind of driven-to-the-point-of-obsession person it takes to push oneself and others into these unknown caverns, as well as the sadness of the book, as the physical strain and psychological battle tears down those divers who were not up to the task. I’ll simply say this: Tabor does an excellent job laying the groundwork, filling out his cast of characters and then setting up the race to the center of the earth. Sometimes the names of the caves and locations got a bit jumbled in my head, but that may be the fault of this reader rather than the writer, and in the end, it’s not really necessary to be able to locate each cave on a map — I always understood enough to keep pace with the progress of each team.
Krakauer remains the standard-bearer for this genre (and imitators are plenty), but James Tabor does a commendable job here. This was a book that I read obsessively for 3 days, reading sections aloud to my wife, and then immediately passed to her to read when I was finished. Well worth the time.
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