Cave Diving

Bonne Terre, Missouri
August 2, 2001


I step off the wooden platform and splash into the clear water below, like a layer of smooth glass. The frigid water penetrates my booties, gloves and hood, jarring me awake. My buoyancy vest holds me on the surface, ripples bouncing off the cave walls send light reflections to and fro like a frenetic disco ball.

I wiggle my body, encased in a 5mm wetsuit, two layers in fact bind my torso and discomfit my crotch. I kick my legs a bit to try and loosen the suit in all the right places. Wince.

To distract myself, I glance down below me and see twenty feet down the odds and ends of this once active lead mine: pick, ore cart, timers shack, railroad tracks; all submerged here 150 feet below the surface.

My past dives took place mainly in warm ocean water and I hardly wore a wetsuit, let alone two 5mm layers, a hood and gloves. Now I know what an astronaut feels like, layers of protective clothing and critical life support equipment. A constrained view of the world through a mask, this requires me to constantly turn to and fro to see around me as peripheral vision is impossible.

The other five divers and two guides form up and we submerge to 50 feet under the frigid water. Swimming slowly down a vertical shaft we round pillars of rock, five feet in diameter which run from the unseen bottom past us to the surface of the water, which looks like a layer of plate glass above us.

Lights suspended in the cave above cast surrealistic shadows on the wall, yet the light leaves everything in shades of gray, a colorless world of only light, dark and nuances in between

We swim through a 3-D system of tunnels, sideways, up & down, and diagonal, I get disoriented and find myself breathing heavy, which I never do. The air hoses tangle in my vest, I pull at hoses to find my air guage, my breaths come in shallow gasps. I check my air, fine; but suddenly I look up at the guides who signal me to move up with a flashlight. My bouyancy turned negative during my thrashing and I sank deeper into a verticle shaft. Adding air to my vest, I rejoin the group.

The dive seems like an endless struggle of bouyancy control, breath control, trying to unbind the wetsuit in my groin; and in-between all this, taking in the ghostly world of the Bonne Terre Mine.

The Mine is located in Bonne Terre, Missouri; the name meaning good Earth. After the lead mine closed in the early 1900's an enterprising husband and wife team bought the mine and turned it into a deep earth dive site in the early 1980s. National Geographic Adventure magazine rates the mine in the top ten of US adventure travel destinations.

My second dive goes smoother as I adjust my lead ballast weight during the break. The cold remains difficult to adapt to; but at least the wetsuit binds no more.