[Times photos: Daniel Wallace] A relative newcomer to caving, Tracey Matzke, a 33-year-old house cleaner from Largo, explores a small opening in White Cliff Cave near Ocala on Jan. 31. “You have to get dirty to find the excitement,” she says.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 17, 2002

For fun, cave explorers crawl, creep and shimmy through dark tunnels and tiny crevices under the earth. Stay calm. Think thin.

OCALA -- Notes from the underground:

Turning on my headlamp, I drop through a narrow opening and creep head first into the bowels of the earth. Swallowing claustrophobia, I slither deeper while watching for the rattlesnakes that frequent cave entrances. Nothing fanged and cold-blooded shows up in the beam of my lamp. Okay, take a deep breath and try to relax.

Is Osama bin Laden claustrophobic, too?

I will think about him later. For now, just keep going.

The earth opens enough for me to stand. Not for long. Chasm ahead. I wedge my backside against one wall and prop my feet against the opposite wall. By sliding a little at a time you progress. Don't look down. It's a drop of a dozen feet or more onto sharp rocks.

"This cave isn't so bad," Tom Turner calls from somewhere ahead or somewhere behind. In a cave, voices echo.

A Pinellas County landscaper, fit and tough at 42, he is known as "the Cave Hound." As a Boy Scout he joined an expedition to the Withlacoochee State Forest to explore a cave. After that he explored libraries for books about caving. When he was older, he began studying Florida topographic maps. They didn't pinpoint the location of the caves, but they gave him a place to look. He became a ridge walker.

A ridge walker hikes in hilly areas likely to harbor a cave. On certain days, when air temperature and atmospheric conditions are perfect, steamy air might rise from one. A lucky ridge walker might have himself an expedition.

"Never go alone into a cave," warns Turner, who caved alone when he didn't know better. He was lucky. He never broke a bone or got seriously lost.

Today he is accompanied by members of the Florida Speleological Society, out of Gainesville, and the Tampa Bay Area Grotto, a west Florida club to which he belongs. Four men and a woman, they're strong, flexible and generally slender.

Slender is important. Imagine crawling under one of those muddy four-wheel-drive Dodge pickups. You might scrape your back on the chassis, but you'd pass easily beneath. Next, imagine creeping under a Plymouth Voyager van. You'd succeed, but find it more difficult. Now think about trying to squeeze under a Toyota Corolla.

"Cavers have a party game," says Tom Farnell, who is just as athletic, at 42, as his friend. "Stick both arms straight in the air. Now get somebody to pass a wire coat hanger over your arms and down your body all the way to the floor."

If you're as wiry as Farnell, you might win the party game. Same goes for Tracey Matzke, a 33-year-old house cleaner from Pinellas who only recently discovered caving.

"You have to get dirty to find the excitement," she says.

A moment later she contorts her body into a rolled-up pancake and squeezes through a hole like one of those snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Sunlight greets Bill Walker, 30, from Ocala as he emerges from the entrance to White Cliff Cave. The steel door is locked over the entrance to protect the cave from inexperienced explorers.

Weird animals

"Let's turn out our lights," says Turner, the cave hound. "We'll try an experiment."

We all hit the switches on our helmets.

It's not dark like in a bedroom closet. It's the dark you'd find inside a vacuum cleaner. I try my own experiment. In the blackness I press the illumination button on my wristwatch. The dim glow casts a shadow.

"Can you imagine getting stuck in here without a light?" asks Turner. "It would be pretty bad at first. But at least this cave only has about 1,500 feet of passages. You'd crawl your way out eventually."

Maybe he would. But most of us wouldn't. Few people even know Florida caves exist. Oh, they know about those underwater caves, the ones where divers drown. But the dry caves don't get much press. They're not in the league with those famous Kentucky and New Mexico caves, but few places on Earth are, including Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and his cronies might be holing up.

Dan Straley, 28, from Tampa and Tom Farnell, 42, from Largo help light up Effigy Hall, the main room in White Cliff Cave near Ocala. Over millions of years, water has eroded Florida’s soft limestone bedrock to form a maze of caves.

Florida's caves, created by millions of years of rain leaking through soil and limestone, can be spectacular enough. Some stretch for miles. Others boast a variety of formations and lakes full of albino crayfish, catfish and other weird animals that evolved without needing eyes. Some caverns in Florida are big enough for a school bus or a basketball court. Some are so tall Michael Jordan might not be able to throw the ball all the way to the ceiling.

Of course, you couldn't drive the bus or carry a backboard into such caves. To reach the wide and high places usually requires crawling and creeping hundreds of feet, often past spiders, scorpions and bats. The bats, vanishing species all, are harmless. Florida cavers, as a rule, avoid caves inhabited by large bat colonies. Nobody wants to disturb such fragile animals, and nobody wants to breathe dried bat guano, which can damage the lungs.

That's only one hazard. More worrisome is the possibility of getting lost or falling. It's more dangerous driving your car to a cave than exploring one, but cavers have been killed once inside.

Caving clubs usually install padlocked steel doors at the openings of the best-known caves to protect beginners -- and the foolish -- from injury.

"And you want to know something?" says Dan Straley, the editor of the Tampa Bay Grotto's monthly magazine. "People who shouldn't be in caves still manage to get into caves."

Nose in the mud

Time to move.

"Now we're going to have to crawl for a while," says a disembodied voice that belongs to Bill Birdsall, another cave hound of legend. He's ahead, in the dark, with Tracey Matzke, the human pancake. As a new caver, she is the most enthusiastic about trying to insert her body into tiny crevices.

If you're not a human mole, if your years on earth exceed a half-century, you probably will suffer. At first I walk on my knees, covered thankfully by pads. When the passage narrows, I crawl, bump my head and thank the gods for a borrowed helmet. I try to look ahead for Birdsall's light but give up. Not enough room to raise my eyes. I creep forward, nose in the mud.

"Almost there!" shouts Birdsall. The passage has opened enough for us to sit, rest and talk.

Birdsall says he visited his first cave as a teenager. He says he has been a hard-core caver 15 years. He's 47, an old man in a young person's sport, but he is wiry and enthusiastic and knows this particular cave better than anyone. It practically lies in his Ocala backyard. He even carries the key for the steel gate.

Known as “the Cave Hound,” Tom Turner, 42, from Largo, makes his way through a passage in White Cliff Cave. “Never go alone into a cave,” Turner warns, though he did that himself when he was younger and didn’t know better.

Not that gating the entrance always matters. Recently, cave club members arrived to find their gate open. Somebody had broken the lock and removed the door. Vandals. They decorated the entrance with graffiti.

Pure Pimp, somebody wrote with spray paint.

"We find all kinds of stuff in our caves," Birdsall says. Beer bottles. Cola cans. Condoms. "We even found a mattress. Don't know how somebody dragged a mattress through these passages. Strange place for romance."

Birdsall loves caves for a different reason. "They're the last frontier," he says.

His friend, Bill Walker, shines his light into my eyes.

"Everything has been picked over and been seen on the top of the earth," he grouses. Like Birdsall, Walker is a hard-core guy. He's 30, the editor of the Florida Speleological Society Web site, and happens to be recovering from neck surgery -- unrelated to caving. Still, his bones remain a little tender.

"I should have worn my neck brace," he says. "But that would have made it tough to maneuver."

Walker and Birdsall often explore together. They have in common their ambition to find caves nobody has ever visited.

"It's like leaving your footprints on the moon when you find one," Birdsall says.

Visiting an unexplored cave is especially dangerous for the careless, however. Birdsall, like Turner now, always goes with other people. And he's an expert with map and compass. Every time a passage turns, he stops, takes a compass bearing, and writes down the numbers. Later, he prepares a map. At other times, he sticks glow-in-the-dark markers on the cave walls. They reflect light on the way out. Nothing is more important than light. He has three different lights, independently powered.

He carries no ropes into this cave, but sometimes rope is needed to rappel into a shaft hundreds of feet deep.

Not long ago, a couple of teenagers discovered a cave near here. They carried a flashlight and a rope. They managed to get down the shaft, but when it was time to go home gravity was against them. Cave club members had to perform the rescue.

Recently a teenager told his mother he was going to investigate the same cave. He didn't return home. Even the experts failed to find him. That's because he had changed his mind and gone to the mall instead.

The possibility of a tragedy, and the fruitless search and rescue effort, so frustrated the local sheriff that he had the cave entrance bulldozed shut. Cave clubs are negotiating to have it reopened. They plan to install a padlocked steel gate.

"It's a constant battle," says Dan Straley, a 28-year-old airline computer technician who teaches caving to Scouts and USF geology students. "We need to have access to the caves, but at the same time we need to protect the caves from people who might hurt themselves or damage the caves. So we operate in a shroud of secrecy. We don't want people to know where caves are."

"Caves can be spectacular," Turner says. "I can hardly blame people for wanting to investigate. But it's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing."

He reaches up and touches the ceiling. It's damp but clean.

"People don't understand why they should care about caves," Turner says. "You care about them because they're one level above the aquifer. If there's pollution in this cave -- say there was a dairy right above us -- most likely your water is polluted too."

Time to move. An extremely narrow passage lies ahead.

"I'm not looking forward to this one," says Straley, muscular and flexible -- but 190 pounds. "I'm very big for a caver."

Last time here, he got stuck. He turned off his light to calm himself, breathed deeply and managed to back out. He removed clothing and tried the passage again.

This time he made it. Yes, he put his clothes back on.

Bombs away

Bill Birdsall always carries a cigarette lighter.

From time to time, he ignites it and studies the flame. He hates to see an elongated flame. It tells him the cave's oxygen is low. He likes a modest flame.

Our destination is a claustrophobic cell in which Birdsall once found a fossilized crab. Forty million years ago, Florida was still under water.

"Crawl up that pipe," he advises. "Then turn, twist and see if you can get your head in that little passage. Put your right arm in first, then follow with your head. Keep the other arm at your side. Use your toes to push ahead."

Birdsall never knows what he will find. Usually it's fossils. He has never found contemporary bones.

Humans, of course, have hidden in caves for eons. Turner, the cave hound, has found shavings from rocks -- evidence that prehistoric people were mining the caves to make arrowheads.

A few years ago, he discovered an old gun and donated it to the Florida Museum of History in Tallahassee. The carbine once belonged to a federal soldier during the Second Seminole Indian War. Seminoles often hid in caves.

Of course, 19th century warfare was different from 21st century warfare. Federal troops in 1835 lacked the AGM-130 bombs that the modern U.S. Air Force has been firing into the mouths of caves in Afghanistan.

"If I were Osama bin Laden," Turner says, "the last place on earth I'd want to hide would be a cave. All they'd have to do is drop a big bomb on the entrance. And you're sealed in your own tomb."

The explorers -- Tracey Matzke, Tom Farnell and Tom Turner -- dust off after their trip through White Cliff Cave near Ocala. The group picks up trash inside and outside the caves they visit.

Pancake Squeeze

Bill Birdsall buries people for a living. An Ocala funeral director, he sometimes works nights, sometimes days. It hardly matters when you explore a cave. It's always dark.

"You up for one more round?"

He says it's going to be a little tight in there, tight like a coffin, but then it will open up and pretty soon the entrance of the cave -- and blessed light -- will loom ahead as a reward.

He shimmies away. Turns out his light. Just to see if he can do it in the dark.

Of course he can. Like Turner, he's part mole and part bat. He likes to forge ahead of other cavers and wedge himself in a tight crevice near the ceiling. When other cavers catch up, he surprises them.

Experienced cavers don't scare easily. I do. I'm already nervous enough, having heard the names of famous Florida caves and famous Florida cave passages. Dead Man's. Pancake Squeeze. Mole Sewer. Knotted Hose. The Cemetery.

And my favorite, named by a guy who liked to walk his dog in the woods.

His dog trotted ahead and tumbled into a sinkhole. At the very bottom of the sinkhole, waiting like a kitchen drain, was the cave shaft. The dog vanished into the shaft and fell 60 feet to its death. In Drop Dead Cave.

Tom Turner is somewhere behind. Tracey Matzke and Bill Birdsall are somewhere ahead. Birdsall directs Matzke to an especially challenging passage. Matzke's voice is muffled but enthused.

It helps to be an athlete, but not the kind I am. Above the ground, I swim, bike, run and consider myself fit. Under the ground, aerobic fitness should be important. But more important, apparently, is the ability to control your fear.

Crawl. Creep. On your belly, like a snake. My chin scrapes mud and my helmet rakes the cave ceiling. I hear nothing but my own ragged, frightened breath. My heart pounds like in the last mile of a triathlon.

Ah, the passage opens. Birdsall is sitting and waiting. If I could speak, I'd thank him for not leaping from the ceiling like the monster in those Alien movies.

"Catch your breath," he says. "Boy, are you sweating. But we're here. You've made it."

The entrance lies ahead. But of course, the entrance is on the other side of the chasm. Once again I wedge myself between the walls and try to inch my way forward. Gravity won't help this time. I have to muscle my way up.

I see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I'm having trouble getting there.

So close, but so far. My legs have turned to spaghetti. My arms feel like they weigh a ton. Did I pull a muscle in my abs?

Slip. I almost fall. That was close.

It feels good to swear like a sailor.

"Hang on," calls Birdsall. "Take your time and you'll do fine." He grabs my shoulder and tells me where to place hands and feet. I breathe deeply and relax. And Turner is behind me, just in case.

"Don't worry," Birdsall says, in a calm funeral director's voice. "We haven't lost anybody yet."

Minutes later I stand in the cave opening. My head sticks out of the ground like a cabbage. I gulp wonderfully fresh air and glory in the sunlight.

I am filthy from head to toe. I know my jeans will never be the same.

A little dirt never hurt anybody. In a strange way, I feel reborn.

I feel utterly alive.

For more information, check out the Florida Speleological Society Web site: www.afn.org/~fss/index_ie.htm.

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