I was a close friend of Mitch Ventura and, in a way, many of the readers of the Guadalajara Reporter also know him because he was a “guest writer” for this column on two occasions.
Ventura was one of Colima’s best-known bomberos (fire fighters) famed for his bravery and for a manual he had written on fire-fighting techniques. For many years, he also managed a guest house in Comala, Colima for the University of Oklahoma.
It was in the Comala guest house in the late 1980’s where I first met him and gave him information on rope-climbing techniques. Not long afterward, he participated in the exploration of deep vertical caves in the hills of Manantlán and earned himself a page in the history of Mexican Cave exploration.
Mitch had been dreaming of exploring a deep pit and there we stood at the edge of Pozo de los Lentiscos, a drop of 126 meters down to the floor of the pit. “I want to do a quick rappel to the bottom,” he told us, even though it was a bit late in the day.
So, someone threw a rope down the hole. Now, the correct technique for doing this is to lower the rope slowly, not toss the whole thing over the edge. In this case, the result was a knot in the rope at about 84 meters down. Mitch’s rappel was fine until he came to the knot. “How do I get past the knot?” he shouted up to us, his voice hardly audible. Well, “passing a knot” is a technique cavers usually practice in their backyard, not at the bottom of a deep pit. It involves disconnecting and reconnecting one’s rappelling device and explaining how to do it is a lot easier if you can see the person on the rope, which I could not. As a result, it took Mitch two full hours to get past the knot (“In the end, I undid that knot with my teeth,” he claimed) and when he finally reached the bottom, he couldn‘t walk because his harness had cut off circulation to his legs for such a long time.
By now it was dark. Crawling over to one side of the pit, Mitch asked us to throw down a sleeping bag, food and water and that’s where he spent the night. However, being one tough customer, at sunrise he was back on the rope and exited under his own power.
When it came to courage and toughness, there was no one quite like Mitch Ventura, which he demonstrated by working as a fireman in Iraq for two years. Upon his return, he got himself a job as a security man at Maria Madre Island, a place he described in an article published in this newspaper on June 18, 2010, under the alias of Mario Perez. Once again, Ventura managed to get himself into and out of extraordinary scrapes, as witnessed, for example, in his anecdote, “Death by Raincoat,” which took place on Maria Madre Island:
“I had been promised a truck by the company that hired me, but never received it and had to get around by mule, bicycle and hitch-hiking. One day, a friend gave me a ride on his all-terrain vehicle. It was drizzling, so I put on my new raincoat and jumped on. I don’t know how it happened, but when my friend put the ATV in reverse, my raincoat got caught in the gear train and suddenly I was being choked to death. It was pulling so hard I couldn’t make a sound, so I smacked him on the shoulder so he’d see what had happened. Well, he turned around and what he saw scared him so much, he stomped on the accelerator and the raincoat pulled even tighter. Finally I was able to get a couple fingers between my no-longer-breathing throat and the cursed raincoat, which at last ripped open. When I could speak once again, I told my friend (an ex-prisoner who had just finished a sentence of six years) that he was mighty lucky I survived because it wouldn’t have looked too good if they had found my strangled body lying next to his ATV. It was a joke, but the poor guy got all worked up about it …”
Mitchell Ventura could not abide injustice going unpunished and on numerous occasions had come to the defense of the defenseless with no fear for his own safety. Ventura died as he had lived, generous and fearless. Among his friends, cavers, firemen, kayakers, canyoneers and hang-gliders, he will surely remain a legend and will never be forgotten.