I heard someone else tell I story that I myself had told many times over the years.

She had been attending a summer camp where they would occassionaly go to explore caves. Deep, complex caves with headlamps and damp spots. For years she would go on these trips, enjoying them, and learning the caves. Going so often in fact, that she knew them as well as some of the instructors, could just fly through them. Knew them like the back of her hand, and enjoyed the experience.

Then one day, down in the cave she suddenly realized what she was doing was insane. You could not carry her, kicking and screaming, down into that cave. Wild horses could not drag her to their threshold.

It’s unclear what in her had changed to elicit that response, but it was binary and irreversible. She would never cave again.

Firstly it’s amusing that taking a hard line against caving is exactly the sort of thing unique to children. If I told my friends and family now that I would never go caving, that would seem obvious...

But I made the decision to never go caving again when I was a kid, and I arrived at that decision exactly as my sister Mia did, the woman telling the story exactly as I had. 

The story was actually similar enough that I suspect one of us might be projecting the experience of the other on to our own memory, having heard the story retold at countless family dinners and get togethers. 

Or maybe there is something that happens to people once they reach a certain age or a certain number of hours in a cave; people just reach their subterranean limit. Or perhaps we Jagers have some ancestral trauma with regards to caves and it took a certain level of exposure to dredge it back up. Or perhaps all humans do.

Whatever the case may be I am unlikely to ever set foot in a cave ever again in my life. 

Insanity.