Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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 until 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.