Trail Safe Three-Pronged Self-Defense

Attention to intuition is also characteristic of cave diving. A diver can "call", or cancel, a dive at any point in the dive. I was at a Florida springs once when one of the top cave divers in the world showed up to meet with her team. She'd helped map the very caves we had planned to dive and knew them as well as any person alive. The five divers in her team waited, all fully geared-up and ready to dive. She drove into the dive site in her pickup truck, looked around at her divers, then stuck her arm out the window and gave a "thumbs up" sign, a signal cave divers use to end the dive. Then she headed out for a beer. Everyone began breaking down equipment and packing it up for the day without ever placing a toe in the water.

Was there a little grumbling? Sure, of course. But it wasn't serious grumbling, and nobody said a word to the team leader. Within the culture of cave diving, it's considered the height of bad form to question why a dive is called.

I recall one particular dive with my instructor, John, which was called for no apparent reason. It was a deep dive, bottoming out at almost 200 feet in the cave. The entry had been uneventful; we were swimming against a slight current, which required some effort, but the cave was beautiful. Periodically we passed blind albino crayfish that waved white pincers angrily in our direction. We had dropped into the second level of the cave and were getting ready to drop through a vertical tunnel in the floor of the cave to the third level when John came to a stop, shone his powerful cave light on his hand, and signaled a "thumbs up." We turned around in the narrow tunnel, and I led us back up the line to the surface. We broke the gear down, talked about generalities (usually, in the Florida sinkholes, the talk is about mosquitoes), then headed out for pizza and beer. At the restaurant, John finally decided to break etiquette.

"Normally, I wouldn't say anything about this at all," he started, "but because you're new, I'm going to make an exception. Everything was going fine, but I had this feeling in the back of my head that someone was going to die. The deeper we went, the worse the feeling got. So I called it."

Let's call that feeling in the back of his head intuition, and before we talk any more about it, let's jump from the spooky world of underground caves to the warm, homey smells of my grandmother's kitchen.