There are those who live out their lives in suits, ensconced in familiar, office environments that may, from time-to-time, challenge them intellectually, but certainly never will physically. And then there's Bill Stone, an inventor, a holder of a doctorate in engineering, and one of the world's most accomplished cavers. This is a man who seems to be comfortable only when he's thousands of feet beneath the surface of the earth, where humans were never designed to live, much less survive. In Blind Descent, Mr. Tabor explores the world of extreme caving, chronicling the adventures and the dangers, but it is the men and women who inhabit this blackened world, who drive themselves beyond the limits mere mortals set for themselves, who bring this book to life.
Extreme caving is an extraordinarily risky pursuit which demands both mental and physical strength from its practitioners. A caver is not just descending into a hole in the ground; he is voluntarily immersing himself in a darkness so complete, so profound, that the odds are very good it will drive him temporarily insane with a need to escape, to flee. This phenomenon, known as the rapture, has killed numerous cavers who were perfectly equipped to handle the extraordinary descents, the rocky obstacles, the tight squeezes, the twisting tunnels, and the underground lakes, but physical strength cannot protect the mind from what it has never had to handle. After all, how many among us have been thousands of feet underground, inside a place no human has ever explored, dependent upon our wits and the whims of technology to keep us alive, and utterly powerless to prevent a random shifting of the earth from killing us?
Mr. Tabor uses the competition between American and Ukrainian teams to find and explore the world's deepest caves as the narrative drive for a piece fundamentally about the human desire to explore, no matter what the terrain. The spirit of extreme adventure which animates cavers is powerfully charismatic, even through Mr. Tabor's filtering lens. The personalities are as potent as the swiftness of the minds that have developed all manner of new techniques and technologies to circumvent natural barriers that ought to have stopped us cold by now. But the human desire to know, to see, to be the first, has driven these adventurers to an unthinkable extreme. Mr. Tabor does as good a job of explaining the anatomy of a dive as he does analyzing the cavers who execute them and, in doing so, he furnished me with a complete and compelling portrait of an exceptional pursuit. There's an honor here, an ethic fading from the more trodden walks of life. It is the spirit of human adventure and it burns bright. Excellent work. (4/5 Stars)
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