Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

“He must still be on his way home from Utah, then,” Leona said. “Maybe he’ll be there in an hour or so.”

“Maybe. I’m gonna go, but I’ll check back. When do you leave?”

“In an hour, once I get the car packed.”

“OK, call me if you see him.”

“I will. Bye.” Leona hung up and paced around with a heavy heart. She started packing her aunt Leslie’s Subaru with her belongings, readying for the drive down to Boulder, but the more full the car got, the more worried she became.

Aware that I had never been over fifteen minutes late in the past, Brion was also starting to get concerned. He went down to the sales floor around eight-thirty A.M. to talk the matter over with another employee and climber, Sam Upton. “Have you seen Aron come in yet?”

Sam looked up from organizing the trail-running shoes in the display room. “Uh, no-he’s supposed to be redoing the camping wall this morning, right?”

Ignoring Sam’s question, Brion pressed. “He hasn’t called or anything?”

Sam sensed the tension in his voice. “No. Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. I just talked with Leona, and he wasn’t home. She said it didn’t look like he’d been there at all. It’s eight-thirty now. The only time Aron’s ever been more than a few minutes late was when he had that epic up on Pearl Pass.” Remembering the time a month earlier when I had spent the night bivouacking in a hand-dug snow pit at 12,000 feet, Brion had confidence that I would show up unless I was in serious trouble.

Understanding the implications, Sam asked, “Do you think he’s had an accident?”

“Aw, I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is he’s not ditching work. It’s possible something bad might have happened.”

“He could be lost or hurt. But I doubt he’s lost-he’s always wearing his compass and altimeter watch, and he’s good with it,” Sam said.

“No, I know. Even if he were fifty miles out in the middle of nowhere, he could cover that in a day. It’s not a panic situation. I mean, he’s strong enough that if something happened, he’d get himself out. Anything short of a broken leg wouldn’t even slow him down. And if he broke his leg, he’d crawl back. It’d take him awhile, but he’d get out. We have to give him twenty-four hours,” Brian concluded, and Sam agreed.

Leona called in to the Ute once an hour, speaking with Brion and Paul Perley, the general manager. She recounted the last time she’d seen me, on Wednesday night almost a week before. “He had his boxes of climbing equipment out and his biking stuff. He said he was going to do some climbing, some canyoneering, and maybe some mountain biking. He was packing like ‘Oh, I should take this just in case I go biking,’ and ‘Oh, I should take this in case I want to do some climbing.’ He usually would have it all figured out ahead of time, but this time I don’t think he knew where he was going. He said he was going to Utah, to the Canyonlands area. The question is, did he make it to the desert?”

As the afternoon slipped away, Brion reiterated his decision with Paul. “We have to give him until nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Any mountaineer would want the chance to get himself out of trouble before the helicopters start flying. If he isn’t here at the start of his shift tomorrow, I’ll call his parents and get the ball rolling.”

Tuesday evening around six-thirty P.M., right after their shifts, my roommates Brian and Joe were sitting in the living room at Spruce Street, relaxing with the garage door rolled up, testing the quality of the beer left in the keg.

“Hey, what’s the story with Aron?” Joe inquired.

“He’s still gone,” Brian replied. “I think Leona called the Ute this morning. He didn’t go in to work.”

“What do you think we should do, call the cops or something?” Joe wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do, but it struck a chord with Brian.

“You know, we probably should,” he said after thinking about it for a long moment. He pulled the phone book out from under the coffee table at his feet and leafed through the pages for the number of the Aspen police department. He dialed the nonemergency number and spoke with the dispatcher after the first ring. “A friend of ours was due back from a trip last night, and he hasn’t come home, and it’s been a day. I just wanted to let you know we think he’s missing. It’s pretty low-key-we’re worried about him, but we’re not freaking out. What can we do about it?”

“We can file a missing person’s report. You said it’s been twenty-four hours?”

“Yeah, he was supposed to come back from Utah yesterday, and he missed work today.”

“What’s his name?”

Brian provided my name, age, approximate height, weight, and description to the dispatcher, who typed the data into the police computer system.

“Do you have his license-plate information?”

“Uh, yeah, hold on, I think I can get it for you.” Brian went in my room and found an old climbing itinerary from when I had soloed the Bells two months earlier. It listed my license number-NM 846-MMY-and the year and model of my truck.

“Where do you think he went? You said Utah?”

“I know he was heading out to ski Mount Sopris on Thursday, but he was all packed up for a trip. I think he said he was going to the Moab area in Utah.”

“Anything more specific than that, or just the Moab area?”

“That’s it. He usually leaves itineraries, but he didn’t leave one this time.”

“All right. That’s a start.” They hung up.

What the dispatcher didn’t tell Brian was that I hadn’t been missing long enough for the police to do anything yet.

BEATIFIC IVORY FACES SMILE AT ME. They are half protruding from red womblike walls, surreally pale and bald, like contenders in a Patrick Stewart look-alike contest who have been doused in flour. The walls seem to form a scarlet tube of organic tissue, a fibroid tunnel pulsing in waves that could be an eight-foot-tall empty blood vessel, except that I’m inside it. In my dreamy vision, I reach out, brushing the tissue’s sponginess with my fingers. It responds to my touch with welcoming caresses. As though I’ve triggered a release, I sense I have begun moving along the tube, passed along by the wave motion. Stringy pulp drapes cling to my face and arms with the invisible softness of a wildflower petal as I float through the veiled twists and turns of the passage. Passing the saintly faces one at a time, I am vaguely aware of their blurred animations, like adoring mimes calling out to me, but I can’t hear their voices. An uncertain familiarity compels me to look more closely at the faces, but I can’t pause long enough in the tube, and they continue to drift past me before I can place any particular one. I can’t quite tell their sex, either, but they seem to be about my age or maybe a little older. In any case, I feel comfortable here, like the faces are my friends-or, more exactly, like the faces are the faces of my friends-but I can’t tell.

The forward movement continues for some time, relaxingly passing me along the placenta-like corridor. I feel like I’m enjoying a gentle crowd surfing, but I’m worried, too. What’s happening? What is this stuff around me? Where am I? Is this a dream? Where’s the canyon? My surroundings seem to respond by supporting me more firmly, and then the tube slopes up in front of me. Until this point, my journey has been strictly horizontal. I couldn’t feel the pull of gravity before, but now it’s like I’m riding the uphill portion of one very bizarre roller coaster. There are no more faces, just the lining of the walls slipping by in monotonous progression minute after untold minute. How high have I gone? Several hundred feet, I imagine. The grip of the fleshy waves on my body becomes subtler, with the exception of slight vibrations that add to the roller-coaster sensation, tugging at my legs, waist, torso, and back.