Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter (13 page)

According to a local source, this particular shaft should be about sixty feet deep, allowing us to rappel down inside and access the maze of tunnels below. When climbing, our policy is to rig redundancy lines for each climber. One line allows an individual to self-descend. A second line is controlled from the top in the event that the climber releases his primary line.

Our director of photography, Evan, and I are going to lead the group. Evan goes first so that he can film me from below. He lowers himself down, using about half the length of his rope, and then yells up for me to begin. I can tell from the timbre of his voice that he’s nervous, which is a very bad sign. Evan is a longtime
D.T.
veteran who surfs, climbs, scuba dives, and is generally up for just about any insane activity I throw his way. In all his seasons of making the show, this is the only time I’ve ever heard genuine fear in his voice. Hooked in, I back toward the rim of the pit and gaze down into a void. Evan is hard to see hanging only fifty feet underneath me. I rappel down about thirty feet. Small rocks hail down and bounce off of Evan’s helmet and into the darkness. He calls up at me: “Something’s wrong, dude.”

I look between my dangling legs and see the flicker of his headlamp below me. “What?” I yell down.

“It’s too deep. Listen to the rocks.”

I dislodge a small stone from the wall and let it drop from my hand. It sails past Evan and into the nothingness. Silence. The rope creaks. More silence. Evan shines his light down hopelessly. The sound of the rock hitting the bottom is so distant, so small, that it immediately turns my stomach over. This mine shaft is
hundreds
of feet deep.

This is a problem. A big problem. First of all, our ropes are only 100 feet long. What concerns me more is that the rigging at the surface doesn’t offer enough leverage to pull us back up. We were planning on resetting the lines from the bottom. Now we’re screwed; we have to go back up. I try to use a device called an ascender to hoist myself up the line, but the walls are sheer; there aren’t any footholds. I kick off the wall a few times with a grunt before giving up, spinning quietly in the void. Evan and I yell up to the team at the surface that we’re stuck. After what feels like an eternity, they call down that they want to hoist Evan up first, since the position of his rigging makes it easier. Great. Inch by inch Evan rises up toward me. Though I can’t hear or see what’s happening at the surface, I know that the team is digging their heels into the ground in a gravitational tug-of-war. It’s laborious and slow work. Eventually, Evan and I are eye to eye. There isn’t much to be said. We put our hands on each other’s shoulders as he begins to pass upward. “Get me out of here,” I whisper.

Night sets in just as Evan clears the top of the shaft. I can no longer tell where the mine ends and the sky begins. I’m in utter and complete blackness. “Josh!” Evan calls down from above. “They need to re-rig your safety line and add some pulleys for leverage.
DO NOT
let go of your other rope.”

I watch as the safety line in front of my face goes slack. The only thing keeping me from falling into the abyss is the grip of my right hand. A hand that is sore and turning numb. There’s nothing to do but wait.

I shine my light at the wall and notice the faint grooves of chisel marks made by the workers who originally dug this pit of despair. Do you remember that scene in
The
Silence of the Lambs
where the senator’s daughter is down in that well, and she has to put the lotion in the basket (lest she “get the hose”)? As Buffalo Bill hoists the basket up, the light illuminates fingernail marks on the walls of the well, and she completely and utterly loses her shit. As though before this moment she thought that maybe this situation was going to shake out okay for her. That’s me. I see the chisel marks in the wall, feel utterly helpless, and begin to panic.
I’m never getting out of this place. I’m going to die here.

I turn my headlamp off with my free hand. The darkness is everywhere now. I picture the bottom of the shaft.
How long would the fall take? What would I land on? Skeletons?
Fear begins to unhinge my mind, and I picture alien creatures clinging to the walls or ghoulish miners reaching up at me from the tenebrous depths. The dread moves into my body, paralyzing my muscles. I feel the rope slip an inch through my fingers. I’m very close to tears.

Then I stop. I take a series of deep breaths, lean my forehead against the rope, and tell myself to calm down. I turn the light back on and stare at a groove in the wall, focusing on it with every scrap of concentration that I can muster. I hold fast to my line. In time, the safety rope tightens, and I begin to rise. I let my grip relax and am hoisted toward the surface.

Lesson:
Never, ever panic. It helps nothing and makes the rope slip.

Hippo attack: West Africa

We decide to take a boat into hippo-infested waters. This turns out to be a bad idea. The lesson here is pretty straightforward:
Leave hippos alone.

Waterfall of doom: Madagascar
s

Charging through the cloying, black jungle, I swat at menacing vines and oversized leaves that whip by my face. Madagascar’s flora is so otherworldly that I may as well be reenacting a scene from
Avatar.
We’ve come here looking for a mysterious jungle creature known as the Kalanoro, based on dozens of eyewitness reports generated from this patch of wilderness. Just ahead of me, an animal is getting away, and I want to know what it is. Behind me, our camera operator, Gabe, and sound guy, Mike, are keeping pace. We’re running alongside a fast-flowing river.

Suddenly there’s nothing ahead of me, and I wave my arms in backward circles to stop my momentum. I slide to a halt at the top of an abrupt cliff. The river plunges over the lip in a spectacular waterfall that cascades down with a roar. I look down into a shimmering lagoon, surrounded on all sides by jungle.

It’s an intoxicatingly beautiful place. So much so that I’m drunk with impulsivity. And at that moment, I almost jump. I almost just sail off the edge into the humid night air and the darksome waters below. I don’t, though. I feel my muscles relax and the moment pass. “What are you doing?” Mike asks as I squint down at the bottom of the falls.

“Nothing. I was going to jump. I’m not sure how deep it is, though.”

“Are you nuts?” Mike asks. “It must be a fifty-foot drop.”

“I know, but I think it’s deep. Don’t you just want to jump off this thing?”

Mike looks over the edge and beams. “Totally.” This is the type of people we hire.

The animal we were after is long gone by now. Mike and I hike down to the water’s edge to determine the depth of the pool. Gabe stays at the top for a well-earned cigarette. If the water is deep enough, we can scramble back up the ridge and jump.

The hike down is miserable. We slip against crumbling ledges, ensnared by hundreds of plants. At the bottom we draw near to the water’s edge, which is choked with vines and spiderwebs. I’m sure there are snakes here, and I’m praying there aren’t crocs. Mike and I look at each other in a way that silently conveys:
We’re going to take our clothes off now and go swimming in a tropical lagoon together, but it’s not going to be weird.

We strip down, dive into the water, and begin paddling toward the falls. By the time we reach the center of the pool, the sound of the crashing falls is deafening. Still swimming, I look up at the cliff and the cloud-cradled moon beyond. It would almost be romantic if I weren’t with a naked Mexican dude. We count to three and submerge. We’d need at least fifteen feet of freeboard here to make the jump viable. Instead, I immediately feel my feet hit the bottom. In fact, I can stand. There are jagged rocks everywhere, and most of the lagoon can’t be more than five feet deep.

There is a hardwired function in our minds designed to keep us out of harm’s way. Sometimes it’s worth overriding that instinct, and sometimes, like tonight, it decidedly isn’t. The takeaway here is tried and most certainly true.

Lesson:
Look before you leap.

Pukefest: Micronesia

I’m sweatier than usual, if that’s even possible. Rivulets of water are streaming off my forehead as I walk by torchlight through the jungle ruins. The flickering flame illuminates the basalt walls of an overgrown tomb and the outline of a narrow path beneath my feet. I’m alone and trying to get back to our base camp; I’m not sure that I’m going to make it. A small GPS receiver in my hand illuminates directions for me. But I falter, dropping to my knees, letting the torch be extinguished on the wet ground. I reach into my pocket and grab a headlamp, turning it on with a click and banishing a cone of darkness. Suddenly a thick column of vomit shoots out of my mouth.

Our executive producer, Brad Kuhlman, loves to trot out the Boy Scout motto. Before we leave the country each season, he sits the whole group down and says, “I used to be a Boy Scout, and the Scout’s motto is:
Be Prepared.
” I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the fact that while I’m “being prepared,” he’s back at home golfing, eating sushi, and kicking back in the Hollywood Hills. But that’s beside the point.

Back at base camp I am looked over by our paramedic, Shawn, who administers an IV. Over the course of the next few hours, I will vomit eighteen times and receive three bags of much-needed fluid through my arm. I won’t even begin to tell you what’s happening below my waist. The point is that without the electronics that led me back to camp or the medicines waiting for me there, I might have found myself in an even worse situation.

Now, I’m all for being whisked wherever the wind blows, but when it comes to adventure travel, you need to have the right tools for the job. If you’re headed to the ice planet of Hoth, you need to bring a winter coat. If you’re hiking across the Sahara, you should carry a canteen or two. And if you’re going to muck about in the jungles of the developing world, you need a GPS, headlamp, and access to medicine (in my case, administered by an actual medic).

From pocketknives to granola bars, I hone my travel kit every time I leave the country, learning from my mistakes and adjusting the items I need for the journey at hand. The Boy Scouts (and Brad) are right.

Lesson:
Be Prepared.

Roof rips off airplane: Romania

The pilot adjusts the flaps and begins to bank around toward an open field. Time seems to slow down, and I think about the circumstances that brought me here. . . . I manage to catch the pilot’s gaze for only a moment; above the din he looks at me and yells,
“We must go back!”

Indeed. We must. With the roof torn off, the aircraft is difficult to control. If the pilot can’t land this thing soon, what’s left of the plane is going to take a much more direct route to the ground. There’s absolutely nothing that I can do to help this situation. I’m powerless, which in itself is the lesson. Sometimes you just can’t sway the forces of the universe to better your situation. It’s out of your hands from time to time.

Lesson:
Let go and enjoy the ride.

CASE FILE:
FLYING FIENDS

NAMES:
Thunderbird, Jersey Devil, Ropen, Kikiyaon, Kongamato, Ahool, Fangalobolo.

DESCRIPTION:
These are winged predators, commonly reported as large and prehistoric. Other variations include giant bats, oversized owls, or, in the case of the Jersey Devil, an airborne demon.

LOCATIONS:
British Columbia, Alaska, Africa, Madagascar, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and weirdly, New Jersey.

STATUS:
Evidence of flying cryptids comes almost exclusively from eyewitness reports. Little photographic documentation exists. A common thread is a belief that these creatures live in caves, probably because it answers the troubling question of why we don’t regularly see them out in the wild.

In the age of the dinosaur, massive flying pterosaurs ruled the sky. With a wingspan of up to thirty feet, these long-beaked and leathery-winged predators bear little resemblance to the reptiles of today. But nearly all of these animals share the same modus operandi. They supposedly swoop down from on high, plucking victims off their feet with razor-sharp talons before devouring their unsuspecting lunch. In the case of the Jersey Devil, the beast seems satisfied with just scaring motorists, which, if you’ve ever driven down the Jersey Turnpike, is actually pretty tough to do.

VERDICT:
After investigating several varieties of flying fiends, I’m happy to go on record as saying that I think the majority of eyewitness recollections are based on actual encounters. Folks who think they’ve seen an unknown aviator are some of the most earnest I’ve met. I just think that most of the time they’re misidentifying what they’re seeing. The major problem is that scale is notoriously difficult to establish in the sky. Without surrounding natural features to provide perspective, estimating an animal’s size in flight (not to mention clearly recalling its features) is nearly impossible. In my travels, I’ve ducked down at the sight of large species of bats with wingspans of four feet. But from the ground they look like that demon in
Fantasia
.

Even more problematic is the fact that the regions where stories of these winged behemoths are most prevalent are also home to oversized birds. In 2002 a pilot in Alaska made international headlines when he and his passengers spotted a large, birdlike creature with a wingspan he claimed was the length of his Cessna. Though many believed this to be the legendary Thunderbird of Native American folklore, biologists contend that it might have been a rare Steller’s sea eagle, a predatory bird with a nearly ten-foot wingspan.

In a class by itself, tales of the Jersey Devil are some of the richest on record. A bizarrely hoofed, flying biped, the creature has the distinction of being America’s oldest monster. Still, the roots of the Devil legend are clearly folkloric (it was rumored to be the satanic offspring of an
unlucky local woman), and despite hundreds of years of sightings, there still isn’t a shred of physical evidence to support its existence.