TWENTY-FIVE
“THERE’S ONLY ONE PERSON I’D BE more surprised to see down here, and I’d have to kill that person,” Stone said when Vetter appeared in early May. (The homicide reference was to an absent filmmaker.) Stone was a bit strung out. The sting of Outside’s 1992 piece—at least that sharp ending—might have not entirely faded yet, either. And it appeared that Outside had sent a writer down only after its editors had heard juicy rumors of “bitter dissension and death,” as the article would later say. Apparently not much interested in a successful expedition, the magazine seemed quite interested in one beset by disaster, death, and desertion.
The expedition was essentially over by the time Vetter arrived. The remaining team members were emaciated, drained physically and emotionally, “a picture of dirt-eating exhaustion.” The atmosphere was rank with anger, disappointment, and grief. There had been a death, a mutiny, countless close calls, and many vicious arguments. The leader’s woman had been more than a small part of the problem. All in all, it looked like the ultimate expedition nightmare.
Which made it a magazine’s dream.
Outside had stumbled onto a veritable bonanza of scandal, death, and intrigue, the kind of thing that might come along once a decade. The resulting article, “Bill Stone in the Abyss,” took full advantage. It ran more than seven thousand words at a time when three thousand words was a long standard feature. Its subtitle:
His life’s obsession has been to get to the bottom of the world’s deepest cave. Two team members have already died. How much farther is he prepared to go?
The article referred to Stone as a sorehead who was obsessed, suicidal, sullen, surly, possessed, crazy, callous, desperate, pompous, and hyperinsensitive. It asserted that in his zeal to establish Huautla as the world’s deepest cave, Stone would “choose death before outright failure.”
Its conclusion declared, “In the end, it may be that prizes like Huautla go only to those who rarely ask anyone’s permission for anything, and who rarely stop to count the price.”
There it was again, another of those shape-shifting bits of writing that tiptoe around the edge of libel, seemingly saying two things at once, or maybe nothing at all. To be fair, the article did include a few positive references, but, buried in that avalanche of seven thousand mostly critical words, they were hard to find.
Stone was furious when the piece came out several months later. He thought it a hatchet job by a publication willing to stoop to any level to sell copies and, to this day, he calls the magazine Outhouse. Craig Vetter, to this day, defends the article as fair and balanced, saying that he reported only what he found. His claim is credible, given that Outside’s assignment came late, so that by the time Vetter arrived, he could only poke through the expedition’s charred bones. But how to account for the overwhelming number of criticisms in the piece and so few direct responses from Stone? “He was difficult to interview, and Barbara am Ende was his gatekeeper and guard dog,” Vetter told me. Partly, Stone’s reticence grew out of his displeasure with Vetter’s unexpected arrival. More compelling, though, was his contract with sponsor National Geographic, which forbade him (and the other expedition members) from speaking with any other media. That fact did not find its way into the Outside article.
Be that as it may, it’s safe to assume that most of Outside’s million-odd readers did not come away from the article impressed by Stone’s solo recovery of Rolland’s body, which got one sentence, or by his and am Ende’s incredible six-day exploration (several paragraphs), or by the rebreathers’ flawless performance. Nor would most readers have come away thinking of Bill Stone as one who, like Livingstone, Shackleton, and Lewis and Clark, overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the name of exploration and in pursuit of a great discovery. Most likely they would have ended up thinking of Bill Stone in very different terms—as, say, the ogre-in-chief.
But set all that aside for the time being. Magazines publish what sells, and we buy what they publish. The more compelling question, looking back over the whole Huautla episode, is: Why? Why push himself and others to such extremes, and why at that particular time? On previous expeditions, like those to Pe?a Colorada, Stone had been disciplined but not overbearing. (Not overbearing enough, perhaps, to judge from the Pe?a Colorada mutiny.) At Huautla in 1994, “overbearing” was probably too mild a descriptor. Something, apparently, had happened to Bill Stone between Pe?a Colorada and Huautla. What was it?
One thing is obvious: he was older and feeling pressured by the advancing years. In Vetter’s article, one expedition member said, “Through it all, Stone pushed as if he were late for something.” Type-A personalities always feel as if they are late for something—it’s the condition’s defining characteristic. Moreover, Stone really was late for something. In 1994, he was forty-two years old. For a lawyer or teacher or bus driver, say, that would have meant nothing. But for those who make a living with their bodies, like professional athletes, models, prostitutes—and explorers—forty-two is the leading edge of old age.
Caves are no country for old men. During extended expeditions, their assaults on the body are cruel and numerous: weeks of rappelling down and climbing up immense vertical drops with huge loads, banging like human wrecking balls into rock faces, scraping through rib-cracking squeezes, destroying knees on steep breakdown piles, worming through spine-twisting breakdown, all the while soaked and verging on hypothermia, buried in perpetual darkness, malnourished, sleep-deprived, and diarrheic. (All this in addition to cave diving, of which Stone was a frequent and extreme practitioner.) At forty-two, he had been taking that kind of beating annually, or sometimes more often, for twenty-two years, and he was already older than many others who were going on, let alone leading, supercave expeditions.
Perhaps he also was feeling pressured by the greater success of other cavers, many of them younger, elsewhere. European cavers had been doing impressive work on their continent, particularly in France and Austria, where supercaves still being explored had been swapping the “world’s deepest” record of late. And rumors had been coming out of eastern Europe—the Republic of Georgia, especially—about a couple of supercaves being investigated by expert, well-equipped, highly organized international expeditions.
It might also have been money. Stone routinely invested his own funds, without reservation, in his expeditions, and he had gone deeply into debt to launch the 1994 effort. His above-ground lifestyle reflected, if not impoverishment, at least a Spartan quality. He lived alone in a nondescript, sparsely furnished home in a Washington, D.C., suburb where Rabbit Angstrom would have fit right in. The house, in fact, was not really a home in the traditional sense; it was more like a way station between caverns. Caves were his home and, to a lesser extent, the laboratory.
Living without independent means meant finding sponsors. The corporate world was watching, not only those who had already ponied up but everybody who might conceivably back him in the future. Much of the time during Huautla ’94 he felt something that no one else did: the hot breath of those sponsors on his neck, peering over his shoulder at every turn, interested in only one thing: ROI, return on investment. We showed you the money. Where’s our payoff?
But does even all that explain Stone’s pushing himself and others to such extremes, risking so much, including his lover’s life, and suffering such costs, including Ian Rolland’s death? One quick and easy answer pops to mind: obsession. In fact, some 1994 expedition members did use that word.
Obsession has fascinated us since biblical times, Jesus being perhaps the ultimate example of obsession’s triumph—and toll. The word conjures visions, most wildly pejorative, of characters like Mr. Kurtz, the deranged ivory trader in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. (Outside’s article did suggest, obliquely, that Stone might have become a real-life Kurtz.) In the minds of many, “obsession” is followed quickly by “crazy.”
Obsession is not classified as a mental illness. Its dictionary definition is “domination of one’s thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, or desire.” So one doesn’t have to be crazy to be obsessed. But like the rich, the obsessed surely are different from you and me. Edward Bulwer-Lytton observed tellingly that “talent does what it can, but genius does what it must.” Not all geniuses are obsessed, of course, any more than all the obsessed are geniuses, but the two conditions do share a certain lack of volition. One could even paraphrase Bulwer-Lytton to say that interest does what it can, but obsession does what it must.
Bill Stone himself dislikes the word, as did another great explorer, George Leigh Mallory. The pioneering Everest climber (he of “Because it’s there” fame) was a husband and a father, like Stone, of three children. But the center of Mallory’s short adult life was unquestionably Mount Everest. He made three attempts on the mountain, and the last, in June 1924, during which he may or may not have reached the summit, killed him. He left a wife, Ruth, and the children.
Robert Macfarlane, a gifted writer and mountaineer, comes to a startling conclusion about Mallory in his book Mountains of the Mind. In an earlier book of my own I quoted this same passage, and I cite it again here because it illuminates so brightly the subject at hand:
To read Mallory’s letters and journals from the three Everest expeditions … is to eavesdrop on a burgeoning love affair—a love affair with a mountain. It was a deeply selfish love affair, which Mallory could and should have broken off, but which instead destroyed the lives of his wife and children—as well as his own.
Not obsession, then, but—who’d have thought it?—love. Hmm. At first blush, that seems a middling excuse for megalomania. But not so fast. Another great writer on the subject of love pointed out that
When a man loves a woman …
He’ll trade the world
For the good thing he’s found
He’ll trade the world …
Obsession may be part of love, and love part of obsession. What is perfume about, after all, but love, and what is one of the most popular essences d’amour called but Obsession? If more proof of love and obsession’s link be needed, consider this: Obsession’s elegant bottle resembles nothing so much as the male organ, ready for love. The sharpest marketers on earth, who know a lot, understand that the two conditions are as intertwined as lovers on a bed.
More proof may not be needed, but it does exist, provided by none other than Bill Stone himself in a 1994 Washington Post Magazine article, “Journey Toward the Center of the Earth,” by Hampton and Anne Sides. About his extreme caving, Stone said, “It’s been a very insidious involvement … one of those things I absolutely must do.”
There was undoubtedly another factor, and it harked all the way back to Stone’s competitive father, Curt. At every opportunity, Bill Stone downplays the idea of competition in what he does, but that’s a bit disingenuous. He is one of the most naturally competitive people you will ever meet, for one thing, and for another, competition has always driven those seeking the Big Discoveries. There are too few of them, and too many humans, for such prizes not to become hotly contested. Examples abound in every field. The fact that Scott and Amundsen, to cite them one last time, were literally racing to the South Pole on different routes is one example. Other scientists were hot on the heels of Crick and Watson, who discovered DNA, or, as they put it, “the secret of life.” If Charles Lindbergh had not made his transatlantic flight when he did, others were idling on the tarmac, poised for their own takeoff rolls.
Exploration, be it for science or adventure, and competition go hand in hand. In 2006, Stone told X-Ray Mag, an international diving publication, “The game was that we were trying to beat the French…. Now we are trying to beat the Russians but it is still the very same game.” (Italics added.) He could have been talking about the Olympics.
UNDERLYING EVERYTHING ELSE MAY HAVE BEEN something even more primal and basic: desperation. By 1994, Bill Stone had lost his wife, his children, his home, two close friends, and all his money; he had borrowed heavily and promised the moon to scores of sponsors. One golden moment had been snatched away by fate in Cheve in 1991. Stone knew that life did not often present a second, but there it was, down in Huautla, in 1994.
“I’ve shot my wad,” he confessed miserably to Noel Sloan after dinner on April 29 down in Camp 3. “This is my chance, maybe my only chance. I’m going to push this cave to the bitter end. No matter what.”
No matter what.
Bill Stone may have despised Outside, but there was an eerie ring to those three words. The magazine’s 1992 article about him ended with the same three.