GOD'S WELL
Bucky McMahon joined an expedition to dive a killer cave 158ft below the surface of a crocodile-inhabited pool at the bottom of a crater on a remote Jamaican mountain.
Pictures by Alex Kirkbride.
A burst of strange curses rises over the lip of that godforsaken Jamaican pit called God's Well.
"Bumbo!" one of our crew spits out from below. "Bumbo claat! Dem mad rass ants!"
Moments later, photographer Alex Kirkbride and our guide Delwin Rochester come scrambling over the rim of the sinkhole. "Did you hear them?" Delwin asks Alex. He swears he could hear the ants bustling from their nest "like a crackling fire".
I'm sorry I missed that: savage, virgin ants, waiting all eternity in a deep hole in the steaming jungle for some mad bastard to tread on them. Alex did the honours with his Soho combat boots.
Delwin, a young Jamaican entrepreneur who divides his time between the family tailoring business in Atlanta and their newly opened resort called Sea Riv, on Jamaica's undeveloped south coast, has never been all the way down to the forbidding water of God's Well, but he is drawn powerfully to get there. Aptly named, God's Well is an awesome absence, a sheer-walled shout of space that opens up the limestone mountainside like the crater of a nuclear blast.
Insects shrill in the green heat. On the crumbly rim of the hole we crouch among coils of rope, heaps of dive gear and guys - lots of guys. To assist his local dive masters, Delwin has recruited half a dozen gear bearers from the nearby fishing village of Alligator Pond. Another 20 guys have apparently quit their jobs with the coastal road crew just to watch. Boys as young as eight, barefoot in dusty trousers, climb trees with pockets full of rocks, which they toss into the abyss, as boys must. We're hours from the nearest town, yet we've drawn a circus crowd.
The key to the descent - a scramble down the steep dirt slope, then a clamber along roots to a rocky ledge with a lone sapling sturdy enough to hold block and tackle - lies in dividing the labour into minute portions, so everyone can contribute something.
Now an energetic labour dispute erupts to precisely that purpose. Dive master Leon, the single most outspoken person I've ever met, is down on the ledge with the ants and two of the crew, being pummelled with advice from every man, youth and stone-throwing boy. Leon answers each argument with passion, hitting high notes of anger and glee as if he's fluting some irrepressible symphony.
Soon, thin plumes of acrid smoke waft over the edge of the sink, and the voices crescendo with satisfaction. The Jamacian crew is burning the ants out, smothering them with smoke and talk and laughter - the island's inexhaustible resources. No problem, mon. Dive soon come. We hope to be under water by noon, when the sun heaves directly overhead, and God's Well will glow green and cloudy like a great cataracted eyeball.
There were times, diving on Jamaica's wild south coast, when I felt like a character in an H. Rider Haggard novel. This was never more true than when we drove the dirt streets of Alligator Pond with Delwin Rochester, recruiting a crew of porters for the God's Well expedition.
Geographically as far from both Kingston and Montego Bay as you can get, and temporally stuck in the 19th century, the town of Alligator Pond is a scant, dusty block dead-ending at the sea. Goats, chickens and scrawny blonde dogs mix with men and women balancing elaborate loads on their heads. The air is pungent with salt and smoke from open jerk stands and smouldering charcoal pits (Jamaica is a world leader in rate of deforestation), and the ganja of some unseen Rasta's spliff. Saturday morning, and Sea Riv's four-wheel-drive truck was the only vehicle on Main Street.
We took a side road that cut through pastures and vegetable plots out beyond the reach of telephones and indoor plumbing. In the dirt yards of tiny cement homes, children raced toy buses fashioned from orange juice cartons and wooden spool wheels. Seeing Alex and me in the cab of the truck, they shrieked: "White man! White man!"
At a crossroads, Delwin stopped to work the grapevine, finding out who was up and about and interested in earning a few bucks. It was Delwin's shrewd policy to spread out the ecotourist dollar to as many pockets as possible. Though no-one starved here - fish and fruit could be had for the picking - labour is as plentiful as currency is scarce. Indeed, I'd never seen so many people, young men, mostly, just hanging out on corners and in two-stool rum stands, keeping watch for the main chance and dreaming the universal dream of a good time and "just a likkle" for the pocket.
The back of the truck swiftly filled with able-bodied gear bearers ready to follow our whim with energy and abundant humour. We sport divers, free of all burdens, would also be freed to imagine whatever we liked - that we were explorers, pocket Sir Richard Burtons in quest of Arawak bones or pirate gold at the bottom of God's Well. Here in the underbelly of Jamaica, a place of caves and springs and deserted black sand beaches, there were no rules, no limits, and no checks on human folly.
FulIy manned and provisioned, the God's Well expedition took off at devil-take-the-hindmost speed along the coastal road, scattering herds of goats and bursting though clouds of white butterflies. Beyond Gut River, one of half a dozen spring-fed streams that percolate out of the limestone mountains and meander to the sea through a morass of mangroves and reeds, we were blocked by an obstacle of some historic moment: a crew of fifty men attacking the bush with chainsaws, machetes and a bulldozer, opening the coastal road to traffic from Kingston. For better or worse, change was coming to Alligator Pond and the Long Bay Morass, the spring-fed refuge of the manatee and the American crocodile.
At God's Well, after the incident of the ants, the rigging of the ropes went surprisingly quickly. It was a pleasure watching the crew work once they set to in earnest. They had played in these mountains throughout their boyhoods, and they took obvious pride in their mastery of this harsh, idiosyncratic karst country.
Soon, tanks and gear bags were jouncing down the line to the ledge, and then in turn Delwin, Alex and I were lowered the final 30ft by butt-sling to a scrap of shingle at the water's edge. We landed right on top of the smouldering ant log which the crew had hurled down before us.
Across the green pool, a blindingly bright wall of limestone, hirsute with linguini-like lianas, soared some 300ft above us. A small crocodile, which had either fallen in or washed out through a cave, swam right for us, flying the flag of jungle menace. Rocks pelted down around it, and around us, too, as we eased into the water.
As far as Delwin knew, only five divers had preceded us. The first two, a man and a woman, had become separated when the former experienced an equipment failure. For some reason the woman carried on alone into a cave and died there. The next three divers came from Florida to retrieve her body.
The sinkhole's lethal record was very much on our minds as we began the descent. For the first 30ft the visibility was nil, the water a hot pea soup. At 50ft we passed through a dramatic thermocline: temperature plummeted and the vis soared, revealing a stark, monochromatic spectacle. Along the dark sides of the sink little puffs of silt appeared, mini-explosions billowing in suspension, the effects of stones still being thrown down from the peanut gallery. Below was a maze of ancient trees that had toppled into the sink over the course of centuries.
God' s Well was as cyclopic below as above: a narrowing funnel burrowed under the north wall. We cleared the last of the deadfall trees below 140ft, and continued down into the cavern zone. It was very cold and very dark under the mountain's brow. At 158ft we found the entrance to the cave, and an abandoned diver's mask - a spooky memento mori. The cave was a killer, that was certain: deep, tight - no more than a 4ft-tall wink in the stone - and silty.
I tested the bottom with a finger and it plunged into a spongy black medium light as air that undulated like a sheet of gelatin as I tried to rise motionlessly away from it. One stray kick and it would be instant blackout. We wanted no part of that cave.
Still, we were far from disappointed with what we had seen and learned from the whole process, the brief deep dive being just the iceberg tip of the expedition. We came up out of the cold, through the weird green water, and surfaced in the noonday heat - right next to the ant log, now bobbing on the water, still smouldering and teeming with shipwrecked ants. They had pursued us to the end. Up on the rim of the sinkhole, the Jamaicans made the jungle loud with their laughter.
On the drive back, Delwin pulled off the road beside a dense mangrove swamp and announced: "The Suicide Run." Delwin hadn't actually done the Suicide Run himself, he confessed, but he was drawn to the wildness of it. Only Down, the older, quieter of the two Sea Riv dive masters, had completed this two-mile swim from the coastal road to the sea. I didn't see any "run" at all - only a tangle of dark, interlocking roots, seemingly impenetrable.
"You wanted to see crocodiles?" Delwin asked. "This is a good place for them."
The crew had worked hard and waited stoically in the heat while we dived God's Well. Now they showed off their skill at free-diving, letting off steam on the Suicide Run. They flashed and wriggled through the roots, setting a murderous pace. You would take a breath and dive, swimming sideways through hoops of roots and under sunken logs, pulling yourself along hand over hand until you found a gap to come up through. All the while, the swimmer behind you would be blowing exhalations like an angry walrus, trying to pass.
I surfaced once with a rubbery mangrove root wedged between my mask strap and my face, kebabed like a hunk of jerked pork. I was out of the race after that. But there were strange sights to see: brilliant blue crabs among the detritus of the bottom, many pairs locked in copulation, their swimmerettes twirling like batons. Little freshwater tropicals, navy blue and chrome, darted among mullet and African perch in the mangrove roots. The Run was both a spring and a swamp, combining cold clear water with a prolific hatchery.
I didn't catch up until the entire pack stopped dead in its tracks. Half of the crew had climbed high into the mangrove trees - in fins! Leon, the muscular, voluble young divemaster, had climbed highest of all, and was warbling with laughter. Calmly clinging to a root, he pointed to the water: ''Crocodile," he whispered. "Him look too full in de belly to move."
Good thing, since we had swum right up on top of the brute in barely 6ft of water. I sucked in a breath and dived. My God, yes! And a big one. It lay placid and still, bunked under the shelf of brush in its private gloom. As big as a cow round the belly, its long distinctive snout zippered tight with interlocking ivory, the crocodile looked as potent as a living bomb, glowing the palest shade of blue in the late afternoon light. It finally spooked when Alex came too close with his camera, and vanished with a whip of its tail.
The sea, when at last we reached it, staggering up over a bar of black sand, felt hot as bathwater, and we lolled in the breakers, soaking up heat for the cold swim back to the truck.
We took a different route this time, through the reeds, which proved just as remarkable as the mangroves. The tawny elephant grass spiked up 10ft tall and floated in great island-mats. It was a world evocative of biblical times, of Moses in the bullrushes, of the cradle of man. For long stretches, the reeds completely closed off the waterway, and we had to dive under the barricades into dark water, looking for sapphire columns of light, ethereal zones of passage where it was possible to beam up for a breath.
Back at Sea Riv, long after dark, Uggers, the chef and head waiter, a gentle giant of a man, had dinner waiting: fried chicken and whole fish, which we fell upon with ravenous hunger. We ate in silence on the veranda, under a slow-twirling fan. The whole of Sea Riv, a big cement country house, seemed adrift in the black bush, as isolated in the darkness as a tramp steamer at sea.
Images of the day kept coming back in vivid flashes. Somehow the entire amazing experience - God's Well, the mangroves, the reeds - was just like being a kid again, when a day is as long as a week, and everything is new and green and striving, and tumbles down upon you and your comrades in waves of terror and joy, and you come home at last, all bruised and caked in grime, and home takes you in, and makes you clean again.
There was magic in this Jamaica, if it could take you back to that. All night I dreamed of caves and mazes, pursued by blue crocodiles.
The next day, everything fell apart. We planned to dive the reefs early to beat the wind, but the crew tried to launch the boat in front of the hotel instead of further east, where they usually put in, and got the truck stuck in the sand up to the doors. While they watched to see if the truck could be freed, the guys in the boat cruised back and forth until they ran out of petrol. A wave swamped them and flooded the fuel line. In a matter of hours, Delwin's transportation had been reduced to a borrowed motorbike.
As a fledgling dive operator with one foot in the business culture of Atlanta, and one foot in practically primeval Alligator Pond, Delwin has two powerful gods of disaster to propitiate. One is Murphy, who presides over mechanical failures. The other is Bredder Anansi, the native trickster, usually characterised as a spider - the sneaky side of people, as one Jamaican defined him for me.
There's a ton of Murphy in the dive business, and plenty of Anansi in the fishing village. What Delwin was trying to do - ease Alligator Pond into the 20th century in time for the 21st, and awaken environmental consciousness among fishermen - required all the tack and diplomacy he could muster. It meant giving the crew enough rope to hang themselves.
"It's the only way they'll learn," Delwin told me. "I used to get all tense and angry whenever something went wrong. Now I just take a deep breath and get on with it."
Getting on with it this time meant chartering a local fisherman's traditional "canoe" the next morning. In exchange, Delwin had to offer Leon and Down's labour as spearfishermen on one of the dive sites to make up for the fisherman's loss of productivity - a dive operator's bargain with the devil.
The coral mounds and spur-and-groove formations offshore of Alligator Pond are fished every day with line and trap, and lobsters are taken year-round in true frontier disregard for the law. Yet population density is so low here the waters remain fishy, with lots of snapper and plentiful schools of grunt, spadefish and barracuda.
The two coral bommies we dived, Saletsat and Drop-drop, were virtual lobster high-rises; I counted a hundred in a quick census. Both sites were near a solitary little sand cay miles out in Long Bay - a perfect cartoon desert island - where fishermen break for lunch and process their catches. The waste that washes into the shallows brings in Volkswagen-sized rays, Delwin says, and bruiser nurse sharks.
Our last afternoon at Sea Riv, we lunched with the fishermen on the spit and shared their cookfire, tasting fare from their mixed grill, an exotic sampling of what the reef guides usually call "odd-shaped swimmers." Looking to shore, we could see the whole of Delwin's domain in the blue haze of distance. The lie of the land looked like nothing so much as a lurking crocodile: Round Hill to the east was the bulbous tip of the snout, God's Well a missing molar, and the high plateau of Lover's Leap the dome of the skull. It's a sleeping giant, smouldering with potential, and it could all vanish with a flick of the tail.
Appeared in DIVER - September 1996
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