Crickets & Cartwheels

In the 70s I spent a lot of time exploring The Breaks in southwestern Oklahoma. It had broken prairie land full of rough ravines sometimes rushing with floodwater but most of the time bone dry. It had mesas and little caves just below the rims of some of those mesas. In those caves were creatures seeking shelter from the scorching sun, sipping mineral-laden moisture seeping from the chamber walls. In 1976 I went exploring alone and found a cave with Camel Crickets clinging to the ceiling. Some people called them Sprickets because their long legs and antennae gave them a menacing spidery appearance. They're harmless and beautiful. I sat in the coolness of the cave out of the blistering sunshine for a long time admiring them and their choice of shelter, wondering if anyone else knew about that place.

A couple of years later I talked a friend into going hiking in the breaks with me, wanting to share the discovered cave and its inhabitants with him. We arrived early in the morning and quickly scaled the mesa slopes to reach the flat top. After a short rest and quick drink of water sitting beneath the shade of a fat juniper tree, we struck out to find the cave. But the day quickly warmed up to an uncomfortable degree of heat and we began running low on water as we searched in vain for the cave. We eventually decided to give it up before noon and get down off of the mesa to go home. Being in The Breaks without water is no fun at all.

Always way too eager, as I am about most things I get involved in, I spotted a likely place to descend and showed it to my friend. He was leary of it, though, and went on along the rim to find a better place to go down. I turned and started down the spot I had chosen and all was going well until I stepped on a small rock shelf which snapped off and sent me cartwheeling down the mesa slope with a yelp of surprise my friend was by then too far away to hear.

My uncontrolled descent somehow progressed without collision against any bone-breaking boulders or outcrops. As I sensed the slope leveling off, I breathed a sigh of relief to have avoided severe injury only to come to an abrupt stop in a large prickly pear patch. Gingerly extracting myself from that and taking a few minutes to pluck cactus spines from my arm, thigh and butt, I began thinking about my friend, wondering how his descent was going. Promptly becoming worried that he too might have had a similar risky mishap as mine, I quickly scrambled to my feet and headed off in the direction I last saw him walking. Finding him unscathed and relaxed, happily striding over the hot, hard prairie, my near-panicked concern evaporated and we walked together back across the maze of ravines toward the car.

The friend hiking with me that day, Gary, was the younger brother of the classmate I was with in The Breaks when I got chain dogged, and I marveled at the fact that I had taken a serious fall while out there with each of them and had come through relatively well both times. The cactus punctures hurt some, as did having the wind knocked out of me when I fell off of the stack of pipe, but I was okay otherwise and never suffered any longterm ill effects from either fall.

A couple of decades later I took a friend from work, his son and his son's friend out to The Breaks to show them the little cave and its crickets. We found it quickly and enjoyed relaxing in it out of the sunshine, as I had twenty years earlier. Nothing had changed, the crickets still sheltered there, and on that outing to The Breaks, I managed not to take another risky fall.

 P  is where I got chain dogged.  X  marks the spot I cartwheeled down the mesa slope.  O   is the location of Camel Cricket Cave