Too Deep For Children: A Memoir

Over the course of July’s creative writing workshop at the Paris American Academy, I had the pleasure of working on fiction and nonfiction essays with several talented students. Many of these essays were stellar, including one that was picked up for publication before the workshop even ended (more about that soon). Many more stand a good chance of being published by magazines and newspapers in coming months, and I’ve decided to kick off this publication process by sharing one of these stories here.

The essay below, “Too Deep For Children”, by Joyce Hardy-McDonald, is a straighforward and chilling memoir of Jacob’s Well, a dangerous Texas sinkhole that was once used for recreation by children and cave divers alike. Joyce, who is 79 years old, took this tale through four workshop drafts — cutting out some details, adding others, and toying with dramatic structure until she came up with the tale below. Using happy family memories of Jacob’s Well to offset the horror of her last visit there, Joyce utilizes a water motif to underscore shock and sadness of the drownings she and her family witnessed. Here’s her tale.

TOO DEEP FOR CHILDREN

By Joyce Hardy-McDonald

Two sets of bubbles rose up through the clear, blue water to the top and popped as they hit the sunshine. The wives of the two scuba divers lay on towels, sunning themselves on the concrete retaining wall around part of Jacob’s Well. Above the opposite side was a high cliff with layers of fallen boulders piled along the edge of the well. The headwaters of the Frio River flowed from the spring, all the way downstream through huge cypress trees, whose roots jutted up like knobby knees along the banks, to our cabin and beyond.

Tom, our five children and I had toted a picnic lunch down the path to the well that morning. The children, Tommy, 14, Lynn, 12, Buck, 10, Mike, 8, and Larry the youngest at 5, insisted we go swimming there at least twice a week. Usually we had the place to ourselves, but not today. Around noon, four strangers had come walking down a brushy footpath from a make-shift parking lot above the backwater pond of Jacob’s Well.

Earlier, the children had been jumping off the high boulders into the well feet first, diving for red coke cans or gold beer cans, testing their bravado and their lungs with their daring-do. The water was so clear that we could see whatever they threw in to retrieve, even though that first ledge where the cans landed was fifty feet below the surface. They would wait patiently to jump in, some doing the canon ball, some the can-opener, the younger ones just proud to be able to jump out far enough from the jutting rocks to land in the middle of the well. It was a right of passage. Tom and I floated around on the outskirts of the well trying to act relaxed and not at all like two lifeguards, which we were.

When the two couples arrived on the scene, all action in the water ceased. The two men began unloading their equipment while the two ladies spread their towels on the retaining wall and settled down to sunbathe. Tommy, Lynn, Buck and Mike, bursting with questions, immediately swam over to the wall where the men were sorting their gear. Tom and I pulled ourselves up onto the wall, the only place to sit, motioning Larry to follow us. Jetta, who was never far from the kids, swam after Larry and scrambled up onto the wall, too.


The men were excited, laughing and kidding each other as they began to put on their wet suits and check their air tanks and gauges.

“Are those rubber suits going to keep you dry?” asked Tommy.

“Yes, but mostly they are going to keep us warm. It’s very cold down there.” said the taller of the two, as he pulled the hood of the wet suit over his head. Now only his face showed.

“What’s that thing?” asked Buck.

“This is my air tank and this is the hose I put in my mouth so I can suck in air and not water,” answered the tall dark-haired man, continuing to screw things together and check fittings.

“You mean you can’t breathe through your nose in that thing?”

“No, my nose is up here inside these goggles, pinched off.”

“We dive for cans down at the bottom of the well,” said Mike, “and we don’t hold our noses shut.”

“Yes,” laughed the stocky one who looked like a football player, “but we go down much farther than you do, hundreds of feet below that first level that you can see.”

“Why?” asked Lynn.

The stocky one squatted down, smiling at Lynn and said, “Because we are explorers and there’s a big cavern way, way down in the earth that we want to find and look for the spring that feeds Jacob’sWell.”

“How can you see way, way down there?”

“They have flashlights, stupid.” said Tommy. “Big ones, see?”

By now the men were in chest-deep water, putting on their tanks, adjusting dials, hoses and watches. The last thing they did was to swish their face masks around in the cold water and put them on. Then they waved at their wives, stepped to the edge of the drop off, kicked a few times and disappeared.

The boys sat on the edge of the wall, dangling their feet in the water, and patiently waited for the divers to surface. I called for them to come and eat lunch. They climbed up to the rock ledge where Lynn was helping me spread our picnic. Tom was putting a Bandaid on Larry’s skinned knee, and we were all keeping our eyes on the water. Over an hour passed, lunch was over and the boys were getting antsy. They wanted to jump off the ledge into the well, but we said no. It would have stirred up sediment for one thing; mostly, we didn’t want anything to spoil our birds-eye view of the divers coming up.

It was getting hot on the rock and there was no shade. Another half hour passed and we were all tired of just sitting, but no one wanted to go home. Buck and Mike were standing on
the edge of the rock with their daddy when Buck tugged on Tom’s arm and whispered, “Daddy, the bubbles have stopped.”

*

Jacob’s Well is north of Wimberley, which is eighteen miles north of San Marcos, Texas up Ranch Road 12. Our family had been coming to Jacob’s Well Ranch for the past six summers, if you can call it a ranch. Six cabins that were about as close to living in a tent as I care to be. It was a great place for kids because we lived in the water from ten in the morning until sunset. I packed lunch, snacks, and drinks to last the day, and down we would go with our innertubes, floats, life preservers (during the early years,) towels, fishing poles, buckets, books and Jetta, our dog.. There was plenty of shade, plenty of sunshine and plenty of water, so we dressed in our bathing suits for the day.

There was a picnic table and metal lawn chairs in the shallows, a hammock between two cypress trees, even a small waterfall just a few yards downstream. When Larry, our youngest, was still crawling, we would put his play pen in the shallows, too, where about an inch of water ran through it and he was a happy camper.

Not far upstream, the water was deep; there was a long knotted rope tied to the top limb of a cypress where the brave ones swung out over the water and dropped in, usually with a Tarzan yell. I could never get used to the coldness of the water; when I swam, it was torture to put the arm back in the water that I had just lifted out. Even when I floated in an innertube, it took my butt a while to numb up, but as long as the sun was burning my topside, I was OK. The cold water never seemed to bother the children.

We stayed in a one room screened-in cabin with flaps to drop down if it rained. At least it had cold running water and an indoor John. Our landlord, Mr. Longcope, had a weird sense of humor, nailing notes everywhere, saying things like “Don’t hit your fool head on the damn cabinet doors,” “Not responsible for your stupidity,” “Coffee and doughnuts in the Main House between 5 and 5:15 am.” On his front door were nailed two signs painted in black that read: “Office hours vary, if I’m here I’m here, if I’m not I’m not.”

The shower house was on the path leading down to the river and it, too, had only cold running water, which certainly made baths painful. Most of us preferred to use the bar of soap on a rope in the river. One day Lynn came running up to the cabin, yelling, “Mama, you’ve gotta come see Mr. Longcope’s new signs in the shower house.” I followed her to the latest comments by our resident comedian. The one on the door read “Scorpions love water too, so keep track of your damn feet.” Over the shower stall, one said “Don’t expect hot water, this ain’t the Hilton.” Somehow, the notes made up for the lack of amenities.

Everyone had favorite things to do in this place where the days were full of discoveries, imagination and ingenuity. Tommy could always find some girls in the other cabins to hang out with, Lynn persisted until she was finally allowed to drive the old Plymouth around the open fields behind our cabin, loping along like a jack rabbit as she tried to learn to use a stick shift, Buck was a rock hound, Mike was our fisherman, and Larry rerouted the river several times, rearranging the waterfalls with his dam of rocks. I was content to sit with my feet in the water and read books or write in my notebook, Tom loved the hammock for sleeping.

Most nights after supper, we sat under the stars and sang or told ghost stories. Other camp families joined us, bringing beer, soda water, lawn chairs and kids. Sometimes when the kids got bored, they begged the grownups to let them go on their scary trek to a nearby hill.

“Can we climb Old Baldy?”

“Yea!” they all hollered, and off they would go, a small trail of flashlights bobbing down the road. Walking through the deserted, overgrown cemetery with its headstones leaning at all angles was the scary part of the trip, flashlights whirling eerie shadows of ghosts all around them as their feet swished the long grass into whispers of the dead. Lots of screams and laughter echoed through the old burial grounds of early settlers. When they reached the top of Old Baldy, after climbing 156 concrete steps, they all blinked their flashlights at their parents, still sitting in their lawn chairs, and we blinked back at them as a signal that we saw them, and then they bobbed back through the dark night.

Those were the highlights of our quiet summers at Jacob’s Well Ranch. It has fallen into disrepair now, even though it didn’t have far to go, we thought it would always be there. Today the well is covered with barbed wire criss-crossing the heart of it. As far as I know it has been closed off to the public for many years. Little did we know as we sat on the high ledge, waiting for the divers to surface, that it would be our last summer there.

*

“Oh my God, Beth, I don’t see any bubbles,” yelled Jan, only moments after Buck had noticed it.

“It’s been an hour and a half since they went down. They have more air than that,” answered Beth. Both were kneeling now, peering into the well.

“Maybe the bubbles are going up somewhere else, like maybe they found that other cave they were looking for with an opening somewhere else.”

By this time, Tom was scrambling down the rocks and on to the concrete wall. The kids and I were not far behind.

“Did your husbands tell you what they were going to do after they got down there?” asked Tom when he reached the two wives.

“Yes,” said Beth, “there’s a large cavern down there that they had heard about. It’s kind of a mystery. No one knows much about it, that’s why they wanted to look for it. The other divers who told them about Jacob’s Well had given up, saying it was too dangerous.”

“How much air did they carry?”

“Two hours, I think,” answered Jan, her face drained of color and eyes dilated with fear.

“Everything will be all right. They’re good divers, honey,” Beth said, putting her arm around her friend’s shoulder, “they’ve done this a hundred times before, remember?”

“But not here in this spooky old place, it gave me the creeps the minute we got here. It’s haunted or something.”

The minutes were ticking by rapidly now. We were all staring into Jacob’s Well wishing for bubbles to rise, praying for bubbles to rise, but none did. Jan was crying. Beth was looking at Tom, pleading with her eyes.

“I’ll go find a phone and call the fire department, maybe they will know whom to send. I don’t know where the nearest phone is, but I’ll find one.”

It was an hour before the rescue team arrived and began to ask questions. Two divers and two medics came running down the long path from the road, heavy equipment in hand. The divers wasted no time donning their gear and going down in the well to find the two men.

Forty five minutes dragged by. I could hear hearts beating. The wait was excruciating. No one said a word but the medics who were talking quietly to Tom, telling him that over the years there had been five divers die in Jacob’s Well. Finally, the rescue divers surfaced. The medics ran to help, seeing that one of them had a body in his arms. The other one climbed out of the water and walked over to Beth and Jan. Tom and I stood beside them.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am. We found one of the men caught under an outcropping of rock in the small chamber, but not the other one or the tanks. Somebody had unscrewed the iron grate that the state had ordered cover that small opening into the cavern, we don’t know when that happened, but that’s where the trouble was. We assume that they took off their air tanks so that they could get through the small opening. One of them squeezed through into the cavern. The other one must have pushed one of the tanks through to him, then pushed his own through the hole intending to follow, but that one must have panicked without air or his buddy. I guess we’ll never know the whole story.”

Jan and Beth stood frozen in disbelief and shock. I stood close to them for support, ready for comfort, anything, I felt so helpless. I was afraid Jan was going to collapse. She became hysterical and cried, clinging to Beth’s shoulder. Otherwise, silence hung over us like a shroud. The children were still standing on the wall under the ledge, they had not moved since the divers came up. They stood close to one another in a little clump, Lynn was holding Larry’s hand, Tommy had his arms around Buck and Mike. I decided they needed my comfort as much as Jan and Beth did and went to be with them. I wished with all my heart that they hadn’t seen the body being pulled from the water. None of us would ever forget that horrible moment.

Tom stayed until the rescue team left with the body. Then he drove Jan and Beth to a phone, and finally to the motel in town where they were staying. I walked the children down the dark path along the river and back to the cabin where the day had started with so much laughter and where that night they cried themselves to sleep.

Posted by | Comments Off on Too Deep For Children: A Memoir  | August 1, 2005
Category: Travel Writing

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