Field Trip

Susquehanna River Valley, Spring, 2006

Two cavers descended a crevasse so deep they couldn’t hear winches squeaking in a cavern above. Harnessed to safety ropes, they lurched down the fissure. Wearing oxygen tanks and miners’ helmets, they resembled giant insects caught in a narrow spider web. Four others worked in the cavern near the surface, cramped inside a ten-foot-wide bubble of air. Headlamps cast misshapen shadows, making the coppery walls look like Hades. Two men operated the winches, lowering boxes on pulleys rigged to pitons.

The four men—two descending, two in the cave bubble—were students in their early twenties, as was a woman who scribbled notes in the light of a flexible flashlight clipped to the fur collar of her overcoat. She stamped from foot to foot, her breath vaporizing in the damp air. An egg-shaped man, three times the age of the others, spoke into a headset microphone while the woman at his side recorded every word.

There was enough humidity to cause a rain shower inside the cave. The scent of stagnant wetness offended the woman. So did the constant drip…drip…drip from a dozen stalactites; the drops from one plunked on her helmet every five seconds. Each time she side-stepped, the insufferable man nudged her back under the drip. Plunk…plunk.

“Increase oxygen by point two,” the egg man said. His gravelly German accent belonged in a World War II movie. “Ann, tell me when the boys are a hundred meters below baseline.” He rolled his R’s and leaned on the B’s.

“Ten meters to go, Doctor Bergmeier.” Her voice was girlish. “Ninety...ninety-five…there. One hundred.”

“Stop,” Dr. Bergmeier barked. “Now, boys, set the charges precisely the way we practiced. Is the structure as I predicted?” His emphasis on words beginning with P was even greater than those starting with B.

“Yes, Doctor,” came a voice transmitted to the old man’s earpiece. “The inversion is right on.”

“Good, good. Go to work. And be careful.”

For the woman, the wait was tedious; she fidgeted with her flexible light and tried to move out from under the plunks. But the man pushed her back. “I need you by my side, Ann. How is the oxygen?”

“Fine,” she muttered for the tenth time, fighting off a shiver.

Plunk… plunk…

An hour later, the cavers ascended, a process that took 45 minutes. By the time the two exhausted young men arrived in the round cavern and slurped water, they had completed eight hours of underground work. It was 9:00 p.m.; the team hadn’t seen daylight since six in the morning. Ann felt the cold in her teeth, dampness in her bones. Finally, time to get out of hell.

Two of the men had to help the old man up steep sections of the tunnel to the cave entrance. The other two helped Ann, although she didn’t need it. Upon exiting the cave, she was relieved to breathe clean air. No more mineral stench. No more plunks. She ripped off her helmet and shook out brown hair. Her sinuses opened; she smelled pine. Thawing would take longer.

After a ten minute drive with the heat on full-blast, Ann stopped her SUV, rolled down the windows, then shut off the engine. Dr. Bergmeier took a remote control device from his coat pocket and flipped a safety switch. “Ready?” he said. All six held their breaths. The old man pressed the button.

Ann felt a faint rumble, the hungry growl of a subterranean beast.

“Did you feel it, Ann?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“And you, boys?”

“Yeah,” said the tallest. “I heard something, too. But how the fuck is that possible?”

“Watch your mouth, Jason.” Bergmeier sucked in a breath through his nose, as if smelling fine cognac. “I told you the explosives would generate a tiny earthquake. Drive on, Ann. We have more work to do.”

Fifteen minutes later, the SUV approached the entrance of a different cavern, only fifty meters from the explosion, but five miles by road. The lankier of the climbers said, “You know, doctor, there’s no chance of finding kimberlite clay here.”

“Did you pack both charges precisely as specified?”

“Sure.”

“Then you’ll find kimberlite clay here at a depth of one hundred twenty-five meters.”

Using the ropes and pins that had been set the morning before, the two climbers descended. It was easy compared to laying out the route, although several pitons had been dislodged. The other two men removed a hand truck from the back of the SUV on which to stack boxes of crumbled clay that the old man expected the team would find. There were five hours of darkness remaining.

The cavers reached cached boxes at 100 meters below the surface. At 124 meters, they hit a pocket of chalky clay, exactly where Dr. Bergmeier had predicted. The men filled four boxes with rocks and dirt, fastened the lids, then lugged them to the pulley-station from which the two men at the surface hoisted the cargo.

During the drive to campus, the swelling tones of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde filled the car while the boys yawned and Ann tapped her nails on the steering wheel.

“Do you mind?” Bergmeier said.

She minded his nitpicking but stopped tapping and kept her mouth shut.

Ann parked her SUV behind Dr. Bergmeier’s house. There, using headlamps for light, the students ran their hands through the boxed rubble on the tailgate.

“I still can’t believe a few shaped charges could loosen the cap.”

“Keep your voice down, Jason.”

“Hey, Doc, did you plant that kimberlite after we went to sleep last night?”

“You idiot,” the old man snapped, taking the joke seriously. “Look at me. I couldn’t climb down ten meters, much less one hundred and twenty-five. And you undoubtedly saw a mountain of clay. Now get those boxes inside. Downstairs.”

In his unfinished basement, next to a clicking hot water heater, Bergmeier ordered two students to load the rubble from the boxes into the hopper of a mineral sorter he had invented. The machine, the size of a pool table, sounded like a washing machine doing a load of rocks. After twenty minutes, Bergmeier ordered, “Check the two slots.”

“Hey, look at this,” Jason crowed. “There’s ten times the target concentration of red garnet G-ten.”

Ann squealed, “And the chrome diopside reading is off the chart.”

“Holy shit, Doc, do you know what this means?”

The odd, round man ripped Ann’s statistics page from her notebook and jammed the paper in his pocket. “Yes, I know exactly what it means. And watch your mouth, Jason.”