Climbing Caves 2

This is another excerpt from my journey with the tapes.  I taped one dozen tapes. Sadly one, tape number 10, was stolen so I only had eleven to transcribe.  This excerpt is from the eleventh tape.  Today, February 8^th is father’s birthday. He would have been 94this year. He has been gone in body, but always with me in spirit for eleven years. I spent the morning reading the last transcriptions I made. Most people know my father as a non-fiction writer, political activist, and or educator.  But my father was also an adventurer. This is one California adventure.

dm: What led you to even do spelunking. You come from New York, you lived in Chicago, then San Francisco, still pretty urban. Then you say I think I’ll take my son with this other guy and we’ll climb around some caves.

Reggie Major: Well, it was kind of funny.

I was trying still it make it as a writer and I met this guy who was a tech writer who lived down the Peninsula. And we talked back and forth about tech writing and whether I would be interested and so forth and so on and he happened to mention that he was a spelunker. It was a term I had never heard. Huh? Then he told me it was cave exploring and I said, “Listen the next time you go spelunking. let me know.” And so one day he told me what was going on and I said well you know I’ve got a couple of teenagers who’d like to be there and he said that would be fine.

The first cave we went to was Murphy’s Cavern. And at that point all that Murphy’s was a manhole sort of at the top. You got in this manhole, and you moved a couple of things and you were in this immense cave. I was fascinated. I had come with two cameras, and you know Nat (one of my dad’s best friends) always had these jumpsuits and somehow he had a suit that would fit me. So, I wore two or three jumpsuits, because of all the water.

dm: I imagine it was cold because no sun shines down there.

RM: Yeah, it’s cold but not freezing. And so we went to a couple of commercial caves. And then we went to one which was the most fun. I can’t remember which one, but I know it was near a town that I like. In there everybody had mining caps and they were lit with acetylene, and you had to spin a little wheel like lighting up a cigarette lighter in order to light up this thing.  

dm: Did it stay awhile, or did you have to keep doing it?

It stayed until it got jolted. If it got jolted, it went out. And that’s where we started. I was at the top of this slide, and I could see it and I could see the guys in front of me and I decided to take a picture of these guys going down. And as I did it I went to sit down, and bump I went down and out went the light and they were on their way. And my ass is sliding, and I couldn’t see anything. It was something else.

David (my brother) and Danny (my brother’s best friend) were having a ball. They had a good time, they climbed and slipped, and they found one crevice, it was skinny, I doubt it was three foot high. It had to be closer to two and there were two parallel blocks of basically granite. And the thing about the caves they all ooze stuff and you can’t help but get dirty. We spent the entire day going from cave to cave.

dm: I remember one time you did it at night because mom and I were outside with some people around a camp fire. And you said I was too weak, I couldn’t go.

RM: No, you couldn’t go. We spent a lot of time in the dark too. I didn’t think you were scared of the dark, I just didn’t think you were physically fit enough. At that point you were maybe ten or twelve.  (Probably twelve since Danny was from Belvedere Street and we didn’t move there until I was 11.)

I had never, rappelled. when you rappel, you’re using a rope to pull you up or let you down, and that’s tricky enough by itself but we were rappelling in total darkness.(laughter)  Now part of it was the darkness, which I still remember. I did an awful lot of  darkroom work  and I’m really, very comfortable in inky black, you know if I walk this way, I can count myself back. They taught me how to rappel and we weren’t supposed to be in inky black. I was with I don’t know a half a dozen guys and so they put the inexperienced people in the middle, after a while they just let David go. (laughter)

But that’s what spelunking was about. It was a lasting experience. I saw a bunch of different caves and I learned to rappel they talk about physical courage but there is also foolhardiness. And I think I was more foolhardy than courageous.