Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [160]
The vibrations of the helicopter engines mount to a dull roar, only barely muted by the headphones. “How long until we get to Green River?” I ask, unnecessarily straining to raise my voice.
Be strong, Aron. You’re almost there. Hang on.
The pilot comes back, clearly audible over the scratchy background static: “We’re going directly to Moab. It’ll be about fifteen minutes.”
Oh, wow, good. “Is there any water I can have?”
Both of the officers scramble, as if my request has shaken them out of their astonishment. I can’t blame them. If a blood-soaked guy came and sat next to me, it’d be a few minutes before I would think to offer him a drink, too. The man on my left turns up a screw-top bottle of spring water and hands it to me. After I’ve held it for a second staring at it dazedly, he realizes the top is still on, so he unscrews it and gives it back. We shift around, and the uniformed officer on my right moves a jacket under my arm to soak up the bloody runoff.
In just two minutes, we come to a massive river below us, and from its color and our position, I’m certain it is the Green River. The pilot says over the headsets, “Keep him talking.”
I reply, “I’m still drinking the water.” I can hardly believe I’m still able to stomach any more liquid, or that I still feel thirst. Including what I’ve got in my hand now, I’ve drunk over two and a half gallons of water in the past three hours.
“Don’t let him pass out,” the pilot warns the officers. I’m not worried I’m going to pass out, as the pain won’t even let me rest, but I do want to get to a hospital as soon as possible.
“How much longer do we have?” I inquire, sounding to myself like a whiny kid pleading for a bathroom break on a road trip with his family.
“Twelve minutes from here,” the pilot says. We follow the river north for a minute or two in silence as I take another three gulps of water, finishing the bottle. When we bank to the right, I see a winding dirt road that drops over a canyon wall to the river. “See that road?” I ask.
The man on my right looks out the window and nods. “Yeah?”
“That’s the beginning of the White Rim, uhh, Mineral Bottom, it’s called. I biked that with some of my friends a couple years ago. It’s over a hundred miles.” The officer seems slightly slow to absorb what I’m saying. Perhaps it’s all in my perception of him, or perhaps it’s his disbelief that I’ve turned the flight into a scenic tour. We’re over the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands, heading northeast. I know this area well enough to judge our progress. I ask the pilot, “Will we go by the Monitor and the Merrimac?”
“I don’t know what those are,” the pilot explains.
The officer on my right asks me what happened, and I begin to tell him about my week. I wriggle around enough that I can get the map out of my left pocket, and I show him where I was stuck. I explain about the chockstone, how it moved and I became trapped, how I shivered through five nights, how I ran out of water and drank my own urine, how I finally figured out how to amputate my arm. In recounting the story, I begin to wonder about the timing of the helicopter and how it found me in the canyon at the perfect moment when I needed it. If it had been an hour later, I would have died waiting for help. Or, if I had figured out how to cut off my arm two days earlier, when I stabbed myself, there wouldn’t have been a helicopter, and I would have bled out before getting to my truck, let alone Green River. I had been right on Sunday when I said on the videotape that amputating my arm would have been a slow act of suicide.
After six minutes or so of explaining my story, I see two thin sandstone buttes out the front window. The formations of eroded rock resemble two submarines engaged in battle, and I declare, “Look, that’s them, the Monitor and the Merrimac.” I know we’re getting close, but we seem to be banking to the right again when I was thinking town should be straight