Not your typical nine-to-five

Most of the time, people seem to feel sorry for me when they find out that I work three out of four weekends a month. It's true that barely having any weekends off does suck sometimes, but there are definitely compensating perks. For instance, yesterday I got paid to go crawl around in a cave with my boss and some of our teen volunteers. Only three of our seventeen kids made it on the trip, but they're three of my favorite girls, so it was fabulous.

The girls were complete troopers. Nobody complained, nobody wimped out, and they loved the experience. Our guide, who was probably only a few years older than the volunteers, said that they were the best girls she's ever had on a tour.

These aren't from our trip, but this is what we did:

Since the temperature inside a cave is usually close to the average annual air temperature outside the cave, it was about 58 degrees. Almost from the start, we had to walk through a shallow stream, which was cold enough to numb our toes through our shoes. We climbed over a huge pile of breakdown (rocks that had fallen from the cave ceiling) and then went through two crawls. I was a little nervous before the first one since I hadn't been through a crawl since I went spelunking on a Girl Scout camp trip when I was 16, but when the guide asked for a leader and all the girls looked at me, I had to go for it. It really wasn't bad at all--most of it was hands-and-knees crawling, with just a little bit of army-crawling at the end.

For the rest of the trip, we did crawls alternating with a lot of stooped-over walking through passages and a few rooms with high enough ceilings that we could stand up.

In one passage, a bat zoomed in and out of the beams of our helmet-mounted Petzl lights. A little while later, I followed its increasingly irritated peeps ("Shut up! I'm trying to sleep over here!") and spotted it hiding in a cavity behind a stalactite, high above us. As the girls crowded around me, aiming their lights to meet mine, the bat crawled out into the open, using its thumb claws to grip the surface of the formation. The girls squealed over how cute it was, and our guide identified it as an Eastern Pipistrelle, one of the smallest bats in North America. She told us that one bat can eat 600-700 mosquitoes in an hour, which is equivalent to a 65-pound kid eating 173 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in an hour. (I think it was 173...it was something close to that.)



After seeing the bat, we climbed up into another room, where pebbles covered the ceiling, pressed into the mud by flowing water back when the cave was filled to the top by a stream.

After another crawl, a climb down a metal ladder, and a slog through a knee-high stream, we came to another fairly open passage, where tens of thousands of water droplets clung to the ceiling, sparkling like diamonds everywhere our lights landed. In each of those droplets I saw the potential for a stalactite, growing at a rate of one cubic inch per year. It was over a little too soon, but I had a fantastic time, and--more importantly--the girls did, too.