A few years ago, before my world fell apart and got reassembled, before I had been nearly beaten to death by a man I dated and had surveyed with, I was learning the skills to sketch caves and draft my own map. Smoketree Slide was supposed to be the first map I drafted on my own.
I took two survey trips there with the man who later tried to kill me, and with two others. And I sketched passages as best as I could. It was not a cave that would win any prizes. Honestly, in some ways, it was painful, contorting myself into cracks to get to the third drop and pinching rope so tightly into a stahl that there was no hope of it coming out.
In the meantime, my personal life became increasingly dangerous. The man I loved was violent and a stalker. I didn't understand the beginnings of crippling anxiety or the PTSD that followed when he tried to kill me. So, sketching that map was nowhere on my priority list. In fact, it was a painful memory because Tony and I fought over it. He didn't want me to turn the cave location in because he wanted credit for the find, while perversely refusing to submit the cave himself. The issue was exacerbated when after my attack, every paper I owned was like a deck of cards, thrown into the air and brought down around me. Or maybe more like a casino's worth of decks of cards. I couldn't find important documents, mixed with old phone bills, mixed with handprints on construction paper, mixed with mementos of a life that didn't feel like mine. That sketchbook was one tiny part of a frightening stack.
When I attended the meeting today, the sketchbook was buried and almost forgotten. I was unsure of my welcome post-attack and following my epic truth-telling that rocked a different well-respected organization. (Sometimes you know what you have to say. You know that you might be hurt in the saying, and you say what's right anyway. It didn't make me universally loved.) I was surprised anyone spoke to me at all. I attended because my husband loves me so well that I can be an island wherever he is. I would endure a lot of derision to watch him light up over cartography. But I was wrong. I have friends still and kind people who still treat me like a normal human without Ben looking menacing next to me. I was happy to be wrong.
And I was talking to a couple of those kind folks who made my day when one of them asked the other about a cave that sounded eerily familiar. And they both survey far more often than I do now, so I am not a likely source of information. But I knew from the description that Scott meant Smoketree Slide.
And here's the moment when things often go sideways between cave surveyors. I could have gotten angry and asked him his intentions. He had turned in the cave already, but not mapped it. But, honestly, I knew over the years that anyone might find the cave and submit it. 🤷🏻♀️ So, I instead asked him if he would like the data and sketches. And he was thrilled to get the full story and find out why a map had never been submitted or even just the cave location itself. And in a win-win for cavers, he plans to draft the map.
For a few reasons, the map is a painful one for me to revisit now. But I happily dug through the stack of random papers and sent him data, getting myself some closure in the process. I didn't close any map loops this time, just mental ones.
If you, like me, find yourself sitting on data, thinking you'll get to it eventually, I recommend handing it to someone else with time to dig into it. Alabama caving could greatly benefit from more collaboration and less project possession. And I'm really looking forward to the final outcome.
