Post by Kelly Jessop on Sept 27, 2007 17:55:54 GMT -5
www.orlandosentinel.com/orl-skiles2307sep23,0,5144751.story
From the surface, it's just a small pond in deep woods. But Wes Skiles knows better. He knows where it leads. He remembers what it once looked like. And he is all too familiar with its ghosts.
"Perfect," he says in a dry, toneless voice, as he reaches the place in the North Florida woods where a sloping circle of forest floor gives way to the coffee-colored pool.
Skiles has lugged a movie camera deep into Peacock Springs State Park, 252 acres of wilderness near Tallahassee, to make a five-minute documentary about waters such as this. It is a spring, once crystal-clear and fast-running, now matted and nearly still.
The documentary will be used by the officials of the Suwannee River Water Management District in a campaign to protect the region's springs, weakened by a lengthy drought, threatened by pollution and increased water usage.
None of the campaign's charts and figures will convey the delicate majesty of the springs and the subterranean waterways that feed them. That's where the bearded man in a sleeveless dive-shop T-shirt comes in.
At 49, Skiles is the dean of Florida cave divers. He knows better than anyone how to turn on the lights in Florida's basement. Most of his life has been devoted to illuminating the pitch-dark, ill-understood, quadrillion-gallon network of rivulets, streams and water-filled caverns that riddles the peninsula's porous limestone foundation and feeds pristine water to hundreds of springs.
Scientists call it the Floridan Aquifer. Skiles has been exploring, mapping, photographing and filming it since his first dive to the caves and passageways beneath Ginnie Springs, 35 miles northwest of Gainesville, in 1971. He was 13. Cave diving was in its infancy. By the time he graduated from high school, he had become one of its pioneers.
He crafted specialized cave-diving equipment in shop class. He spent weekends exploring the endless array of uncharted limestone passageways at Ginnie Springs.
He recovered his first body when he was 16.
Cave diving offers numerous opportunities for fatal errors. Miscalculate your air supply and lose a race back to the surface. Kick up too much silt with your fins, and become blind and confused in the waterborne blizzard. Lose track of the line you unreel to keep from getting lost, and make the last wrong turn of your life.
Panic.
One or more of those things doomed two college students who had gone scuba diving in Ginnie Springs. Rescue divers unfamiliar with its labyrinths found one body but had searched in vain for the other. Skiles volunteered to help and led them to the young man's body, shrouded in a film of chalky silt.
"There were a lot of nights afterward when I sat bolt upright in my bed," he recalled. "From that point on, I knew there was more to life than pimples, proms and football games."
He didn't know the half of it.
Learning from life
Skiles never went to college. All of his professional skills, and many of his personal qualities, are connected to his lifelong passion for the aquifer.
He moved to get closer to it as soon as he could, leaving his childhood home in Jacksonville in favor of the rural North Florida counties -- Gilchrist, Levy, Lafayette, Suwannee, Alachua -- that offer the best cave diving in the state.
He took jobs as a dive-shop technician and diving instructor, and spent his spare time driving back-country roads in a car stashed with scuba gear, hoping to discover hidden springs leading to unexplored passageways and caverns. One night, emerging from a farmland spring he had sneaked into, he saw a shadowy figure approaching. He began formulating an apology for trespassing. None was necessary: His silent companion was a cow.
Soon, he became part of a group of North Florida cave divers who called themselves "The Mole Tribe." They competed with one another to see who could find more miles of unexplored passageways and caverns. Skiles did his share, discovering 400 miles worth of previously uncharted cave systems and recording all of it in meticulous maps.
But it wasn't just about exploring the unknown for him. It was about understanding it.
From the surface, it's just a small pond in deep woods. But Wes Skiles knows better. He knows where it leads. He remembers what it once looked like. And he is all too familiar with its ghosts.
"Perfect," he says in a dry, toneless voice, as he reaches the place in the North Florida woods where a sloping circle of forest floor gives way to the coffee-colored pool.
Skiles has lugged a movie camera deep into Peacock Springs State Park, 252 acres of wilderness near Tallahassee, to make a five-minute documentary about waters such as this. It is a spring, once crystal-clear and fast-running, now matted and nearly still.
The documentary will be used by the officials of the Suwannee River Water Management District in a campaign to protect the region's springs, weakened by a lengthy drought, threatened by pollution and increased water usage.
None of the campaign's charts and figures will convey the delicate majesty of the springs and the subterranean waterways that feed them. That's where the bearded man in a sleeveless dive-shop T-shirt comes in.
At 49, Skiles is the dean of Florida cave divers. He knows better than anyone how to turn on the lights in Florida's basement. Most of his life has been devoted to illuminating the pitch-dark, ill-understood, quadrillion-gallon network of rivulets, streams and water-filled caverns that riddles the peninsula's porous limestone foundation and feeds pristine water to hundreds of springs.
Scientists call it the Floridan Aquifer. Skiles has been exploring, mapping, photographing and filming it since his first dive to the caves and passageways beneath Ginnie Springs, 35 miles northwest of Gainesville, in 1971. He was 13. Cave diving was in its infancy. By the time he graduated from high school, he had become one of its pioneers.
He crafted specialized cave-diving equipment in shop class. He spent weekends exploring the endless array of uncharted limestone passageways at Ginnie Springs.
He recovered his first body when he was 16.
Cave diving offers numerous opportunities for fatal errors. Miscalculate your air supply and lose a race back to the surface. Kick up too much silt with your fins, and become blind and confused in the waterborne blizzard. Lose track of the line you unreel to keep from getting lost, and make the last wrong turn of your life.
Panic.
One or more of those things doomed two college students who had gone scuba diving in Ginnie Springs. Rescue divers unfamiliar with its labyrinths found one body but had searched in vain for the other. Skiles volunteered to help and led them to the young man's body, shrouded in a film of chalky silt.
"There were a lot of nights afterward when I sat bolt upright in my bed," he recalled. "From that point on, I knew there was more to life than pimples, proms and football games."
He didn't know the half of it.
Learning from life
Skiles never went to college. All of his professional skills, and many of his personal qualities, are connected to his lifelong passion for the aquifer.
He moved to get closer to it as soon as he could, leaving his childhood home in Jacksonville in favor of the rural North Florida counties -- Gilchrist, Levy, Lafayette, Suwannee, Alachua -- that offer the best cave diving in the state.
He took jobs as a dive-shop technician and diving instructor, and spent his spare time driving back-country roads in a car stashed with scuba gear, hoping to discover hidden springs leading to unexplored passageways and caverns. One night, emerging from a farmland spring he had sneaked into, he saw a shadowy figure approaching. He began formulating an apology for trespassing. None was necessary: His silent companion was a cow.
Soon, he became part of a group of North Florida cave divers who called themselves "The Mole Tribe." They competed with one another to see who could find more miles of unexplored passageways and caverns. Skiles did his share, discovering 400 miles worth of previously uncharted cave systems and recording all of it in meticulous maps.
But it wasn't just about exploring the unknown for him. It was about understanding it.
