Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [55]
What are you doing, Aron? Get that knife away from your wrist! What are you trying to do, kill yourself? That’s suicide! I don’t care how good a tourniquet you have, you’ve got too many arteries in your arm to stop them all. You’ll bleed out. You slice your wrist, and it’s as good as stabbing yourself in the gut. If you manage to get through the bones and free yourself, say you make it down as far as the rappel. That tourniquet won’t make a damn difference—the rescuers will find your depleted body sometime next month, pecked clean by buzzards down in that canyon. Cutting your arm off is just a slow act of suicide.
I feel vaguely ill and drop my left hand, allowing the knife to ease away from my skin. I can’t do it. Maybe I’m not ready to pursue amputation any further at the moment. Maybe that argumentative voice is right, though, maybe it is suicide. I’ll have to be a lot more strung out to go through with the amputation. Who knows, maybe some random person will come along tomorrow. All I can be certain of at this point is that, should the need arise for a prolonged and nasty operation—such as hacking through my bones like I was doing to the chockstone—my fortitude will have to be at an all-time high. I shudder at the thought, my eyes close softly, and my mouth gapes open. I can picture my blood spilled on the canyon walls, the torn flesh and ripped muscles of my arm dangling in gory strands from two white bones pockmarked with divots, the result of my last efforts to chisel through my arm’s structural frame. Then I see my head drooped to my sagging torso, my body lifelessly hanging from the knife-nicked bones. It’s like watching the closing sequence of a film, but it doesn’t fade to black. It’s my waking nightmare, a premonition that causes me to set my knife down on the chockstone’s shelf and retch.
Slowly, I blink. My vision blurs in a nauseating swirl, but then it stabilizes and my equilibrium returns. With the sickening surgical practice session over, I review my situation. I no longer have any options that I haven’t already examined and tabled as ineffective or deadly. Even though I’ve followed each potential scenario through its preliminary stages, I can’t presently go further with any of them. I’m stymied at every turn. I’ll die before help arrives, I can’t excavate my hand, I can’t lift the boulder, and I can’t cut off my arm. A sinking depression hits me for the first time. The optimism that has graced me for the last day is gone, and I feel lonely, angry, and scared. I whimper to myself: “I am going to die.” Probably in another two days, not that it matters when.
I will die here.
I will waste away here.
I will shrivel up, slumping here with my arm trapped in this place, when dehydration decides to stop toying around and finally kills me.
Why do I even bother drinking my water? It’s only prolonging my ordeal. Dismally, I wish for a flash flood to end it all. The thought of intentionally slitting my wrists fleetingly dashes in and out of my mind. My despair turns to adolescent anger. I hate this boulder. I hate it! I hate this canyon. I hate the morgue-cold slab pressing against my right forearm. I hate the faint musty smell of the greenish slime thinly glazing the bottom of the southern canyon wall behind my legs. I hate the breezes that blow grit in my face and the dim half-light of this claustrophobic hole where even the sandstone