Blind Cave Shrimp

by Jane Stecyk

My father died hundreds of feet from sunlight in a flooded, cramped tunnel. In a place humans were never meant to go—and haven’t been since. They say it like it’s a good thing: “He died doing what he loved.” And he did love it. He loved every claustrophobic second that got him there. Every week away from home training for it. Every press conference, every rescue, every sycophantic magazine profile written about the Vincent Riley.

They called him “The Father of Cave Diving.” At least I never had to wonder which of his children he loved more. So no, I don’t take much comfort in the fact that he died doing what he loved. Of course he fucking did. He never had time for anything else.

The only way to get close to my dad was to share his obsession. Which is why I’m wearing a thick wetsuit and 150lbs of equipment, sweating next to a cenote under the scorching tropical sun. I’m one of a handful of people skilled enough to recover his body. I don’t have his fame, but I do have most of his knowledge. It should be enough—it has been enough—but I still feel a tightness in my chest as I go through my pre-dive checks.

In regular diving, the option to go up—fast—is always there. It’s not always preferable, but it’s possible. You lose that escape route the second you enter an overhead environment. You also lose light, your sense of direction, and freedom of movement. It’s a maze, underwater, in the pitch black. And there’s a pretty strict time limit, counted in steady breaths from your tanks.

After the official checklist is complete, I turn to my own personal rituals to steady me. I put my emotions away. I take a deep breath of the humid jungle air as I slip into the water, and focus my mind on the basics of the dive plan. The water takes the weight of my equipment off of my body and I will it to lessen the weight of the mission, too. Descend. Penetrate the cave. Locate the target. Retrieve the target. Ascend with the target. The generic language helps. I repeat it like a mantra as I begin breathing canned air, deflate my buoyancy vest, and start to descend. 

***

The walls of the cenote fly by as I let gravity pull me down. The only action I need to take is to clear my ears periodically as the pressure builds. As I approach the bottom, the water shifts from a bright tropical blue to a dark indigo. Despite my wetsuit, a heavy cold settles around me like wet wool.

Cenotes like this are notorious for cave diving deaths. Novices are attracted to the easy access and glimmering waters close to the surface. Most stay there, as they should. But a handful decide to explore beyond their abilities, lured by a flashing fish or an unusual geological formation. Then they see an interesting opening in the rock and decide a quick poke around with their cheap dive light couldn’t hurt. It can—and often does. 

That’s not to say that warnings aren’t given. There’s even a bouncer stationed at the cave entrance in cenotes like this—the Grim Reaper. I level out right before the sandy bottom and come face to face with him. His iconic visage is leering over a pile of bodies. Above him on the sign, in big block letters: “STOP: PREVENT YOUR DEATH. GO NO FURTHER.” 

The first time Dad took me cave diving, I was thirteen and barely Open Water Certified. He didn’t warn me at all. It was like taking a kid who just learned to ride a rusty bicycle and dropping them off on the autobahn. Different cenote, same sign—and he just frog-kicked right past it.

One of the cardinal rules of diving is that if anyone wants to call it, for any reason, you call it. When Dad turned back to me, all I wanted to do was give a thumbs up. Not in agreement—in our world, a thumbs up means up. Up to the surface, up to uncompressed air, up to normal weekend activities for a normal father and daughter. Instead I gave him the “ok” sign, and swam to meet him. He only took me a dozen feet into the cave. There was a small room right off the main tunnel with incredible stalactites, but all I wanted to look at was my gas gauge. I could feel myself taking quick little sips of air in rhythm with my galloping heart. Dad covered it with his hand and offered me an extra dive light with the other. When I took it he pointed two fingers at his eyes and then off into the chamber. Look, Jilly. I bounced the beam off of pink and orange crystals the size of my head until the motion of my hand slowed and my breathing followed. After a few minutes, he tugged my fin. Thumbs up.

When we were back topside, floating on the surface, I spat my regulator out. Before I could yell at him, he whooped with laughter and pulled me in for a hug. Our neoprene squeaked as he whispered in my ear. 

“That’s just a taste of it, Jillybean. More people have been on the moon than some of the places we’ll go.” 

He pushed away but kept his eyes on me. A few of his buddies were sitting on the lip of the cenote, dangling their feet, and he yelled back at them. 

“Jill got baptized today, boys!” 

They cheered, a few of them raising beer bottles in a toast. My cheeks reddened. Dad smiled and turned to swim to the edge. I knew then that whatever sickness he had, whatever drove him to do this—I’d just caught it, too.

*** 

The cave entrance is a few feet past the sign. An overhanging ledge protrudes above it, almost hiding it in midnight blue shadows. I switch on my lights, illuminating it like a crime scene, and locate the guideline.

Dad would have set this. He was always the one who went first, who pushed the farthest and the hardest. There was an unspoken rule on his expeditions that if you found any sign of an unexplored passageway—silt ripples, a clean rock wall, anything unusual—you noted it and moved on. He’d be the one to push through. To find whatever was there, whatever was just sitting in the dark, waiting to be discovered. 

When he was home between expeditions and I was too young to dive, we’d spend afternoons sitting together and flipping through old National Geographic magazines. I’d always pick the ones that featured him—there were dozens to choose from—and he was happy to reminisce about his adventures.

One day, he stopped at a photograph of two bizarre crustaceans.

“Look at them, Jilly. Beautiful.” Their bodies were so pale and translucent against the black water that I mistook the photo for an x-ray at first.

I looked at the caption and sounded out each word. Moving schools every year to chase Dad around the world had taken its toll—I was the worst reader in the second grade.

“B-blind. Cave. Sh-ri…shrimp! Blind cave shrimp. Ew. Weird.” 

“Open your mind, Jillybean.” He winked at me. “They’re perfectly adapted. They have exactly what they need to survive. To thrive, actually. And the rest?” He raised his hand and flicked his fingers, as if working eyeballs were as disposable as a spent cigarette butt.

I shivered. Natural selection was a foreign concept to me at that age. I could only picture normal creatures entering one of Dad’s caves and slowly shedding parts of themselves. Becoming more translucent the farther they went and the darker it got. Dad, ignorant to my unease, continued flipping through the magazine. 

“I’ll take you here someday,” he said, pointing to a photo of the cave shrimp’s habitat. A diver hung suspended in the photo, the rock walls only a few inches from them on all sides.

“I…I don’t think we’d both fit,” I said, scrambling to find an excuse that wouldn’t paint me as a coward. 

“‘Course we will, Jilly,” he said, turning the page. “We’ll just have to leave a few things behind.” 

*** 

I follow the line for a hundred feet before it ends at a junction. To the left, a wide opening. To the right, a narrow one. I knew from his expedition notes that Dad was pushing through the right passage, theorizing that it would connect this system with the larger Chac Mool cenote.

The opening is so small. To swim through it, I need to remove my tanks, push them ahead of me, and reattach them on the other side. It’s a relatively straightforward procedure, mechanically. But psychologically…moving your only air supply away from your body—seeing the hose, your literal lifeline, stretch as you push the tank into the darkness—it shrinks everything down to a pinprick. A single directive tenses every one of your muscles in preparation: get the fuck out of here. Never mind that there’s several hundred feet of solid rock between you and “out.” Even with all my experience, I still feel my jaw clench down hard on my regulator every time, enough that it’s sore for days afterwards. I allow my body this one release, this minor acknowledgement of my screaming survival instincts, and it appeases my lizard brain. I breathe steadily through the bear-trap and focus on the immediate next step.

This constriction is what makes this body recovery almost impossible. On the way back, I’ll need to guide the death-stiff body through the opening and the turn back to the main passage. I’d participated in several recoveries—almost every experienced cave diver has—but I’d never done one with my dad. It lent a certain irony to this entire endeavor.

It had been a point of contention between us, actually. By the time I was twenty, I was a full-fledged member of his expeditions. I had more experience than divers twice my age. I was his chosen partner for some of the hardest, most technical dives—but he’d never brought me on a body recovery. And there were plenty. 

“You need more experience,” he’d say when I volunteered. I confronted him after a straightforward recovery where he’d chosen a relatively green dive buddy. 

He took a long slug of his beer and answered my question with another. 

“What kills divers?” 

I rolled my eyes, but his prolonged eye contact suggested it wasn’t a rhetorical question. I gave in, and answered him.  

“Panic.”

He nodded.

“You’re a great diver, Jilly. I’ve seen you get through some tough spots. You know when to listen to your fear, and when to ignore it. You’ve got it popped in a nice little box.” He tapped his temple, the beer bottle leaving condensation on his cheek. 

I flushed. Before my dives I’d gotten into the habit of clearing my mind and packing my emotions and anxiety away in a little chest, deep in my brain. I’d visualize the entire thing, including a lock and key. I’d never told my dad, or anyone, about this little ritual.

“Seeing a body like that…” He sighed. “It can make a little hole in that box. Get enough holes, and that fear starts getting real loud. And that’s when you’re in trouble.” 

I considered this before replying. The whole thing had taken on the air of a pop quiz I was desperate to ace. 

“So, I need a stronger box?” 

He laughed. 

“Sure.” He drained the last of his beer. “Or less to put in it. Either way.” He set the bottle down and gave me a kiss on the forehead on his way to the door.

*** 

I find him on the ceiling of the third chamber. The water is completely opaque. Caves like these have ultra-fine clay on the bottom, and it can stay suspended for several days after being disturbed. The only evidence he’s here are his dive lights. They pierce the darkness, eerie spotlights cutting through the silt. Locate the target. Retrieve the target. The generic words have lost what power they had on the surface. My jaw clenches down again, even harder this time, as I make my way towards the body. The chest in my mind quavers, its contents roiling. I mentally double check its locks before kicking up to him. I avoid his face and focus on his arms, locating and removing the dive computer on his wrist. The official incident report will dissect and analyze every number on this machine to calculate the factors that finally brought down the indomitable Vincent Riley. I scan the rest of him and mentally catalog his remaining gear, his gas gauges, and finally his writing slate. The latter two are both empty.

Once, after a basic recovery, he’d come back with frustration simmering off him like heat on asphalt. The diver had become lost in the cave system after an amateur error. They’d wandered off the main fixed line without setting a jump, and had been unable to find their way back. I assumed Dad was upset about such an obvious breach of safety protocols leading to a preventable death, but he was quick to correct me. 

“When I found him, his slate had a message on it. Sorry mom, sorry dad…” He scoffed. “Nonsense.” It was a level of callousness that felt extreme, even for him. I tried to keep my expression neutral, but he must have seen a twitch of surprise. 

“He gave up, Jill,” he said. “He was less than a dozen feet from the line when I found him. How long did it take him to write that note, I wonder?”

The memory hangs in the water with me alongside the clay as I look at Dad’s empty slate. I grab his hand, intertwining his stiff fingers with mine. This is the first time I have held my father’s hand. The revelation doubles the pressure of the water and the encroaching rock walls until I worry I might be crushed by the weight of it all and remain here forever—a footnote to my father, even in death. I close my eyes and visualize the chamber expanding, pushing outwards. I convince my amygdala that this tomb is a cocoon. A place of becoming. Suspended and blind, I take a risk and unlock my chest. Its contents seep out and it’s not the tsunami I’d been warned of, but a gentle flow that laps and trickles.

I open my eyes, and turn my father’s head to look into his.

‍ ‍You’d be so mad at me for changing the dive plan, Dad. But I’m going to, just this once.

I squeeze his hand a final time before dropping it and following the line back the way I came. Without a body, ascending is easy—but still slow. I have to stop several times to decompress, and while I wait, I dissemble and reshape each memory, littering the cave with the scraps. I’m left with new ones, and marvel at them as if they’re a sparkling new underwater discovery.

A dad who believed his daughter could follow in his footsteps. Who spent his weekends initiating her into a mysterious cult, showing her a world that most people will never see. A dad who encouraged her to be strong, but still tried to protect her. A dad who didn’t stop to say goodbye because he fought to the bitter end. 

The support team is waiting and their shouts assault my ears as soon as I break the surface. I swim to the ladder and wave off their questions as they help me clamber out. I lie back on the grass, exhausted, while they swarm over me like ants.

“What happened, Jill?”

“Did you find him?”

“Where is he?”

“I found him,” I answer. “He’s exactly where he wants to be.”

They peel off my tanks, my mask, my wetsuit. I stand up, and leave it all behind.