The Boys in the Cave Read online

  The Wild Boars, eighty-four strong, were separated into three age groups: under-thirteens, under-fifteens, and under-seventeens. They were short on finances but long on grit and teamwork: They’d practice up to twenty hours a week, hitting the pitch several days a week for a couple of hours and then on weekends often spending whole days together. Drilling and scrimmaging would last most of Saturday morning, and the rest of the day would often be spent on team-building exercises. Since many of the boys had bikes, sometimes they’d ride places with Coach Ek.

  If Head Coach Nok was the general, Coach Ek was his friendly lieutenant—with his smiling eyes and chirpy voice, he was more big brother than drill sergeant. He had the perfect temperament to train the under-thirteen group, which he had been doing for about three years. The veterans of the team would sleep over at the modest home he shared with his aunt. He was very close with some of the boys; often when eleven-year-old Titan’s parents went out of town, they’d leave Titan in the care of the coach.

  Before big games, the former monk would lead them in the Buddhist meditation practice of vipassana, which focuses on mindfulness breathing and the understanding of the ever-changing and impermanent nature of reality. When he wasn’t coaching he would do odd jobs at the Wat Doi Wao temple, where he had been a monk. The temple practiced the central Buddhist pillar of “loving-kindness,” or benevolence to others. The monks were gentle with all of nature’s creatures—especially humans. Harsh words were rarely spoken to the boys, and corporal punishment was taboo. In many ways, Coach Ek was the focus of many of the boys’ social lives, and he would be seen tousling their hair and joking around with them.

  Perhaps the most striking thing about Coach Ek was his cheeriness despite an early life marked by suffering. A member of the Tai Lue minority that roams the mountains between Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos, he was born stateless and remained stateless. Thai was not even his first language. His family had been part of the working poor, his father a cook in a local restaurant; when an epidemic swept through their village sometime in 2003, it first claimed his little brother, then his mother, then his father.

  A couple of years after his parents died, the coach’s aunt sent him to a monastery. For centuries, Buddhist temples in Southeast Asia have attracted poor young boys seeking free education and steady meals. They are taught their letters, but also Buddhist discipline. For the next decade, as he learned the teachings of Buddhism, Ek’s stomach had growled between the noontime meal of rice and a soup or stew and the next meal the following morning. Buddhist monks in Thailand believe in eating only twice a day, a meal at sunrise and another at noon. Anything more would be decadent. This daily fasting isn’t predicated on self-flagellation. Rather, Buddhist monks believe that deprivation enables them to focus on their practice, on meditation. The goal, handed down from the teachings of the Buddha himself five hundred years before Christ, is to unshackle monks from the constraints of desire. The Buddha knew how we all feel before dinner, craving that burger or nightly tot of whiskey. Strip that away and you can focus. So after the low rumble of pre-meal chants Ek—like his fellow apprentice monks sitting on the floor in front of wide knee-high tables—would ladle fat mounds of steaming rice into his bowl.

  After nearly a decade as a monk, he now enjoyed the freedom of life beyond the temple. One of his special rites of passage was taking the boys to the Tham Luang cave, about a half-hour bike ride from the pitch. A week earlier, some of the team members who had formed an intra-team bicycle group posted messages on their Facebook page that they’d be riding out to the cave on Saturday. The cave offered a refuge from the simmering heat and—especially appealing to Ek, the former Buddhist monk—detox from the IV drip of cell phone signals upon which the boys were hooked. The cave walls jammed those jangly ringtones and the chirps of incoming messages until only silence and togetherness remained.

  On Saturday, June 23, Head Coach Nok had live-streamed part of the team’s intramural scrimmage on Facebook, and then had gone home, unaware that some of the boys had planned to go to the cave with Assistant Coach Ek. Once practice had ended around noon, the boys ducked under the rusted rail surrounding the pitch and crossed the street to a tiny unlit shop, just as they did every weekend. The smiling old lady who runs the shop was there when they arrived, selling them Lay’s potato chips, Dino Park (dinosaur-shaped fritters), and a savory snack called Bento—leathery strips of desiccated squid. They drank Pepsi and a popular yellow-tinted electrolyte drink called Sponsor and prepared to head out to the cave.

  A few of the boys had been there before, but it was birthday boy Peerapat Sompiangjai’s first time. Many Thais choose their own, shorter nicknames; Peerapat called himself Night. He was excited for the adventure—the only hitch: they’d have to cut the excursion short, because Night was due back home around 5 P.M. for a birthday celebration. The cake, decorated with a big toothy emoji, was already cooling in the fridge.

  As the journey to the cave got under way, Coach Ek, in a bit of precarious, don’t-try-this-at-home-kids multitasking, live-streamed the boys’ bike ride as he rode on the back of a moped driven by the team’s fourteen-year-old goalie Biw. In the video, the moped zooms by the boys in a flash of red and blue jerseys before the camera pans back to show them all pumping the pedals in their flip-flops or sneakers, their nylon backpacks stuffed with clothes, soccer cleats, and shin pads. The road narrows from there, and, cackling with delight, they are not at all winded by the additional trek after a long practice. These are, after all, the Wild Boars. Coach Ek’s camera bounces and the image pixelates as the road roughens. The battleship-gray barracks of a local military base give way to creaky two-story buildings anchored by first-floor shops, with apartments above. Buildings yield to jungle as the blacktop switches to dirt track. A pack of raggedy dogs howls a warning. They’re nearing the cave. Banana trees, cane, and tamarind—with its thorny branches protecting seedlings—hug the roadside. Green jolts of grass spring from every crack in the earth. Egrets form dots of white against the green wall of the mountain. And as they head uphill toward the cave and the phone camera tilts upward, it catches a few fleeting frames of the dark clouds crowding Doi Nang Non mountain, which translates roughly into “the Sleeping Princess.”

  If you’re driving from south to north on Thailand’s Route 1, you can’t miss the ridge of mountains that divides the country from Myanmar. Five miles south of the town of Mae Sai, look up and you might notice, if you squint, the distinct profile of a supine woman. From north to south, there’s the sweep of hair flowing down toward a dramatic escarpment. Direct your eyes slightly southward, to your left, and you’ll make out a prominent forehead, the gully of her eye socket, and the rise of a prim little nose. Farther south, her chin dips into her neck, then her torso rises to an ample bosom. South of that, where her pregnant belly would be, the mountain soars seemingly twice as high as the other ridges. For those who have seen it, it’s like an autostereogram—once your eyes have solved the puzzle, you can’t stop seeing it.

  Tham Luang Nang Non roughly translates to “the great cave of the sleeping princess.” The legend goes that a beautiful princess fell in love with a stablehand in her father’s kingdom. She became pregnant. The tryst was forbidden and the king became enraged. The young couple fled, seeking shelter in the not-exactly-homey cave. When her lover was out foraging for food, the king’s men found and executed him. In her grief and rage, the pregnant princess stabbed herself with a dagger. Local folklore says that her body morphed into the mountain and that the stream flowing through the center of the cave is her blood.

  Spawned by the mix of Buddhism and ancient local animism, the tale is similar to many others around the world, where people have devised legends to explain unusual or possibly dangerous phenomena; in this case a human-shaped mountain crest and a colossal cave beneath are endowed with host spirits to be revered and feared. As in the great caves of Mexico’s Oaxaca region, taboos are established around the legends—along with a cast of easily enraged spirits wh
o frequently need to be appeased with offerings or sacrifices. But it didn’t take an ancient shaman to understand that the cave with the giant mouth and increasingly narrow guts was dangerous, especially in the rainy season.

  When the boys arrived, they rested their bikes in the bushes near the cave and dropped their gear. Some kicked off their shoes and left any unnecessary encumbrances behind. They didn’t have to worry about carrying the heavy soda cans and glass bottles or their snacks of squid and fried batter; they’d scarfed them down before they left the pitch. One boy left his training pants dangling over handlebars, as if hanging to dry. Theft isn’t a problem in this part of Thailand, and anyway few people come to the cave during this time of year. Besides, the boys wouldn’t be gone long. They walked down a set of muddy stairs past a spirit temple housing a trio of mannequins in pink silk, then up another flight of steps past a second altar housing a plaster idol of the Sleeping Princess herself. Near the mouth of the cave was a sign that read, in Thai and English, DANGER!! FROM JULY TO NOVEMBER THE CAVE IS FLOODING SEASON.

  It was only June 23; there was nothing to worry about.

  Chapter Two

  Some Birthday

  They had only planned to go in for a short time. After all, as everyone knew by now, Night had to get to his birthday party. The emoji cake was waiting. His grandmother, parents, and kid sister were getting the grill ready for his favorite meal: grilled pork and shrimp. It was only his first season on the team—he’d only been with the guys for two months—but he’d gone with them because he wanted to take part in the adventure. They had their flashlights, and some brought in their backpacks—but they wouldn’t need much for such a short sprint in and out of the cave.

  They climbed those stairs, past the warning sign about flooding season beginning in July.

  They proceeded in. Coach Ek led the way, the backpack slung over his shoulder containing a length of green rope and extra flashlights with batteries. Behind him were Night, as well as Tee, a fifteen-year-old captain; fifteen-year-olds Note and Nick, who was a bit of a ham and Night’s cousin; fourteen-year-old Biw (pronounced “Beeyoo”), the goalkeeper with the moped, round-faced and tall for his age; fourteen-year-old Adul, who, with a hint of dark peach fuzz over his top lip and a more muscled physique, looked older than many of the other boys; Tern, also fourteen; thirteen-year-olds Dom (another captain), Pong, and Mark; and twelve-year-old Mick. Giggling among them was the little guy, ironically nicknamed Titan, who was eleven.

  Given the enormous differences in physical development and socioeconomic backgrounds—Adul, Tee, and Night pretty much looked as old as the coach, while Titan was a grinning pipsqueak—they were a remarkably cohesive group. Mark, Adul, Tee, and Coach Ek were stateless. Adul, a refugee from nearby Myanmar, had been living at the Mae Sai Grace Church for a decade, and was the recipient of a scholarship to a local private school. None of the boys seemed to care much about economic status, or religion for that matter. All but Adul were Buddhist. Soccer and a sense of adventure united them. The big boys took care of the little boys—including Mark, who was thirteen but the same size as Titan—and the little boys tried to keep up. The coach, who was shorter than several of the boys yet powerfully built with ropey arms and tree trunks for legs, took care of them all. Heading in they luxuriated in the blast of chilly air.

  They ascended two flights to the cave’s oblong opening—which looks like a gaping mouth baring five-foot-long mossy teeth. The mouth exhales gusts of cool, musty air revealing the cave’s grand lobby, which would befit the grandest of five-star hotels; it is, in fact, big enough to fit the Taj Mahal. The boys who had never been there before struggled to comprehend the enormity of Mother Nature’s creation. In that first chamber, chandeliers of stalactites somehow affixed to the cave ceiling dangle from above. Below and to their right was a large, dusty gravel bed and mud stains twenty feet up showing the high-water mark of the previous year’s flood.

  The path through the first chamber, which the cave’s recent British explorers had named Mae Sai High Street, is well traveled and clearly marked with a rusty metal hand rail. Farther in it snakes around obstacles and rougher terrain. Even farther in, as the colossal first room slims down, the cave lobby is draped with stalactite curtains dozens of feet high—formed when stalactites, which hang from the ceiling, meet stalagmites, which are basically drip castles formed by drops falling from stalactites above. Hundreds of millennias’ worth of droplets laced with minerals have deposited microscopic calcium rings that year after year build out the stalagmites in ultra-slow-motion. The color scheme seems as if it’s pulled from a 1970s motel: brick-brown, off-white, and fungus grey—a pattern of prints fashioned by the various minerals absorbed by the water as it filters down fifteen hundred feet from the tree canopy, through the soil, and into the porous limestone. Because some of the boys had been there before, they knew where they were going: a chamber in the cave nearly three miles in called Voute Basse, which means “low vault” in French. Though it’s not particularly impressive, Voute Basse, or as the kids knew it “the Underwater City,” was the cave’s terminus for most amateurs. Just beyond, covered by a low overhang, is a deep pool of water that is flooded even during the dry season—going farther required scuba gear, or squeezing through a tiny “window” to the skinny passage beyond that only expert cavers knew about. It is there, on the walls just before that pool, where Mae Sai’s most intrepid boys, often on the occasion of their high school graduations, would scribble their names.

  The boys, some barefoot, padded on, heading nearly due west, bound for Voute Basse. If the tunnel had continued in that direction for a little over a mile, they would have found themselves beneath the border with Myanmar. About two hundred yards in they encountered the first squeeze, as the grand lobby tapered off to a passage roughly the size of the crawl space you might find under a staircase. The boys stooped to get through and kept going, marching fast. Little Titan, who was experiencing the cave for the first time, was scared. He had been with the team for two years, and had begged his mother to let him join, but as one of the youngest he found himself afraid of the dark and the creepy shadows cast by their flashlights, He didn’t dare tell the older boys though; they were covering ground quickly, not stopping to take in the views or rest much.

  They encountered more chambers the deeper they went in. The grand, nearly seventy-five-foot-high Chamber Two is also impressive. Thirteen flashlights raked the rocky dragon’s teeth above, producing a discotheque’s strobe effect. Beyond that the tapering continued. The passage to get into Chamber Three was just high enough for them to stand in, if they walked on the lowest, gravelly part. They had to crab-walk for the next 150 yards or so until they hit Chamber Four, with thirty-foot ceilings. It’s the last of the grand rooms. Knowing the route ahead might get a little wet, the boys who had carried their backpacks inside dropped them here, while others kicked off their knock-off Adidas slides, continuing barefoot. The cave floor there was dry, cracked clay that hadn’t seen significant moisture since the last monsoon season.

  The boys now were forced to walk and crawl mostly single file through the tunnels. They mushed to a T-junction intersection about two thousand yards into the cave. Turning right leads north and slightly uphill to a cave extension called the Monk’s Series—named by the French cavers who first mapped Tham Luang for a little meditation structure that has long since vanished after many flood seasons; turning left, or nearly due south, leads to Voute Basse—the Underwater City.

  This is a basic survey of the Tham Luang Cave. It is about 2,000 yards from the entrance of the cave, on the right, to Sam Yek (the T-Junction). Then another 400 yards or so to Pattaya Beach and about 300 yards to Chamber Nine, which does not appear on the map but lies just where the main passage turns south again and near the annotation “Main Cave” at around the middle of the image. A few thousand feet up from that right-hand turn toward the Monk’s Series is a little stream that drains down into this extension, slaloming between bamboo stan
ds and fishtail palms. While the exact draining point is a mystery, the amount of water it feeds into that narrow channel is not. When it flows, picking up momentum as it heads downhill toward the T-junction, it has the volume of a decent-size river.

  But the boys and their coach couldn’t have known that, nor could they have known that outside the cave the rain had started. And they certainly were not aware that since this year had already produced a foot of water more than usual, the mountain wasn’t as thirsty as it normally would be at that time of year. The mountain’s soil would no longer act as a giant dry sponge; instead, it would now repel water, which began pulsing through the hidden cracks in the mountain, pulled by gravity to the lowest possible place. Places like the T-junction.

  No, the boys were not aware of any of those things. They were aware of the bats. The glare of the flashlights woke them from their daytime slumber and they flapped around, trying to flee the light. Bats are momentarily blinded by light and seem to have the propensity to zing straight toward you. It’s a most uncomfortable feeling when a bat grazes the top of your head. But for most of the boys, as long as they were in a group and with Coach Ek, they weren’t afraid.

  If you could see a sliced cross section of that part of the passage, it would look like a very rough triangle with a frown-shaped bottom. If the boys kept to the middle, they’d be less likely to whack their heads on a protruding rock between the larger spaces. All but Titan and Mark, the smallest boys, had to stoop to get through Chamber Seven. Then they arrived at a sandy area called Pattaya Beach, named after one of Thailand’s best-known resort towns. To the left of this area, a sandy bank stands several feet above the lower parts of the tunnel. A few minutes from Pattaya Beach, which was part of Chamber Eight, the route jogs to the west toward Myanmar, then curves sharply south, where there is the biggest dropdown of the cave—about thirty feet. At its bottom, the boys likely forded what the British explorers called the Goolie Cooler. A goolie is a euphemism for your tender parts—because when you dip in, it’s “very uncomfortably cold.”