Into the Planet by Jill Heinerth

Author:Jill Heinerth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

The Pit

2000

ONE YEAR AFTER Wakulla I heard a phrase that I had never expected to hear: “Never dive again.” The physician’s words made my heart drop. “I have no idea what will happen if you choose to go back in the water again.”

Although I had faced the deaths of colleagues, I had not fully embraced my own mortality until I had a terrifying close call. Tiny bubbles from decompression sickness were simultaneously dissolving my body and vanquishing my faltering marriage.

When Paul and I first returned from Wakulla, we were swept into a sort of powerlessness of inertia. We worked long hours in the store and were constantly dealing with our customers’ needs instead of our own. I was traveling for television work with Wes Skiles, marketing jobs for Cis-Lunar and frequently headed to North Florida’s cave country to teach classes. Life was so hectic that we did little to address problems in our relationship, instead blindly fumbling along the conveyor belt of life, each doing the best we could.

But in the spring of 2000, we decided to take a break to explore a sinkhole called the Pit, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Three years earlier, we had found a deep basement cave in this system and had been keeping it secret until we could have a good crack at exploring it. It had taken us three years to assemble the technology and money necessary to get us back to the base camp deep in the jungle of the Ejido Jacinto Pat region. However, I was concerned about how some of our Wakulla dives had gone down. Diving with Paul was like putting on an old pair of comfortable shoes: they felt great when you first slipped them on, but they might not make it through a really tough day on the trail. Still, I wanted to find the expedition magic with him again. I remembered watching the wind in the Santo Domingo canyon blowing through his curly brown hair and being captivated by him. Perhaps we would recapture our love in the country where it first took root.

Once again, we thought we had an opportunity to make a potentially historic dive. On our rough sketch maps, two massive neighboring cave systems appeared to overlap, so it seemed possible to us that somewhere in the labyrinth of passages, we would find the physical link. These were the two longest caves in the world at the time. Connecting them would be remarkable. Doing so through a tunnel almost four hundred feet deep would be a complete surprise to our community.

Underwater cave exploration was expanding in the Yucatán, and the competition to be the first explorers to join two of the world’s largest cave systems was getting fierce. Diving businesses along the Caribbean coast were eager to reap the rewards of being able to say they were operating in the world’s longest cave. They would align themselves with one team or the other and jealously guard information that might give their team an edge.

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