A strange and upsetting thing happened this past Saturday.

You may have seen the first report in the Sunday edition of The Centre Daily Times. A 21-year-old Penn State student named Chris Miller broke his back and wrist while spelunking in the J-4 cave in Pleasant Gap.

The accident made me think deep thoughts for the next few days.

That's easy for me to write because I may be what conservative Neanderthals refer to as a bleeding-heart liberal. I like to call myself a human being.

The eerie part about Chris Miller's accident was talking with him and his friends about an hour before he injured himself.

I was wandering through the cave with three friends on Saturday seeking some stress relief, and we bumped into Chris Miller's group deep into the cave.

None of us knew each other, but a cave is a place where conversation between complete strangers occurs naturally. It's an alien environment.

We joked around for a few minutes and exchanged advice about the various obstacles in the cave. Then, they headed back towards the entrance.

We descended the Formation Climb, explored the Dome Room and wandered through the Wine Cellar. Sometime while we were having an absolute blast, Chris Miller fell about 15 feet and broke his back.

We rested for a short time in the Dome Room, snacking on Hershey bars and sitting with our lights out to experience complete darkness. We talked about women, of course, but not in any crude way. It was simply a shared interest. (Men who both really like women and enjoy sex may not be the norm, but they do exist in large numbers.)

While we were relaxing, Chris Miller's friends managed to move him to within 150 feet of the entrance. He was in some serious pain.

Then, he had incredible luck --the kind of luck that makes you believe there's a cosmic watchdog in the sky. A group of nine cavers from Tri-State Grotto -- six men and three women from Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania -- just happened to enter the cave. They found Chris and immediately sent somebody out to phone in a "rescue."

In the time it took us to get from the back of the cave to that chamber, they had contacted the Pleasant Gap Fire Company and Medics 23 and 24, and cavers from Nittany Grotto were pouring in from all over Centre County. There were eventually about 60 people involved in the rescue, with approximately 25 people actually inside the cave.

Caving clubs like Nittany Grotto and Tri-State Grotto always provide the experienced cavers needed for these rescues. They take classes in rescue techniques, store the necessary equipment and basically hope they never need to use it. I've been doing crisis-oriented work for seven years, and I have to say that the level of professionalism and calmness displayed by these people impressed the hell out of me.

"They were the caving knights," one of my friends said later. "We were more like their squires."

When we reached the chamber, a "sector leader" asked us to hang out until all the equipment arrived on the scene.

"We're going to need a lot of bodies to get Chris out of here," he said quietly. "We'll form a human chain and reposition as we go, but this will be tough."

We waited as the oxygen and a flexible basket stretcher got passed into the cave through narrow, twisting passages and over piles of jagged rocks. I was amazed at Chris' calmness. He even made a few jokes.

Once the move started, our procession resembled a horde of army ants on the march. People would pass off the stretcher, then climb past to take new positions at the next obstacle. The problems came at the tight places -- the passages only a little bigger than a garbage shute --and on the vertical moves.

Covering the 150 feet to the entrance took more than three and a half hours because getting leverage was almost impossible at certain points. Eventually, they had to take him out of the stretcher and depend on the neck brace and body board due to the cramped space.

In a rising shute, for example, several people would lie on their backs to form a human sled path. While they protected Chris' head, one person would lie on top of them facing the opposite direction. That person would grab the handholds on the body board, the next person would grab that person's belt, then they'd slowly haul him up over the row of bodies. We rotated people when someone got tired, but it was a long, frustrating process.

It also created some interesting situations. I remember one caver's muffled voice rising out from under another's crotch. "I've never been in this position before," he said. "This is a new experience for me."

Once they passed us by, we waited with other cavers while they eased Chris Miller through the two narrow entrances pipes and lowered him down the quarry wall. I think that's when we all started mentally putting ourselves in Chris' situation.

"Well. . ." said a caver who had been involved in several other rescues, "it happens." He didn't mean to sound cold. He was just voicing our shared realization that, for whatever personal reasons, we had all chosen a dangerous hobby.

Later that day, after eight hours inside the cave, I went to work at the local runaway shelter. I sat on the couch, thumbing through the National Missing Persons Report and trying to absorb the day's events. It may sound trite, but the way all those people came together to help someone in trouble gives me some hope for our future.

Yesterday, I saw in the paper that Chris Miller is in fair condition.