EIGHTEEN
THINGS BEGAN ESCALATING FROM DESERTIONS to attempts to derail the whole effort. Rob Parker, a respected British cave diver and a friend to both Ian Rolland and Stone himself, was terribly disturbed by Rolland’s death. He was, in the estimation of Stone and others, a true superstar, and he went around camp repeating to anyone who would listen, “Ian himself said, ‘Somebody’s going to die on this machine.’” Parker wanted the expedition suspended right then. Stone could understand Parker’s grief. But he thought that the idea of ending the expedition to honor Ian Rolland was “horseshit” and refused to do it.
His decision to continue was not well received by a team stressed to the breaking point and being sown with seeds of discontent by Rob Parker—and others. Parker was not the only one saying openly that the rebreather had killed Rolland. Bill Farr (co-discoverer, with Carol Vesely, of Cheve) was making similar accusations. Farr had been with the expedition at the beginning but had removed himself early on from the dive team. He had spent most of the expedition over at the Cheve resurgence, and had returned to Huautla only in time to witness the emotional procession of cavers and locals bringing Rolland’s body up to the village from the cave entrance. Some members of the expedition, including Barbara am Ende, felt that Farr had contributed little to the overall effort, and certainly not enough to justify speaking as though from some bully pulpit.
But Farr, who gave away eight inches and fifty pounds to Stone and was even smaller than am Ende, was nevertheless himself a stubborn alpha. A veteran of many expeditions, he was appalled at the deterioration—exhaustion, anger, eroded morale, and the death of a member—he perceived in this one. He felt that continuing would probably add catastrophe to tragedy. Things finally came to a head one morning in the base camp cookhouse, a one-room, vacant village home the expedition had rented. It had bare wooden walls adorned with fading pictures of Jesus, a concrete floor, and a corrugated metal roof so low Stone banged his head if he stood up straight without thinking. Two benches and a long plywood table that Ian Rolland had built occupied the center of the cookhouse. It had become the expedition’s de facto headquarters, a place for cooking and eating but also for parties, bull sessions, and important meetings.
On Saturday, April 2, an exhausted Stone slept late. He planned to hold a meeting of the entire team the next day to discuss the future of the expedition. Am Ende left Stone asleep and walked over to the cookhouse. Entering, she found another meeting already in progress. Bill Farr was declaiming to a group around the table, not suggesting but telling them that the expedition was over.
Furious, am Ende lashed out at the Californian: “Excuse me, but what in hell are you talking about? There is no evidence that problems with the rig caused Ian’s death. There’s no evidence for that.”
“Well, but we’ve had problems since Florida,” Farr countered, in what am Ende heard as a condescending tone. “And Noel told me that he almost went hypoxic on his last dive.”
“Who’s we, Kemo Sabe?” am Ende snapped. “I don’t recall seeing your smiling face at Ginnie Springs [a training site]. The rigs were working fine. But you don’t know that, because you weren’t there, were you? As for Noel, he didn’t run out of oxygen. He had hypercarbia because he forgot to change the damn lithium hydroxide canister because Noel … well, because he’s Noel. That was operator error, not a problem with the rig.”
Barely pausing for breath, she rushed on: “And Noel completed that dive without incident, didn’t he? That’s because all he had to do was switch to the offboard bailout system. If that had somehow failed—which it didn’t—he could have grabbed one of the bailout bottles stashed in the sump. So there were lots of bailouts. Ian knew all about the bailouts. But you wouldn’t know about them, would you? Because you didn’t dive, did you?”
Everyone sat in stunned silence. Even am Ende was a bit surprised by her outburst. But she wasn’t finished. “The fact is,” she continued, “we don’t know what happened. We’ll review the data that Bill and Kenny collected and we’ll adjust our procedures, if necessary, so that every dive will be a safe dive.”
“There aren’t going to be any more dives. This expedition is over,” Farr decreed. Am Ende was astonished at what she considered the man’s crude and ill-timed grab for power.
“You don’t know that,” am Ende shot back. “That’s not your decision to make. We’ll have a team meeting tomorrow or the next day. And the team—that means the people who actually do the work around here—the team will decide whether or not to continue with the expedition.”
But Farr would not be deterred. “They terminated the Cheve expedition after Chris Yeager died,” he retorted. “This project needs to be stopped, too.”
Am Ende could only stare. Who the hell does he think he is? she wondered. Disgusted, she spun on her heel and stalked out of the cookhouse. Not long after, a young British caver named Mark Madden came out to join her.
“Quite an immediately dislikable fellow, that one,” he chuckled, smiling sympathetically.
Am Ende agreed wholeheartedly, and Madden’s quip helped dispel some of her lingering ire. She laughed, and Madden went on his way. Before long, though, another cookhouse witness, the diver Rob Parker, walked up.
“I’m on my way into town to talk to the local authorities,” he told her.
“Please do not tell them that the expedition is over,” am Ende beseeched him.
“In reality, it might be,” Parker said.
So it’s not just Farr, she thought. “It’s not Bill Farr’s or Rob Parker’s or my decision as to the fate of the expedition. That’s a decision the whole team has to make,” am Ende declared.
Parker clearly disagreed, and went on his way without another word.
THE INCIDENT LEFT TEMPERS SIMMERING on both sides. Stone convened the meeting as planned the next day, April 3, which happened to be Easter Sunday. He tried to hold the team together with a speech. His personal philosophy, that they were engaged there in something far more important than “adventure,” was at its core.
“Three or four hundred years ago … ships would often lose thirty percent of their crew in the course of a voyage,” he reminded the cavers. “The difference between us and them is that our society now places so much importance on life.”
The message fell on mostly deaf ears. For many of the team members, deep caving was an adventure, with science second at best. They just could not see things as Stone did. Nor could some local residents. A few days later, Stone met with the nearest village’s three town officials to report on the status of the project. Two of the men were well-educated teachers and businessmen. The third was an old, traditional Mazatec. After hearing Stone out, he said, “I will tell you why this good man died. You did not seek permission from Chi Con Gui-Jao. You have been arrogant. And for this you must pay the price.” Chi Con Gui-Jao was the spirit that lived in Huautla. The Mazatecs knew this to be true, and believed it as fervently as Christians believed in the Resurrection.
Many, perhaps most, members of the expedition agreed. Overworked, exhausted, devastated by tragedy, and leery of the rebreathers, members began packing up and leaving. As April got under way, there were five team members left: Bill Stone, Barbara am Ende, Noel Sloan, Jim Brown, and Steve Porter. Stone blamed himself for the team’s dissolution, as he had for the 1984 mutiny. If he had learned anything, it was that the guy who’s in charge has to keep the focus. And that meant inspiring the troops with action. If I do it, they will follow, he believed. Or, perhaps more accurately: If I do it, they should follow. That was how leaders should lead, and that was how he led.
On an earlier expedition in nearby Puente Cave, Stone had had a revealing exchange with a younger male caver. Thinking to inspire the younger man, Stone told him that the descent they were about to undertake—together—would be the toughest, most brutal trip he would ever do. Ever.
“This will make a real caver out of you,” Stone said, his tongue at least partially in cheek. Thinking that he had whipped the fellow into a frenzy of anticipation, Stone was surprised when the neophyte asked, “But is it going to be fun?”
Fun? Fun? “Of course not,” Stone said. By 1994 he had long since stopped thinking of this stuff as fun. No, it would be goddamned bloody awful, he told the young man. This wasn’t a vacation. It was exploration, on the last great terrestrial frontier, in the name of science.
“Well, why would I want to do that?” The young caver seemed as genuinely mystified as if Stone were speaking a different language. Which, in a sense, he was. Bill Stone was just as confused. He had been doing his share and more, and would continue to. What was wrong in that other guy’s head?
The exchange revealed something valuable. Stone would have made a superb general in the Civil War, where leaders led from the front and took the first bullets. For them it was a matter of faith that coming close on their heels, without pause or complaint, was how their followers would follow.
Scientists have long known the fascinating fact that the human eye has a blind spot in its field of vision, right on the point of the retina where the optic nerve leads back into the brain. Even more fascinating is psychology’s awareness that we have a kind of emotional blind spot as well. Awareness does not equal understanding; there is debate about why we have emotional blind spots, but none about their existence. No blindness is benign. Reduced to essentials, emotional blind spots cloud judgment, flaw decisions, and damage relationships.
Stone led by challenging people because that was what best motivated him. For the sake of a mission, he himself was willing to challenge anything, up to and including universal laws. The quote that opens Part One of this book explains Stone’s philosophy: If a universal law gets in the way, hell, bend the bastard. Challenge was one way, maybe one great way, to inspire, but it was not the only way. If Bill Stone had a blind spot, it was failing to understand that every lock requires a different key.
Two differences distinguish most people from the Bill Stones of this world. One is that a big majority are happy living and working quietly in the shadows. Bill Stone and the few like him spend much of their lives in the spotlight. The bright glare invites applause, but it exposes flaws with equal intensity.
The second difference is that our actions rarely invite injury and death, while theirs not infrequently lead to both.