Vesely, at the time was forty-one when Andrew Todhunter quoted
caving historian Ernst Kastning in his 1998 article saying that she was
"the epitome of the gung-ho woman caver in this country ... right there
with the best of the men ... [and] can outdo a lot of them." In her
twenty-one year cave resume at the time she had already made at least a
thousand trips to 350 caves and 15 countries. She was the chair of the
National Speleological Society's Survey and Cartography Section and had
surveyed more than 75 miles of underground passage worldwide.
Until
that time, Vesely worked as a substitute teacher in Monrovia, CA, and
was a dissertation shy of a Ph.D. in cognitive developmental psychology.
She held two part-time jobs too but changed that when she became a
full-time mother. Her two-year-old son, Brian and husband would wait
above ground to support her leadership underground.
Before
Brian's birth, Vesely caved three months a year; averaging fifty or
sixty trips annually but maternity cut her caving activity in half.
Still, when Brian was 11 months old, she joined an expedition that
linked two lava tubes on the island of Hawaii making them the deepest
known cave in the United States (at the time at 3,614 feet). It was also
the first U.S. cave known to be deeper than 1,000 meters; an
international landmark among cavers. Todhunter reported that amazingly,
"13 miles into the trip ... Vesely left her fellow cavers at an
underground campsite, crawled from a side entrance, and drove to a
hotel, where her mother-in-law waited with Brian. Vesely stayed the
night to nurse the baby and sped back to the underground camp in time
for breakfast."
One night Todhunter recalls that Vesely's
son fell asleep in her lap as cavers told stories of caves across the
known world beside the camp fire lights. Vesely said that as a girl, she was
exceptionally shy and uncomfortable in crowds; a social outsider. "I
don't think I know any cavers who were ever in the in crowd. A lot of
cavers, when they finally find caving, feel that they finally fit in. I
can go anywhere in the world and all I have to do is find another
caver."
SOURCES
m.theatlantic.com
m.theatlantic.com
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