Caving with Rainbow-Covered Headlamps

I doomscrolled YouTube for caving deaths on a tiny, illuminated screen while I rode north on the BART commuter train in San Jose the other evening—Milpitas, South Fremont, Union City, names blaring on the overhead speakers every few minutes—and I learned of a young man named John, who, in a tragic underground accident, spent twenty-eight exhausting hours suspended upside down, stuck in a foot-wide tunnel with only his rainbow-covered headlamp to comfort him, before succumbing to a horrible death because he chose to keep going down the narrow, suffocating, immovable, cold stone walls of Nutty Putty rather than turn back, and his catastrophe reminded me of David Rosler in 2011, Thomas Edward Benning in 1995, Tim Smafield in 2007, Rachel Cox in 1989, Robert and his brother in 1999, Brett Smith in 2013, David Carson and John Brock in 1980, Bejamin Miller, Robert Svensson, Eric Tskale, James May, and Joseph, Amy, and Charlie, who in the last fifty years also perished or very nearly perished in similar horrors, all clinging to life by a more loosely bound thread than they had perhaps imagined, but irony wasn’t lost on me because, let’s be honest, I also grasped tightly to a rope of unknown length and girth as I travel the overpopulated but somehow still alluring Bay Area, and no matter how brutal a death someone else experiences, I always managed to think about myself rather than the losses the spelunkers’ families endured—like John’s father, who gave him that rainbow-covered headlamp and whose son’s grisly death has a rabid social media following fifteen years later—so, in existential panic, I pulled my gaze from the claustrophobic weight and scanned the narrow tube I sat in and knew while I was not suffocating, nor in peril like those doomed cavers, I too lived in a dangerous world, and I too didn’t measure the consequences of my choices adequately, and I too got sticky in the ungainly spaces I crawled through. And yet, just like that, an ad appeared on the same tiny screen featuring Patrick Duffy from old television shows like Dallas and Step by Step and Patrick Duffy is still alive, and everything I felt from claustrophobia to secondhand fear like pushing on the passenger floorboards of a car when the driver tailgates, to a sense of empathy for all who died dissipated, and I got back to my regularly scheduled life. 

I saw a clear, vulnerable sandwich box on the light green seats nearby and the crumpled white napkin inside, discarded, left for someone else to toss away, and I realized that even if I’m not watching seventeen-minute after seventeen-minute videos on my phone that remind me of mortality, I had other reminders like my niece’s recent passing at age thirty-four, and my brother-in law’s cousin’s death from stomach cancer several days before that, or my father who passed a couple of years ago from Parkinson’s, or my mother four years prior. 

The ride ended normally enough and people exited the train just as normally, and I thought about the next day, when I’d have to do it all again. People die in threes, and that was why my mother used to scan newspapers when I was a boy–which I thought was silly–to find the thirds because then maybe she could be at ease, and I haven’t done anything less as I watched my videos. I ended up quickly googling death rates, and, in fact, it’s not threes that people die in but in one-hundred and seventy thousands, or, if I wanted to feel safer, only one caver every fifty-six days.