It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we are free to do anything.
– BRAD PITT, as Tyler Durden, in Fight Club
PEEKING OUT from the inky confines of my rope bag, I watch dawn pushing its way into the canyon. The fresh daylight reduces the visions that dominated my night. However, my brain is so twisted around from 120 hours without sleep that the new day’s reality feels like a hallucinatory fabrication itself. The ugly chockstone on my arm is hardly discernible from the imagery generated by my delirious mind. With five days of gritty build-up pasted to my contact lenses, my eyes hurt at every blink, and wavering fringes of cloud frame my dingy vision. I can’t hold my head upright anymore; it lolls off against the northern canyon wall, or sometimes I shift and allow it to fall forward, where my left forearm braces it. I am a zombie. I am the undead.
It is Thursday, May 1. I cannot believe I’m still alive. I should have died days ago. I don’t understand how I lived through last night’s hypothermic conditions. In fact, I’m almost disappointed that I’ve survived the night, because now the epitaph on the wall is incorrect-I didn’t “rest in peace” in April, after all. For a short moment, I ponder whether to fix the date, but decide not to bother. It won’t matter to the body recovery team, if they even notice it, and the coroner will be able to discern my death date from the extent of decomposition within a day or so. That’s good enough, I figure.
Where is the confidence I felt during the vision I had of the little blond boy, my future son? Psychologically, I thought I had hit bottom the night before, when I carved my epitaph, only to then find assurance in picking up that toddler. But my buoyancy has been enchained by the stoic might of the boulder and the bitterness of the piss that etches ridges into the roof of my mouth. Drinking sip after sip of urine from my grotesque stash in the Nalgene has eroded the inside of my mouth, leaving my palate raw, reminding me that I am going to die. The piss’s acidity dissolves any remaining self-belief I found in the middle of the night. If I am going to live, why am I drinking my own urine? Isn’t that the classic mark of a condemned man? I have been sentenced and left to decay.
It’s eight-thirty A.M., but the raven hasn’t flown over me yet. I wonder after it for a time but lose my thoughts to the insects that are swarming with all-time intensity around the chockstone. After I swat a few of the flying bugs with my left hand, killing them to entertain myself, I look at my yellow Suunto, which says 8:45. Even the bird has forsaken me-it has not been later than 8:30 for its daily flight, but today, nothing, no raven. In its absence, I feel that my time draws nearer, as though it was a totemic deity sustaining me.
A desire bubbles up: I want to die with music in my ears. Somewhere along the days, even that dreadful BBC song from Austin Powers lost its hold on my psyche. But I can’t bring a single melody to mind. All I have is the awful hush of the canyon; silence maddens me. I need my CD player. The headphones haven’t left my ears or neck in five days, but the player and two CDs are in the main compartment of my backpack. I sling my sack off my back with three easy movements and rest it on my raised left knee, my fingers diving to the bottom, where they find the Discman and discs…and a half inch of sand.
Before I extract the equipment, I know it’s a hopeless cause. The discs are scratched beyond playability. Five days in the desert have left their plastic coatings looking like I took a belt sander to them. No matter. The Discman won’t even spin the disc that’s in it already. It tells me NO DISC each time I push play. I swap out the batteries, but only to be thorough. I must have bashed the unit against the wall at some point over the last five days and whacked the laser out of alignment.
The camcorder, however, has survived the sand and havoc in my pack. Giving up on the music, I decide to video another bit. It occurs to me that I’ve entered the time of highest probability that I will be rescued while I’m still alive. I put my backpack back on and resecure the shoulder strap for the fiftieth time. Resting the video unit on the chockstone, I get myself settled and try to collect my thoughts. When I first speak, the thinness and elevated pitch of my own voice startles me. Another reminder that I am nearly dead, just waiting for the Reaper.
“I was just thinking…It’s Thursday at about nine o’clock in the morning. I’m entering the highest probability of time that will interface…that someone will actually find me, and that I’ll still be alive.”
“That’s almost good news,” I think. But considering that I’ve established the rescue window to start anytime today through Sunday, it’s not cause for hope of imminent help. My chances have upgraded from “ridiculously improbable” to perhaps “totally unlikely.” I don’t dwell on the issue. In fact, because my mind is confounded by a persistent and deepening daze, I couldn’t dwell on something if I wanted to-I don’t have the mental stamina. Somewhat randomly, I think about my sister and her wedding. She and Zack had asked me to play the piano for a few minutes during their upcoming ceremony in August, and I said I would. But obviously, I won’t; I won’t even be there. It disheartens me, but I realize there may be something I can do.
“Sonja…if you still want me to play at your wedding…there’s a tape in a box in the basement of Mom and Dad’s house. The box is labeled, I think, ‘My Piano Stuff,’ or ‘My Music,’ maybe. There’s a tape in there. It’s me, playing mostly music audition songs from about 1993 or 1994.”
I immediately imagine her inserting the tape into a cassette deck, listening to the songs at our parents’ home with my mom. I know it will be an ultimate effort for them to listen to the music I played so studiously ten years ago: Mozart and Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, my favorite. Another image jumps into my mind, this time from the wedding. I can’t place the exact setting, but it is pastoral and outdoors. The same piano music wafts broodingly from a speaker system, churning into a menacing cloud that breaks to drench the assembly of our extended family in a downpour of tears. My death will cast blackness over Sonja’s wedding, but I know she will carry on with it. There will be no question and no reason to postpone. Life moves on for the living.
I move on and scatter the images of my mother and sister in my mind, leaving a broken trail of thought to pick up again later. Realizing there was one more thing I forgot to mention about my financial assets, I start to explain my wishes for my retirement planning accounts.
“Also, obviously, my Schwab IRA accounts can go to Sonja if there’s…”
I don’t finish the sentence. Disjointed thoughts spasm, my mind is adrift. Where there was previously a concept I was attempting to express, I don’t have even a memory. I float, expressionless, lost, then stumble upon another fleeting thought, but I can’t connect with it fast enough to bring it to words. It sinks back under the surface of my mental ocean, then bobs up again. This time I seize it. It has to do with my cremation and the distribution of my ashes.
“Oh…um…clarifications…Knife Edge peak…For the part of me that goes back to New Mexico. The Bosque and Knife Edge-the Knife Edge being one of my favorite climbs ever. So maybe that would be what Dan and Willow and Steve DeRoma, Jon Jaecks, Eric Neimeyer, and Steve Patchett would go and do.”
Clearing my throat once again, I press the silver record button on the back of the unit. I hope what I’ve said on the tape will serve both as an appropriate goodbye to my loved ones and as my last will and testament. I’ve covered what to do with my possessions and finances, and I’ve tidied up my estate, as much as I have one to tidy, hoping to benefit my sister. While I could have been more organized, I am drained from the effort involved in thinking through all this and have no wish to edit or redo any of the video. For what will be the last time, I fold the screen of the recorder flush against the camera body and tuck the unit into its notch between the left side of the chockstone and the canyon wall.
Miserable, I watch another empty hour pass by. At least I don’t have to fight to stay warm. The cold bite of the outer atmosphere no longer sucks off my body heat as it did throughout the night. But by removing the need to reconfigure the ropes around my legs and the cloth and plastic wraps around my arms, daytime has removed the last bustle from my experience in the canyon. Without even that minimal distraction, I have nothing whatsoever to do. I have no life. Only in action does my life approximate anything more than existence. Without any other task or stimulus, I’m no longer living, no longer surviving. I’m just waiting.
Since the recoiling blows of the hammer rock tenderized my left hand, all I’ve had left to do is wait. For what, though? Rescue…or death? It doesn’t matter to me. The two endings represent the same thing-salvation and deliverance from my suffering. I can’t stand the inactivity that breeds such apathy. At this point, the waiting itself is the worst part of my entrapment. And when I’m done waiting, all there is, is more waiting. I can touch the face of infinity in these doldrums. Nothing gives even a slight hint that the stillness will break.
But I can make it break. I can ignore the pain in my left hand and resume smashing the chockstone with the handheld wrecking ball. I can continue hacking away at the rock with my knife, despite its inutility. I can do everything I’ve done in the past five days for the sake of motion. I reach for the rounded hammer rock, then realize I’m going to want my left sock for a pad. Off with the shoe, off with the sock, and I have the cushioning for my battered palm. The bruises on the meaty pad of my thumb are the most sensitive to the impact, and they scream for reprieve from the first blow through the fifth, when I pause. Adrenaline channels into anger, and I raise the hammer again, this time in retribution for what this wretched piece of geology has done to my left hand. Bonk! Again I strike the boulder, the pain in my hand flaring. Thwock! And again. Screeaatch! The rage blooms purple in my mind, amid a small mushroom cloud of pulverized grit and the burning smell of the sock that comes between the rock and the chockstone, melting with the friction heat of each strike. I bring the rock down again. Carrunch! With animalistic fury, I growl, “Unnngaaarrrrgh!” in response to the throbs pulsing in my left hand.
I force myself to stop, and can’t release my grip on the hammer rock. My fingers have been paralyzed in their clench.
Whoa, Aron. You might have taken that too far.
Gradually, my shocked nerves relax, and my digits extend until I can let go of the rock, which I set on the chockstone. I’ve created a mess once again. I want to brush the collected dirt off my arm, away from the open wound. I take my knife and begin clearing particles from my trapped hand, using the dulled blade like a brush. Sweeping the grit off my thumb, I accidentally gouge myself and rip away a thin piece of decayed flesh. It peels back like a skin of boiled milk before I catch what is going on. I already knew my hand had to be decomposing. Without circulation, it has been dying since I became entrapped. Whenever I considered amputation, it had always been under the premise that the hand was dead and would have to be amputated once I was freed. But I hadn’t known how fast the putrefaction had advanced since Saturday afternoon. Now I understand the increase in the interest of the indigenous insect population. They could already smell their next meal, their breeding ground, their larvae’s new home.
Out of curiosity, I poke my thumb with the knife blade twice. On the second prodding, the blade punctures the epidermis as if it is dipping into a stick of room-temperature butter, and releases a telltale hissing. Escaping gases are not good; the rot has advanced more quickly than I had guessed. Though the smell is faint to my desensitized nose, it is abjectly unpleasant, the stench of a far-off carcass.
On the heels of the odor, a realization hits my brain-whatever has started in my hand will shortly pass into my forearm, if it hasn’t already. I don’t know and furthermore don’t care if it’s gangrene or some other insidious attack, but I know it is poisoning my body. I lash out in fury, trying to yank my forearm straight out from the sandstone handcuff, never wanting more than I do now to simply rid myself of any connection to this decomposing appendage.
I don’t want it.
It’s not a part of me.
It’s garbage.
Throw it away, Aron. Be rid of it.
I thrash myself forward and back, side to side, up and down, down and up. I scream out in pure hate, shrieking as I batter my body to and fro against the canyon walls, losing every bit of composure that I’ve struggled so intensely to maintain. Then I feel my arm bend unnaturally in the unbudging grip of the chockstone. An epiphany strikes me with the magnificent glory of a holy intervention and instantly brings my seizure to a halt:
If I torque my arm far enough, I can break my forearm bones.
Like bending a two-by-four held in a table vise, I can bow my entire goddamn arm until it snaps in two!
Holy Christ, Aron, that’s it, that’s it. THAT’S FUCKING IT!
I scramble to clear my stuff off the rock, trying to keep my head on straight. There is no hesitation. Under the power of this divine interaction, I barely realize what I’m about to do. I slip into some kind of autopilot; I’m not at the controls anymore. Within a minute, I orient my body in a crouch under the boulder, but I can’t get low enough to bend my arm before I feel a tugging at my waist. I unclip my daisy chain from the anchor webbing and drop my weight as far down as I can, almost making my buttocks reach the stones on the canyon floor. I put my left hand under the boulder and push hard, harder, HARDER!, to exert a maximum downward force on my radius bone. As I slowly bend my arm down and to the left, a Pow! reverberates like a muted cap-gun shot up and down Blue John Canyon. I don’t say a word, but I reach to feel my forearm. There is an abnormal lump on top of my wrist. I pull my body away from the chockstone and down again, simulating the position I was just in, and feel a gap between the serrated edges of my cleanly broken arm bone.
Without further pause and again in silence, I hump my body up over the chockstone, with a single clear purpose in my mind. Smearing my shoes against the canyon walls, I push with my legs and grab the back of the chockstone with my left hand, pulling with every bit of ferocity I can muster, hard, harder, HARDER!, and a second cap-gun shot ends my ulna’s anticipation. Sweating and euphoric, I again touch my right arm two inches below my wrist, and pull my right shoulder away from the boulder. Both bones have splintered in the same place, the ulna perhaps a half inch closer to my elbow than my radius. Rotating my forearm like a shaft inside its housing, I have an axis of motion freshly independent of my wrist’s servitude to the rock vise.
I am overcome with the excitement of having solved the riddle of my imprisonment. Hustling to deploy the shorter and sharper of my multi-tool’s two blades, I skip the tourniquet procedure I have rehearsed and place the cutting tip between two blue veins. I push the knife into my wrist, watching my skin stretch inwardly, until the point pierces and sinks to its hilt. In a blaze of pain, I know the job is just starting. With a glance at my watch-it is 10:32 A.M.-I motivate myself: “OK, Aron, here we go. You’re in it now.”
I leave behind my prior declarations that severing my arm is nothing but a slow act of suicide and move forward on a cresting wave of emotion. Knowing the alternative is to wait for a progressively more certain but assuredly slow demise, I choose to meet the risk of death in action. As surreal as it looks for my arm to disappear into a glove of sandstone, it feels gloriously perfect to have figured out how to amputate it.
My first act is to sever, with a downward sawing motion, as much of the skin on the inside surface of my forearm as I can, without tearing any of the noodle-like veins so close to the skin. Once I’ve opened a large enough hole in my arm, about four inches below my wrist, I momentarily stow the knife, holding its handle in my teeth, and poke first my left forefinger and then my left thumb inside my arm and feel around. Sorting through the bizarre and unfamiliar textures, I make a mental map of my arm’s inner features. I feel bundles of muscle fibers and, working my fingers behind them, find two pairs of cleanly fractured but jagged bone ends. Twisting my right forearm as if to turn my trapped palm down, I feel the proximal bone ends rotate freely around their fixed partners. It’s a painful movement, but at the same time, it’s a motion I haven’t made since Saturday, and it excites me to know that soon I will be free of the rest of my crushed dead hand. It’s just a matter of time.
Prodding and pinching, I can distinguish between the hard tendons and ligaments, and the soft, rubbery feel of the more pliable arteries. I should avoid cutting the arteries until the end if I can help it at all, I decide.
Withdrawing my bloody fingers to the edge of my incision point, I isolate a strand of muscle between the knife and my thumb, and using the blade like a paring knife, I slice through a pinky-finger-sized filament. I repeat the action a dozen times, slipping the knife through string after string of muscle without hesitation or sound.
Sort, pinch, rotate, slice.
Sort, pinch, rotate, slice.
Patterns; process.
Whatever blood-slimy mass I fit between the cutting edge and my left thumb falls victim to the rocking motion of the multi-tool, back and forth. I’m like a pipe cutter scoring through the outer circumference of a piece of soft tubing. As each muscle bundle yields to the metal, I probe for any of the pencil-thick arteries. When I find one, I tug it a little and remove it from the strand about to be severed. Finally, about a third of the way through the assorted soft tissues of my forearm, I cut a vein. I haven’t put on my tourniquet yet, but I’m like a five-year-old unleashed on his Christmas presents-now that I’ve started, there’s no putting the brakes on. The desire to keep cutting, to get myself free, is so powerful that I rationalize I haven’t lost that much blood yet, only a few drops, because my crushed hand has been acting like an isolation valve on my circulation.
Another ten, fifteen, or maybe twenty minutes slip past me. I am engrossed in making the surgical work go as fast as possible. Stymied by the half-inch-wide yellowish tendon in the middle of my forearm, I stop the operation to don my improvised tourniquet. By this time, I’ve cut a second artery, and several ounces of blood, maybe a third of a cup, have dripped onto the canyon wall below my arm. Perhaps because I’ve removed most of the connecting tissues in the medial half of my forearm, and allowed the vessels to open up, the blood loss has accelerated in the last few minutes. The surgery is slowing down now that I’ve come to the stubbornly durable tendon, and I don’t want to lose blood unnecessarily while I’m still trapped. I’ll need every bit of it for the hike to my truck and the drive to Hanksville or Green River.
I still haven’t decided which will be the fastest way to medical attention. The closest phone is at Hanksville, an hour’s drive to the west, if I’m fast on the left-handed reach-across shifting. But I can’t remember if there’s a medical clinic there; all that comes to my mind is a gas station and a hamburger place. Green River is two hours of driving to the north, but there is a medical clinic. I’m hoping to find someone at the trailhead who will drive for me, but I think back to when I left there on Saturday-there were only two other vehicles in the three-acre lot. That was a weekend, this is midweek. I have to accept the risk that when I get to the trailhead, there won’t be anyone there. I have to pace myself for a six-to-seven-hour effort before I get to definitive medical care.
Setting the knife down on the chockstone, I pick up the neoprene tubing of my CamelBak, which has been sitting off to the top left of the chockstone, unused, for the past two days. I cinch the black insulation tube in a double loop around my forearm, three inches below my elbow. Tying the black stretchy fabric into a doubled overhand knot with one end in my teeth, I tug the other end with my free left hand. Next, I quickly attach a carabiner into the tourniquet and twist it six times, as I did when I first experimented with the tourniquet an eon ago, on Tuesday, or was it Monday?
“Why didn’t I figure out how to break my bones then?” I wonder. “Why did I have to suffer all this extra time?” God, I must be the dumbest guy to ever have his hand trapped by a boulder. It took me six days to figure out how I could cut off my arm. Self-disgust catches in my throat until I can clear my head.
Aron, that’s all just distraction. It doesn’t matter. Get back to work.
I clip the tightly wound carabiner to a second loop of webbing around my biceps to keep the neoprene from untwisting, and reach for my bloody knife again.
Continuing with the surgery, I clear out the last muscles surrounding the tendon and cut a third artery. I still haven’t uttered even an “Ow!” I don’t think to verbalize the pain; it’s a part of this experience, no more important to the procedure than the color of my tourniquet.
I now have relatively open access to the tendon. Sawing aggressively with the blade, as before, I can’t put a dent in the amazingly strong fiber. I pull at it with my fingers and realize it has the durability of a flat-wound cable; it’s like a double-thick strip of fiber-reinforced box-packaging tape, creased over itself in quarter-inch folds. I can’t cut it, so I decide to reconfigure my multi-tool for the pliers. Unfolding the blood-slippery implement, I shove the backside of the blade against my stomach to push the knife back into its storage slot and then expose the pliers. Using them to bite into the edge of the tendon, I squeeze and twist, tearing away a fragment. Yes, this will work just fine. I tackle the most brutish task.
Grip, squeeze, twist, tear.
Grip, squeeze, twist, tear.
Patterns; process.
“This is gonna make one hell of a story to tell my friends,” I think. “They’ll never believe how I had to cut off my arm. Hell, I can barely believe it, and I’m watching myself do it.”
Little by little, I rip through the tendon until I totally sever the twine-like filament, then switch the tool back to the knife, using my teeth to extract the blade. It’s 11:16 A.M.; I’ve been cutting for over forty minutes. With my fingers, I take an inventory of what I have left: two small clusters of muscle, another artery, and a quarter circumference of skin nearest the wall. There is also a pale white nerve strand, as thick as a swollen piece of angel-hair pasta. Getting through that is going to be unavoidably painful. I purposefully don’t get anywhere close to the main nerve with my fingers; I think it’s best not to know fully what I’m in for. The smaller elastic nerve branches are so sensitive that even nudging them sends Taser shocks up to my shoulder, momentarily stunning me. All these have to be severed. I put the knife’s edge under the nerve and pluck it, like lifting a guitar string two inches off its frets, until it snaps, releasing a flood of pain. It recalibrates my personal scale of what it feels like to be hurt-it’s as though I thrust my entire arm into a cauldron of magma.
Minutes later, I recover enough to continue. The last step is stretching the skin of my outer wrist tight and sawing the blade into the wall, as if I’m slicing a piece of gristle on a cutting board. As I approach that precise moment of liberation, the adrenaline surges through me, as though it is not blood coursing in my arteries but the raw potential of my future. I am drawing power from every memory of my life, and all the possibilities for the future that those memories represent.
It is 11:32 A.M., Thursday, May 1, 2003. For the second time in my life, I am being born. This time I am being delivered from the canyon’s pink womb, where I have been incubating. This time I am a grown adult, and I understand the significance and power of this birth as none of us can when it happens the first time. The value of my family, my friends, and my passions well up a heaving rush of energy that is like the burst I get approaching a hard-earned summit, multiplied by ten thousand. Pulling tight the remaining connective tissues of my arm, I rock the knife against the wall, and the final thin strand of flesh tears loose; tensile force rips the skin apart more than the blade cuts it.
A crystalline moment shatters, and the world is a different place. Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind surfing on euphoria. As I stare at the wall where not twelve hours ago I etched “RIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03,” a voice shouts in my head:
I AM FREE!
This is the most intense feeling of my life. I fear I might explode from the exhilarating shock and ecstasy that paralyze my body for a long moment as I lean against the wall. No longer confined to the physical space that I occupied for nearly a week, I feel drugged and off balance but buoyed by my freedom. My head bobs to my right shoulder and dips to my chest before I right it and steady myself against the wall. I stumble as I catch my left foot around the rocks on the canyon floor, but I get my legs under me in time to prevent a hard fall onto the southern wall. It is beautiful to me that I could actually fall over right now. I glance at the bloody afterbirth smeared on the chockstone and the northern canyon wall. The spattering on the chockstone hides the dark mass of my amputated hand and wrist, but the white bone ends of my abandoned ulna and radius protrude visibly from the gory muddle. My glance lingers and becomes a stare. My head whirls, but I am fascinated, looking into the cross section of my forearm.
OK, that’s enough. You’ve got things to do. The clock is running, Aron. Get out of here.