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I attended my first Central New Jersey Grotto meeting in December of 1991. I can still remember it quite well, all the strange looks and stares and talk of near death experiences inside caves. These people were weird, and I was going put my life in their hands while they led me on my first cave trip. When I left that cold, wet, muddy, tight New Jersey cave that day, my life would never be the same. The word CAVE would become a part of my normal vocabulary, and J would soon be looked upon as the weird one.

Early trips with the grotto were the building blocks for my stories yet to come. Stuck cavers, lost cavers, jammed locks, bat attacks, raccoons, carbide explosions, and flooded passage all helped shape my young impressionable mind. Nice easy cave trips turned into horror filled passages as my fingers typed out the trip reports. Telling the truth was much too boring for me.

In the years to come, my stories appeared in several Speleo Digests, adding fuel to my overactive typing fingers. But without a doubt, it was through the Caver's Digest on the internet that these stories found their way into grotto newsletters across the country. It was then that the idea of a book came to be. After reading these stories remember one thing, I really am a nice guy.

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