six months alone in a cave

I’ve been thinking a lot of about solitude lately. A few months ago I tried to do a cleansing fast and successfully did three days without food before I happily succumbed to a glass of orange juice. Three days isn’t very long, but it is the longest I have ever gone without food and it was tough! But what is the longest I’ve ever been alone? It was three days on a backpacking trip and on the third day some nasty microorganism attacked my stomach and I got terribly dehydrated and was lucky to meet some hikers who shared their electrolytes with me. Three days alone, that’s it! What would it be like to be alone for a month? or a year? What organ would that cleanse? These thoughts were mulling about in my head when I found an article in a 1975 National Geographic about a french geologist who spent 6 months alone in a cave. Now six months of solitude is pretty intense, but to undertake those six months in a cave, cut off from all time, with the stale darkness… that’s madness.

siffre

Well, not quite madness. Michel Siffre subjected himself to such extreme conditions by choice, as part of an experiment to learn more about how and why we sleep, and how our bodies react when they’re cut off from the diurnal cycles that regulate our sleep/wake periods. In the finest sense, Siffre was an explorer. An explorer of ‘liminal spaces’ as universe would say. While he ventured no more than a few hundred yards into the cave, the psychological spaces he journeyed through were some of the most demanding and treacherous any human being has ever recorded.

cave

Throughout the course of the 177 days he spent beneath ground Siffre was connected via a battery of electrodes, rectal thermometer, and intercom to the surface. This was before wireless technology so he was literally on a tether of cables the entire time. This tether limited his forays out into the cave and essentially confined him to his small camp. Intercom communication was kept brief to avoid giving Siffre any clue of what the hour was on the surface. He was supplied with fresh water and a sufficient number of pre-packaged meals from NASA to last him through his ordeal. Every day he had to complete a number of routine tests; firing a pellet gun at a target, aerobic exercise on a stationary bicycle, and other procedures that measured his mental acuity, memory, and manual dexterity. Siffre also shaved daily and saved all the trimmed whiskers for later analysis. When Siffre felt tired, he signaled the surface and they turn off the lights. When he awoke, he called and they turned them back on.

camp

This highly structured environment provided a way to pass the days, and in the excerpts of his journal printed in the article his initial entries are stoic, hopeful, and full of phrases like “this marvelous grotto” and “the food delights me.” He read to pass the time and found projects such as sweeping and dusting to occupy him. Initially he had planned on music being a vital distraction, but his record player was broken. I wonder if he might have avoided some of the later psychological trouble if music had been with him. In the first week he discovered that his cave was inhabited by a colony of mice and rather than risk them getting into his food he set traps for them each night. Things were going well but by the 77th day, he had begun to deteriorate.

mealsandguns

Interestingly, because Siffre defines his days as sleep/wake cycles, when the 77th calendar day was marked, he had only gone through 63 cycles. At that point his memory began to fail, and unless he wrote a thought down he immediately forgot it. Days were lost, his mind incapable of capturing and keeping experiences. Then two cycles later, he read in a book how Corentin Queffelec emerged from a grueling 3,850ft deep cave exploration and realized that he was 40 years old and could never do that again. In the isolation of the cave time collapsed on Siffre as he read those lines and he panicked, unsure of how many months or years he had been beneath the earth and terrified that he was wasting his entire life in the cave. He grabbed the intercom and called the surface, begging to let the experiment end. His partner on the other end calmly reassured him that it was okay, he was doing fine… and then hung up the phone.

Siffre lay on his cot for several cycles, unable to perform his daily tasks.

Then, on the 72nd cycle (86th day) he believed he had found the perfect solution to his suffering… suicide. He would make it look like an accident so his wife would get the insurance money. He planned an elaborate scheme of electrocution, but at the last minute realized that if he died the enormous debt he had accrued funding his research would be passed on to his already poor parents. He abandoned the idea.

Nearly two months passed, each day a grueling test of willpower. I can’t imagine that loneliness, that disorientation. Then, on the 130th cycle (156th calendar day) he scraped mildew from a magazine and read that bat urine and saliva can transmit rabies through the air. For the past 5 months he had been breathing in the foul ash of dried bat guano and he immediately panicked. He noticed a rash. Gray hairs in his beard. Then Siffre unsteadily scrawled these words in his journal;

“When you find yourself alone, isolated in a world totally without time, face-to-face with yourself, all the masks that you hide behind–those to preserve your own illusions, those that project them before others–finally fall, sometimes brutally.”

Then, during the night of the 135th cycle (calendar day 162) he heard a mouse, and rather than try to kill it, he rejoiced that there was something else alive in the cave! He named it Mus, and spent days watching it, slowly gaining its trust with dried peas. Then three days later he tried to capture the mouse so that he could keep it as his companion. He wrote in his journal; “For the first time since entering the cave, I feel a surge of joy.”

But his physical dexterity had deteriorated to such an alarming degree that when he tried to bring a casserole dish down over the mouse he clumsily smashed it beneath the edge.

“Mus lies on his side. I stare at him with swelling grief. The whimpers die away. He is still. Desolation overwhelms me.”

He suffered through 9 more days, and then on August 10th he received a phone call that told him the experiment was over. The six months were up.

chart

What an ordeal. Analysis of the data later revealed that Siffre had slipped into several sleep/wake periods that were 48 hours rather than our 24. It reminds me that there are as many ways to sleep as there are people and sleep norms are predicated more on culture than human physiology. Despite Siffre’s efforts, much about sleep is still unknown. You can read more about that here.
Siffre pushed himself to the utter limits of what is humanly possible and in doing so stripped his psyche down to the most bare, raw core of self. The complex network of social affect, dissemulation, and studied poses that we present to the world was slowly starved to death by the negation of time and lack of human interaction. I think that the need to maintain a layered self is especially symptomatic of our society that is thick with social networks and rife with the desire to belong, almost religiously, to a clique. We want to belong so terribly that we are willing to alter our personality to do so.

Siffre’s experience in the cave makes me wonder if the true self, the theoretical hard nut of “Me” inside of “me” is only realized when I interact with everyone in the exact same way. What if I succeeded and I was capable of being exactly the same person to everyone I ever met, but I didn’t like who I was? Is that possible? Maybe we have to be different for everyone in order to keep us from having to approach the parts of ourselves that we haven’t learned how to love, or use. In any case, Siffre went through something extraordinary in that cave, and you would think that after such an ordeal he would stay happily on the surface with his family…. but no!

As of the year 2000 Siffre was back in a cave, this time in France, once again spending untold weeks beneath the surface trying to figure out what makes us… us. Or maybe he found something addictive in the caves and the solitude, maybe he found something that he knows for certain is him.

December 21st 2006 Posted to Uncategorized, exploration, geographic

* Comments(3)

the Tarahumaras

I first came across the Tarahumaras in the May 1976 issue of National Geographic Magazine and the following information and photographs reflect how the author, James Norman, found the Tarahumaras at that time.

The Tarahumaras (they call themselves Raramuri) are a group of indigenous people who live in in the high sierra mountains of central Mexico and are quite possibly the best runners in the world. Living in such desolate, rugged country where the villages are often separated by many miles, the Tarahumaras have integrated running into nearly ever aspect of their society. The author describes meeting a Tarahumaran man who was jogging down a steep mountain path looking for his lost goat. The author had seen the goat a few miles back and the man went bounding off down the trail. A few hours later the same man came jogging back up the steep path, having just climbed well over 2000ft with the goat across his shoulders. The man is neither winded nor sweaty and the author asks to take his pulse. He finds it a steady 70 beats per minute. The Tarahumaras have been known to hunt deer by simply chasing it on foot for days until the deer collapsed from exhaustion. When the author asked a Tarahumaran why they were running, he invariably got the reply, “to get there.”

A semi-nomadic people they grow crops of corn and beans but will migrate from the plateaus to the valleys during the cold winters. They have no typical dwelling structure and utilize caves, overhangs, and rough houses made of stone or wood. Their society is made up of smaller social groups called ranchos that are in turn composed of five or six families. Scattered across 80 square miles or more, these ranchos will democratically elect a governor who, in conjunction with shamans, settle disputes, heal the sick, and counteract spells cast by powerful wizards. The tarahumaras practice a form of social welfare called korima where the “more fortunate are expected to take care of the less fortunate in times of need.”


An integral component of Tarahumaran society is a fermented corn beer, called tesguino. This drink is used extensively during the so called “beer cult.” In all, the Tarahumaras usually have 90 or more prolonged festivals during the year and each festival requires the preparation of enormous quantities of tesguino. The author estimated that in all one third of the year is spent preparing, drinking, and recuparating from tesguino. The author speaks rather derisively of the “beer cult” as being a “strange and sad phenomenon” that is “costly” in terms of grain and time. He does note that beer drinking is integral to the social relationships in their society and often debts are repaid in cups of corn beer, drunk on the spot. One of the many types of festivals the Tarahumaras have revolve around the game of rarajipari where two teams of the Tarahumaras both run a grueling course of mountain trails kicking a small wooden ball along with them. Some of these races can last two or three days straight. Friends will run along with them carrying torches at night, and the runners will wear rattles around their waists to keep themselves from falling asleep.

In the 1974 Olympics two Tarahumaras men represented Mexico in the 26.5 mile marathon. They lost by several minutes, but no one had told them the length of the race and when they reached the finished line they kept running until someone could explain to them that the race was over. They stopped, amazed that the marathon had ended and exclaimed “Too short! Too short!”

When the article was written there were about 40,000 Tarahumaras living scattered throughout the mountains. The tourism trade was bringing increased pressure to take part in capitalism, and gold mining companies had tricked some of them into forfeiting their land by taking advantage of their inability to speak Spanish. A new highway was being built, a new church going in, inter-marriage with Mexicans was on the rise, and change seemed inevitable.

Today there are between 50,000 and 70,000 Tarahumaras. They have become more integrated in modern society, but the codes and traditions that mark their culture have remained largely intact. They are being slowly usurped from the valleys as the more fertile land is taken for permanent agriculture by Mexicans, and they are retreating further into the high plateaus of the Sierras. The majority of them have officially converted to Christianity, but still maintain many of their traditional religious customs. Some groups still hold the belief that every soul is reincarnated three times and the final life is always a moth. Once the moth dies the soul is gone forever. Modern archaeologists have noted that the Tarahumaras are some of the most honest people ever studied and suggest that years of selection have actually altered the brain to exclude the capacity to lie.

Clearly, no culture is capable of existing indefinitely without change. But the Tarahumaras seem to be successful in managing how that external change is integrated into their indigenous customs. There are more tennis shoes being worn by the Tarahumaras, but they don’t dedicate any more of their time to working for money to buy those shoes. It’s an uneasy middle ground, for sure, and cultures often disintegrate when they attempt to coexist in both the capitalist structure and the traditional subsistence lifestyle. In the modern system time is used to earn money, and the money then used to purchase the necessities of life but in the subsistence mode time is used directly to procure what is needed. Rather than working for the railroad to earn money to buy corn, it is grown. And as tourism and television bring the external material complexities nearer to the Tarahumaras they must strike a balance between the acquisition of material possessions and the ability to exist in their landscape.

The relationship between the Tarahumaras and their landscape is vital to the protection of their society from unwanted external influence. The rugged mountain trails that made them exquisite runners are also their best defense. The small area of arable ground available to the Tarahumaras also limits the amount of crops they can grow, which in turn limits the capacity for wealth accumulation. Combined with the tribal welfare system there is almost no desire to permanently accumulate wealth. There are relatively few jobs available in the region, and the Tarahumaras seem to naturally eschew long term employment. Perhaps their instinctive honesty also makes it difficult for them to take part in modern capitalism where it is integral to be able to both lie and discern when others are lying. Often when reading old National Geographics I come across a portrait of an indigenous culture and when I research their current situation I often find that they have declined steadily in the last 30-50 years. Yet the Tarahumaras seem to be growing and resisting many of the changes that contact with external forces bring. Their land, their honesty, their beer, and their amazing ability to run seem to be, at least for the moment, keeping them one step ahead of assimilation.

November 19th 2006 Posted to Uncategorized, geographic, indigenous, ancient, world

* Comments(1)