FIVE
BILL STONE, IT’S SAFE TO ASSUME, would have succeeded grandly in any endeavor. One of those gene-pool anomalies people admire, sometimes envy, and occasionally fear, he is graced with genius-level intellect, prodigious physical strength, boundless energy, and ambition that keeps everything else revving at redline.
Stone’s father, Curt, had been a professional baseball player with the Cincinnati Reds’ organization and, before that, a four-sport athlete in high school and college. Had a German psychopath not come to power, it’s likely Curt Stone would have gone on to a career in major league baseball. But World War II blew up the world, and military service knocked Curt Stone out of the ballparks. His dreams derailed, he became a salesman rather than a shortstop.
By 1952, he was married and living in Ingomar, Pennsylvania, where his son, Bill, was born. The youngster was drawn at first not to sports but to science, and quite early in childhood. Despite his own athletic background and lack of scientific training, Curt Stone recognized that his son was something of a science prodigy and gave Bill a chemistry set when the boy was in sixth grade. The present was welcome, but Stone quickly outgrew it and was soon ordering his own chemicals and equipment from major scientific supply houses. By tenth grade he had created a sophisticated basement laboratory.
In high school, Stone was a self-described science nerd who earned straight A’s, built and launched homemade rockets, and spent hours performing experiments in his basement lab. By the time he was in his teens, it was clear that Stone, tall and strong, had inherited his father’s physical gifts, if not his passion for team sports. In fact, Stone’s family was somewhat in awe of the big, rangy kid whose curiosity and intellect were a match for his imposing physique. They sometimes compared him to Doc Savage, the pulp fiction hero of the 1930s and ’40s who was a scientist, inventor, explorer, researcher, and musician and who, according to his creator, radiated “Christliness.” Bill may not have been “Christly,” but to his kid sister, Judy, he seemed the best big brother a girl could want, a funny guy, warm and protective, always happy to include her in escapades and adventures.
In addition to size, he inherited his father’s competitiveness, but team sports held little interest for him, perhaps because being just a player, rather than the leader, seemed unappealing. (There were team captains, to be sure, but the chances of becoming one were small and, at the high school level, determined mostly by precocity.) Not playing organized sports, and thus earning no varsity letters, made him feel like a failure. That was not an option even then for one so competitive, so he got into a sport that involved shooting—bullets, not basketballs. Joining the rifle team, he could compete as an individual, responsible to and for no one else, and in his junior year became a varsity letterman.
Disinterest in team sports did not mean that the big, restless teenager had no appetite for excitement and adrenaline, and during his junior year something happened that would turn the rest of his life into a classic quest producing exorbitant amounts of both. He attended a slide show presented by two men whose names he never forgot, Dick Schmidt and Al Haar, from the Pittsburgh Grotto chapter of the National Speleological Society. He also never forgot the particular moment when the cave bug bit and would not let go. At one point Schmidt and Haar showed an image of a caver hanging on a rope in a vertical cave shaped like a huge cylinder, hundreds of feet deep. The top of the immense shaft was carpeted with bright green moss. Sunlight poured down into it, illuminating the caver, who hung like a tiny, glowing spider on a golden thread. Beneath him yawned a vast, bottomless darkness. Something about that image struck a spark deep in Bill Stone’s soul, and an inner voice shouted, I want to do that. It was a desire he would spend the rest of his life fulfilling.
That such an image could create a life-shifting epiphany is curious. It’s not so hard to understand why someone could be galvanized by, say, images of a professional athlete at work, or a marine biologist, or a jet pilot. It’s more difficult to understand such instant attraction to places perpetually and absolutely dark, cold, wet, riddled with coffin-tight passages and gigantic, gaping abysses. Part of the reason Stone could feel so excited was that the slide of the rappeller showed none of caving’s darker side, so to speak. It showed cave exploration at its cleanest, brightest, and most exciting, with that climber floating in golden light. But the rest of that slide show did reveal caving in all its other “glories,” and they did nothing to dampen Stone’s enthusiasm.
He promptly joined his high school’s new caving group, the NASTY (North Allegheny Spelunking and Traveling Young) People’s Club. In a nearby quarry, Pittsburgh Grotto cavers introduced Stone and others to caving’s most basic and essential technique: rappelling. As beginners, they were taught the body rappel. Advanced cavers were using rappel racks by then, but beginners body-rappelled, and there was still that crotch problem. Showing an early flash of his problem-solving skills, Stone bought coveralls and had his mother sew leather patches in the right places. Then he went out and rappelled every quarry within fifty miles.
STONE SOON GRADUATED TO THE HUGE pits and caverns that have made West Virginia a caving mecca. There, while still a high school junior, he completed a rite of passage, rappelling to the bottom (“dropping,” in caver-speak) of 158-foot-deep Hell Hole Cave in the Mountaineer State’s Germany Valley. The experience introduced him to a whole new tribe of cavers, those who lived, and sometimes died, for vertical work.
“Pit freaks,” they were called, and Stone quickly developed an enthusiasm for both them and their exhilarating, “yo-yo” style of caving. He dropped Hell Hole Cave almost sixty times. What went down had to come back up, of course. For ascending, he and many other cavers then used those inefficient Prusik knots. Then one day in 1969, Stone encountered a group of southern cavers at Hell Hole with vertical rigs the like of which he had never seen: stainless steel rappel racks, seat and chest harnesses, étriers (stirrups), and mechanical ascenders. Those cavers had come up from TAG—Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia—the most cave-rich area of the United States. Their vertical techniques and gear were revolutionizing cave exploration. Using such rigs, explorers could get down into, and back up out of, caves that had previously been inaccessible. Because of the new rigs’ efficiency, cavers could carry along unprecedented amounts of weight, which eventually would make possible the extended expeditions supercaves require. For Stone, it was an epiphany, akin to someone showing the Wright brothers a Piper Cub. He understood in a flash the potential of this new equipment and what it foretold about the future of cave exploration.
After high school, Stone studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. By then tricked out with the latest vertical gear, when he was not in science labs, he was out caving with such stars of the day as Buddy Lane, Richard Schreiber, and the already legendary Marion O. Smith, who as of this writing has explored more caves than anyone else, ever—over five thousand. Smith introduced Stone to places like 586-foot-deep Fantastic Pit in Georgia’s Ellison’s Cave, the longest in-cave free rappel in the Lower 48. Fantastic is big enough to swallow the Washington Monument. Dropped from its lip, a rock takes eight seconds to hit bottom.
So long were rappels like these that cavers poured water on both rope and rack to prevent overheating produced by friction as the rope, under tremendous stress, ran through the bars. During his first descent of Fantastic, Stone stopped at 200 feet to do just that. But, committing an ultimate rookie gaffe, he dropped his canteen. Other cavers, including his guide and mentor Smith, were already down in the darkness on the pit’s floor, almost 400 feet below.
“ROCK!” Stone screamed—the standard warning for any falling object. Looking down, he could see tiny lights flying in all directions. Except for one that, strangely, didn’t move at all. Terrified that he had brained a fellow caver, Stone completed the rappel in agony. Reaching the pit’s floor, he found Marion Smith holding the bottom of the rappel rope taut; such an assist made it easier for Fantastic first-timers to control their descent rate. The canteen had hit and exploded a few feet away, but Smith had not budged. Mortified, Stone started gushing apologies. Shrugging them off, Smith dismissed the very close call with one word:
“Happens.”
Stone was blown away by the elder caver’s sangfroid. Life had just shown him an archetype—Hemingway’s iconic “grace under pressure” ideal—that he would strive to emulate forever after, that would shape his leadership style, and that would serve him well during future trials and tragedies.
Later that night, Stone and the other newbies’ hike back to camp was raucous as they burned off Fantastic adrenaline. After listening for a while, Smith said softly to Stone, “Son, this ain’t where it’s at.”
They had just dropped the biggest hole in the continental United States. What on earth could one-up that? If this isn’t where it’s at, asked Stone, then where is it? Smith let the question linger for a while and finally let fly another one-word zinger:
“Mexico.”