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By Root 816 0

November. The festival was showing a documentary of the hiking accident in Tasmania that cost Warren both his legs above the knees. We met at a dinner where Warren filled me in on some of the details. Leaving his partner in camp to go to the bathroom one night, he crossed a nearby streambed, took care of business, and, on his way back, spent a few minutes climbing some boulders near the bank. That was when he pulled a tremendously large boulder onto himself, crushing both his legs and trapping himself in the shallow creek. By the time his partner realized something was wrong, a rainstorm had begun, and Warren found himself waiting for help in the rising waters of the stream. It took rescuers two days to free him, prying up the car-sized boulder with a hydraulic lifting jack. I saw his movie the next night, stunned at the images of Warren under the rock, and amazed by his recovery and return to the mountains. Within two years of his accident and learning to use prostheses, Warren climbed Federation Peak, one of the highest and most remote mountains in Tasmania.

From my ensnared position in the bottom of Blue John, I feel a profound level of empathy for what Warren endured. It strikes me as funny, the irony that within six months of meeting him, I would become the second hiker I’d heard of to be immovably pinned by a boulder. Maybe there have been others, too, I don’t know. I wonder to myself how he went to the bathroom while he was trapped. I envy Warren’s fortune at having a companion nearby to get help. If only I had been with someone…Warren’s story inspires me to think that if I do survive this experience in the canyon, I, too, will continue climbing and enjoying the outdoors. I won’t perform piano concertos like I did in college, but hey, those are the breaks.

I pass the rest of the morning and early afternoon alternating between my few activities: standing and sitting, chipping unenthusiastically at the rock, looking at the sky for early signs of flash-flood danger, swatting at insects, counting the minutes and hours until my next sip of water. Finally, it is three o’clock, the hour I’ve been waiting for. It’s my second significant milestone, the end of my second full day trapped.

Pulling my video camera out of my backpack again, I blow the grit off the lens and align it in its spot on top of the chockstone. This is the most action I’ll create for myself during the afternoon. It’s uplifting to break the tedium of waiting, but unfortunately, I don’t have any good news to share. I sigh and begin speaking.

“It’s the forty-eight-hour mark now. It’s three o’clock on Monday. I have about one hundred and fifty milliliters of water left. That’s five ounces.” I pause and consider my dispassionate reaction to the statement. Through the first day of my entrapment, I felt an emotional connection to the amount of water I had, the umbilical tug of its life-sustaining essence compelling me to make it last as long as I could. Now that feeling is disconnected. Sometime in the night, my final countdown began without notice. There’s so little water, it doesn’t matter that there’s any left at all—it can no longer affect how long I’ll survive. By morning, the water will be gone. I’ve come to accept that fact, and with acceptance, my looming dread dissipates, leaving only emptiness.

My next thought is of my sister. I look directly into the camera lens, imagining her sitting in her living room watching this tape someday in the future. I see her face and her eyes looking back at me as though through the camera. “Sonja, I’m very proud of you. I didn’t get to hear firsthand how your championships went, but I heard from Mom that you placed very well at the national competitions, that you were tenth overall in speech and debate in the nation. Hot damn, girl. I’m very proud of you. Not just for that but for who you are.

“I’ve been thinking about that. My friend Rob in Aspen says to me several…frequently…several times that, confusingly, ‘It’s not what you do but who you are.’ I kind of got hung up on that a lot, because I always thought who