Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [143]
It is 11:32 A.M., Thursday, May 1, 2003. For the second time in my life, I am being born. This time I am being delivered from the canyon’s pink womb, where I have been incubating. This time I am a grown adult, and I understand the significance and power of this birth as none of us can when it happens the first time. The value of my family, my friends, and my passions well up a heaving rush of energy that is like the burst I get approaching a hard-earned summit, multiplied by ten thousand. Pulling tight the remaining connective tissues of my arm, I rock the knife against the wall, and the final thin strand of flesh tears loose; tensile force rips the skin apart more than the blade cuts it.
A crystalline moment shatters, and the world is a different place. Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind surfing on euphoria. As I stare at the wall where not twelve hours ago I etched “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03,” a voice shouts in my head:
I AM FREE!
This is the most intense feeling of my life. I fear I might explode from the exhilarating shock and ecstasy that paralyze my body for a long moment as I lean against the wall. No longer confined to the physical space that I occupied for nearly a week, I feel drugged and off balance but buoyed by my freedom. My head bobs to my right shoulder and dips to my chest before I right it and steady myself against the wall. I stumble as I catch my left foot around the rocks on the canyon floor, but I get my legs under me in time to prevent a hard fall onto the southern wall. It is beautiful to me that I could actually fall over right now. I glance at the bloody afterbirth smeared on the chockstone and the northern canyon wall. The spattering on the chockstone hides the dark mass of my amputated hand and wrist, but the white bone ends of my abandoned ulna and radius protrude visibly from the gory muddle. My glance lingers and becomes a stare. My head whirls, but I am fascinated, looking into the cross section of my forearm.
OK, that’s enough. You’ve got things to do. The clock is running, Aron. Get out of here.
Fourteen
Homing In: “We Have His Truck”
You must believe it before you can imagine it.
—MARK TWIGHT, signature inscription in my copy of Kiss or Kill
FOR THREE HOURS, my mother sat in the dark on the aspen-white carpet of the upper stairway in our family’s home in Denver. These were the same stairs I bounded up and down two at a time for six years in middle and high school, earning uncountable reprimands from my parents. She was unable to relax, worst-case-accident scenarios chasing one another through her mind. The intense anxiety in her stomach forced her to crunch her body into an upright fetal position, her knees tucked in the crooks of her crossed arms, her forehead resting on the bend of her left forearm.
She was waiting for land-management personnel to return to work in the morning. Like me, my mom is not very good at waiting. She prayed, but even after she had prayed dozens more times, she was restless and unsettled. Needing to do something, at about five-forty-five A.M., she got up from her vigil and started to wade through her list of federal and state agencies that administer the public lands in central and southern Utah. My mom called a half-dozen groups in those early hours of Thursday morning. First she phoned the Hanksville branch of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and left a message; then she called the St. George police and filed a report. Next she filed the missing person’s information with the Department of Public Safety (DPS) dispatcher in Cedar City and, minutes later, with the DPS dispatcher out of Richfield. Her voice was exhausted and tattered with emotion when she spoke with Georgia,