TWENTY-SIX
STONE-LED EXPEDITIONS IN 1995 and 1997 failed to find any other way through Huautla. Stone devoted 1998 largely to a massive project mapping Florida’s vast Wakulla Springs underwater cave system. The project provided him with a matchless opportunity to test and refine his rebreathers. It also afforded the media yet another chance to have at him. This time it came in the form of a writer from National Geographic Adventure, the offspring of National Geographic magazine, published by the National Geographic Society, which was one of Stone’s most important sponsors. Though he might have wished to, given his previous experience, there was no way Stone could keep NGA’s writer, Geoffrey Norman, away from the springs.
The Wakulla Springs Mapping Project was three months long; involved a team of 152, supported by 28 sponsors; and cost more than $1 million. It was also ambitious, even by the standards of Stone endeavors, with not one but four goals. Improving and testing the rebreathers was one. Demonstrating the worth of another Stone invention, a computerized, sonar-enabled device that produced three-dimensional, color underwater maps, was another. The third was demonstrating the utility of a “variable depth decompression habitat,” as Stone called it, a bell-shaped, submerged chamber that allowed divers to do long decompression stops in its warm, dry environment, rather than spending hours hanging off hand lines underwater. And there was the overarching reason for being there: mapping Wakulla’s caves.
Early on, one of Stone’s divers suffered a bout of decompression sickness (the bends) but survived. Later, another went into convulsions at 100 feet (oxygen toxicity, again) and nearly drowned. That diver was very lucky indeed to live. On February 15, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and experienced diver named Henry Kendall, who had been working in support, did drown. All three had been using Stone’s rebreathers; the first two accidents occurred because the divers had failed to adjust their units correctly. An autopsy ultimately revealed that a stomach hemorrhage killed Kendall. “He would have died in Wal-Mart,” a Florida coroner was quoted as saying in Norman’s article.
These mishaps would have been bad enough by themselves, but Stone and his team also ran afoul of territorial local divers who had been mapping the springs on their own for ten years. The 160-diver group called itself the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP). Given their professed commitment to science, WKPP’s divers might have welcomed the newcomers and, with their intimate knowledge of the springs, pitched in to help. Perhaps that was expecting too much of human nature, especially that of the WKPP leader, George Irvine. A muscular, combative, fitness-obsessed man, Irvine was another classic alpha who bitterly resented the Stone crew’s ballyhooed invasion of “his” turf.
“There are a lot of people who don’t like me, and I don’t really care,” Irvine told Norman, and one he especially didn’t care about was Bill Stone. One of his posts on a widely read divers’ Internet forum stated, “The bottom line is that in my opinion this guy [Stone] has no regard for human life, is a complete dillatante [sic], is a pretender, and has proven it for the nine years that I have been diving there while he has been yapping like a cocker spaniel.” Stone refused to respond in kind.
Arriving at the springs, Stone’s team found in front of their trailer a pile of trash bags with the note “You might need these for body bags.” A bit later, divers found a dead catfish with a note stuffed in its mouth that read, “Triple this,” a reference to Stone’s prediction that his team, with its high-tech rebreathers, 3-D mapper, and fast electric scooters, might triple the existing mappage, which had taken WKPP ten years to accrue.
Then Stone’s divers began finding that safety lines had been cut in a number of places.
They suspected that WKPP divers had done it, but Irvine called those charges “bull” and rejoined that Stone and his team were “a bunch of crybabies.”
Nevertheless, the outsiders persevered. By March 1, when Stone’s permit ran out, the team had made 3-D maps of every cave passage within the boundaries of the state park that served as their base of operations. That did leave a vast portion of the 450-square-mile cave system unmapped, but what the 3-D mappers lacked in quantity, they made up for in quality, proving that some of the handmade maps created by George Irvine and his teams were off by 300 feet in the first mile.
Stone doubtless awaited the publication of NGA’s article with some trepidation. It did contain a few references (how could it not?) to Stone’s relentless drive and brusque manner, but it gave legitimate credit to his inventions, his explorations—“an extraordinary accomplishment”—and his vision. As for WKPP, Norman let its leader, Irvine, come onstage and speak for himself, which brought no great credit to him or his organization. Stone held his tongue for the most part, which reflected well on him and his.
AS 2000 ARRIVED, STONE ONCE AGAIN began looking across the canyon at Cheve Cave. Nobody had come close to cracking Cheve’s terminal sump, but at some point the choices in exploration shave cruelly fine: Which cave, mountain route, ocean deep, whatever, is 5 or 10 or 2 percent more likely to go? For several years, the odds had fallen in favor of Huautla. Now they were shifting back to Cheve, and so would Stone. He knew that “the Russians,” as he called them, were going very deep in caves of their own, and he was determined to beat them.
He wasn’t actually vying with Russians—that was a slip of the tongue caused by the Cold War tendency to call everything within the former U.S.S.R. “Russian.” In fact, the opposition was Ukrainians, at work on a small, otherworldly plateau called the Arabika Massif in a small, strange eastern European region named Abkhazia. There, Ukrainian cavers had shattered the existing world record by a huge margin, descending 5,610 feet into a supercave called Krubera (KRU-bera) in the forbidding Caucasus Mountains, overlooking the Black Sea. The Ukrainians were just as skilled, determined, and courageous as the Mexican supercave teams. They made no secret of their belief that Krubera could go much deeper still. They typically mounted at least one expedition every year, and sometimes more, and would surely keep pushing themselves and their own supercave to the limits.
Thus the choice really had been made for him. Bill Stone would return not to Huautla and the Mother of All Sumps, but to Cheve. And this time he would not just be searching for the center of the earth. He would be racing to get there first.