Cave country

“Sometimes you don’t need a plan, bro. Sometimes you just need balls.” 

– my dive instructor’s T-shirt

We packed the truck, left in the early morning, and headed west. I was eager to use my newly-minted rebreather skills in the real world, and today’s dive offered an opportunity for just that. My husband, Carl, rode beside Rob, our instructor/guide, while I curled up in the back. After a couple hours, we pulled off the highway and onto a dirt road in a state park. A rusty, unlocked gate served as a deterrent for anyone who didn’t know where they were going, and a large brown sign listed the rules: don’t dive alone; leave your certification cards on your dashboard; and be back by sundown.

Emerald Spring was exactly what I was expecting for a dive site in cave country: an unassuming yet surprisingly deep hole in the ground in the woods. Many of the north Florida dive sites are actually surrounded by infrastructure – camp grounds and picnic tables and gift shops. At one well-known site, Ginnie Springs, children swim or float on inflatable animals in the river above. Not so at Emerald. Wooden stairs lead down to the water surface, and that was it. Cave country.

It was a great dive. From the main basin, I could look up and see the complete rim, plus the trunks of trees surrounding us in a pale green sheen. It felt like I was looking at the world through a distorted, fairy-tale lens. One tree trunk stood vertically in the basin, while leaves littered the floor. A number of passageways lead horizontally off of the main basin, and thin nylon lines stretched along the rocks marked routes previously explored by other divers. I wasn’t able to swim very far along the passages because I’m not certified for cave diving, but even the entryways offered interesting observations. Tiny white isopods scurried along the sediment, and I even saw a pale, blind crayfish – almost certainly a cave-dwelling species. Thin tracks meandered across the fine sediment, and on closer examination, I noticed a snail at the end of each one. Their shells were tall and thin and ridged, like a spiral stretched skyward. I wanted nothing more than to collect one of them for dissection at home, but when Rob stuck his hand into the mud, it sank in a good 6 inches. Trying to collect a snail would have made the water column hopelessly silty, so I let it be.

At one point, Rob covered his light and pointed ahead of us. There was a place where a tree had fallen through the ceiling of the passage, scattering limestone debris on the floor and creating a place for sunlight to poke through. It honestly looked like some ancient treasure in a movie, with stone ruins and illumination from above and the staff of a king long dead. It was gorgeous.

After we surfaced in Emerald Spring, Rob drove us across the highway to another similarly unassuming puddle. Standing on the wooden platform at its edge, he explained that this was where one of the passages came out. We obviously did not swim that far, but it blew my mind to imagine swimming through a limestone passageway, under the highway, with blind crayfish and spike-shaped gastropods and trees poking through the ceiling.

I had an amazing time diving in north Florida this week and am glad to know such a cool part of the country exists!