Aron Ralston - Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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, praying to me, “Hold on. We’re coming, Aron, we’re coming. Just hold on.”

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.