Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [127]
Brion knew that the hushed phone line meant she hadn’t heard from me, but he had no idea if she was going to start crying, get upset, or explode. It relieved him when she firmly asked, “You realize what this means?”
Brion said, “We think something has happened.”
“Yes. The kinds of things he does are very dangerous, and he goes out by himself a lot. He wouldn’t miss work without calling in if he could. Something terrible has happened. We have to find out where he is. What have you done? Have you talked with his roommates?”
Brion was impressed at my mom’s response and instantly felt some of the psychological weight of responsibility lift from his mind. He had found the ally he needed to move forward with the search, and quickly brought my mom up to speed on the developing situation.
My mom thought it was odd that I hadn’t told my roommates about my plans, but it didn’t completely surprise her. She had coached me during my early seasons of winter climbing to always leave a note on my desk at Intel, or with one of my friends, so that someone would know where I was. At first I left notes on the dash of my vehicle at the snowed-in trailheads, but once I started visiting more and more remote areas, I realized I needed a better system. It could be weeks if not months before someone would happen upon my vehicle at a given trailhead, so I followed my mom’s suggestions and made it a habit to tell at least one person about my plans. One winter climbing season, in 2000–2001, I had called my mom before and after each fourteener I attempted, but she didn’t much like hearing the details of my hair-raising adventures, so I went back to leaving word with my friends.
Terrified about what might have befallen me, my mom struggled to concentrate on what they should be doing. Pushing aside the fear that gnawed in her gut, she was able to carry on with her discussion with Brion: “Have you talked with the police yet?”
“No, I haven’t. I was going to do that next.”
Never having been trained in search and rescue, my mom knew very little about missing person’s reports. She was uncertain about what the police would need to get the search going, but she understood emphatically that was what needed to be done. Speaking almost more to herself than to Brion, my mom said, “Missing person’s reports have to be filed in the jurisdiction where the person lives, I know that much, so it should be with the Aspen police. I’m not really sure what the process is, whether the county sheriff needs to be involved, but they’ll know what to do next. Will you go to them and file the report?”
Brion agreed. “I’ll call them right now and call you back as soon as I’m done.”
“Thank you, Brion. I have to go.” My mom’s world was caving in around her. She immediately phoned her longtime friend Michelle Kiel, who was coming over later that morning to discuss plans for the neighborhood garden club, and asked her to come right away and hurry. “Aron is missing,” she stammered.
Minutes later, Michelle opened the front screen door to find my mom involuntarily rocking back and forth on a stool at the kitchen counter, clutching her heaving stomach and sobbing in grief-stricken terror. My mom’s wail overwhelmed them both. They hugged for several minutes, crying together, and then my mom drew on her own courage and Michelle’s comforting presence to gather herself and start talking through the options of who might know something about my plans.
For my mom, this was the most emotion-wrought hour of her life, all the unspeakable what-ifs floating through her mind one after the other, but still she managed to reason through the puzzle. “He’s usually very good about telling someone where he’s going. If he didn’t say anything to his roommates, or leave a note there at the shop, I don’t know. Maybe he wrote an e-mail to somebody, telling them what he was going to do.”
Michelle’s face lit up. “We could check that. Does he have Internet e-mail, like Yahoo! or Hotmail