(Really) Risky Business

Why Risk It? Tales From the Downside

Beneath the white clapboard churches and pink ranch houses of north-central Florida lies an awesome world of underwater caves and caverns. This complex waterscape was formed over millions of years, as rain percolated down through the region's porous limestone and chewed through the soft karst, braiding a riverine Web of underground passageways. Today, this immense latticework of tunnels, dubbed the Floridan Aquifer, contains as much water as all of the Great Lakes combined.

For the past two decades, a small band of master divers, centered on the area around the rural town of High Springs, have limned many of the Aquifer's speleological riddles. Hole by hole, tunnel by tunnel, they have pushed through its culvert-sized passageways and broken into its diamond-clear underwater rivers. Wes Skiles is among the most experienced of this skilled tribe of cave divers. A barrel-chested man with a high-domed forehead and an accent as thick as a Florida heat wave, Skiles probed his first cavern when he was just 15 years old. Seven years later, he helped design many of the safety procedures that now regulate the National Speleological Society's cave-diving certification program.

Today, Skiles and veteran cave diver Peter Butt, 45, own and operate Karst Environmental Services Inc. -- an organization that contracts with government agencies, conservation groups, and private companies to map the Aquifer's countless tunnels. Skiles also runs a photography and television-production company, Karst Productions Inc., which has produced science-adventure specials on underwater caves for PBS, CBS, and the Discovery Channel. Whether as a film-maker or as an explorer, Skiles has helped shotgun some of the most ambitious cave-diving expeditions on the planet.

We meet up with Skiles in his office outside High Springs on a late-spring day, as great tropical thunderheads boom outside. As Skiles launches into an animated talk about risk as it applies to cave diving, his face breaks into a Jack Nicholson-like grin, without the leer. His mood doesn't darken one bit as he takes on the critical element in every risk equation: the downside. It is difficult to overestimate the dangers of venturing into a water-filled cavity of the earth. As a cave's stygian gloom takes over, the environment becomes a totally alien place. A world without gravity or light. A world utterly unforgiving of careless mistakes.

A single misplaced fin kick, and you can rile up a black pudding of silt that cuts visibility to zero. Take just a couple of detours down tempting side tunnels, and the whole physical world can turn in on itself -- making even an experienced diver swear that the way in is the way out. And all the while, a diver is using up precious air. Take a wrong turn, and you only have a finite number of breaths to find your way back.

"If you get disoriented in open water, you can locate the surface simply by following the ascent of your exhaust bubbles," says Skiles. "But in an underwater cave, your bubbles are swallowed by the blackness. There is very little up and down in one's mind: Everything could be up; everything could be down. An underwater cave is a three-dimensional space in which you have to reorient yourself to the rules of gravity. And then you have to deal with the voices in your head -- voices that could, if you let them, push you into a panic. If you're not able to calm your fears, your fears will take over."

The folklore of cave diving is full of stories of lost divers who frantically searched for a way out until their air was exhausted. Veteran divers have all heard the story of the Florida diver who took a wrong turn at a junction of two tunnels. When he realized that he was about to exhaust his air supply, he grabbed his slate and used his last breaths to scribble a good-bye message to his family. Michael Bane, in his book Over the Edge, tells the story of a diver who became separated from her fiancé and took a long, panicked death swim down a tunnel to nowhere. The recovery team found her claw marks etched into the limestone wall.

In a 12-year span that began when he was just 16 years old, Skiles recovered the bodies of 30 divers who perished in northern Florida's underwater caverns. Another time, he pulled three dead brothers out of a cave called Devil's Ear, near High Springs. They were inexperienced divers who got lost, panicked, and drowned. "The three of them were holding hands when I found them," recalls Skiles. "That was a tough one. It wiped out the family's whole lineage. But what kills one can just as easily kill three."