Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  My thirst selectively drives my memory to focus on the five-gallon water jug bought in Moab, sitting three quarters full in the bed of my pickup. I think about the two one-liter bottles of Gatorade I bought at a convenience store late Friday night in Green River. They’re spread across the floor of the passenger seat, along with some grapefruits, oranges, muffins, burritos, and snack bars that were shaken out of their plastic bags from all the bouncing and swerving on the dirt road. I hold in my mind the image of the grapefruits on the floor mat, fantasizing their juiciness. I had bought them specifically to eat after my Blue John/Horseshoe circuit, anticipating the intensifying effect a long day’s journey would have on their succulence. My tongue smacks across my palate, yearning for refreshment. Before my longing can get the better of me, causing me to guzzle my six ounces of water, I shake the image out of my head.

  I’m impatient with the idleness fencing me inside my head, so I evaluate my situation again. I won’t have another go at the lifting system. It is as futile as hammering the rock with my multi-tool file. My options seem to have played out. I reconsider my remaining choices for the twenty-fifth time, it must be, clinging to the idea that I might have missed something.

  I still haven’t given amputation a full chance. I didn’t even try to cut myself yesterday. I stopped short. Was it because I wasn’t ready or because I was afraid it would end badly? I remember how the sight of the metal blade against my wrist repelled my hand and left my stomach heaving. I’m less than confident about the webbing tourniquet I crafted yesterday. Maybe my reticence signals a need to further prepare my strategy. Escaping this canyon on foot—scrambling the tightly twisting canyon, rappelling sixty-five feet, and then hiking eight miles—after a full-extremity amputation mandates a world-class tourniquet. In the end, I don’t care if I do damage to my residual limb’s tissue or remaining blood vessels with a flawless constricting device. The main problem is stopping the imminent threat to life, stanching the blood flow completely. So how can I improve my tourniquet, and thereby my plan? I’ve already ruled out my water-pack tubing; it’s too stiff to tie a solid knot. The webbing isn’t stretchy enough; it doesn’t conform to my arm’s contours, and I worry about getting it sufficiently tight. I need something more flexible than the tubing and more elastic than the…That’s it! Elastic! The neoprene tubing insulation from my CamelBak is stretchy and supple but strong. It’s perfect.

  I’m elated at the idea. I retrieve the discarded tubing insulation from my pack, where I dropped the parts left over from yesterday’s surgical prep session. Why didn’t I think of this before? Using my left hand to twice wrap the thin black neoprene around my right forearm just two inches below my elbow, I tie a simple overhand knot and tighten one end in my teeth, then double and triple the knot. I take my carabiner with the purple marking tape—the same one I used yesterday, I note—and clip the neoprene, twisting it six times. Clamping down on my forearm, the material pinches my skin. I adjust my arm hairs under the band, but it still hurts. For some reason, the pain pleases me, perhaps because it reassures me that the tourniquet is working. I can see what little pink is left in my forearm fade to fish-belly white, and the flesh bunched up between my elbow and the tourniquet flashes to bright red. Oh yeah, this is way better than the webbing idea. The ache in my arm flares, but my self-satisfaction overrides it. I’m pleased with myself, and with the tourniquet’s squeeze, less masochism than a renewed sparkle of hope. I’m taking action. And it feels very good to be taking action.

  I’m ready for the next step. I take my multi-tool and switch it from the battered file to the longer of the two knife blades, forgetting my plans to use the sharper one. Instead of pointing the tip into the tendon gap at my wrist, I hold it with the blade against the upper part of my forearm. Surprising myself, I press on the blade and slowly draw the knife across my forearm. Nothing happens. Huh. Repeating the act, I press harder with my palm on the tool’s grip. Still nothing. No cut, no blood, nothing. Extracting the short knife, I vigorously saw back and forth at my forearm, growing more frustrated with each unproductive attempt. Exasperated, I give up. This is shit! The damn blade won’t break the skin. How the hell am I going to carve through two bones with a knife that won’t even cut my skin? God damn it to hell.

  Embittered, I set the knife atop the chockstone, unclip the carabiner, and loosen the tourniquet. After a minute, the weak blood flow in my arm raises an irritated series of red lines on my skin where I was sawing with the knife. These aggravated scratches are the sole evidence of my attempt at amputation.

  That’s pathetic, Aron; just pathetic.

  Back to waiting.

  Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. A black raven flies overhead. I check my watch. It’s eight-fifteen A.M.—precisely the same time I saw a raven yesterday morning. I wonder if it’s the same one. Of course it is. It probably has a nest down the canyon someplace. How kooky is it that the bird flew off at exactly the same time it did yesterday? It seems unnatural to me that a living thing would have such a refined sense of time. The sunlight or air temperature must trigger some response that tells the bird it’s time to go find some food. I don’t know.

  More predictably but no less punctually, the dagger of sunlight appears about an hour later, and I stretch out to it at 9:35 for my ten-minute “sun salute” break. With the twin visits of the raven and the sun dagger, I figure that my morning routines are completed. Then, for the first time, I feel pressure in my bladder. I unclip from the daisy chain, unzip my shorts, and turn around to urinate. The sand soaks up the liquid before it can puddle or splash, seemingly absorbing my urine faster than it falls. It doesn’t smell as bad or look as dark as I’d have figured, seeing as how it’s been two days since I peed. Feeling nature’s other call, I take off my harness and drop my pants in an attempt to defecate. I don’t want to stink up the canyon, but I don’t have any choice. My concern quickly turns out to be moot; it’s a false alarm.

  Tired from the stress of the early-morning rounds of elevated and dashed hopes, I let my mind drift. I recall meeting an Australian outdoorsman, Warren MacDonald, at the Banff Mountain Film Festival last November. The festival was showing a documentary of the hiking accident in Tasmania that cost Warren both his legs above the knees. We met at a dinner where Warren filled me in on some of the details. Leaving his partner in camp to go to the bathroom one night, he crossed a nearby streambed, took care of business, and, on his way back, spent a few minutes climbing some boulders near the bank. That was when he pulled a tremendously large boulder onto himself, crushing both his legs and trapping himself in the shallow creek. By the time his partner realized something was wrong, a rainstorm had begun, and Warren found himself waiting for help in the rising waters of the stream. It took rescuers two days to free him, prying up the car-sized boulder with a hydraulic lifting jack. I saw his movie the next night, stunned at the images of Warren under the rock, and amazed by his recovery and return to the mountains. Within two years of his accident and learning to use prostheses, Warren climbed Federation Peak, one of the highest and most remote mountains in Tasmania.

  From my ensnared position in the bottom of Blue John, I feel a profound level of empathy for what Warren endured. It strikes me as funny, the irony that within six months of meeting him, I would become the second hiker I’d heard of to be immovably pinned by a boulder. Maybe there have been others, too, I don’t know. I wonder to myself how he went to the bathroom while he was trapped. I envy Warren’s fortune at having a companion nearby to get help. If only I had been with someone…Warren’s story inspires me to think that if I do survive this experience in the canyon, I, too, will continue climbing and enjoying the outdoors. I won’t perform piano concertos like I did in college, but hey, those are the breaks.

  I pass the rest of the morning and early afternoon alternating between my few activities: standing and sitting, chipping unenthusiastically at the rock, looking at the sky for early signs of flash-flood danger, swatting at insects, counting the minutes and hours unti
l my next sip of water. Finally, it is three o’clock, the hour I’ve been waiting for. It’s my second significant milestone, the end of my second full day trapped.

  Pulling my video camera out of my backpack again, I blow the grit off the lens and align it in its spot on top of the chockstone. This is the most action I’ll create for myself during the afternoon. It’s uplifting to break the tedium of waiting, but unfortunately, I don’t have any good news to share. I sigh and begin speaking.

  “It’s the forty-eight-hour mark now. It’s three o’clock on Monday. I have about one hundred and fifty milliliters of water left. That’s five ounces.” I pause and consider my dispassionate reaction to the statement. Through the first day of my entrapment, I felt an emotional connection to the amount of water I had, the umbilical tug of its life-sustaining essence compelling me to make it last as long as I could. Now that feeling is disconnected. Sometime in the night, my final countdown began without notice. There’s so little water, it doesn’t matter that there’s any left at all—it can no longer affect how long I’ll survive. By morning, the water will be gone. I’ve come to accept that fact, and with acceptance, my looming dread dissipates, leaving only emptiness.

  My next thought is of my sister. I look directly into the camera lens, imagining her sitting in her living room watching this tape someday in the future. I see her face and her eyes looking back at me as though through the camera. “Sonja, I’m very proud of you. I didn’t get to hear firsthand how your championships went, but I heard from Mom that you placed very well at the national competitions, that you were tenth overall in speech and debate in the nation. Hot damn, girl. I’m very proud of you. Not just for that but for who you are.

  “I’ve been thinking about that. My friend Rob in Aspen says to me several…frequently…several times that, confusingly, ‘It’s not what you do but who you are.’ I kind of got hung up on that a lot, because I always thought who I was, was very much wrapped up with what I did. That I was happy because of the things that I did that made me happy. If things you do make you happy, then they can also make you unhappy.

  “I think that’s why I found myself being as ambitious and energetic—” The wind interrupts me, and I shiver, muttering, “It’s cold,” then continue where I left off: “—to do all the outings that I did.”

  The video letter to my sister has turned into a confessional. While I don’t feel regret for how I’ve lived, I think I’m trying to share some advice with Sonja, something she’ll take from this that will help her to be happy with herself. We’re similar in our assertiveness, our intelligence, and our sense of inner competition that drives us to perfectionism. I’m hoping she won’t stumble into the pitfall that I have fallen into, of letting my ability to create what I want in my life convince me that “I am” only insofar as “I do.” Yes, I am a mountaineer, an engineer, a music enthusiast, an outdoorsman. But I am not only those things; I am also a person who enriches other people’s lives, and whose life is enriched by other people when I let them.

  “In retrospect, I’ve learned a lot. One of the things I’m learning here is that I didn’t enjoy the people’s company that I was with enough, or as much as I could have. A lot of really good people have spent a lot of time with me. Very often I would tend to ignore or diminish their presence in seeking the essence of the experience. All that’s to say, I’m figuring some things out.”

  My rambling explanation eases the guilt I feel for my selfishness. Bringing to mind those memories has lifted my spirit and even made me smile despite my present circumstances. That I spent so much of my time leaving my friends behind for solo trips, or even for some alone time when I was with them, reveals a self-centeredness that displeases me. The memories evoking the most gratitude for my life are of times with my family and friends. I am beginning to understand the priceless nature of their company, and it depresses me to realize that wasn’t always the focus of our time together.

  I record a few snippets of my ongoing efforts to free myself. “On the situational front here, I rerigged and rerigged, even got to a six-to-one pulley system—too much friction. I wasn’t even pulling the main rope taut—too many sharp bends in the rope. I chipped away some more at the rock. It’s hopeless.” Fatigue and sleep deprivation cloud my thinking, and I fail to mention that I tried to saw through my arm.

  Now I turn toward the bleak prospects of outside intervention and rescue. “I got to the point where I was realizing the slim factors that might go into my rescue, and I don’t see those happening and coming together at all in time. I’m thinking about Leona, my roommate who worries about me as much as my family does. I just told her that I was going to Utah. She’ll know when I’m not back tonight that I’m overdue. Even if she immediately files a police report, it’ll be twenty-four hours before they take action on anything. That said, I think there’s a very slim chance that a ranger even goes by the trailhead where I parked at Horseshoe, except for weekends, to lead the walks to see the Great Gallery.”

  Shaking my head, I gaze at my sliver of sky, at the foot-wide bottom of the canyon, and at the rigging, anything to avoid the condemning reflection of my face in the viewfinder.

  “Brad and Leah were expecting to hear from me on Saturday, but when they didn’t, they probably didn’t think much of it. I was supposed to meet them for the party out at Goblin Valley State Park. But I doubt they really missed me enough to take action. They didn’t know where I was going, anyways. I didn’t even know. One of the things that got me so excited was I’d crossed the state line before I knew where I was headed to, where I was going on Friday, and even then I wasn’t sure about what I was going to do on Saturday. Oh, man.”

  I know I broke one of my rules when I left without detailing my plans in advance. Now I’m paying an overdue debt. How many times have I gotten away with making changes to my itinerary without notifying someone? It happens all the time. Not anymore.

  “I also could have said something more to Megan and Kristi, the Outward Bound girls. I should have gone with them. Just left and gone out the West Fork.”

  Again I shake my head in self-pity and fight off a series of long blinks. I deserve all of this.

  “God, I am really screwed. I’m going to shrivel up right here over the course of the next few days. If I had a way to end it, I probably would, tomorrow afternoon or so. It’s miserable. It’s cold. I can’t keep the wind off me. It just blows. It’s not even that much of a breeze, but it’s cold. It comes from back there.” I motion over my left shoulder with a toss of my head.

  “I’m doing what I can, but this sucks. It’s really bad. This is one of the worst ways to go. Knowing what’s going to happen, but it still being three or four days out.” My voice trails off to a hoarse whisper. I hope I don’t last for four more days. I can’t imagine what shape I’ll be in if I’m still alive on Friday.

  Feeling the weight of my impending demise, I make a logical transition to what to do with my stuff. I can’t avoid the moroseness of it, but it seems practical to advise my family about my assets, effectively recording a short version of a last will and testament.

  “I did want to say, on the logistical side of things, I have some American Express insurance that should cover costs of the recovery operation when that does happen. Bank-account balances should take care of my credit-card debts. You’ll have to sell my house, Mom and Dad. Possession-wise, I don’t know if Sonja can use my computer and video camera…There are pictures on the memory stick in my pocket and in the camera. My friend Chip down in New Mexico can have my CDs. All my outdoor crap, Sonja, if you want it, if any of it fits and you can use it, you’re welcome to it.”

  Nearly in tears, I’m finished talking. I stop the camera, fold the screen into its stowed position, and put it back in my pack. I hold my head in my left hand and dejectedly shake it, sniffling, wiping my palm down over my nose and mouth, my fingers wiping at my eyelashes and brushing the facial hair under my nose and around my frown lines.

  A half hour later, a
round 3:35 P.M. on Monday afternoon, I have to urinate again. “How is this possible?” I wonder. That’s twice today, despite the fact that I’m most certainly dehydrated. What’s going on?

  Save it, Aron. Pee into your CamelBak. You’re going to need it.

  Obeying, I transfer the contents of my bladder into my empty water reservoir, saving the orangish-brown discharge for the unappetizing but inevitable time when it will be the only liquid I have. I should have saved the first batch, I realize with hindsight. It was much clearer than this and didn’t smell half as nasty. I debate whether I should drink it or not but defer that choice for later.

  I eagerly dig out my digital still camera for the first time and take a series of pictures: a close-up of my arm disappearing into the rock; a detail of my anchor system that suspends me in my harness; and two self-portraits—one looking downcanyon, and one from above my left shoulder that shows me with the chockstone. Reviewing the photos, I also flip through the ones I took during the first two days of my vacation on Mount Sopris and around Moab, then the ones of Megan and Kristi in the upper part of Blue John Canyon. The angels.

  Eight

  “I’m Goin’ to Utah”