Unknown—the week's previous misfortunes were reduced to insignificance in an instant.  I thought, “Seventy feet...that’s not a rescue.  That’s retrieval.”

The grim vision of what lay ahead uncoupled its chaotic sprawl before me one boxcar at a time, each concealing an answer to some dread, unspoken question.  Still no caboose in sight, no signal of a limit to the disaster.  All was conjecture and anxious anticipation.  And strangely, within this clarifying urgency, I began to relax, focus, and ten minutes later I was on the road, Sloansward. 

I felt better, purposeful.  The exhaustion from a marathon retyping of the grotto newsletter slipped away like a shed skin.  I was reborn, filled with a purpose far outweighing my prior petty inauspiciousness.  And, despite the unattractive prospects in front of me, to be raised beyond the doldrums of quotidian misery was a welcome boon.  Though a tad behind schedule, everything thus far promised had been accomplished.  Against maddening and depressing vicissitudes (the disk containing the entire summer issue of the newsletter had been stolen when I briefly left the UK computer lab!), the Cricket had been compiled and printed, the meeting organized, replete with handouts.  And now this.  What better baptism from the trivial than an honest-to-God cave rescue?

Seventy feet—the figure kept thrumming through my mind as I slam-dunked my gear together—not even really possible in the Big Room without the most unlikely (e.g. insectivorous) locomotion.  But I assumed that this translated to “a real long way down.”  Certainly that was possible.  The South Overlook was my first suspicion, the North