by Aron Ralston
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 pa
late. 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 in
deed 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.