Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [142]
Setting the knife down on the chockstone, I pick up the neoprene tubing of my CamelBak, which has been sitting off to the top left of the chockstone, unused, for the past two days. I cinch the black insulation tube in a double loop around my forearm, three inches below my elbow. Tying the black stretchy fabric into a doubled overhand knot with one end in my teeth, I tug the other end with my free left hand. Next, I quickly attach a carabiner into the tourniquet and twist it six times, as I did when I first experimented with the tourniquet an eon ago, on Tuesday, or was it Monday?
“Why didn’t I figure out how to break my bones then?” I wonder. “Why did I have to suffer all this extra time?” God, I must be the dumbest guy to ever have his hand trapped by a boulder. It took me six days to figure out how I could cut off my arm. Self-disgust catches in my throat until I can clear my head.
Aron, that’s all just distraction. It doesn’t matter. Get back to work.
I clip the tightly wound carabiner to a second loop of webbing around my biceps to keep the neoprene from untwisting, and reach for my bloody knife again.
Continuing with the surgery, I clear out the last muscles surrounding the tendon and cut a third artery. I still haven’t uttered even an “Ow!” I don’t think to verbalize the pain; it’s a part of this experience, no more important to the procedure than the color of my tourniquet.
I now have relatively open access to the tendon. Sawing aggressively with the blade, as before, I can’t put a dent in the amazingly strong fiber. I pull at it with my fingers and realize it has the durability of a flat-wound cable; it’s like a double-thick strip of fiber-reinforced box-packaging tape, creased over itself in quarter-inch folds. I can’t cut it, so I decide to reconfigure my multi-tool for the pliers. Unfolding the blood-slippery implement, I shove the backside of the blade against my stomach to push the knife back into its storage slot and then expose the pliers. Using them to bite into the edge of the tendon, I squeeze and twist, tearing away a fragment. Yes, this will work just fine. I tackle the most brutish task.
Grip, squeeze, twist, tear.
Grip, squeeze, twist, tear.
Patterns; process.
“This is gonna make one hell of a story to tell my friends,” I think. “They’ll never believe how I had to cut off my arm. Hell, I can barely believe it, and I’m watching myself do it.”
Little by little, I rip through the tendon until I totally sever the twine-like filament, then switch the tool back to the knife, using my teeth to extract the blade. It’s 11:16 A.M.; I’ve been cutting for over forty minutes. With my fingers, I take an inventory of what I have left: two small clusters of muscle, another artery, and a quarter circumference of skin nearest the wall. There is also a pale white nerve strand, as thick as a swollen piece of angel-hair pasta. Getting through that is going to be unavoidably painful. I purposefully don’t get anywhere close to the main nerve with my fingers; I think it’s best not to know fully what I’m in for. The smaller elastic nerve branches are so sensitive that even nudging them sends Taser shocks up to my shoulder, momentarily stunning me. All these have to be severed. I put the knife’s edge under the nerve and pluck it, like lifting a guitar string two inches off its frets, until it snaps, releasing a flood of pain. It recalibrates my personal scale of what it feels like to be hurt—it’s as though I thrust my entire arm into a cauldron of magma.
Minutes later, I recover enough to continue. The last step is stretching the skin of my outer wrist tight and sawing the blade into the wall, as if I’m slicing a piece of gristle on a cutting board. As I approach that precise moment of liberation, the adrenaline surges through me, as though it is