Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Intensifying, the vibrations shake me more and more, distressing me. Now I want to find out what’s at the end of this incline. I get the feeling there will be some kind of gateway. I want to see it, perhaps pass through it, but I somehow know I will shake free of the delicate wall lining before I make it to the end. Vibrations cause me to have tumultuous spasms. I won’t make it to find out what comes after the incline. I peel free of the lining, seizures ripping me away from the vanishing walls of the vessel. Without their support, I somersault backward in suspended slow motion, shuddering violently, as though I am about to detonate. Blackness eradicates the tunnel, and the dream-state quaking resolves into real shivers, my body trying to free itself from the tenebrous clutches of the canyon night.

It’s Tuesday night, just after sunset, and my sleep-deprived mind is fabricating delusional flight from my entrapment, if not for my body, at least for my spirit.

Distracted by fatigue and the relative warmth of the day, I haven’t yet redonned my Lycra shorts, but the evening’s oncoming chill signals another nine hours of weary battle. I had removed the shorts prior to my surgical attempt this morning. Thinking I might succeed, I was planning to use their padded liner as an absorbent bandage on my stump, but of course I hadn’t needed it. For never having been formally trained in backcountry medicine, I’m proud to have covered so many medical needs with my improvisations. I’m almost disappointed that I won’t get a chance to test their efficacy, but I have resolved not to make another attempt at amputating my arm. I’ve proved to myself it’s infeasible to cut through the bones. Bound by my own disintegrating capacities, I know any further efforts to cut off my arm will be certain suicide.

Death by dehydration is turning out to be even more psychologically grueling than I was anticipating on Saturday. Waterlessness stalks me, the indomitable leviathan of the desert drawing in closer every hour. Enforced insomnia compounds my body’s anguish, loosing a fourth-dimensional aberration in my head. I no longer exist in a normal space-time continuum. Minute by minute, my sleep deprivation dismantles yet another brain function. Considering my deteriorated state, seeing Wednesday morning will be another accomplishment altogether. I’ve outlasted my first predictions that I wouldn’t live to see Tuesday evening. Maybe I’ll outlast myself again.

Just hang on. That’s all you can do.

I decide to put my Lycra shorts back on under my thin tan nylon shorts. The act engages me for nearly ten minutes. I unclip my harness from the supporting rope system, unthread the waist belt from its double-back safety ring, and drop the harness around my legs to my feet. Removing my shorts, I marvel for a moment at the scrawny appearance of my pasty legs in the light of my headlamp. I’ve lost a lot of weight, maybe twenty pounds or more, and I was no chub when I walked into this canyon. I’ve got a long way to go till I use up all that body mass, but the sad part is, most of it will become fodder for the insects and scavengers of this desert environment. I haul up my biking shorts, catching my shoes on the stretchy fabric as I poke each leg through its hole. The tan shorts slide back on easily, followed by the twisted mess of the harness. Getting my legs through the appropriate loops takes three attempts before I get all the tangles worked out. Weaving the belt through the slotted ring is simple enough with one hand, but reversing the webbing to complete the double-back cinch is more difficult, and after five minutes, I leave it unfinished, as it was before.

Blackness inters me in the canyon. Another night of hypothermia’s depredations awaits me. I’m fitful and restless as I resolutely cycle through a dozen repetitions of retightening the rope around my legs, often drifting away on another extraordinary trance fantasy in the ten-minute reprieves I earn between bouts of shivers. My spirit yearns for its freedom, and I leave myself a half-dozen times. Sometimes the voyages are psychedelic dream-trips, like the journey through the blood vessel, and other times I see myself from above on an out-of-body vacation where my soul can leave the canyon, like it did on Sunday afternoon when I flew over the Pacific Ocean and turned into a photon shower in the vacuum of space.

Still other experiences begin with seeing my friends, whole-bodied yet transparent, ghosts who temporarily inhabit the canyon with me until we leave together to go to a familiar setting. They never communicate with words, only with gestures, and by somehow transmitting emotions across nonverbal wavelengths; if they want me to feel safe and reassured, then that’s what I feel. If they wanted me to be frightened, then I would feel fear, but I don’t-I am totally comfortable in the trances. Regardless of the location or the company in these visionary experiences, there is always a mute voice that reminds me when I need to resume taking care of myself. I inevitably delay my return until my body is convulsing from hypothermic shivers, but I always know when it is time.

In real space, confined between the chockstone and the canyon wall, I intermittently pour off the top layer of my urine from the CamelBak into the Nalgene bottle, leaving the unsavory sediment to dump in the sand behind my feet. I repeat this activity more often than needed, just to break the tedium. Oh, what I would give for a crushed-ice strawberry daiquiri, a margarita, a malted milk shake, a tall glass of grapefruit juice, a cold bottle of Budweiser. Every thought is preceded and followed by a thought about a beverage of some kind-drinks that my memory produces in vivid projection when I close my eyes, floating in a spot two feet in front of me and about six inches above eye level. It’s peculiar that no matter what the drink, it always appears to me in a form from my past, and in the same elevated space, within reach but not there. I’m not sure if letting my imagination entertain itself sustains me or makes me thirst more for the drink. It’s the same debate I’ve held with myself about the last of my food, the last of my water, drinking my urine, all the most important choices of my entrapment: “Is this good for me, or will it make things worse?” I have been careful to deliberate over every choice. But here I remain.

Confusion, delirium, and ruthless cold compete for equal time through the night, warping even small segments of time into compounding infinities of struggle against the cruelty of the elements. The same horseshoe-shaped constellations that I first noted on Sunday night center themselves over Blue John Canyon, their march across the sky following my sight line of the heavens between the blinders of the walls. I wonder who else is up there on the desert plateau, looking at the same celestial ceiling, and if they, too, are noticing the stars’ rotations. I don’t get far with the thought. In fact, my thoughts rarely finish themselves. My mind sputters as though it has run out of fuel, getting only two or three words into a question or a resolution before it drifts into silence or another pressing input. I can’t keep my focus.

My brain has put itself out to pasture. It is unmotivated to accurately track time, either consciously, with my watch, or by the subconscious instincts on which I usually can rely. Typically, my mind has a very precise ability to assess time. For example, earlier during my entrapment, if I looked at my watch, then thought about my sister’s wedding, fidgeted with my headlamp, and tucked in the webbing around my right biceps, I had an intuition that it had been about two minutes. Whatever I did, I had a sense of the appropriate duration, and that estimated time correlated closely with the real progress of my watch.