The Post-Caver Era

Stephens Gap Some people dabble in caving, and some people become cavers. Caving literally becomes their identity. If you're lucky, you can even get other people to promote that image. Sandra Packard, my old boss at the University, used to introduce me by saying, "This is my assistant, Rodger. He rescues people from caves." I'll admit that I liked having that kind of unusual, memorable sentence summing up who I was.
It's been a long time since I called myself a caver, and for a long time that created a severe identity crisis. I had defined myself as a caver for so long that when I stopped caving every weekend I literally didn't quite know who I was anymore. I have an old copy of Marion Smith's book about the birth of TAG up in the attic somewhere, and while I was too young to be part of that era (even if I can say that I have been to the TAG House and have even seen a good portion of Engle Double), I still think his book captured the spirit of belonging to a community of cavers. Then, as now, you could drive to a place out in the middle of nowhere every weekend and find a half-dozen crazy people who shared your passion.
It's been ten years or more since I've done a sportingly wet multi-drop, but every time I drive the W Road up Signal Mountain on a foggy night and see the wet rock in the beams of my headlights I can't help but remember Guys Cave. Sometimes I still lie awake at night and give myself shivers thinking about the ledges around the top of Surprise Pit, about inching forward on a belly crawl of a ledge with your arm hanging over 400 feet of blackness. I can still close my eyes and see the water rushing over the flowstone and down the Bolt Drop in Fern, just as it has done thousands of years, just as it is doing even at this moment.
Clearly I'm being self-indulgent in publishing these relatively insignificant stories now, but every once in a while someone will write to tell me they've enjoyed reading these things, and apparently that's encouragement enough.