Between the dives.
I met Artur in October 2008 on the narrow, traffic-filled main street of some unmemorable town in north Fermanagh (probably Pettigoe, Kesh or Irvinestown). He had bussed up from Dublin for the SUICRO symposium, and Paul and I had offered him a lift for the last leg of the journey to Lusty Beg, where he was to give an eagerly awaited talk on his record-breaking dive in Pollatoomary that evening. His dives apart, Artur was remarkable too for his determination to dive while both unemployed and without his own transport, relying on friends for lifts or more often using public transport. The following year I too became immersed in this life-on-the-road, encouraged by Artur and necessitated by unemployment and the loss of my car. From our trip to Creevy Rising in February 2009 to our final dive together in Carrickbeg in May 2010 our dives and cave trips are well documented. Rather than rehearse our sometimes intense, sometimes painful, mostly fun underground explorations, I want to recall some of the time between the caves. Our lives on the surface, often hidden in our accounts, were as fun, intense, and as occasionally painful as our time spent diving grotty sumps and digging squalid passages.
Late in the evening at Lusty Beg, Artur and I sat at a sticky table in a dark corner of the bar, and talked about the possibilities for diving in the north of Ireland. This led us to arranging our first joint bus trip, from Belfast and Dublin respectively, to Carrickmacross. Meeting up at the stop on a sunny main street we loaded our bags onto our backs and Artur’s folding sack trolley (I would soon acquire my own), and hiked the several miles out of town to Creevy Rising. The trip took longer than expected, and I missed the bus to Dundalk and returned to Dublin with Artur that evening. We sat at the back of the bus, alternating between tiredness after the days’ exertions and elation at the magnitude of our find; the water oozed out of my wetsuit, out of the tackle bag, and dribbled down the aisle. There followed many such trips with Artur to Fermanagh and Monaghan, fitting our caving around bus timetables and routes, and with our signing-on days at the dole offices.
As we started surveying Creevy in May, we met the folks at McCabe’s Plant Hire, and got permission to camp in the nearby meadow just upstream of the cave. That evening, just as the office was closing, Artur nipped up to get some water to make tea, and he returned with the offer of the worker’s canteen to eat and sleep in. Now that we had a free base we planned multi-day trips to the county, working on the Creevy survey and exploring further afield. We would arrive in Carrickmacross around lunchtime, go caving, and often at dusk or later leave our wetsuits drying in the meadow and walk up to the workshop, petting the guard dog on the way. After microwaving some pizza we would sit around drinking tea and conversing into the night (wet undergarments drying on the radiators), before fitting ourselves to sleep around the table and chairs. When we would get bored of Creevy we checked out caves further away, sometimes walking for miles in wetsuits. One night we hiked into the town to get food, and sat on a window sill around midnight, eating a Chinese and arguing heatedly about whether the novels of Katie Price constituted literature. The local people got to know us, and would smile and wave as we hiked in or out of Carrickmacross with our trolleys, others offered us lifts, and an employee of McCabe’s told us that we had been accepted as members of the community. It was a very rewarding way to cave, and we got much deeper into the community than we would have if we had travelled by car and stayed only for the day.
Our other main haunt was the Aghnahoo cottage on the Marlbank, where we would again live for days at time, subsisting mainly on pasta. Soon there was a clutter of our kit in cottage – lead weights stacked on the shelves, a tangle of polypropylene under the bench, cylinders under the table. Our evenings were often late, and the mornings even later (getting up was not one of our strong points). We would sit around the fire – always a large one – discussing the Caves of Fermanagh and Cavan, planning, theorising, drying and sometimes singeing our wet kit, occasionally drinking when someone was silly enough to leave alcohol in the cupboard. Eventually we would crawl into our sleeping bags, continuing to talk, and argue over whose turn it was to fuel the fire into the wee small hours. It was to the ‘Hoo we returned with relief following our nearly disastrous dive to the Monastir Way in May, where we were fed and patched up by fellow cavers. It was to the ‘Hoo we returned following the Bloody Sunday in Aghinrawn Cave, when Artur realised the reason for my white face when he looked in the mirror. Sitting with him in the Erne Hospital that night, as we ate tea and toast, he asked the nurse for the bus timetable so he could get to Altnagelvin Hospital for further surgery to his head wound; the nurse looked at him askance as she told him they would provide an ambulance.
A few scattered memories to be sure, but for me as pleasant as our caving was from our first to our last cave together. From drunken discussions about the meaning of life and why he was driven to do what he did, heated arguments about the inconsequential and the important, and his hair-let-down shenanigans, to his underground focus and drive, Artur was never less than a fantastic person to know. It was a privilege not only to cave with him but to live with him between the dives, to share life and his passion for it. Irish caving and diving today is so much the richer and more vibrant as a result of his commitment to it. Artur would never let himself be stopped, continuing sometimes against the odds because he had to know: what was behind the next boulder; what was in and beyond the cold, dark water; what was in his soul.
"...what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time? If I defer the grief i will diminish the gift..." Eavan Boland
