This is me. The person that someone at home calls “into extreme kinda stuff” because well, if there’s something out there I want to try, I wind up trying it. The person that someone at work really admires because “you’ve great get up and go” and the person, all the same, who occasionally terrifies the life out of various members of the family because that might be just a little bit dangerous. This is me. The person I wanted to be when I was 25 years old and working as a bureaucrat.
But there are some things I will never ever try and caving is one of them. It’s not even something I really thought about too much until a week or two ago when there was something on RTE 1 that I caught a few moments of about a cave rescue in Clare. I don’t want to go into it, but even if you skip the details that the piece was about a rescue, the pictures by no means enticed me to give it a try. Didn’t make my blood rush, made it stop instead.
However, I have a twitter feed and for some odd reason, I don’t know why, people with an interest in extreme sports occasionally find me and if I like the look of their feed, I follow them back. One such posts a lot of extreme sports links, things I would never have found on my own. Today, they posted a link to this site. If you are even remotely squeamish, I strongly recommend against reading the piece because in some ways – a lot of ways – it’s harrowing. It involves under water caving, something I will never, ever do because despite the interest in assorted watersports, one of the ways of dying that terrifies me more than most others is drowning (the other is dying in a fire). I have nightmares about both and it’s probably why I will always ever so slightly doubt myself as a swimmer no matter how good and strong I get at it.
If you bear in mind I won’t go into a cave in the dry, and I’m terrified of drowning, you can be sure that this is why I will never get involved in underwater caving or cave diving. Choose your term. As far as normal scuba is concerned, I would only try it a second time just to get more out of it than I did the one time I did an introductory lesson.
This story is not about people who made it; it’s about people who didn’t. Some of it…is hard to swallow, particularly when you realise that the death of the key character in the story is caught almost completely on the camera that he was wearing on his helmet. The piece left me just a little emotionally battered, I have to say.
Society spends a lot of time – sometimes – protecting people from themselves. I’ve mixed feelings, sometimes, about whether this is a good thing or not. I’ve always taken the view that people who know what they are doing; know the risks attached to what they are doing should be free to do it. People who are utterly stupid about it, they need to be saved from themselves.
The two guys in this story; they knew what they were doing, they knew the risks. I can’t condemn them for doing it anyway because…somehow, not doing it makes their lives a little bit worse. I am not sure that this is a good idea for them either. It just…leaves behind harrowing stories sometimes.
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interesting site which I discovered to day as a result of all this. CrazyJourneys.
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