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Activities Page] Cave surveying --- slow, tedious, seemingly never-ending. If you are conscientious and determined to do your self-appointed task correctly, to map the entire cave, that is, you are forced into passages that an ordinary explorer would choose to avoid. You go into the backbreakers you know won't go anywhere, trapped between the hillside and mass of known cave.
In a wet cave, you may lie for hours in the water and slop, teeth chattering, moving so slowly your blood circulation can't keep you warm. Hands dripping slime every time you try to write in your survey book, the work of hours under constant threat of obliteration from a single false move.
Few really big cave surveys are truly ever finished, fewer still ever have a published map other than in a rudimentary form. In the cave, the passages get worse and worse, the mapping further and further from the entrance --- hours of travel to reach an unmapped lead that ends around the first bend just after the chert nodules slashed your hand and ripped your pants from groin to kneecap. The surveying help that was so eager to join you for a stroll down the tourist passages of a famous cave disappear after the first real trip into side passages, drifting to easier picking, the sexy new discovery in some other new cave.
So in the end you are left with yourself and the hard-core few that you manipulate, threaten, or sweet talk into one more trip. Or the bright-eyed innocent who doesn't know better -- who if you are unlucky will revolt after the first hour of red clay belly crawl has left his face smeared and his cave clothes permanently dyed an unwashable reddish brown...
When you are at last done, possibly days or weeks later, there are five minutes of pleased satisfaction when you look at the final product and smile.
Why would anyone subject himself to the drudgery of the cave surveyor? Stubbornness and stupidity, pride and ego are only part of the answer. It begins in fact with the intrinsic mystery of the cave, the explorer's wish to find limitless virgin avenues, and once having found them, decipher the meaning of their apparently random meanderings.
Lacking an intuitive sixth sense, you know that to make the cave bigger, you must understand how the explored passages lie with respect to each other and to the surface. So you map as you explore.
The mapping explorer's satisfaction, then, is in the unfolding of a mystery, suspense in slow motion, as in the manner of a sloth you creep down the passages with your survey tape, watching the cave unfold around you as the bursting of spring's new flower. Week by week the cave marches across your graph paper, answering one old question, but replacing it by two new ones, suckering you on and on, the fundamental enigma evidently to be resolved only by pushing beyond the last metaphorical bend...
-- Smyre as published by Matthews, Cumberland Caverns (1st edition), 193-196.
[Republished in 2nd edition (2005) ISBN 0-9615093-4-1, 111-114.]
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