The real test of any choice is, “Would I make the same choice again?”
No one can see beyond a choice they don’t understand.
– THE ORACLE, The Matrix Revolutions
BEATIFIC IVORY FACES SMILE AT ME. They are half protruding from red womblike walls, surreally pale and bald, like contenders in a Patrick Stewart look-alike contest who have been doused in flour. The walls seem to form a scarlet tube of organic tissue, a fibroid tunnel pulsing in waves that could be an eight-foot-tall empty blood vessel, except that I’m inside it. In my dreamy vision, I reach out, brushing the tissue’s sponginess with my fingers. It responds to my touch with welcoming caresses. As though I’ve triggered a release, I sense I have begun moving along the tube, passed along by the wave motion. Stringy pulp drapes cling to my face and arms with the invisible softness of a wildflower petal as I float through the veiled twists and turns of the passage. Passing the saintly faces one at a time, I am vaguely aware of their blurred animations, like adoring mimes calling out to me, but I can’t hear their voices. An uncertain familiarity compels me to look more closely at the faces, but I can’t pause long enough in the tube, and they continue to drift past me before I can place any particular one. I can’t quite tell their sex, either, but they seem to be about my age or maybe a little older. In any case, I feel comfortable here, like the faces are my friends-or, more exactly, like the faces are the faces of my friends-but I can’t tell.
The forward movement continues for some time, relaxingly passing me along the placenta-like corridor. I feel like I’m enjoying a gentle crowd surfing, but I’m worried, too. What’s happening? What is this stuff around me? Where am I? Is this a dream? Where’s the canyon? My surroundings seem to respond by supporting me more firmly, and then the tube slopes up in front of me. Until this point, my journey has been strictly horizontal. I couldn’t feel the pull of gravity before, but now it’s like I’m riding the uphill portion of one very bizarre roller coaster. There are no more faces, just the lining of the walls slipping by in monotonous progression minute after untold minute. How high have I gone? Several hundred feet, I imagine. The grip of the fleshy waves on my body becomes subtler, with the exception of slight vibrations that add to the roller-coaster sensation, tugging at my legs, waist, torso, and back.
Intensifying, the vibrations shake me more and more, distressing me. Now I want to find out what’s at the end of this incline. I get the feeling there will be some kind of gateway. I want to see it, perhaps pass through it, but I somehow know I will shake free of the delicate wall lining before I make it to the end. Vibrations cause me to have tumultuous spasms. I won’t make it to find out what comes after the incline. I peel free of the lining, seizures ripping me away from the vanishing walls of the vessel. Without their support, I somersault backward in suspended slow motion, shuddering violently, as though I am about to detonate. Blackness eradicates the tunnel, and the dream-state quaking resolves into real shivers, my body trying to free itself from the tenebrous clutches of the canyon night.
It’s Tuesday night, just after sunset, and my sleep-deprived mind is fabricating delusional flight from my entrapment, if not for my body, at least for my spirit.
Distracted by fatigue and the relative warmth of the day, I haven’t yet redonned my Lycra shorts, but the evening’s oncoming chill signals another nine hours of weary battle. I had removed the shorts prior to my surgical attempt this morning. Thinking I might succeed, I was planning to use their padded liner as an absorbent bandage on my stump, but of course I hadn’t needed it. For never having been formally trained in backcountry medicine, I’m proud to have covered so many medical needs with my improvisations. I’m almost disappointed that I won’t get a chance to test their efficacy, but I have resolved not to make another attempt at amputating my arm. I’ve proved to myself it’s infeasible to cut through the bones. Bound by my own disintegrating capacities, I know any further efforts to cut off my arm will be certain suicide.
Death by dehydration is turning out to be even more psychologically grueling than I was anticipating on Saturday. Waterlessness stalks me, the indomitable leviathan of the desert drawing in closer every hour. Enforced insomnia compounds my body’s anguish, loosing a fourth-dimensional aberration in my head. I no longer exist in a normal space-time continuum. Minute by minute, my sleep deprivation dismantles yet another brain function. Considering my deteriorated state, seeing Wednesday morning will be another accomplishment altogether. I’ve outlasted my first predictions that I wouldn’t live to see Tuesday evening. Maybe I’ll outlast myself again.
Just hang on. That’s all you can do.
I decide to put my Lycra shorts back on under my thin tan nylon shorts. The act engages me for nearly ten minutes. I unclip my harness from the supporting rope system, unthread the waist belt from its double-back safety ring, and drop the harness around my legs to my feet. Removing my shorts, I marvel for a moment at the scrawny appearance of my pasty legs in the light of my headlamp. I’ve lost a lot of weight, maybe twenty pounds or more, and I was no chub when I walked into this canyon. I’ve got a long way to go till I use up all that body mass, but the sad part is, most of it will become fodder for the insects and scavengers of this desert environment. I haul up my biking shorts, catching my shoes on the stretchy fabric as I poke each leg through its hole. The tan shorts slide back on easily, followed by the twisted mess of the harness. Getting my legs through the appropriate loops takes three attempts before I get all the tangles worked out. Weaving the belt through the slotted ring is simple enough with one hand, but reversing the webbing to complete the double-back cinch is more difficult, and after five minutes, I leave it unfinished, as it was before.
Blackness inters me in the canyon. Another night of hypothermia’s depredations awaits me. I’m fitful and restless as I resolutely cycle through a dozen repetitions of retightening the rope around my legs, often drifting away on another extraordinary trance fantasy in the ten-minute reprieves I earn between bouts of shivers. My spirit yearns for its freedom, and I leave myself a half-dozen times. Sometimes the voyages are psychedelic dream-trips, like the journey through the blood vessel, and other times I see myself from above on an out-of-body vacation where my soul can leave the canyon, like it did on Sunday afternoon when I flew over the Pacific Ocean and turned into a photon shower in the vacuum of space.
Still other experiences begin with seeing my friends, whole-bodied yet transparent, ghosts who temporarily inhabit the canyon with me until we leave together to go to a familiar setting. They never communicate with words, only with gestures, and by somehow transmitting emotions across nonverbal wavelengths; if they want me to feel safe and reassured, then that’s what I feel. If they wanted me to be frightened, then I would feel fear, but I don’t-I am totally comfortable in the trances. Regardless of the location or the company in these visionary experiences, there is always a mute voice that reminds me when I need to resume taking care of myself. I inevitably delay my return until my body is convulsing from hypothermic shivers, but I always know when it is time.
In real space, confined between the chockstone and the canyon wall, I intermittently pour off the top layer of my urine from the CamelBak into the Nalgene bottle, leaving the unsavory sediment to dump in the sand behind my feet. I repeat this activity more often than needed, just to break the tedium. Oh, what I would give for a crushed-ice strawberry daiquiri, a margarita, a malted milk shake, a tall glass of grapefruit juice, a cold bottle of Budweiser. Every thought is preceded and followed by a thought about a beverage of some kind-drinks that my memory produces in vivid projection when I close my eyes, floating in a spot two feet in front of me and about six inches above eye level. It’s peculiar that no matter what the drink, it always appears to me in a form from my past, and in the same elevated space, within reach but not there. I’m not sure if letting my imagination entertain itself sustains me or makes me thirst more for the drink. It’s the same debate I’ve held with myself about the last of my food, the last of my water, drinking my urine, all the most important choices of my entrapment: “Is this good for me, or will it make things worse?” I have been careful to deliberate over every choice. But here I remain.
Confusion, delirium, and ruthless cold compete for equal time through the night, warping even small segments of time into compounding infinities of struggle against the cruelty of the elements. The same horseshoe-shaped constellations that I first noted on Sunday night center themselves over Blue John Canyon, their march across the sky following my sight line of the heavens between the blinders of the walls. I wonder who else is up there on the desert plateau, looking at the same celestial ceiling, and if they, too, are noticing the stars’ rotations. I don’t get far with the thought. In fact, my thoughts rarely finish themselves. My mind sputters as though it has run out of fuel, getting only two or three words into a question or a resolution before it drifts into silence or another pressing input. I can’t keep my focus.
My brain has put itself out to pasture. It is unmotivated to accurately track time, either consciously, with my watch, or by the subconscious instincts on which I usually can rely. Typically, my mind has a very precise ability to assess time. For example, earlier during my entrapment, if I looked at my watch, then thought about my sister’s wedding, fidgeted with my headlamp, and tucked in the webbing around my right biceps, I had an intuition that it had been about two minutes. Whatever I did, I had a sense of the appropriate duration, and that estimated time correlated closely with the real progress of my watch.
But presently, that correlation is gone. With fatigue causing so many clipped thoughts, things seem to take longer than they actually do. I’m having a difficult time understanding why only two minutes have passed, according to my watch, when it feels like ten. Another bout of paranoia strikes me, and I clutch tight the idea that my watch was damaged in the chockstone accident and is no longer truthfully telling the time. Maybe it’s closer to dawn than I had figured; maybe it’s even a day further along. (Or maybe I’m completely unhinged.) It takes me awhile to deduce that my Suunto is functioning just fine-how else could it predict the coming of dawn, the daily appearance of the raven and the sun dagger, and the fall of night so accurately? OK, OK, so it really is only one-thirty A.M.
I have a half hour till my next sip of urine. At least the piss is chilled now; I’m glad for that. But I’m even happier for the beverage memories that mesmerize me from time to time, complete with lifelike projections.
I close my eyes, and I am an eight-year-old sitting on the back porch of my grandparents’ house in the central Ohio countryside, playing gin rummy with my grandpa Ralston. We beat the heat with a 7-UP, poured from a refrigerated two-liter bottle into a white Styrofoam cup with five cylindrical ice cubes, the carbonation tickling my nose as I lift the cup for a sip. Just as I can taste the clear sweetness, the memory changes to a vision, and there in front of me is the Styrofoam cup in a halo of light, glowing like the Holy Grail, atomized fizz popping up over the cup lip in the backlighting. I shiver and open my eyes, and though the inside of my rope bag is perfectly dark, the vision blinks out.
Again I shut my eyes, and it is a late-summer afternoon in 1987. Deep in a childhood memory, I am taking a break from baling hay with family friends on a rolling green hillside field in eastern Ohio. The view to the north is open and lush; a pocket of uncleared forest cuts the southern horizon two hundred yards away. We are sitting on the rear of the baling trailer’s bed, taking turns chugging ice-cold sun tea thick with sugar from a red and white thermos. When the jug comes to me, I raise it up, and condensation drips onto my cheeks from the lid. I pause to wipe the humidity away from my eyes, then I shudder and lose the vision before I can gulp down any of the syrupy tea.
A serial succession of visions takes me around the world and traverses most of my life. I take my first sip of beer from a pull-tab can of Budweiser on my family’s back porch with my dad and uncle in 1985. I drink warm sake with my friends Jon, Erik, Moody, and Chrystie in our hotel room in downtown Nagoya, Japan, before a Phish show in June 2000. I sip on a double-length straw stuck in a Slurpee wedged in the triangular hole in the handlebars of my bike as I ride back from a 7-Eleven near my parents’ house in suburban Denver, on a July afternoon in 1991, before I had my driver’s license.
One beverage in particular surfaces repeatedly in my mind, its salted rim cloaking the sweet taste of a blended mixture of ice, tequila, triple sec, and lime. I imagine that I’m slobbering over myself, foaming at the mouth in lust for a margarita, but my tongue adheres to my cotton-dry palate. My breath rasps through my desiccated throat, and I wheeze then choke on my vocal cords, and I am reminded of a fact that the beverage memories have pushed aside: I am dying.
At three A.M. I apply more lip balm to my lips, hoping to seal in any last moisture they might have, and it occurs to me that I might likewise be successful in sealing my tongue. Painting the petroleum wand across my tongue makes me salivate, and I suck on the lip balm, curious about its caloric content. If it gets my body excited for food, maybe it will be worth a shot to eat some of it. I bite off a small hunk, about a tenth of the total stick, and mush it around in my mouth. It coats my teeth and my tongue, and minute amounts of saliva ooze through the layer of tasteless jelly. The resulting goo gobs up around my molars, and I decide not to swallow it. The fact that I am still producing saliva encourages me; I’m not yet into the most severe stages of dehydration. Aside from that inferred conclusion, I gain nothing from the effort. My hunger remains unabated.
Without physical activity to keep me busy, I spend cold hours recounting dozens of my favorite trips with family and friends. From Japan to Peru to Europe, from Alaska to Florida to Hawaii, from climbing mountains to seeing our favorite bands, I call up my fondest memories. I have fulfilled my purpose in life by exploring so much of the world, bringing myself happiness and inspiring others with my adventures. I have met my calling at every opportunity and lived an intense and dramatic life.
Still, I’m not ready to die. I drop into a series of trances. In one, an unidentified male friend appears in front of the chockstone wearing a heavenly white robe, and soundlessly beckons for me to follow him. We turn to the wall of the canyon, just to the left of the ledge where my rope anchor is set. I press on a panel of sandstone, and the wall hinges back on itself, swinging open to the right. We leave together, him first, walking through the door frame that has miraculously appeared, and we step from the sandy canyon bottom into a carpeted hallway in a house. My friend leads me into a living room that is full of more of my friends relaxing on couches and easy chairs. I feel an immediate surge of cheerfulness, as if I’ve arrived home after an extended journey. I still can’t distinguish the friends, but they chat together like we’re at a dinner party, the voices murmuring and swooshing in my ears at an indecipherable level.
I stand in the doorway, feeling at ease, but I cannot engage anyone. They exist on a different plane, and though we can see each other, I am different-somehow, they aren’t real. My friends look up from their conversations as if to let me know they heard me think that and respond in unified thought, “We’re here when you need us. When you are ready, then we will be real.”
I’m affronted. “What’s going on? What’s happening to me here? Am I inside my head? Am I dreaming? How can that be, if I’m not sleeping? But how is this possible if it’s not a dream?” I debate whether or not I’m sleeping. I’m pretty sure I don’t lose consciousness or fall asleep during these episodes. My muscle control seems to stay intact, because otherwise my body would recoil from the violent pain of the weight on my right wrist. No, this mental retreat center is someplace more abstract than my everyday consciousness, but it’s not exactly a dreamworld, either. Somehow, I am maintaining my body in the canyon while simultaneously departing it.
Most of all, I clamor for some verification of what is real, but before I can reach a decision, my mind forgoes the questions it has just asked. My senses are feeding me realistic information that this trance world does in fact exist. I can reach and touch the walls and furniture in this roomful of friends. I can smell the scented candles burning on the end table. I feel the breeze when someone opens the sliding glass door to the patio and walks outside. While much of the atmosphere presents itself convincingly, it is as though I am watching from the dark side of a one-way mirror. There is action, but I can’t participate in it. I find I am no longer moving anything other than my head and arms; my legs have locked at the knees. And that business with the canyon wall opening up? That’s just crazy.
Eventually, I come back into my body, predictably finding my core convulsing in cold spasms. I spend another hour fidgeting with my wrappings and the rope bag before I leave the canyon again, but this time I follow a friend whom I identify at first glance. It is my best friend from high school, Jon Heinrich, and I watch my spirit float up out of my cloaked back and head inside the rope bag. We walk through the hinged canyon panel as I’ve done twice already, and we enter a small, dark, tightly packed square room with barely enough space for the two of us to stand without bumping into each other. The room is pitch-black except for a line of bright light reflecting off the unpolished concrete floor. Jon has apparently misplaced the key that presumably would open the door. He flicks on a light switch, and thin metal shelves full of cleaning supplies appear on three sides of us, an industrial mop sink in the corner to my left. We’re in a janitor’s closet. Somehow I know it is located in a hospital, as opposed to an office building or a school, and my hopes dart wildly.
Bang on the door, Aron! Get help! You need medical attention, and these people can get it for you.
But Jon won’t let me rap on the hollow metal door, as if to tell me it won’t do any good to cause a ruckus-the hospital and the canyon are a world apart. Minutes pass, I slowly understand that the help here are not the doctors and nurses on the other side of the door who will respond to my body’s needs but my friend Jon, who reinforces my courage and bolsters my strength with grace, empathy, and gratitude. I realize how lucky I have been to know him, and my emotions rally around his presence. However, an unspoken voice breaks the trance’s spell: “It’s time to say goodbye.”
I don’t want to go. Once again, more insistent now, reality nudges me: “It is time to say goodbye.” I signal my need to Jon with a jerk of my thumb and nod in appreciation for his blessed visit. I am on the verge of tears, having to leave him, but I know better than to stay. My departure takes a strange effect, as though my consciousness is a ball of solidified energy that suddenly melts like a scoop of ice cream, pooling on the closet floor, then dripping from the vision world back into the space between the canyon walls. Gradually filling my body from the legs up, I reenter my cold-stiffened body.
The shivers begin, wracking my core with furious vengeance, and I wonder if the voice let me elope too long this time. There is always that noiseless voice. It stays in my real body, the watch-keeper that calls me back before I quiver over the invisible brink into hypothermic sleep. In the trances, I don’t feel the cold, the pain, the hunger, the fatigue, the thirst. Whether the destination is a janitor’s closet or a living room, and not some expansive vista of bucolic hills or the cloud thrones of angels, each experience is comforting, and I don’t want it to end. Indeed, Jon’s visit has given me a boost of courage and hope, and through my tremors, I say out loud, my voice echoing in the dark canyon, “I’ve got a few more days left in me.” If I can keep going into the trance world and feel the presence of my mom, my dad, my sister, and my friends, then I may have found my strategy for surviving longer than even my latest prediction of Wednesday noon.
The trances give me hope, but I know, too, that each one will end with the same diving despair that accompanies my return to the canyon, where I feel the cold and thirst and all the other debasements of my entrapment. For the boost they provide, the trances only reinforce that I am not actually free. I may have passed ten minutes more of a heartless night by escaping into an out-of-body experience, but it is ten minutes that push me on toward my indelibly prescribed fate. Even if I last a few more days, it won’t be long enough for rescuers to locate and save me.
In the piercing brutality of night, I repeatedly escape into trances, but they melt from my memory the moment I return to the canyon. If heaven turns out to be as comfortable as the trances, then what I return to in the canyon is nothing short of hell. Hell is conventionally portrayed as a crowded, infernally hot place-Milton’s Pandemonium-ruled by a horned devil overseeing the torture of lost souls. I know better now. Hell is indeed a deep, chthonic hole, but hot? No. It is a bitterly dark and unbearably cold place of lonely solitude, an arctic prison without a warden and but one abandoned inmate, forsaken even by the supposed ringleader of the underworld. There is no other spiritual energy, good or evil, on which to project love or hatred. There is only one emotion in hell: unmitigated despair wrapped in abject loneliness.
Twilight eventually disperses the bleak spell of Blue John Canyon. A dozen mosquitoes and a mild but gritty downcanyon breeze usher in the morning, and after two hours of both ignoring and swatting at the nagging insects, I have daylight to console me. I am not so alone; the sun has arrived to join me for another journey. Glorious torrents of gold light splash on the walls thirty feet behind me, flushing the oppression from the canyon. For the first time in two days, I get out my digital still camera and take a picture of this flash flood of light. When I gaze downcanyon over my left shoulder at the heavenly array, the colors seem to radiate from the sandstone surfaces, not just reflect off of them. I cannot fathom that a more exalted display would accompany anything less than the Rapture. My eyes begin to water. Before I stow the camera, I set up and take a self-portrait, the glowing brilliance floating behind my head like an aura. With the light, the natural activities of desert life resume: The kangaroo rat sketches around in his nest, and more bugs revive to fly around my head.
Another part of my morning ritual is the daily update for the video camera. Just before nine o’clock, I dig the little unit out of my backpack. Why I don’t leave it out, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s one more way to keep myself busy, always unthreading and rethreading my right shoulder strap through its buckle.
I wonder if my parents are involved in any theoretical search. The only way I can be traced is for the authorities to obtain my debit- and credit-card purchase histories, which would lead them to Glenwood Springs, Moab, and then Green River. No, wait: I paid cash for those Gatorades in Green River. Damn. The investigators will really have to get lucky to find my truck. If all they know is that I was in Moab on Friday, with four days and a vehicle, I could be anywhere in the U.S. by now. When the waiting period is over and the police start actively looking for me, they’ll have to first deduce that I’m not trying to evade them, ruling out the possibility that I’ve run off. Then they’ll have to decide that I’m still in Utah, and get the National Park Service and local sheriffs to check out the most probable locations around Moab.
The really depressing news is that I’m in one of the most unlikely places in a five-county area. There are easily two dozen more popular areas closer to Moab that the NPS and sheriffs’ offices will want to check before they would branch out to such a remote trailhead as Horseshoe Canyon. With limited resources, the NPS will follow the historical data of where people get lost most frequently and focus there first. Some three hours away from the town, Horseshoe will be one of the last places the NPS will check, possibly a full day into their initial involvement.
On the improbable shot that the NPS finds my truck, their next step will be to send out strike teams to sweep Horseshoe Canyon. If they encounter my truck anytime past early afternoon, it will be the following morning before they send out a team to clear the upper reaches of Blue John Canyon, fifteen miles farther down the road. Seven miles into the canyon, they would find me, but a hasty team won’t have anything close to the gear that they will need to free me from the boulder. I estimate an additional twenty-four-hour period from the time I am found until I could be freed and transported by helicopter. But at least they’d have water. Just a liter or two and I could go on another day easily. I bet they’d have more than that, as much as I can drink. Daydreams of clear fresh water distract me from thinking about the search.
Finally, I turn on my video camera. Before I start taping, I look at myself in the screen. I seem extraordinarily alert, considering my situation, and I am surprised to see that the redness is gone from my conjunctiva. Counterbalancing that small piece of good news are the hollows in my cheeks. From over my right shoulder, the light from downcanyon dances on the screen, a comely canary-yellow glow. Clearing my throat, I press the record button and begin speaking, immediately noticing that my voice has raised half an octave since yesterday, higher yet again as my vocal cords tighten due to the dehydration.
“Wednesday morning at nine o’clock. I’m curious how the sleuthing is going for everybody out there. Hopefully, somebody figured out how to pull the credit-card report and figure out where I’ve been, like to Grand Junction and Moab and from there.” I involuntarily dart my eyes back and forth, up and down, then stare blankly down to my left foot. Tilting my head, I speculate, “Maybe the NPS ranger at Horseshoe made a report about my truck being there, I don’t know,” and conclude with a shrug.
I remember that a couple of items back in Aspen will need to be sent to other people, so I give a few more directions for my parents.
“Anyhow, the bike in my room in Aspen belongs to John Currier, who lives just a few houses up the street from Erik Zsemlye. All these addresses and names you should be able to find on my PalmPilot, which is in the glove compartment of my truck. Also, the sleeping bag that’s in my cubby at work belongs to Bill Geist, he’s paid for it, so maybe you can get it to him, part of the Denali thing.”
Last on my mind for this go-round with the tape are a few of my favorite memories. “I’m thinking about 7-UP in a Styrofoam cup,” I explain, and take a long blink to conjure up the image one more time. I let out a tiny moan, then move on with another drink memory. “Five-Alive at Grandma Anderson’s house. Some of my favorite beverages going down on the list now. I’m thinking through it.”
I am gasping for breath between sentences and decide that I’ve had enough stimulation for now. Once I have shut down the video camcorder and stowed it on the chockstone shelf, I update my hour tallies in my head: 96 hours of sleep deprivation, 90 hours that I’ve been trapped, 29 hours that I’ve been sipping my urine, and 25 hours since I finished off the last of my fresh water.
While I am running the numbers, the raven flies over my head. I seethe with envy for the bird’s freedom.
On a lighter note, I count up that it’s been four days since I used toothpaste or a toothbrush. What I wouldn’t give to break that sabbatical. With a week passed since I last shaved, my whiskers are a quarter inch long. Rubbing my hand around my chin and neck, I wonder how long my beard will be by the time I’m found-it’ll keep growing for a day or two after I die-maybe a half inch or more?
Time has lost its meaning. Counting up the hours and days is now simply record-keeping. The exercise evokes no emotional response, only a matter-of-fact acknowledgment: “Oh, OK, so that’s how long I’ve been here.” By midmorning, I am not checking my watch anymore. I don’t want to see how quickly the day is passing, because I know what will come tonight, and I’m hardly looking forward to it. It seems best that I ignore time. I can’t speed it up or slow it down; I can only absorb the surreal impressions that swirl in my head, delayed imprints of the walls, telltale trails of the mental claustrophobia that comes with such a long time without sleep, constricting my thinking and shutting down my rational processes one by one.
Suddenly, I have a new idea-what about using a rock as a wrecking ball to smash into the chockstone and potentially remove more of the sandstone from above my hand? Or maybe this is an old idea. Have I thought of this already? I can’t remember. It is brute force compared to the tactical precision with which I could peck at the boulder with my multi-tool, and that lends a positive angle to the theory. At least it’s something different.
I extract a melon-sized rock from the pile at my feet. While supporting my body with my left arm pressing against the escarpment of the canyon wall, I use my legs to roll the bowling ball up onto the ledge at my knees. Once I realize its awkward mass, I’m hesitant. If I lose control of the stone, it will fall directly into my lap or even onto my foot. At twenty-plus pounds, it’s unreasonably large for the job, but I make an attempt, first hoisting it onto my left shoulder and then heaving it forward onto the chockstone in a pulverizing explosion of grit and chalky sandstone. Sure enough, the rock bounces off the chockstone and lurches with the push of gravity for my feet. I jerk my legs out of the way, and it falls back into the pile. The smart thing is probably to leave it there. The stone’s impact did little to demolish the chockstone; the majority of the dust raised by the collision came from the rock I threw, not from the boulder. I need a rock of harder composition than the chockstone. I hunt around and discard from contention each of the remaining rocks near my shoes. This is the obstacle that halted my brainstorming efforts three days ago.
Sometimes when I am climbing, I get stuck at a difficult section because I keep trying the same move the same way and, not surprisingly, keep failing. At that point, I often realize I’m not seeing all my options-I seized upon an obvious choice without taking in the full spectrum of possibilities. Looking around, I might see a foothold that allows me to position my body higher, or a handhold that was previously out of my field of vision.
What am I missing here? What have I ignored because it wasn’t obvious? Arching my head back until I’m upside down, I can see several palm-sized stones lodged over my head in the debris compacted around the large chockstone behind me. There, slate black with a slight reddish tint, an egg-shaped stone stands out from the others; it doesn’t seem to be sandstone but a mineralized layer. Though it may not be harder than the chockstone, it’s more likely to be of similar hardness, and there’s the chance it will be the break I need. Reaching up above my head into the kangaroo rat’s chockstone nest, I pull out the rock. Another stone falls and almost hits me on the head, glancing off my shoulder.
Damn falling rocks. There should be a sign.
The black rock in my hand is the weight of a shot put. It’s perfect. I can lift it without straining myself, and smash it into the boulder without letting go of it. Why it took me so long to turn around and look in the nest for such an opportunity, I can only attribute to the lethargic numbness that diverts and confounds me. Still, taking new action is an accomplishment in itself.
My left hand quickly bruises from absorbing the recoil of each blow of my handheld hammer. After dozens of hits, I have to stop. The damage to my left hand is too great.
Calculating that the diminishing likelihood of my survival has reached its bottom limit, I pick up my video camera to tape my last requests. I begin speaking, my voice taut; I can hear the exhaustion plaguing my efforts to remain coherent.
“It’s two P.M. on Wednesday afternoon. It’s getting close to four days since I dropped in this hole. Some logistics still to talk about. Cremation is probably a good idea, considering what will probably be low-quality remains after this is over. If it’s still appropriate to have pallbearers, I’d like for my friends Jon Heinrich, Erik Johnson, Erik Zsemlye, Brandon Rigo, Chip Stone, Norm Ruth to be pallbearers, and Mark Van Eeckhout as well.” I have named most of my closest friends, more than will be necessary to carry me to my final resting place, but I want to include as many as I can.
While I’m considering whether I have anything else to say, the tape runs out. I rewind it and then start it playing from the beginning. The images enthrall me, and I enter a rapturous state, like a child watching Sesame Street. I have a miniature television in my hands! I entertain myself for an entire hour with the tape that I’ve made. The subject matter is rather dismal, but I enjoy watching the moving pictures of myself, though for some reason my mind critiques my messages to my family, correcting and editing as though I’m going to do a second take. What an inane concept. I image directing myself: “OK, that was good, Aron, but this time say it with feeling.” Ridiculous.
I stop the unit and then rewind it a second time so I can record again, taping over my footage from Mount Sopris with a more urgent message about dividing my remains to be scattered at some of my favorite and special places across the United States.
“I was talking about a ceremony and a cremation, and I’d like to do ashes spreadings among destinations that have been dear or special places. I know that, um, I’d like if it’s possible for my family to have some. And then for-I haven’t got this figured out yet-I’d like for some of it to go with Erik back to California and maybe even take it to the coast, Big Sur, where we had that great trip where we went down to Santa Barbara and that was excellent. Some of it can go maybe with Jon to the East Coast, and if there’s places out there, maybe at Mount Greylock in the vicinity where we almost hit that porcupine, just to spread me around out there. Sonja, if you take a little bit of me to Havasupai, if you ever go there again, that would be really special. Mark, for you to take some of me and do a little spreading ceremony at the top of Sandia Peak, that would be cool.
“So, um, last requests, I guess, oh, that…Actually, Chip and Norm, maybe you could take some of me with Erik and take it down to the Rio Grande in the Bosque, in the river, flowing. That covers kind of the oceans and rivers and forests and hilltops.
“I haven’t mentioned Dan and Julia, they’ve been really special to me. And if Dan and you and Mark and Jason and Allison and Steve Patchett and the guys from search and rescue, on a powder day, maybe there’s a little left of me to spread around at Pajarito or Wolf Creek.”
Realizing I haven’t spoken of my all-time favorite concert experiences, I push past my labored and shallow breathing to say, “I don’t think I could let it go without mentioning Japan 2000 and Bonnaroo and Horning’s, some of the best times I’ve ever had with my friends seeing music. There’s so many that are up there, too. New Year’s with Phish at Big Cypress, New Year’s with String Cheese in Portland-night of the space cowboy. Thanks for all those.”
Wrapping up once more, I feel somewhat more upbeat about my longevity, but I know I’m on my last legs. Looking straight into the lens, I bid one last adieu: “I’m holding on, but it’s really slowing down, the time is going really slow. So again, love to everyone. Bring love and peace and happiness and beautiful lives into the world in my honor. It would bestow the greatest meaning for me. Thank you. I love you.”
A rack of light clouds moves in through the afternoon, muting the normal ten-degree rise in temperature in the canyon. My watch indicates that the day’s high temperature so far has been 57 degrees. The clouds spread out across the Robbers Roost plateau and then disappear as evening comes around. With the lowest high temperature of the past five days coming today, tonight promises to be the coldest and most difficult night. My strength is diminished, and my body’s resources are utterly depleted. Even in the early evening, I can’t keep from shivering. I cut off a strand of my anchor webbing from behind the knot and wrap it loosely a half-dozen times around my neck, just to add some fabric to cover the exposed skin. Maybe that will keep me half a degree warmer, I figure.
I want to keep smashing at the chockstone with my hammer rock, but I can’t bear the suffering it imposes on my left hand. It’s like punching a brick wall again and again. I have an idea to use my left sock around the rock as a pad between it and my hand. Each smashing impact still damages my left hand, but I am making tremendous progress compared to hacking with my ineffective knife. With the series of attacks I’ve made over the course of the afternoon, I have removed more material from the boulder than in the first four days put together. The debris is plentiful enough that I’ve laid the black camera sack I was using as a long sleeve for my left arm over the bandage on my right arm to protect my knife wound from the pulverized grit. Just after six P.M., I take a break to relax my aching left hand and pull out the digital camera again. I take a picture of my right forearm covered with the debris of my effort-an inch-thick layer of sand and rock chips. Putting the camera down, I brush off the rubble, trying to keep the day-old stab wound clear of dirt. A rushing sense of hopelessness overtakes me. Even at this accelerated rate, I can’t possibly obliterate the chockstone to the point where it will release my hand. Not before I die. And that’s even assuming that I could keep up the demolition, which has already caused enough pain in my left hand that I think I might have broken my pinky and ring fingers, or perhaps a bone in my palm above their highest joints. I look forlornly at the hammer rock, wearing my gray SmartWool sock like a stocking cap, and decide to abandon the effort yet again.
Let it go, Aron. Leave the rock there. Why cause yourself any more pain when it’s a futile endeavor to begin with?
I put my sock back on my foot and pull it as high as it will stretch on my calf, knowing I can’t afford to lose any of its insulating effect during the coming night. Somewhere inside my mind, I know I won’t survive tonight in Blue John Canyon. It’s not something I debate or internally discuss, but when I consider that I am going to die in a matter of hours, it rings true. Contrasting my burst of anger earlier during my entrapment, when I lashed out and hit the boulder with the palm of my hand, I accept this statement with a peaceful sense of acknowledgment that I am not in control of this situation. If my time is up, then it is up, and there’s not a thing I can do to stave it off any longer. And if my time isn’t up, then it’s not, and there’s nothing further I need to worry about. But I think the former is much more likely than the latter. I understand that this is the end, that I won’t survive the night, and the thought does not stir me, because I have stopped fighting for control. Letting go of my desire to dictate the outcome of my entrapment releases a disconnected feeling of lightheartedness that vaguely approximates bliss. I wonder if this is what rapture feels like, that mystical experience when each soul relinquishes its earthly embodiment and connects with the divine. It’s not the same as when I have my out-of-body trances, and it’s not apathy or resignation, it’s more like I’ve let go of a spiritual burden. I feel like I’ve recognized a great truth: Some other marvelous force is in control, and has been all along. Give it whatever name I want, all I know for sure is that I don’t have to sweat it out anymore, because I’m not in charge.
Clammy supernatural breezes suck the heat from my body, and my shivering escalates intensely. The canyon is an ice box. Each night has been progressively harder, but these are the killing winds.
Counting from dusk till dawn, I get through only two of the painfully frigid nine hours before I decide it is time to make a final annotation. My watch confirms that it is April 30, for another hour, at least. I had lost interest in time during the afternoon, but now every minute seems important, as any one of them could be my last. I re-etch my name in the sandstone wall over my left shoulder, tracing over the letters I carved with my knife on Saturday after I wrote “Geologic Time Includes Now.” Above the four capitalized letters of my first name, “ARON,” I scratch into the red rock, “OCT 75.” Below my name, I make the complementary scratching “APR 03.” It doesn’t occur to me to write “May,” as I am certain I won’t see the dawn at the far end of this hideously cold night. I finish the epitaph by carving “RIP” above my name and birth month, then I lean back in my harness and set the knife on top of the chockstone before I slip off into a trance.
Color bursts in my mind, and then I walk through the canyon wall on my own this time, stepping into a living room. A blond three-year-old boy in a red polo shirt comes running across a sunlit hardwood floor in what I somehow know is my future home. By the same intuitive perception, I know the boy is my own. I bend to scoop him into my left arm, using my handless right arm to balance him, and we laugh together as I swing him up to my shoulder. This interaction is a powerful departure from the previous trances; in the others, I was spellbound and restrained from engaging other people. But now I am actively participating in the action. I’m mobile and free.
The boy happily perches on my right shoulder, holding my arms in his little hands while I steady him with my left hand and right stump. Smiling, I prance about the room, tiptoeing in and out of the sun dapples on the oak floor, and he giggles gleefully as we twirl together. Then, with a shock, the vision blinks out. I’m back in the canyon, echoes of his joyful sounds resonating in my mind, creating a subconscious reassurance that somehow I will survive this entrapment. Despite having already come to accept that I will die where I stand before help arrives, now I believe I will live.
That belief, that boy, changes everything for me.