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By Root 885 0

’s occupants see us until the bird banks at low altitude and loops back to soar over our heads a second time. I look around for the best landing zone and decide it will be in the wash in front of us. I hastily hike the fifty yards to the edge of the sandbar as the helicopter banks into another U-turn and hovers two hundred feet above the dry streambed. Eric catches up to stand beside me, and we watch the helicopter begin its descent. I take ten short steps into the streambed and turn my back to the landing zone, anticipating that the rotor wash will kick up a bunch of sand. I bring my remaining energy to bear on keeping my legs strong. My knees are weak, and every instinct tempts me to drop and kiss the earth to praise my deliverance, but I am well aware that my brain is tired of supporting the burden of my pain and the demands of the discipline that has sustained me. It wants to abdicate, but I cannot let it, not until I am in a hospital.

The engine whine falls, and the dusty wind at my back dies to a breeze. I turn around to see a stiff-legged passenger hop awkwardly out of the rear door of the helicopter. The figure motions for me. I walk briskly in a wide curve to where the man is standing at the side door of the chopper. He yells, “Are you Aron?”

I nod and shout into his ear, “Yes. Can I get a lift?” and turn to find a uniformed officer of some type sitting at the far side of an all-leather backseat, gaping at me. There are no paramedics wielding IV bags, nobody has latex gloves, and there’s not a single piece of medical equipment in sight. I wasn’t expecting a medevac flight, but I wasn’t expecting full leather, either.

For some reason, the urgency of my own situation dissolves, and I want to give the pilot or officer a fair chance to put down a cloth or jacket before I stain the leather red. I shout into the helicopter over the engine and rotor noise to no one in particular, “I’m bleeding—it’s gonna make a mess of your backseat!”

A voice booms, “Just get in!” and I clamber across two stacked backpacks to the middle of the backseat. I shout to the man who motioned me to the door, “Please get my backpack!” and nod to where Eric is standing with my pack in his hands some eighty feet in front of the helicopter. Running out from under the rotors and around to Eric, he then races back with my nearly empty backpack in his hands. The only contents are the water bottle and CamelBak, with a few ounces of mud in each, my headlamp, multi-tool, and two cameras, a measly five pounds total. Yet its weight had felt five times that in the last two miles before I found the Meijer family. “After carrying it all that way,” I think, “I’d hate to leave it behind.” All aboard, we fasten our seat belts, and the pilot brings the engines to full power, kicking up the dust of the canyon floor.

Someone hands me a headset to put on, and the officers help me get it on over my blue Arc’teryx ball cap. The pilot asks if I can hear him, and I respond, “Yes,” as I settle into the leather seat, lifting my injured arm above my head. Elevated, the insistent throbs are a little more bearable. I watch droplets of blood slither down the dangling strand of webbing at my elbow. One by one, they reach the end of their rope and drip onto my already soaked shirt.

We lift off, and my attention lifts from my shirt to the canyon. We fly higher and higher, and my gratitude again brings me nearly to tears, but dehydration has sealed shut my tear ducts. Although I’m wedged between the two passengers in the backseat, I can still see out the windows of the aircraft quite clearly. Staring straight ahead, I watch the twin black figures of Wayne and Eric recede to small blotches on the red canvas of Barrier Creek’s gravel streambed until the chopper’s window frame blocks them from view.

As we crest the rim of the canyon, my mind fumbles when it tries to comprehend the sudden shift of the horizon. The line demarcating the edge of my universe had been claustrophobically penned in for the past six days, trapped as I was, but now it leaps a hundred miles in a single