James M. Tabor - 007 Blind Descent - Chapter 02.3 - Stone | Текст песни

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• James M. Tabor
• 007 Blind Descent - Chapter 02.3 - Stone

But it was not. In early 1992, Yeager’s Indiana friend, with Tina Shirk’s help, organized an expedition to recover the body. They were fortunate to have assistance from a team of gifted Polish cavers, who brought Yeager’s body to the surface in three days. The Poles were very good, but the retrieval was easier than it would have been a year earlier, for the very reason Stone had stated to Durbin Yeager. Decomposition had done its work, and the body, while not just a skeleton, did come out in pieces.
Once again, news of “the infamous Chris Yeager incident,” as Stone came to think of it, ignited fresh controversy. Many American cavers, Stone among them, were outraged that an upstart team of foreigners had invaded “their” cave. Others, especially Yeager’s friends and family, supported the effort.
The fact that two other expedition leaders and Chris Yeager’s father were involved in the original decision to leave the body in place seemed to get lost along the way. Partly that was because the outspoken Stone’s larger-than-life ways and brusque manner helped make him a natural lightning rod for criticism. Several magazine journalists who spent relatively brief periods with Stone found him less than ingratiating. Their articles in widely read, influential publications such as Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and The Washington Post Magazine reflected that, describing him variously as “domineering,” “obsessed,” and “pompous.”
Stone’s hard-driving, type-A way of going alienated some in the caving community as well. Two of the cavers interviewed early in the research for this book had identical responses when Stone’s name came up: “He’s an asshole.” A third echoed that, adding, “And people die on his expeditions.”
But it is important to note that the majority of people who have actually gone down into the earth with Stone praise his courage, intelligence, strength, and especially the indomitable perseverance that, decade after decade, enables him to keep pursuing a goal that, each time he nears it, recedes like a mirage.
Not genetically disposed to niceties, Stone also inherited at least two of the hard personality traits found so often in great achievers, explorers not excepted: he is a classic alpha male, and a type-A personality as well. One especially salient type-A characteristic is extreme impatience driven by a maddening sense of urgency. It’s an open question whether such people suffer fools or delays less gladly. For them, everything from mowing the lawn to mounting great expeditions feels like a losing race against time, which always seems to be running out.
Niceness aside, type-A and alpha-male tendencies do confer certain advantages, like the willingness—need, some would say—to take on challenges that to the rest of us seem incomprehensible at best and insane at worst. Like spending thirty years pursuing the deepest cave on earth, for example. Well before the twentieth century’s end, in fact, knowledgeable sources were drawing comparisons between Bill Stone and the driven, brilliant, death-defying Italian climber Reinhold Messner, unquestionably the greatest mountaineer of all time.
The comparison had merit, but one of its corollaries was less frequently mentioned. True greatness is rarely achieved without collateral damage. Like Messner, Stone pursued Olympian goals with relentless, single-minded passion, and it cost both dearly: marriages, families, lovers, security, friendships, and the lives of friends as well.
Stone curtly and unapologetically denied my request to accompany one of his Mexican supercave expeditions as part of this book’s early research. A first meeting with him took months to arrange, partly because of his frenetic schedule and partly because he wasn’t overly excited at the prospect of frittering away precious hours with a writer. By the time he finally did submit to an interview, I found it hard not to expect some extraordinary combination of Captain Ahab, Mr. Kurtz, and Spider-Man.
Perhaps, though, that should not have been surprising. What ordinary man, after all

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