NINETEEN
DEATH WAS VERY MUCH ON THE minds of Jim Brown and Steve Porter just then. Neither would dive again on the rebreathers. Sloan might, but his commitment was tenuous at best. Only one person was both able and willing to do that with Stone. “Able” is but half the equation, of course, “willing” being the other half. Barbara am Ende, though a seasoned dry caver and an experienced open-water diver, had logged only about thirty cave dives, and those in much less lethal environments than Huautla. Open-water divers are not considered truly experienced until they’ve logged several hundred dives, and that kind of diving is to cave diving as ballet dancing is to bullfighting. What’s more, because they only had two rebreathers at the sump, and because Bill’s had been configured for his use, Barbara had to dive with Ian’s “death rig,” an option already rejected out of hand by three very good, very brave cave divers.
If Barbara am Ende had loved only caves or only Bill Stone, this whole thing might have gotten to “can” and stopped short of “will.” But she loved both. And so this remarkable woman, whose last name in German means “to the end,” agreed to keep diving Huautla’s deadly sumps with Bill Stone, beyond all hope of rescue, on the suspect rebreather Ian Rolland had been wearing when he died.
THE ODDS STACKED AGAINST AM ENDE and Stone were daunting. For one thing, they were depleted, like fighters who had just gone twelve rounds but were being forced to fight again without leaving the ring. And though they had maintained their mission focus, working hard to remain stoic for the benefit of the others, Ian Rolland’s death had shaken both of them. So had the attacks on Stone by members of his own expedition, some to his face, others behind his back. These disturbed am Ende as much as Stone—perhaps more.
Then there was the matter of diving. Barbara am Ende had practiced with the experimental, massively complicated rebreathers in the springs of Florida, but those springs were bathtubs compared to Huautla. The rebreathers had taken punishing use for weeks (“We beat the shit out of them” was how another expedition diver put it), and one might have just killed a world-class cave diver. That still very open possibility was strong enough to have effectively ended the expedition. The other side of the San Agustín Sump was terra incognita.
Finally, rescue was not a realistic option if catastrophe struck—which, given what am Ende and Stone were about to do, seemed more than probable. In addition to all the routine minor injuries and illnesses involved in supercaving, cave diving invited an array of ailments as unpleasant as their names implied: decompression sickness, arterial gas embolism, nitrogen narcosis, shallow-water blackout, pneumothorax, oxygen toxicity, seizures, and more.
If either or both explorers were incapacitated, even by something as minor as a badly sprained ankle, any potential rescue team would first have to reach Camp 5, then dive the San Agustín Sump, Sump 2, and any others the pair might have moved through. They would have to locate one or both victims, bring them back through the sumps on scuba gear, and then transport them 6 miles and 4,100 vertical feet to the surface, negotiating more than ninety rope climbs on the way, some hundreds of feet high.
The simple fact was that that rescue would be virtually impossible from where the two were going in Huautla. In that regard, their excursion would be unique. There was no other place on earth so remote. Helicopters make extractions from jungles, deserts, oceans, and even the highest mountains possible. Similarly, submersibles enable rescues from deep beneath the sea. No such technologies could come to the aid of these supercave explorers. One of their friends, the great American caver Mike Frazier, said of injuries deep in a supercave, “If you get hurt bad down there, chances are good you’re not coming out.”
True enough. Thus they were embarking on the caving equivalent of an extreme free solo first ascent in rock climbing, something on the order of El Capitan with no protection, rope, or belays.
THEY WANTED TO START IMMEDIATELY, but certain things had to be done first. Ian Rolland’s body had finally been brought out of the cave on March 29, with two recently arrived Mexican policemen on hand to observe. On April 1, the police inspectors were still there when a touching memorial service was conducted in the village church. Rolland’s body, well into decomposition, was then removed to the team’s gear-storage room, where it would stay until arrangements could be made for its return to Scotland. Right after the memorial service, though, the policemen made an unexpected demand:
We must view the body! Take us to it now.
Noel Sloan, Stone, and others escorted them to the gear-storage building, where Rolland’s body, still in its wet suit and wrapped in two plastic tarps, rested on a plywood table. Inside, astonishingly, one of the policemen produced a small toolbox and unpacked syringes, cotton swabs, red rubber gloves, and an X-Acto knife. These he handed to Noel Sloan.
Now you will perform the autopsy, he said.
A seasoned emergency room physician, Sloan had no aversion to gore and putrefaction, but he knew that a butcher-shop operation like this would reveal nothing of value about how Rolland had died. It might even invalidate Rolland’s life insurance policy, leaving his family with nothing.
We cannot do an autopsy here, Sloan explained, speaking through an interpreter.
The two policemen huddled briefly, then replied: Very well. But we must see the body. It is required. When Ian’s corpse had been carried out of the cave, it had been wrapped in the orange tarps, so the policemen had seen evidence of the body, but not the body itself.
You must understand, Sloan said. He has been dead and decaying for a week in the heat, sealed in this plastic cocoon.
The policemen stared at him, understanding but unyielding.
You really don’t want to do this, Sloan said.
But they could not be swayed. Please proceed, one ordered.
Sloan sliced through the tarps one by one, then the wet suit. When he peeled back the tarps, vile fluids flowed over the table and onto the floor, splashing the Mexican cops with the juices of death. It was more than they had bargained for. They jumped back, gave the body a hasty once-over, and fled.
Then arrangements had to be made for returning the body to Scotland, and right after that Stone and am Ende had to spend a week helping prepare the cave camps for a photo team from National Geographic, a key expedition sponsor. Finally, on April 8 the two of them were able to slip down to Camp 5, allowing Stone to do a solo reconnaissance dive through the two sumps and briefly beyond. But immediately thereafter, they had to come all the way out of the cave again so that Stone could allay local unrest, fueled by Rolland’s death, with a public slide show in Huautla village. More work for the photo shoot consumed another two weeks, until the National Geographic team finally headed back to the States on April 23.
Stone and am Ende were still determined to press on at all costs. Their stalwart friend Noel Sloan, unnerved by all that had happened, would keep going, too, but he was less enthusiastic than ever about diving. Steve Porter, still hanging around camp, was fuming and would not dive again. Reclusive Jim Brown was in a funk, living hermitlike in his van; no one was sure what he would do.
Am Ende wanted to dive beyond the San Agustín Sump, but she believed that Noel Sloan should go if he wanted to. He was older, had far more diving experience, and had worked with the ongoing Huautla exploration much longer than she had. But Sloan looked gaunt and exhausted. She could tell that he had been badly rattled by Rolland’s death, and she suspected that, deep down, he didn’t want to dive.
Noel Sloan was an unusual man, even by supercaving standards. Despite his courage, skill, and stellar cave work, there was a mercurial quality to him that caused Stone to think of him as an “emotional amplifier.” When things went well, Sloan was ebullient, almost giddy. When they went badly, his morale plunged—even lower, sometimes, than the situation warranted.
There was more. For all his scientific and medical training, Sloan was superstitious. Perhaps he really was one of those people who feel things the rest of us cannot. He had experienced, after all, that shocking premonition of Rolf Adams’s death at Jackson Blue Springs back in 1992. He placed great stock in signs and premonitions and refused to scoff at Native American beliefs about cave gods and evil spirits. Sloan did not just pay lip service to such beliefs—he acted on them. A “bad feeling” after his initial recon dives into San Agustín Sump had led to his early departure from Camp 5. Later, shaken by Ian Rolland’s death, he secretly visited a local curandero, as the Mazatecs called their shamans.
The curandero would meet Sloan only on a night when the moon was full. Sloan found him in a nearby village, in a dim, dirt-floored hut. The shriveled, white-haired old man burned a fragrant tree-resin incense called copal, read the future in magic corn kernels, and chanted. Sloan joined in prayers for the cave gods’ forgiveness and the expedition’s safety. The curandero gave Sloan two sprigs of a sacred plant called the herb of San Pedro. Plant one of these at the cave entrance, he said, and carry the other one into the cave with you. In addition, he ordered, every person who goes into the cave now must carry garlic. Finally, he told Sloan that eating sand inside the cave would give him courage. Later, Sloan did plant the herb in a spot of sunlight by Huautla Cave’s entrance, and he made sure that all five team members had garlic cloves in their packs before they descended on April 26.
They spent the next three days stocking Camp 5, and on April 28, the whole team, such as it was, came together at Camp 3. Soon, Sloan pulled Stone aside for an unnerving conversation.
“Before we came down in here,” Sloan said, “I called my parents, and my in-laws, and my wife. I said good-bye to all of them.” Given what Stone knew of Noel Sloan’s premonition before Rolf Adams’s death, it was about the most unsettling thing he could have heard.
It sounded to Stone as if Sloan had accepted the fact that he was going to die and had been putting his affairs in order. This is not the Noel Sloan I know, he thought.
“Look, Noel, you don’t have to make a decision just yet,” he said. “Why don’t you sleep on it, and let’s talk in the morning.”
Sloan agreed, but his parting words did little to reassure Stone: “There are a lot of weird vibes going on right now.”
The next morning, am Ende, Sloan, and Stone prepared for their last trip down to Camp 5. Before they headed out, Sloan spoke with Stone.
“I can’t do it. I’ve lost my edge,” Sloan said, appearing almost as unhinged by his own actions as by Rolland’s death and the omnipresent danger. “You’ve seen the crazy things I’ve been doing. I’m not ready to make the dive.”
A bit later, he spoke to am Ende. “You and Bill have been working as a team on this whole expedition,” he said. “I think you should go.”
Sloan’s decision solved one problem but created another. The three of them knew that Porter and Brown did not think that am Ende should dive. Porter had stated unequivocally that he would quit on the spot if he learned that she was going to, and Brown would almost certainly follow him. But their help was desperately needed to finish stocking Camp 5. There seemed no other choice, so Stone, am Ende, and Sloan hatched a plot. They pretended that Sloan was going to do the dive. The five of them would finish hauling loads down to Camp 5, after which Porter and Brown would return to commodious Camp 3, leaving the conspirators alone.
With that agreed upon, Stone wanted to have one last conversation alone with am Ende, and he knew just the place. Halfway between Camps 3 and 5, they huddled in an alcove in the wall that, like a phone booth, afforded some privacy, if not security. This deep, Huautla was a violent place. Hard wind stripped spray from flowing water and spun it over black walls laced with bright white stripes of calcite.
“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this dive?” Stone asked.
“I feel like I’ve trained for this all my life,” she answered. “I know I can do this. The line is there. I can handle the buoyancy.” She had been in lots of big caves before. Like a veteran marathoner who’s experienced hitting the twenty-mile wall, she recognized the physical and mental walls presented by caves in general, plus those this cave was now throwing at her. She was cold, wet, tired, disturbed by Rolland’s death, and anxious about diving a strange sump. But she had experienced difficult things before, kept her cool, retained her mission focus, and kept going. Once she got moving, am Ende felt sure, her brain and body would warm to the task. But she was not going to make the dive alone. An extended recon beyond the sump would require a tremendous amount of gear and supplies, which Stone would have to carry. She turned the tables on him with a question of her own:
“Can you handle the gear?”
Stone had been thinking about that himself. “Yeah,” he answered. “It’s going to be a mother of a pack. As long as I can get it neutral, I’m pretty certain I can do it.” An object that is neutrally buoyant neither rises nor sinks.
They had made their peace and would go forward. Stone was relieved, but also aware that he was shouldering a huge responsibility. He would not only have to manage all the challenges of his own diving, he would have to be hypervigilant about am Ende’s as well, constantly thinking two or three moves ahead, monitoring her performance, anticipating problems, planning escape contingencies. He was comforted by the fact that am Ende possessed that one quality he valued perhaps more than any other: grace under pressure, the ability to ignore distractions, cut through confusion, and focus.
For her part, am Ende felt confident that she could deal with the physical challenges involved. More difficult, she knew, would be managing her fear. But she had not caved and dived this long without becoming expert at that. She understood going in that supercave diving was a dance with death; you either accepted that or you didn’t play. Ian’s death was unsettling, but rationally she knew that he had not been killed by any anomaly in the sump. It was a deadly sump, as most were, but not inordinately so. The water was cold but not debilitating, its flow was not brutal, its visibility was poor but acceptable, and the sump itself was not all that long or deep. She knew that Stone had made it over and back twice—once hauling a dead body, to boot.
That evening, Brown and Porter ascended to Camp 3; two days later, they climbed out of the cave for good, leaving am Ende, Sloan, and Stone by themselves in Camp 5. All seemed ready for am Ende and Stone to make their big push.