127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (28 page)

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?