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The Fatal Allure of JACOB'S WELL Continued... |
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by Louie Bond |
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Looking into the narrow opening leading to the
third chamber of Jacob's Well. |
| The SMART team had already worked for five years with one of the well's surrounding private landowners to take water samples and map the cave for possible recovery missions. Although Brashier's remains had washed out of the well during a 1981 flood, no trace of Maupin had been recovered. Misiaszek spotted the first traces of Maupin down a keyhole opening in the floor of the fourth chamber, more than 100 feet below the surface. "I first noticed one femur bone, then a second, and as I descended into the keyhole-shaped tunnel, I could see a heavily corroded scuba tank and wetsuit," Misiaszek wrote in a chronicle of the event. "It was obvious we had stumbled upon some human remains... At the bottom of the tunnel lay the corroded scuba tank with attached hoses. The tank was still attached to a shorty 'beaver tail' style wet suit with weight belt." Misiaszek found a human skull nearby, and then stumbled upon one piece of evidence that led him to believe the remains were Maupin's - a Neptune's Locker Diving Association patch from Maupin's hometown of Pasadena. Misiaszek carefully left the scene intact, but as he finished filming the area, the dive team inadvertently kicked up some silt. Fighting to remain calm in the ensuing blackout, the divers ditched their expensive camera and scrambled for the guideline, following its arrows up to a shallower depth to decompress before surfacing. Visibility was so bad down there, Misiaszek said, that he passed Price along the way and never knew it. "You couldn't tell up from down, left from right," Kathy Misiaszek says. "You couldn't see your gauges. You were scraping the bottom and banging your tanks on the top. You had nothing to fall back on except your training. We were rather relieved to get out." The abandoned video camera continued recording until it ran out of tape. The divers returned to retrieve the camera and the remains. They later watched the videotape run in quiet blackness until its end, as if the camera were the eyes of a diver left behind to die. "It was a sobering piece of film," Kathy Misiaszek says. Even divers who are experienced in open waters have met their fate while cave diving because they are unprepared for the perils they will encounter. The well's last known victim, Austin mail carrier Wayne Wood Russell, was an experienced topside caver and an open water diver, but had never attempted cave diving. Ironically, it was once impossible to descend into Jacob's Well. Local historians say the artesian spring spumed anywhere from 10 to 30 feet above the ground in centuries past, creating a much heavier flow into Cypress Creek. Documentation from 1924 indicates a flow of 170 gallons per second. "There's a picture of me at 3 years old at Jacob's Well in the family album," recalls 79-year-old historian Dorothy Wimberley Kerbow. "My dad would throw me into the well. You couldn't sink down because the spring would just bubble you up with such force." In the 1950s, Kerbow recalls, she and her friends would often visit Jacob's Well, jumping over and around the springs that percolated all along Cypress Creek. It was impossible to go more than two feet below the surface due to the force of the spring, Kerbow says. According to local legend, the name of the well is a Biblical reference. Early settlers William W. Moon and William C. Winters followed Cypress Creek to its source in the 1850s. They described the crevice in the creek bed which was overflowing with an abundance of clear, cool water as "like unto a well in Bible times." » The story continues - please click here... Page 3 of 4 Article by Louie Bond © 2001 |
