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Michael McLeod
every now and then i get nostalgic and read old clips.
been so long it's like reading something a stranger wrote,
i was so lucky to have been in a position to write in depth stories.
in this case, literally.
Here's a cool but kinda creepy piece I wrote a long time ago. Florida is essentially a floating peninsula. you have to understand that going in. enjoy.
By Michael McLeod
Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
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.
Where was the crisscrossing flow of water coming from? How far had it traveled? Which underwater tributaries fed which springs? How had the homes, farms, businesses and roads hundreds of feet above it affected the ancient system below?
He showed scientists his maps and talked to them about his observations, feeling out of his depth: After all, they had positions and Ph.D.s. He was a dive bum with a high-school diploma and a C average to his credit.
But through the years, he gained confidence in his own, first-person observations. He learned how to take professional-quality still photographs and movies, and began developing a career as a filmmaker, traveling all over the world — to the Yucatan, the North and South Pacific, Australia, Antarctica — to make underwater documentaries.
It was the life he had always wanted, a life of exploration and adventure, all because of the Floridan Aquifer.
That’s over, now, though. All because of the Floridan Aquifer.
‘He’s tenacious’
Skiles’ globe-trotting career began evaporating soon after the appearance of a documentary that may be the most important he has ever made.
Six years ago, at the urging of the newly formed Florida Springs Task Force, he began working on a series called Water’s Journey. Its goal was to illustrate the fragility of critical, complex waterways.
One of the documentaries, The Hidden Rivers of Florida, depicted the vulnerability of the subterranean passageways he knew so well. He filmed a team of divers as they traveled several miles through its depths. A separate team used newly developed radio-telemetry equipment to track the divers’ journey from ground level, tracing their path across the landscape.
The finished footage of the documentary cuts back and forth between the modern world above and the ancient one below.
It shows the divers as they encounter the jawbone of a mastodon, circa 10,000 B.C., just a few yards from a discarded tractor tire, circa the 1990s.
It shows the above-ground team as it follows the divers’ path across a golf course and a highway, then inside a bowling alley and a Sonny’s Real Pit Bar-B-Q. (“Looks like they’re headed for the salad bar,” a member of the team muses, as they barge past patrons too preoccupied with coleslaw and pulled pork to notice them.)
The series was a watershed for Skiles. It heightened his profile in the public eye and drew him, grudgingly, into a new phase of his career.
Now, instead of taking on glamorous assignments, he makes speeches to civic groups and schoolchildren. He attends conferences as a sort of freelance advocate for the aquifer, the only one in flip-flops among suited lobbyists, policy directors, attorneys, water bottlers and developers.
“He’s tenacious,” said Harley Means, a geologist with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “There are hundreds of cave divers around, but Wes is the one who has stepped forward. His passion draws people to him from the moment he stands up to speak and opens his mouth.”
“I’m a reluctant soldier,” Skiles said. “What I really need to do right now is pack up and go off to some wild place I’ve never been to.
“But I can’t. “
He can’t because he considers the aquifer Florida’s final wilderness and feels compelled to play a role in protecting it.
“When Theodore Roosevelt saw the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, he realized that they were such a spectacular part of the landscape that they needed to be preserved and protected forever,” he said. “I feel like that about the springs. When you’ve seen them the way I have, the clearness of the water, the strength of the flow — they are like jewels of nature.”
Ghosts of divers past
Skiles lives in High Springs with his wife, Terri, and their daughter, Tessa. He has an office filled with mementos: a photo he took of a vast underwater cavern, another of the massive iceberg he explored. The workshop next to it is filled with dive equipment. On a wall is a faded Star Trek poster, decorated with the familiar slogan: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” A friend gave it to him years ago, when the phrase could have passed for his job description.
His home is a short drive from Ginnie Springs, the place where his journey as an explorer began. But he rarely goes cave diving these days. It’s not because of fear. It’s not because of commitments. It’s because of ghosts.
It’s Sheck Exley, his first teacher and hero, who died while trying to set a depth record.
It’s Bill Hurst, director of pollution control for Alachua County, who showed Skiles how to map caves. He died in the depths just a few hundred yards from that pool of water at Peacock Springs. He had written a farewell note on a waterproof slate. Skiles keeps it in his office.
“I got lost,” it says. “Tell my wife and my kids I love them.”
It’s Ron Simmons, one of the charter members of The Mole Tribe, who stayed underwater too long in a system of narrow passageways near the Suwannee River, a system that Skiles discovered and shared with him. He died in February, just 300 feet from safety.
“I’ll speak out for the aquifer for the rest of my life,” Skiles said. “It’s my passion. But I guess I could have made a better choice. I picked the deathly hollows of narrow underwater spaces where my friends go to die.
“I picked the worst thing on the planet to love.”
Originally Published: September 23, 2007 at 12:00 AM EDT
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