Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [42]
Sonja and I returned to climb the Mooney Falls tunnels in the fading light. For our dinner back at camp, we laid out some pre-cooked turkey on crackers to go with our main course of macaroni and cheese. Even for backcountry cuisine, it was basic fare, but we weren’t there to celebrate a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner—we were most thankful about being with each other in such an inspiring place. After a chocolate bar each for dessert, we hung our food to protect it from the ring-tailed cats and raccoons and crawled onto our open-air tarp, the two lone occupants of the half-mile-long campground. My sister rolled over and fell asleep as I sat with my headlamp and tweezers for about forty-five minutes, trying to extract the remaining prickly-pear barbs from my inner thighs. It eased my embarrassment to know that no one was watching my peculiar ritual of awkward stretching, rubbing, plucking, prodding, and grimacing—my tweezers and I had the canyon to ourselves. It would be a full week before I found and removed the last spine, a fine hair impaled in my left buttock, while watching football on television in my town home in Chandler.
By seven A.M. the next morning, I was descending the canyon by headlamp, downclimbing the ropes and chains at Mooney Falls, splashing through the streambed, and hiking swiftly through the grasses and reeds bordering the sandbars and creek banks past Beaver Falls. I was exactly on time for the rendezvous at the Colorado River, where Jean-Marc and Chad offered me some of their coffee, freshly brewed on their backcountry stove. We hung out on the slate ledges along the downriver side of the Havasupai outlet, overlooking the comparatively monstrous Colorado, and scoped out swimming possibilities along the south shore of the river. Chad waded out throughthe confluence zone of Havasupai Creek to get a picture of the mixing line where the translucent waters first met the rushing madness of the Colorado’s black-opal current.
What possessed me to follow Chad out into the water, pass him to climb onto the last rock at the upstream edge of a powerful eddy, and then cannonball into the Colorado River, fully clothed, without a life jacket…Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Chad did get a funny picture of me, balled up in midair and unthinkingly bound for disaster, but had he and Jean-Marc not acted as fast as they did in the ensuing moments, it would have been the last picture anyone ever took of me, silly or otherwise. As I plunged in and came to the surface, I gasped at the unexpected temperature of the river—a hypothermic 50 degrees—over twenty degrees colder than the tropically warm Havasupai Creek.
My thick long-sleeved shirt and pants became ten-pound weights, and my running shoes dragged my feet plumb as the current swept me along the edge of the fifteen-yard-long eddy. Kicking off my shoes, I swam hard and fought my way into the eddy within five feet of shore in deep water. I noticed I was no longer getting any closer to solid ground. The circular eddy current was too strong to overcome. As I made stroke after stroke, I watched the shore move past. Chad and Jean-Marc were watching me and called out, “Aron, do you need help?” My pride replied, “Nah, I’ll make it,” as I took in my first swallow of river water.
Chad must have heard panic in my voice, because he dashed up the ledge behind the short beach to their campsite, thirty feet away, as I recirculated upstream in the eddy. Pushed from shore by the eddy current, I was quickly caught by the main current and the cycle began to repeat itself. As I attempted to unbutton my long-sleeved shirt to alleviate the drag, I instantly submerged and couldn’t get more than a single button undone before I needed air. The icy grip of the Colorado constricted my chest, making my breathing a shallow and rapid gasping. After swallowing three gulps of water and immersing a second time, I abandoned the shirt removal. Downstream of the eddy, the canyon walls rise straight from the water in two-to-three-hundred-foot cliffs for