Mack Doyle

Mack’s trademark belly-laugh is one of the things that define the young woman best. It’s loud and unabashed, but you always know where you stand with her when you hear it. The only daughter of a small-town Georgia law professor and a Tennessee farm girl, Mack spent much of her early life exploring the woods around her family’s home outside of Atlanta. Her mother often took her hiking and when her father wasn’t working, he would join them for expeditions.

As she grew older – and more awkward socially in her early teens as her height sprouted suddenly – she and her mother started exploring the Appalachian region for hikes, and eventually took some courses in rock climbing and navigation. Every year, it seemed her interest for the outdoors grew, and while she wasn’t too keen on History and English at school, her curiosity made her excel the most at Science and sometimes Math. She wasn’t particularly good at arts, but she learned to play acoustic guitar from one of her Tennessee cousins. She’d long been drawn towards the blues, having grown up with a mother who sang old mountain tunes, and she enjoyed playing as a sort of “OCD way of righting wrongs,” as she’d put it.

By the time college rolled around, Mack found herself naturally leaning towards something in Parks & Recreation, thinking this would be the best outlet for her love of the outdoors and all things rocky. However, taking a basic Geology course simply to fulfill a college requirement at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville turned her whole life around. Her interest in rock formations and all that went on inside and below mountains made her see mountains were more than just for climbing.

Her interest only grew as her best friend from college talked her into a spelunking expedition in Appalachia, and after that, she was hooked. She was a quick learner with rappelling and spelunking, and she eventually found a career in cave surveying and mapping for the US Geological Survey. Half the job was spent on the computer mapping new sites, and the rest of her time was spent underground, exploring known caves and charting undiscovered ones, mostly in Appalachia and the Smoky Mountains near Knoxville.

She tended to date men who worked outdoors or at least had some appreciation of hiking, but some early disappointments made her reluctant to take her dates too seriously. She respected her colleagues, but figured it was best not to date someone she worked with. Love, while not entirely for suckers in Mack’s mind, was just not worth the trouble.

While she worked out of the Knoxville office and usually in the Smoky Mountains, she had access to a cabin in Adams often rented by the USGS for annual expeditions to Bell Witch Cave. After being notified by staff at the normally easily-traversable cave that the terrain was becoming increasingly unsound, Mack and two colleagues, Sam and Cathy, went to investigate. The discovered fissures exposing hidden caverns deep within the caverns, and decided to rappel down further to see if they could find any obvious cause.

As Mack often said, bad timing was the story of her life. Sam, the only one of the group still lowering himself down, was hit by a boulder and knocked to the bottom – killed. Cathy’s leg was broken and the closest exit was now sealed off. As hours passed and quakes grew more severe, Mack managed to drag Cathy to a sturdy outcropping which would hopefully shelter her from more falling rocks. They knew oxygen was entering the cavern somewhere, which meant there had to be an exit. Where? She had no idea. Mack had been here many times in the past, but these passages were new to her, and she had no idea if there might be another passage leading upwards or east, towards the hillside.

Convinced help would come sooner or later, Mack and Cathy settled in to await rescue. None came. Mack used the satellite phone to try and reach someone, but it either had malfunctioned, or they were too deep for them to work. Or the satellites were no longer working…which Mack didn’t even think of.

After two days of waiting, their drinking water was disappearing. Mack knew if they waited much longer, they’d be too weak to do any real exploring for an exit. She couldn’t think of why no one was coming, and Cathy’s leg was worsening. Mack decided to search for an exit while she still could, promising Cathy she’d bring help. Before leaving, she replenished the feverish Cathy’s water supply by following the sound of water below. Mack soon discovered that the water wasn’t any sort of trickling stream, but rather it appeared water was entering through fissures at an alarming rate. She said nothing to Cathy, not wanting to alarm her, but simply promised to return soon.

It took longer than she thought despite efforts to conserve batteries, her flashlight abandoned her as she searched the caverns for an exit for another day. Despite the panic she found herself constantly choking back, the flashlight’s demise turned out to be a blessing she’d never have seen the ray of light angling downward otherwise. Cathy and the water now far beneath her, she climbed up a narrow passage to an upper chamber bathed in light from a crack in the hillside: an exit. It was the fourth day after the quakes when Mack emerged: Christmas. Exhausted, she tried to find help, but the entire landscape seemed unfamiliar to her. Houses were toppled, rivers were terribly low – and the implications were alarming.

She climbed back up to the Jeep, which seemed to be half-buried in a giant sinkhole, along with the historic Bell cabin. She couldn’t turn on the car to try the radio, or even get into the front of the car, and didn’t want to tempt fate by climbing around in a sinkhole with a large SUV. Instead, she removed the first aid pack and a decent supply of food and water, and sought help.

She tried to find someone to go back and help her with Cathy for two days, but at last, after piecing together that some sort of widespread disaster had struck, she decided that getting Cathy out of there would be up to her. She brought food and water back to the cave’s new entrance, but found that her path was now cut off by rising waters within the cave. She couldn’t imagine what Cathy must be thinking down there, but searched in vain for a day for another entrance to the cave. Realizing at last that Cathy must have drowned by now if the waters were that high, she abandoned the notion of trying to help her friend and made her way back to the cabin in Adams.

Back at the cabin, on the 29th, she collapsed, exhausted, frightened and feeling horrible for having to leave Cathy. Once she was feeling stronger (and once her supplies ran low) on the 31st, she headed to town to restock and look for some sort of battery she might hook up to the cabin’s short-wave radio. She could try reaching rescue workers that way. Surely, someone would be there. It was a city. It had structure.