Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [162]
“Yes, I have her phone number. I’ll call her as soon as we’re done.”
“Thank you.” I pause and recompose myself, continuing, “I left a lot of stuff in the canyon. My ropes, my CD player, my harness, a lot of stuff. Would you be able to send someone in to clean up my stuff?”
“We’ll certainly do that,” Steve answers.
“Some of it’s where I was trapped, some of it’s below the rappel. My bike”—I pause, reaching under the gown for my pocket—“is by a juniper a hundred yards from the east side of the road, one mile south of Burr Pass.” I pull out the folded-up map and hand it to Steve. Digging into my zipped pocket, I retrieve the bike-lock keys as Steve orients himself with the bloodstained map. “Here, these are the keys,” I say, handing the small ring and twin keys across my body to Steve. “I locked the bike to itself, not to the tree, so in case I lost the keys, I could still get the bike back, but it will be easier to get the bike back to the road if the tires roll freely.”
“Can you point to where your bike is?” Steve inquires, holding the map in front of me.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, rolling over a little to extend my left hand. “Oh, no, I can’t; it’s off the end of the map. But it’s right where I said, the last tree for a mile, a mile south of Burr Pass, which is a rise just off the edge of the map.”
“Can you point to where you were trapped?”
“Yeah, it’s the only east-west section of the canyon just above the Big Drop rappel. Do you see it there?” I point to the mark that reads, “Big Drop, 1550, Short Slot.”
“OK, anything else?”
“Just keep track of my backpack, please, it’s very important—it’s on the helicopter—and get my truck and stuff. Thank you.” I’m alert but exhausted, and I want to close my eyes, but I know I can’t sleep. Then a woman in a white smock and face mask enters the room and introduces herself as the anesthesiologist, asking what happened. I tell her the short version, and she scoots off through a side door of the ER, promising she’ll be back with some drugs.
Steve says, “Aron, I’d like to get as much information from you as I can. How big was the boulder?”
“I think it was two hundred pounds. I budged it just a little right after it first fell on me, but I couldn’t lift it with my rigging, so it had to be at least that, I guess.”
“And when did it fall on you?”
“It was about two forty-five Saturday afternoon.”
“How did it happen?”
“I pulled it loose. It was stuck—it was a chockstone—and I stepped onto it, then climbed down off it, and I pulled it. It bounced back and forth, smashed my left hand a little, then caught my right hand. I was trying to push away from underneath it when my hand got caught.” I can hardly believe I’m telling this story. I’m dumb-founded that I’m lying on this table, given the odds that I would survive six days of dehydration and hypothermia, then survive cutting my arm off, rappelling, and hiking seven miles through the desert. And that helicopter. That was a miracle.
Before Steve can ask any more questions, the anesthesiologist returns, this time carrying a loaded syringe and a needle that looks to my eyes like it’s big enough to inoculate a horse. I know what she’s going to do, and I interrupt her in a firm voice. “Whoa, I need to tell you something. Sometimes I have reactions to needles. I’ve passed out from shots, and I fell out of a chair once after having my blood drawn. My doctor told me to tell people that before I get a shot. In my condition now, I don’t know what might happen to me. I could go into shock.”
The doctor, stopped cold in her tracks at my first words, absorbs what I am telling her with a fixed stare. All I can see are her eyes, which are wide open with disbelief, even as she says, “You mean you’re not in shock?”
“I don’t know, clinically, maybe, I don’t—”
She shortcuts my wavering with a direct question: “I’ve got this morphine ready. Do you want it or not?”
“Oh hell yes!” I exclaim. “Give it to me. Just hold me on the table if I start slithering around, OK?”
I look over at Ranger Steve as the doctor injects