Barbara Anne am Ende watched the early morning sunlight stream through barren tree branches and speckle the walls of the large bedroom. A mere two weeks had passed since she'd packed up her life as a North Carolina graduate student and moved in with her new boyfriend, Bill Stone. She wasn't accustomed to either the icy Maryland winter or the rhythms of daily life within Bill's sparsely furnished suburban home. A cold blast of wind shook the highsided tract house. The corner windows groaned. She tugged a blanket up under her chin and watched the shadows dance.
A small pulley swung wildly from one of the tree's thickest branches. Barbara recognized its outline, and that of the new nylon climbing rope that dangled through it to the ground below. She'd spent the better part of a day hanging from that rope, adjusting her new red and pink Petzl harness and tuning her climbing gear for the impending expedition. The pulley creaked as it bobbed about. The noise reminded her that she'd neglected to pack the rope. There was still an awful lot to pack, she thought, but if nothing else went wrong, she and Bill-and the five other team members sacked out about his house-might finally hit the road later today.
Barbara rolled over to face Bill, and watched him sleep. They'd met in the autumn of 1992 at a West Virginia camp popular among cavers. She'd been standing at the back of a friend's van assembling her gear in preparation for the rescue of an injured caver at a nearby hole called the Portal, when the voice of another caver, also hastily recruited for the rescue party, sounded behind her. "You're going?" he asked, without attempting to conceal his incredulity. Barbara spun around. It was Bill Stone. She knew who he was, as did everyone else in the camp. His expeditions and diving developments had made him a legend among cavers. She'd gone out of her way not to fawn over him. In return, there he stood, questioning her abilities as a caver. She was a little intimidated. But while she knew she wasn't the fastest or the strongest, she was competent. She stammered, "Well, I brought my vertical gear."
Annoyed at her verbal fumble as soon as the breath passed her lips, she sat in silence as the rescue team carpooled to the cave entrance. As fate would have it, she and Bill reached the injured caver first. They put the man into a sling, lowered him to the others, and helped him out of the cave. Late the next morning, after the others left in search of coffee, she and Bill sat in their sleeping bags and chatted. He grilled her: "What are you studying?" (Ph.D. in geology.) "How do you get to school?" (Bicycle.) "How much do you exercise?" (Jog eight kilometers twice a week.) She was offended by his rapid-fire inquisition, but attracted to his intensity. He slipped his business card into her toiletries kit before he left. She'd passed the quiz.
Now he lay asleep beside her. He was separated from his wife and three young sons, but not yet divorced. He'd courted her long-distance for the past year and a half. They took turns making the long drive from Chapel Hill to Gaithersburg. This was their first Valentine's Day together. And it wasn't exactly shaping up like a scene from a Hallmark commercial. The expedition was already a month behind schedule. The team was restless after weeks of delay. And Bill was showing signs of stress: For the past several days, he'd leapt frenetically from task to task, completing nothing.
She got up quietly and padded into the bathroom, catching sight of herself in the mirror as she switched on the light. A memory of another mirror flickered through her sleepy mind. The youngest of three children, Barbara took an early interest in caving. After reading every book her local library had about caves, she began pestering her mother to take her to one. When she was about thirteen years old, her mother drove her to Maquoketa Caves State Park in Iowa. Near the entrance to Dancehall Cave she charged into a small opening that snaked into the rock. She slithered forward on her belly until the crawlway became too tight. When she came back out, she was covered in mud. And she was beaming. Her mother took a picture. On the way home, they stopped for dinner at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Barbara went into the bathroom to wash up. She caught sight of herself in the mirror, and felt torn. She was embarrassed for being so dirty. But as a budding caver, she was proud of her first real caving trip-and wanted to continue wearing the mud as a badge of honor. Now she studied herself in Bill's mirror for a moment, and smiled. She was taller, and thinner, and thirty-four years old. She was headed to a much more serious cave. But her excitement about the expedition was exactly the same as it had been all those years ago.
She returned to the bedroom, and realized that she and Bill wouldn't find another moment together once they headed downstairs. So she rustled about as much as possible in the hope that he'd wake. It worked. He lifted his head and peered at her through one eye.
"Happy Valentine's Day, Guillermo," she said. She'd taken to using the Spanish version of his name as a term of endearment, or sometimes just "G." The Mexicans called him Guillermo Piedra-William Stone.
Bill propped himself up on one arm, and sighed. He disliked the holiday. He regarded it as part of an elaborate conspiracy to sell greeting cards. But he liked Barbara, so he played along for the sake of the budding relationship. She reached under the bed and dug out the gifts she'd hidden there: a can of macadamia nuts, a jar of jam, and a card. Guillermo produced one of the team polo shirts he'd printed for the expedition. No card. They lingered in bed for a few moments longer, savoring their shared sense of hope.
As they made their way down the open staircase into the high-ceilinged front room, the couple found Ian Rolland sitting amid scrupulously sorted rows of valves, hoses, connectors, and other parts for the rebreathers. A small, muscular man with wispy brown hair, Ian had been at work since well before dawn. He tossed the couple a disarming smile, and called up a cheery: "Mornin', mates!"
Bill's living room featured none of the items one would normally expect in a suburban American home: no sofa, easy chair, coffee table, or television. In their place was an assortment of makeshift workbenches surrounded by shelves crammed full of caving equipment. Ian sat atop a high stool at the largest bench. A veteran of the groundbreaking British Cave Diving Group, he was one of the most experienced cavers on the expedition. He'd already plumbed most of Europe's deep caves by the time he met Bill in 1985 on an experimental diving expedition at England's legendary Wookey Hole.
Bill matched Ian's infectious grin, and showed his appreciation for the young man's hard work by hamming his way through a dreadful imitation of a stiff British colonial accent. "Well, good day to you, too, Mr. Rolland," he said. "Care to join us for a spot of tea?"
Ian hopped down and joined them in the kitchen. On leave from his job as a Tornado jet engineer in the Royal Air Force, the twenty-nine-year-old had arrived in mid-January with the expectation that the team would be leaving for Mexico within days. He missed his wife, Erica, and their "two girls and a little lad." And while he was willing to temporarily live apart from them to go exploring, he found it irksome to have spent a month sorting parts in a bland American suburb. So without ever being asked, the young RAF sergeant had begun organizing the expedition. Each morning he casually questioned Bill about the status of various projects. Afterward, with humor and tact that belied his age, he gently cajoled his fellow team members into attacking the jobs he considered most essential.
"So then, Bill," Ian began, "should we pressure-check the new tanks before we toss them on the lorry?"
As Ian's laundry list of concerns poured out, Bill and Barbara foraged for silverware among the carefully sorted piles of freeze-dried food that concealed the kitchen's faded yellow countertops. They were well into their corn flakes by the time Noel Sloan's bare feet staggered across the dingy linoleum.
Noel headed straight for the coffee pot. He dumped eight heaping tablespoons of sugar into a small cup, then topped it off with java. Ian ceased his interrogation to gaze in mock horror. Barbara stifled a laugh. Noel, oblivious to them both, loudly slurped down the first cup of syrup, then fixed himself another.
Bill had seen Noel's morning routine many times before. The two were like brothers separated at birth. They'd both been brainy kids who'd nearly blown off their hands in boyhood chemistry experiments. They'd both taken up caving while in high school, and gone to graduate school in Texas to live close to the Mexican caving grounds. And they'd become friends the moment they met outside a Florida dive shop. It was the fall of 1983, and Bill was sitting on the shop's lawn assembling a new type of high-pressure scuba tank. Noel hopped out of a sleek Mazda RX-7 sporting a cowboy hat and mirrored sunglasses. He strolled straight for Bill, studied him a moment, then blurted, "Hey, man. Very cool. How high can you pump those suckers?" Bill looked up at the tall stranger, then back down at the bright yellow fiberglass tank resting between his long legs. "Well," he said, "I figure they'll blow up at about 17,000 psi." Noel laughed, and extended a hand still scarred from childhood. They shook, and had been caving together ever since.
Noel pawed through the cupboard in search of a bowl. Then he poured himself some cereal, shoved aside a large pile of cardboard boxes, and joined the others at the table. Ian resumed questioning Bill, but Noel wasn't listening. He, too, was frustrated that the team was still in Gaithersburg; but unlike Ian, he wasn't the least bit surprised. All of Bill's expeditions had started this way. In fact, as Noel knew all too well, it was one of these prolonged refugee encampments that had broken the back of Bill's marriage. Noel studied Barbara as he sucked down his cereal. He was pleased Bill had found a girlfriend, and delighted she was a caver. He was glad to have a woman on the team, having noticed over the years that expeditions tended to be a bit more civil whenever women were around. But Barbara's presence had seriously altered the long-accustomed team dynamic. She'd replaced him as Bill's confidant, just as Ian had replaced him as Bill's de facto lieutenant. As he slurped down the milk at the bottom of his bowl, Noel realized that for the first expedition in memory, he didn't really know what his role would be. He set his bowl down and smiled. The mystery of his own concealed future excited him.
Ian was plodding through an oral inventory of the equipment stacked throughout the two-story house and adjacent garage. There were 106 tanks, nine rebreathers, compressors, camp supplies, two tons of food, and a seemingly unlimited supply of clothing donated by various outdoor suppliers. There was simply no way it was all going to fit into two small Toyota pickups and the Step Van delivery truck they'd borrowed for the trip.
"We've got a mountain of fleece, mate," Ian noted. "Maybe we could pare down the Patagonia pile a wee bit?" After a half-hour of defending the necessity of every item Ian questioned, Bill was about to concede Ian's point when Noel, who'd just tuned in, leapt on the fleece thing. He stretched his neck out and tilted his head forward, confronting Ian with bulging blue eyes that looked as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. "So, what kind of underwear are you going to wear under your drysuit?" Noel objected, unconcerned that he was derailing Ian's effort to focus Bill. "I mean, the water in San Agustin is pretty damned cold, man."
Noel's face remained pointed at Ian while he waited for an answer. He tugged the edge of his mouth back toward one ear for an instant. The head tilt and jaw tick, along with his bulging eyes and prematurely receding hairline, lent him the look of a large iguana. Barbara choked back another laugh. She looked from the amiable iguana, to the frustrated inquisitor, to the hapless den mother. And she thought, Maybe we won't make it on the road today after all.
With a conciliatory smile, Ian was about to answer Noel when Kenny Broad slipped into the room. "I'm going to wear the pink lacey undies you gave me, Noel," Kenny said. "You know, the ones without the crotch."
The room filled with laughter.
Besides being a compulsive wise-ass, Kenny was the most experienced diver on the team; he'd spent more time underwater than the rest of them put together. Slight of build with a leathery tan and a scraggly reddish beard, Kenny grew up in Miami Beach and had been diving since he was a boy. He'd worked all sorts of diving jobs-including gigs as a stunt diver for adventure shows-before moving to New York City to study for a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University. Behind the swashbuckling persona hid a remarkably methodical twenty-eight-year-old: He was a licensed captain, an emergency medical technician, and a hyperbaric chamber operator.
Kenny's relentless pranks helped bridge the cultural divide that separated the cavers from the divers. Bill, Barbara, Ian, and Noel were cavers who, after being stymied by one sump or another, had learned to dive through sumps as a means to push deeper into caves. Kenny was an ocean diver who hadn't started working in dry caves until 1993, and then only to transport himself down to remote sumps like the one at the bottom of the Sitano de San Agustin. Cavers who could dive were rare; divers who could cave were more so. Bill's long years of trying to find a way through the San Agustin sump made him one of the few expedition leaders with friends in both groups, and it had taken him years to assemble a team of interdisciplinary explorers. But as thoroughly cross-trained as the team was, their loyalties to their home tribes never completely faded. When tensions ran high, the cavers derided the divers as lazy and uncommitted, while the divers accused the cavers of being undisciplined.
Like Ian, Kenny was astonished by the lack of advance preparation.
He was accustomed to working on well-funded research or filmmaking
expeditions, not volunteer operations like Bill's nonprofit U.S.
Deep Caving Team. So Kenny simply figured the chaos in Gaithersburg
was just part and parcel of shoestring expedition life, and he
adjusted his expectations accordingly. He concluded that one
couldn't reasonably expect such a disorganized expedition to guard
the well-being of each of its members, so he resolved to set his own
safety boundaries, and stay within them.
Continues...
Excerpted from Beyond the Deep by William Stone Barbara am Ende and Monte Paulsen Copyright © 2002 by William C. Stone, Barbara Anne am Ende, and Monte Paulsen. Excerpted by permission.
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