127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (21 page)

I remember to install a progress-capture loop from the anchor to the main line this time, so that if I am successful in raising the boulder even a few inches, I can seize the main line with the Prusik and reset the rest of the system to haul again. With a 6:1 system ratio, for every twelve inches that I successfully pull the haul line, I’ll get two inches of lift on the boulder. Since my system is stuffed into a cramped three-foot space between the anchor loop and the chockstone, I have only about a one-foot haul run until the system cinches up on itself. I need to lift the boulder six to eight inches to free the upper part of my palm, requiring at least three resets on the system. I’ve already decided that if one or more of my fingers are still stuck, once I get my palm free, I will do what it takes to liberate my hand, ripping off the remaining pinched digits if necessary.

With the system in place, I hoist myself up the rope until I can step into the foot loops. I notice the added spice of excitement in this attempt, and a hope comes that I will soon be free. But as I weight the haul loops and the rope stretches and the Prusiks grab the main line, there is no effect on the boulder. Emotionally let down but not despairing, I examine the system, adjust the Prusiks, and consider whether I should shorten the anchor webbing again. Because of the rope stretch, I need more space for the system to grow before it will pull on the boulder. I add two more knots above the rap ring. Trying again, I watch the system tighten, but still not even a scrape or a rumble from the boulder. There is no sharp attack of pain in my wrist that would certainly attend any significant movement of the chockstone. Dammit, what’s going on here? I bounce in the foot loops, pulling back on the haul line with my left hand at the same time. The rope is taut in my grasp; I’m exerting as much force as I can. But as I follow the rope through the bends at the carabiners with my fingers, I feel it slacken at every turn. With my weight fully set on the system, I pluck the main line just above the boulder and realize the problem: There is no tension in the rope. It’s as loose as if I had completely let up on the haul. Friction between the rope and the carabiners is dissipating every bit of force that I can apply. There are too many bends, too many losses. Maybe with pulleys I would have a chance, but not like this.

Now the disappointment settles over me. After I’d already acquiesced to the inutility of further attempts at self-extrication yesterday, and resolved to wait for rescue, raising my hopes only to annihilate them a second time leaves me utterly dejected. My shoulders slump as I step out of the haul loops, and I tear down the haul system so I can sit in my harness and rest. I sigh disconsolately over and over again, fighting with every reserve I can to keep from crying. I am on the brink of total abdication.

I pull myself out of this wretched state by imagining my friends in Aspen getting up and going to work this morning, my housemates preparing for our roommate Leona’s goodbye party. By this time tomorrow, they will know positively that something is wrong, and the search will begin. My nearly extinguished hope for salvation flickers again. I’m no worse off than I was yesterday; I’m back to waiting.

Each time I look at my watch and see it near the top of the hour, I calculate how long I’ve been stuck, counting down to the significant milestones. One of the effects of the sleep deprivation is that I’m unable to hold the last hour’s tallies in my head, and I constantly have to start over with the math. It’s seven
A.M.,
and I have been trapped for forty hours. Forty hours without sleep, forty hours without adequate food and water, forty hours of shivering, forty hours of stress, fatigue, and agony. Exactly two days ago, I woke up in the back of my truck, where I’d slept on Friday night, and cooked some oatmeal before getting my canyoneering and biking supplies ready for the itinerary I had planned.

My thirst selectively drives my memory to focus on the five-gallon water jug bought in Moab, sitting three quarters full in the bed of my pickup. I think about the two one-liter bottles of Gatorade I bought at a convenience store late Friday night in Green River. They’re spread across the floor of the passenger seat, along with some grapefruits, oranges, muffins, burritos, and snack bars that were shaken out of their plastic bags from all the bouncing and swerving on the dirt road. I hold in my mind the image of the grapefruits on the floor mat, fantasizing their juiciness. I had bought them specifically to eat after my Blue John/Horseshoe circuit, anticipating the intensifying effect a long day’s journey would have on their succulence. My tongue smacks across my palate, yearning for refreshment. Before my longing can get the better of me, causing me to guzzle my six ounces of water, I shake the image out of my head.

I’m impatient with the idleness fencing me inside my head, so I evaluate my situation again. I won’t have another go at the lifting system. It is as futile as hammering the rock with my multi-tool file. My options seem to have played out. I reconsider my remaining choices for the twenty-fifth time, it must be, clinging to the idea that I might have missed something.

I still haven’t given amputation a full chance. I didn’t even try to cut myself yesterday. I stopped short. Was it because I wasn’t ready or because I was afraid it would end badly? I remember how the sight of the metal blade against my wrist repelled my hand and left my stomach heaving. I’m less than confident about the webbing tourniquet I crafted yesterday. Maybe my reticence signals a need to further prepare my strategy. Escaping this canyon on foot—scrambling the tightly twisting canyon, rappelling sixty-five feet, and then hiking eight miles—after a full-extremity amputation mandates a world-class tourniquet. In the end, I don’t care if I do damage to my residual limb’s tissue or remaining blood vessels with a flawless constricting device. The main problem is stopping the imminent threat to life, stanching the blood flow completely. So how can I improve my tourniquet, and thereby my plan? I’ve already ruled out my water-pack tubing; it’s too stiff to tie a solid knot. The webbing isn’t stretchy enough; it doesn’t conform to my arm’s contours, and I worry about getting it sufficiently tight. I need something more flexible than the tubing and more elastic than the…That’s it! Elastic! The neoprene tubing insulation from my CamelBak is stretchy and supple but strong. It’s perfect.

I’m elated at the idea. I retrieve the discarded tubing insulation from my pack, where I dropped the parts left over from yesterday’s surgical prep session. Why didn’t I think of this before? Using my left hand to twice wrap the thin black neoprene around my right forearm just two inches below my elbow, I tie a simple overhand knot and tighten one end in my teeth, then double and triple the knot. I take my carabiner with the purple marking tape—the same one I used yesterday, I note—and clip the neoprene, twisting it six times. Clamping down on my forearm, the material pinches my skin. I adjust my arm hairs under the band, but it still hurts. For some reason, the pain pleases me, perhaps because it reassures me that the tourniquet is working. I can see what little pink is left in my forearm fade to fish-belly white, and the flesh bunched up between my elbow and the tourniquet flashes to bright red. Oh yeah, this is way better than the webbing idea. The ache in my arm flares, but my self-satisfaction overrides it. I’m pleased with myself, and with the tourniquet’s squeeze, less masochism than a renewed sparkle of hope. I’m taking action. And it feels very good to be taking action.

I’m ready for the next step. I take my multi-tool and switch it from the battered file to the longer of the two knife blades, forgetting my plans to use the sharper one. Instead of pointing the tip into the tendon gap at my wrist, I hold it with the blade against the upper part of my forearm. Surprising myself, I press on the blade and slowly draw the knife across my forearm. Nothing happens. Huh. Repeating the act, I press harder with my palm on the tool’s grip. Still nothing. No cut, no blood, nothing. Extracting the short knife, I vigorously saw back and forth at my forearm, growing more frustrated with each unproductive attempt. Exasperated, I give up. This is shit! The damn blade won’t break the skin. How the hell am I going to carve through two bones with a knife that won’t even cut my skin? God damn it to hell.

Embittered, I set the knife atop the chockstone, unclip the carabiner, and loosen the tourniquet. After a minute, the weak blood flow in my arm raises an irritated series of red lines on my skin where I was sawing with the knife. These aggravated scratches are the sole evidence of my attempt at amputation.

That’s pathetic, Aron; just pathetic.

Back to waiting.

Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. A black raven flies overhead. I check my watch. It’s eight-fifteen
A.M.
—precisely the same time I saw a raven yesterday morning. I wonder if it’s the same one. Of course it is. It probably has a nest down the canyon someplace. How kooky is it that the bird flew off at exactly the same time it did yesterday? It seems unnatural to me that a living thing would have such a refined sense of time. The sunlight or air temperature must trigger some response that tells the bird it’s time to go find some food. I don’t know.

More predictably but no less punctually, the dagger of sunlight appears about an hour later, and I stretch out to it at 9:35 for my ten-minute “sun salute” break. With the twin visits of the raven and the sun dagger, I figure that my morning routines are completed. Then, for the first time, I feel pressure in my bladder. I unclip from the daisy chain, unzip my shorts, and turn around to urinate. The sand soaks up the liquid before it can puddle or splash, seemingly absorbing my urine faster than it falls. It doesn’t smell as bad or look as dark as I’d have figured, seeing as how it’s been two days since I peed. Feeling nature’s other call, I take off my harness and drop my pants in an attempt to defecate. I don’t want to stink up the canyon, but I don’t have any choice. My concern quickly turns out to be moot; it’s a false alarm.

Tired from the stress of the early-morning rounds of elevated and dashed hopes, I let my mind drift. I recall meeting an Australian outdoorsman, Warren MacDonald, at the Banff Mountain Film Festival last 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.