Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  Between four-fifteen and five P.M., Steve called the Zion National Parks police and the Emery County sheriff’s office (ECSO), headquartered in Castle Dale, Utah, to initiate searches at the trailheads for the Virgin River and the Black Box of the San Rafael, respectively. The Zion police indicated that they would check for my vehicle during their evening sweeps of the trailheads. Steve spoke with Captain Kyle Ekker of the ECSO at 5:19 P.M. in his Castle Dale office. Captain Ekker took the information from Steve and then had his ECSO dispatcher enter the missing person’s report, including issuing an all-points bulletin for my truck. Additionally, Captain Ekker asked local search-and-rescue volunteers to drive out to various trailheads. By 6:07 P.M., deputies and SAR folks were en route to Swinging Bridge, Joe’s Valley, and the Upper and Lower Black Boxes. By 6:51 P.M., all four field units had reported back to the ECSO dispatcher that they were searching the outlying trailheads of the San Rafael region for my vehicle. Volunteers Russell Jones and Randy Lake of the Emery County search-and-rescue team met in the area of the Lower Black Box and took all-terrain vehicles in to check the most inaccessible trailhead that normally can be reached only by mountain bike or on foot.

  After filing reports with the other counties, Steve got through to my mom at 6:38 P.M. and let her know about the trailhead sweeps. Additionally, Steve was mobilizing a group from Albuquerque to go to Utah as early as the next day. My mom said she would keep in touch with DPS and a half-dozen contacts Steve provided, to keep tabs on the leads. As Steve read off his list of names and phone numbers, my mom recognized Emery County from the list she’d made after compiling the canyon information with Jason earlier in the afternoon. Once she got off the line with Steve, she was impatient to know if they’d found anything. When she called Emery County at 7:20 P.M., the dispatcher was in the process of receiving the calls from the field deputies and asked my mom to call back just a minute later. During the second conversation, my mom learned that the posse had “negative contact with the missing person or his vehicle.”

  My mom pressed the searchers to keep going after dark, but the dispatcher indicated that was unlikely, as most of the deputies were going off-shift. It seemed reasonable to the dispatcher to suggest, “Sometimes hikers get disoriented and become lost. A lot of times, they find their way back after a few days.”

  “This person clearly does not know my son,” my mom thought, and she replied in a stern assertion, “He is not lost. Something has happened to him.” But she acknowledged that the manpower situation was not going to permit these rural county sheriffs to dedicate all of their night-shift patrols to the hunt for my truck. She ended the conversation politely, then considered what to do next.

  In the next ten minutes, she talked with Eric Ross of the Aspen police, who had taken over from Adam at the shift change. They decided he should go to my house in town and gather my credit-card numbers. My mom called and asked Elliott to help Eric, who was on his way to Spruce Street. Once the officer arrived, he and Elliott sat down in the living room and went over what had been going on at the Ute all afternoon. Elliott had left the shop when the doors closed at six P.M., bringing the files back to the house but suspending the e-mail routine until the morning, as we had no Internet connection at the house. Elliott took Eric into my room and showed him the files with my credit-card and bank statements. Eric made notes of the numbers while Elliott looked for my checkbook, which he found on my shelves. Voiding check number 1066, he tore it out and handed it to Eric. Eric told Elliott he would call the credit-card companies to track my purchases and then go to my bank when it opened in the morning to track my debit-card transactions.

  Ready for bed after an emotionally and mentally exhausting day, Elliott wrote out a note that he affixed to my room door: “Aron, you’re missing. Everybody’s looking for you. Knock on my bedroom door or call my cell phone the minute you see this note.” Then he retired for the night.

  My mom spoke again with my dad at nine P.M. to tell him about the search activities. This second conversation left my dad pacing in his hotel room, certain there was something keeping me from coming back. He knew I hadn’t simply taken off or gotten lost; the only things he could think had happened were that I’d fallen and broken my leg, or I was stuck under a rockslide on the side of a mountain. Praying to me, “Hang in there, Aron, stick with it,” he fought back other, more distressing thoughts. My dad knew, or wanted to believe, that I was alive, but that meant I was injured. It hurt him to know I was suffering; however, that was better than the alternative. There was no way he was going to find enough peace to sleep—grief kept him up and moving—so he busied himself preparing notes for the rest of the New York tour, in case he did need to leave and hand over the reins to someone else.

  Up in Boulder, my friend Leona was riding back with her aunt from a meditation session that hadn’t helped ease her anxiety over my disappearance. She closed her eyes and felt a connection, something beckoning to her, and then a fuzzy vision appeared, like a dream. She saw a spirit that was clearly me, visible from the waist up. She recognized me but couldn’t tell where I was. She could tell I was alive and mostly OK, but frightened. I was holding my arm tight to my chest, as if I had injured it, and I was standing in a tight, dark place, wearing a green shirt. She sensed that I was conscious of her presence and scared, not of her but of my surroundings. She saw her arms reach out to reassure me with a comforting touch, but she was petrified herself—she couldn’t reach me. I had a decision to make. And it seemed I would have to make that decision on my own. Her empathy strengthened the vision’s accompanying physical sensations: She felt cold chills, a parching thirst, and deep exhaustion. She came out of the trance and was spent, as if she had just run ten miles. Sitting in the passenger seat of her aunt’s car, she realized they were home, but she couldn’t remember any of the fifteen-minute trip since they’d left the group session. Leona followed her aunt into the house, drank three liters of water, and went to bed, praying with her hands clasped that she wouldn’t dream about the vision. She knew she was powerless to help me, and she didn’t want to have another dreadful episode when there was nothing she could do.

  After talking with my sister at 10:20 P.M., my mom went to bed. She slept about an hour, then grew restless. After midnight, she lay in bed with her eyes open, thinking about me. At two A.M., having waited edgily for the shift change ever since she’d woken up, my mom called the Aspen police. She learned that the search was slowing down due to a lack of information from my credit-card use—apparently I hadn’t used any of my cards since Thursday, April 24, in Glenwood Springs, to buy gas. There was no indication that I’d gotten any farther than Eagle County. But the biggest sticking point was the license plate; none of the numbers had generated the correct vehicle description when the police had done a records search. My mom knew that, but apparently Eric had tried again. What he said next gave her a pleasing lift: He had looked up the number for the New Mexico state police on their twenty-four-hour DMV assistance line, but without knowing the registration address, which obviously wasn’t in Colorado, he couldn’t perform the inquiry himself. My mom told Eric she would make the call and get the correct license-plate information; she was excited and relieved to once again have something to do.

  At two-forty-five A.M., she got through to an officer in Santa Fe who was able to manipulate the computer file systems and perform a rough search based on the vehicle make and the registered address, which my mom correctly deduced was my town home in Albuquerque. Within ten minutes, she had confirmed my license number was NM 846-MMY and relayed the information to Officer Ross. It was the best feeling she’d had since she successfully reset my e-mail password over sixteen hours earlier. As soon as the sheriffs’ offices opened in the morning, she would start through her call list for the third time. Walking across the kitchen from her station at the phone, my mother sat down on the carpeted steps leading upstairs to where her friend Ann was sleeping in the guest bedroom, and for the next three hours, she held a solitary vigil, p
raying to me, “Hold on. We’re coming, Aron, we’re coming. Just hold on.”

  Thirteen

  Day Six: Enlightenment and Euphoria

  It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we are free to do anything.

  —BRAD PITT, as Tyler Durden, in Fight Club

  PEEKING OUT from the inky confines of my rope bag, I watch dawn pushing its way into the canyon. The fresh daylight reduces the visions that dominated my night. However, my brain is so twisted around from 120 hours without sleep that the new day’s reality feels like a hallucinatory fabrication itself. The ugly chockstone on my arm is hardly discernible from the imagery generated by my delirious mind. With five days of gritty build-up pasted to my contact lenses, my eyes hurt at every blink, and wavering fringes of cloud frame my dingy vision. I can’t hold my head upright anymore; it lolls off against the northern canyon wall, or sometimes I shift and allow it to fall forward, where my left forearm braces it. I am a zombie. I am the undead.

  It is Thursday, May 1. I cannot believe I’m still alive. I should have died days ago. I don’t understand how I lived through last night’s hypothermic conditions. In fact, I’m almost disappointed that I’ve survived the night, because now the epitaph on the wall is incorrect—I didn’t “rest in peace” in April, after all. For a short moment, I ponder whether to fix the date, but decide not to bother. It won’t matter to the body recovery team, if they even notice it, and the coroner will be able to discern my death date from the extent of decomposition within a day or so. That’s good enough, I figure.

  Where is the confidence I felt during the vision I had of the little blond boy, my future son? Psychologically, I thought I had hit bottom the night before, when I carved my epitaph, only to then find assurance in picking up that toddler. But my buoyancy has been enchained by the stoic might of the boulder and the bitterness of the piss that etches ridges into the roof of my mouth. Drinking sip after sip of urine from my grotesque stash in the Nalgene has eroded the inside of my mouth, leaving my palate raw, reminding me that I am going to die. The piss’s acidity dissolves any remaining self-belief I found in the middle of the night. If I am going to live, why am I drinking my own urine? Isn’t that the classic mark of a condemned man? I have been sentenced and left to decay.

  It’s eight-thirty A.M., but the raven hasn’t flown over me yet. I wonder after it for a time but lose my thoughts to the insects that are swarming with all-time intensity around the chockstone. After I swat a few of the flying bugs with my left hand, killing them to entertain myself, I look at my yellow Suunto, which says 8:45. Even the bird has forsaken me—it has not been later than 8:30 for its daily flight, but today, nothing, no raven. In its absence, I feel that my time draws nearer, as though it was a totemic deity sustaining me.

  A desire bubbles up: I want to die with music in my ears. Somewhere along the days, even that dreadful BBC song from Austin Powers lost its hold on my psyche. But I can’t bring a single melody to mind. All I have is the awful hush of the canyon; silence maddens me. I need my CD player. The headphones haven’t left my ears or neck in five days, but the player and two CDs are in the main compartment of my backpack. I sling my sack off my back with three easy movements and rest it on my raised left knee, my fingers diving to the bottom, where they find the Discman and discs…and a half inch of sand.

  Before I extract the equipment, I know it’s a hopeless cause. The discs are scratched beyond playability. Five days in the desert have left their plastic coatings looking like I took a belt sander to them. No matter. The Discman won’t even spin the disc that’s in it already. It tells me NO DISC each time I push play. I swap out the batteries, but only to be thorough. I must have bashed the unit against the wall at some point over the last five days and whacked the laser out of alignment.

  The camcorder, however, has survived the sand and havoc in my pack. Giving up on the music, I decide to video another bit. It occurs to me that I’ve entered the time of highest probability that I will be rescued while I’m still alive. I put my backpack back on and resecure the shoulder strap for the fiftieth time. Resting the video unit on the chockstone, I get myself settled and try to collect my thoughts. When I first speak, the thinness and elevated pitch of my own voice startles me. Another reminder that I am nearly dead, just waiting for the Reaper.

  “I was just thinking…It’s Thursday at about nine o’clock in the morning. I’m entering the highest probability of time that will interface…that someone will actually find me, and that I’ll still be alive.”

  “That’s almost good news,” I think. But considering that I’ve established the rescue window to start anytime today through Sunday, it’s not cause for hope of imminent help. My chances have upgraded from “ridiculously improbable” to perhaps “totally unlikely.” I don’t dwell on the issue. In fact, because my mind is confounded by a persistent and deepening daze, I couldn’t dwell on something if I wanted to—I don’t have the mental stamina. Somewhat randomly, I think about my sister and her wedding. She and Zack had asked me to play the piano for a few minutes during their upcoming ceremony in August, and I said I would. But obviously, I won’t; I won’t even be there. It disheartens me, but I realize there may be something I can do.

  “Sonja…if you still want me to play at your wedding…there’s a tape in a box in the basement of Mom and Dad’s house. The box is labeled, I think, ‘My Piano Stuff,’ or ‘My Music,’ maybe. There’s a tape in there. It’s me, playing mostly music audition songs from about 1993 or 1994.”

  I immediately imagine her inserting the tape into a cassette deck, listening to the songs at our parents’ home with my mom. I know it will be an ultimate effort for them to listen to the music I played so studiously ten years ago: Mozart and Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, my favorite. Another image jumps into my mind, this time from the wedding. I can’t place the exact setting, but it is pastoral and outdoors. The same piano music wafts broodingly from a speaker system, churning into a menacing cloud that breaks to drench the assembly of our extended family in a downpour of tears. My death will cast blackness over Sonja’s wedding, but I know she will carry on with it. There will be no question and no reason to postpone. Life moves on for the living.

  I move on and scatter the images of my mother and sister in my mind, leaving a broken trail of thought to pick up again later. Realizing there was one more thing I forgot to mention about my financial assets, I start to explain my wishes for my retirement planning accounts.

  “Also, obviously, my Schwab IRA accounts can go to Sonja if there’s…”

  I don’t finish the sentence. Disjointed thoughts spasm, my mind is adrift. Where there was previously a concept I was attempting to express, I don’t have even a memory. I float, expressionless, lost, then stumble upon another fleeting thought, but I can’t connect with it fast enough to bring it to words. It sinks back under the surface of my mental ocean, then bobs up again. This time I seize it. It has to do with my cremation and the distribution of my ashes.

  “Oh…um…clarifications…Knife Edge peak…For the part of me that goes back to New Mexico. The Bosque and Knife Edge—the Knife Edge being one of my favorite climbs ever. So maybe that would be what Dan and Willow and Steve DeRoma, Jon Jaecks, Eric Neimeyer, and Steve Patchett would go and do.”

  Clearing my throat once again, I press the silver record button on the back of the unit. I hope what I’ve said on the tape will serve both as an appropriate goodbye to my loved ones and as my last will and testament. I’ve covered what to do with my possessions and finances, and I’ve tidied up my estate, as much as I have one to tidy, hoping to benefit my sister. While I could have been more organized, I am drained from the effort involved in thinking through all this and have no wish to edit or redo any of the video. For what will be the last time, I fold the screen of the recorder flush against the camera body and tuck the unit into its notch between the left side of the chockstone and the canyon wall.

  Miserable, I watch another empty hour pass by. At least I do
n’t have to fight to stay warm. The cold bite of the outer atmosphere no longer sucks off my body heat as it did throughout the night. But by removing the need to reconfigure the ropes around my legs and the cloth and plastic wraps around my arms, daytime has removed the last bustle from my experience in the canyon. Without even that minimal distraction, I have nothing whatsoever to do. I have no life. Only in action does my life approximate anything more than existence. Without any other task or stimulus, I’m no longer living, no longer surviving. I’m just waiting.

  Since the recoiling blows of the hammer rock tenderized my left hand, all I’ve had left to do is wait. For what, though? Rescue…or death? It doesn’t matter to me. The two endings represent the same thing—salvation and deliverance from my suffering. I can’t stand the inactivity that breeds such apathy. At this point, the waiting itself is the worst part of my entrapment. And when I’m done waiting, all there is, is more waiting. I can touch the face of infinity in these doldrums. Nothing gives even a slight hint that the stillness will break.

  But I can make it break. I can ignore the pain in my left hand and resume smashing the chockstone with the handheld wrecking ball. I can continue hacking away at the rock with my knife, despite its inutility. I can do everything I’ve done in the past five days for the sake of motion. I reach for the rounded hammer rock, then realize I’m going to want my left sock for a pad. Off with the shoe, off with the sock, and I have the cushioning for my battered palm. The bruises on the meaty pad of my thumb are the most sensitive to the impact, and they scream for reprieve from the first blow through the fifth, when I pause. Adrenaline channels into anger, and I raise the hammer again, this time in retribution for what this wretched piece of geology has done to my left hand. Bonk! Again I strike the boulder, the pain in my hand flaring. Thwock! And again. Screeaatch! The rage blooms purple in my mind, amid a small mushroom cloud of pulverized grit and the burning smell of the sock that comes between the rock and the chockstone, melting with the friction heat of each strike. I bring the rock down again. Carrunch! With animalistic fury, I growl, “Unnngaaarrrrgh!” in response to the throbs pulsing in my left hand.