Between a Rock and a Hard Place

by Aron Ralston

  Before Steve can ask any more questions, the anesthesiologist returns, this time carrying a loaded syringe and a needle that looks to my eyes like it’s big enough to inoculate a horse. I know what she’s going to do, and I interrupt her in a firm voice. “Whoa, I need to tell you something. Sometimes I have reactions to needles. I’ve passed out from shots, and I fell out of a chair once after having my blood drawn. My doctor told me to tell people that before I get a shot. In my condition now, I don’t know what might happen to me. I could go into shock.”

  The doctor, stopped cold in her tracks at my first words, absorbs what I am telling her with a fixed stare. All I can see are her eyes, which are wide open with disbelief, even as she says, “You mean you’re not in shock?”

  “I don’t know, clinically, maybe, I don’t—”

  She shortcuts my wavering with a direct question: “I’ve got this morphine ready. Do you want it or not?”

  “Oh hell yes!” I exclaim. “Give it to me. Just hold me on the table if I start slithering around, OK?”

  I look over at Ranger Steve as the doctor injects the needle. A mild burning courses up my arm as the narcotic enters my vein, but I never lose consciousness. Steve and I resume our debriefing as I describe my intended route from the Horseshoe Canyon trailhead down the Maze road, through Blue John Canyon, over the Big Drop, and back to my truck via Horseshoe Canyon. Explaining the dimensions of the section of slot where I was trapped, I reiterate the size of the rock and tell Steve how I was stuck in a standing position but that I rigged up an anchor so I could take the weight off my legs. I fill in the time line as best I can before I get drowsy from the morphine, outlining when I ran out of water, when I ran out of food, and when I figured out how to break my arm bones and amputate my arm. Then, as I hear a new voice, a man’s baritone, asking what the items are covering my right arm, I feel someone tugging at the CamelBak pack that I used as a sling, and I hear Ranger Steve say, “There’s a tourniquet or two under there. The rest is just padding.” With the world diving into a tunnel, I manage to slur, “Juss one, on my forearm,” before my streak of 127 hours of uninterrupted experience ends at three forty-five P.M., Thursday, May 1, 2003.

  Ranger Steve Swanke takes my map and the notes from our discussion and walks into the reception area. After he collects himself from the surreal twenty-minute conversation he just had with me, his first action is to unclip his Park Service–issued cell phone from his belt and call my mom. She answers on the second ring, “Hello, this is Donna,” her voice stronger and more hopeful than the first time Steve heard her answer the phone with those words.

  “Donna, hello. It’s Ranger Steve again. I have some good news and some bad news. We’ve found your son; he’s alive and he’s going to live.” Steve pauses and then issues the more difficult half of the update: “He was forced to amputate his arm to get out of the situation he was in. He’s in Moab now, but I’m sure he’ll be headed to Grand Junction shortly.”

  My mom exhales heavily, as if she had been holding her breath for the last two days. “Thank God.” She instantly feels the relief of a mighty burden lifted. Her prayers have been answered: Her son is alive, and he’s going to be OK.

  Still holding the phone, she turns to Sue Doss, who is at the kitchen table. “Sue, they found him! He’s going to be OK!” Never in her life has she been more full of joy than in that moment. For my mom, even the bad news is a blessing in that it isn’t any worse. She gathers herself, and the words rush out to Steve: “Oh, thank you, thank you. Thank you for bringing him back. We’ll leave right away.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Please be in touch as you know more.”

  “I’ll do that. Anything else?”

  A second request forms slowly in her mind, and she teases it out. “You’ll probably have to file a report or talk to the media about Aron. Please don’t be judgmental.”

  Taking a few minutes to assess his notes, Ranger Steve sorts through the facts, looking for causes and contributing factors. As an experienced outdoorsman himself, he reflects for a few moments about how many times he has gone out hiking and kayaking by himself. “What is this all about? I go out and engage in risk activities by myself without always telling my wife where I’m going. It’s happening in Canyonlands today. There are people out there on their own involved in risk activities, solo, without anyone knowing where they are.” He fingers the map, knowing from my website that I am an experienced canyoneer and that Blue John Canyon is not a difficult canyon. Usually, Steve expects that an accident’s severity will be proportional to the terrain—extreme consequences befit extreme environments—but this event was catastrophic relative to the ease of the topography. “This is five-one canyoneering; it really doesn’t get any easier than this. I move rocks hiking in the canyons all the time, I can relate to that. We dance with these canyons with white gloves on, like we’re walking on eggshells. That’s what canyoneers do. We’re always conscious of it: ‘Is this rock going to move?’ or ‘Is that rock going to move?’ ”

  Steve peers through the window in the door of the ER, watching the nurses and the doctor bustling around my unconscious body, thinking about what makes the difference in those thousands of decisions on any given outing. “Most of the time we judge it right, and on occasion we judge it wrong,” he deliberates, “and most of the time when we judge it wrong, the consequences are pretty inconsequential. On occasion, the consequences are pretty significant.” He concludes, “This was someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time, an extreme case of bad luck. It’s just bad luck.”

  After talking with Captain Kyle Ekker, my friend Rachel Polver calls Elliott, her voice ringing with excitement. “They found Aron! Are you sitting down?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Elliott lies, pacing around the living room of the house at Spruce Street.

  “He’s alive…but he cut off his arm.”

  Elliott’s muscles stop propelling him around the room. His stunned reaction is “Holy cow, I should have been sitting down for that.”

  Immediately after landing, pilot Terry Mercer calls in a fuel truck from the Grand County search-and-rescue group. DPS flies for enough rescues in the Moab area that the local SAR team has access to a small tanker. One of the team’s rescue leaders, Bego Gerhart, drives the truck to the hospital, since Terry doesn’t have enough fuel left to take off and fly to the airport just ten miles north of town. As the helicopter refuels, Ranger Steve asks Detective Funk and Sergeant Vetere to pick up a soft-sided cooler from the hospital and fill it with ice. The ER doctor, Dr. Bobby Higgins, wants to see what he can do to save my hand for a possible reattachment. Greg and Mitch’s next assignment is to return to Blue John Canyon, find the place where I had been trapped, and retrieve my severed right hand. Mitch doesn’t want to fly any more than he has to to get back to his vehicle at the trailhead, so Terry yells over to Bego at the fuel truck, “Hey, you wanna go for a ride?”

  Bego is up for the trip and joins Greg in the back of the helicopter for the fifteen-minute flight back to Horseshoe Canyon. Terry drops Mitch at the trailhead at four-thirty P.M., and then Terry, Greg, and Bego take off to find the slot. With the map I gave Steve, and with Bego’s knowledge of the area, they are able to land precisely on a sandstone knoll above the hidden slot. Once in the canyon, Terry is out of his element, but as a more experienced canyoneer, Bego coaches him along. They figure they’ll need all three men to roll the boulder off of my hand. They scramble down past the entry drop-off, run the chockstone gauntlet, twist through the meandering narrows, and in five minutes, come to an installation of ropes and webbing hanging from the point of a ledge at their feet. This must be the place.

  Climbing down from the lip of the drop, the trio easily determines that they will not be able to move the chockstone without significant mechanical aid. It’s not sitting on the ground, as they imagined, but wedged between the walls, and they estimate it to be closer to half a ton than the two hundred pounds I reported. For
the time being, the decomposing remains of my long-dead hand cannot be retrieved. After Greg takes a few photographs for evidence, they collect the yellow webbing, green and orange rope, and other artifacts of my six-day tenure in that hole, and scramble back up the slot to the helicopter, leaving behind the fresh smear of blood on the canyon wall where my hand is crushed beside the fallen chockstone.

  After untold hours of unconsciousness, I come to. I’m lying in a dark hospital room, with fluorescent light from the nurses’ station filtering through the translucent drapes pulled across the window to my left. My vision is blurred, but I can see that I am alone. Before I pass out again, my single thought is “I am alive.”

  Sometime later, I wake up again. A nurse walks into my room and says in a cheery voice, “I thought I heard some rustling.”

  “I’m alive,” I say to her in a gasp. I know I’m alive because I am in pain. My right arm aches, my legs ache, my left hand aches; in fact, there is nary a part of me that doesn’t ache.

  “Yes, you are alive. Your mom will be happy to know that when she comes back.”

  “Mom?” I say, my voice rasping just above a whisper, delicate and weak. The word releases an internal torrent of love that courses through me, overwhelming my drugged brain and loosing a deluge of sobs.

  Mom.

  It hurts my body to cry, but I have no control. As the tears recede, I see a clock on the wall but I can’t read the time. Someone has taken out my contacts. I squint and make out both clock hands pointing somewhere to the left of down. It’s shortly after seven- or eight-thirty, only four hours since I was rescued. Moab is at least a seven-hour drive from Denver. Despite the sedation, my mind works well enough to know the math doesn’t add up.

  “She’ll be back. She was here last night after your surgery. She’s probably having breakfast, and she’ll be in in a half hour or so.”

  Last night? Breakfast? I ponder those concepts for a long moment, perplexed in my fatigue. It must be morning. “What day is it?”

  “It’s Friday morning,” the nurse explains while finishing up her duties, moving precisely about my bed.

  “Oh,” I say, but it comes out as a soft moan. I am stumped by my inability to link together any experience since I lost consciousness on the table in the ER. It seems like I just blinked, and now I’m in a different room. Moab is a long way from Denver. Did my mom fly here? “How did she get here so fast?” I manage to ask, my throat chafing with dryness.

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Denver.”

  “It’s only about four and a half, five hours to drive here.”

  Five hours? That can’t be. “Five hours to get to Moab?”

  “Oh, you’re not in Moab, dear, you’re in Grand Junction. They flew you over last night.”

  “Oh,” I mutter, trying to orient myself. I have no recollection of another flight after that amazing helicopter ride. But Grand Junction, I understand that. I’m in Colorado.

  I am immobilized by exhaustion, which is a good thing, considering I have a full octopus’s compliment of tubes, insulated wires, and other unnatural tentacles running across the sheets into various parts of my arms and head. Before I can entertain any further explorations of my environment, I pass out again.

  When I come around the next time, Sue Doss is at my bedside. I am pleased and comforted to see her. In her soft Texas twang, Sue says, “Your mom is right outside,” and she steps out the door to get her.

  My mom walks into the ICU room. The harsh light of the fluorescent boxes embedded in the ceiling bathes her in a glorious glow. I can’t distinguish her features—but I can see her take two steps to stand beside me on my left side. I lift my left hand, and she takes it in both of hers. Her hands are cool, soft, and trembling ever so slightly. She bends down and kisses my forehead. At close range, I can see how much worry I’ve caused my mom, and though I can barely speak, I scrape out “Mom, I’m sorry I scared you. I love you.” She shakes her head, and before either of us knows it, we are crying together.

  Regaining her ability to speak as the sniffles subside several minutes later, my mom tells me, “Sue and I were joking that if it wasn’t a broken leg that had kept you from coming home, you were going to have two broken ones by the time we got done with you.”

  We both choke out a laugh and smile at each other. Love passes between us, reaching that spot that can be touched only by the reunion of a son with his mother, a mother with her son. I know we both want it to be a long time before we leave each other’s side again.

  Epilogue:

  A Farewell to Arm

  You’ve got to love the life you live, and live the life you love.

  —JERRY GARCIA BAND, “(I’m a) Roadrunner”

  THE DAYS AND WEEKS following my rescue were nothing short of extraordinary. Even before my dad arrived in Grand Junction, my story was headline news across the globe. I had lost forty pounds and a liter and a half of blood in the canyon and had a long recovery ahead, the progress of which I could watch on the CNN scrolling news ticker: “Colorado climber who amputated own arm in critical care.” After three surgeries in five days and more pancakes than had ever been consumed by a patient in the St. Mary’s intensive care unit, the floral arrangements and I outgrew the ICU and had to be moved to a room upstairs, where, during my brief episodes of consciousness, my dad read to me from stacks of letters that came from my friends and from strangers, from just around the corner and from all the way around the world. One woman from Salt Lake City sent a card telling me she had flushed a stockpile of her deceased husband’s sleeping pills down the toilet. She wrote, “Your act of bravery has inspired me to hold on more dearly. I had promised myself that I would end my life if things had not gotten better one year after my husband’s death. I know now that suicide is not the answer. You inspire me to stay strong, remain brave and to fight for life.” My parents and I wept over that letter every time we read it; it was a reminder in difficult times of the greater ripple effects that my rescue and recovery were having on people.

  Throughout that week, there were few moments when my parents left my side. With their love, the encouragement of thousands of prayers, special stealth visits by many of my friends, and the excellent care of the St. Mary’s doctors and nurses, I slowly regained enough mobility that by Wednesday, May 7, I was ready for my first journey outdoors since my accident. The hospital’s recreational therapist would have taken my dad and me to the park across the street, but because an armada of journalists and photographers guarded the hospital doors around the clock, we instead enjoyed a commanding view of Grand Junction’s greenery and canyon escarpments from a couple of folding chairs perched on the hospital roof. The air and the colors held a sweet vibrancy throughout the half hour we spent swapping outdoors stories and talking about baseball. It was one of my favorite memories from a lifetime of special moments with my dad.

  Also that afternoon, I received a package in the mail: a gift from my friend Chris Shea, who lives in Portland. Opening the box and unwrapping the tinfoil coverings, I found a chocolate cake slathered with icing—in the shape of my right hand. When a group of my Aspen friends drove out to see me that night, bringing binders full of music for me to enjoy while I was laid up, my mom cut the cake and served it up with milk from the hospital cafeteria. It was an oddly funny moment, watching my friends smile and laugh as we joked, “Take this, eat; do this in memory of my hand.” We named the reunion the Last Dessert.

  Thursday, I donned my own clothes for the first time in a week and borrowed my mom’s camera for a special occasion. Heavily stoned on three prescribed varieties of the best narcotics known to mankind, I rode with my parents in a hospital car to an auxiliary building half a block away and walked into a room filled with some five dozen reporters and possibly twice that many camera crews and photographers. I couldn’t help myself—I had to take a couple of snapshots. This was the way the world met me, and I guess a lot of first impressions were made during that twenty-minute news confer
ence. I’d just like to say, in my own defense, that I was higher than a lost kite in a hurricane. When a reporter asked me what three things I was most looking forward to and I said, “Going home with my parents, taking a walk with my friends, and sipping back on a tall, cold, salted, frosty margarita,” that’s because it was the truth. I can’t say how many times I thought about margaritas when I was trapped—probably not as much as I thought about my family and my friends, but it was a lot.

  Immediately after the press gathering, I talked with my photographer friend Dan Bayer, who had come to Grand Junction to take pictures for the Aspen Times. Earlier in the week, he had gone into Horseshoe Canyon and hiked the seven miles to the rappel site at the Big Drop. Along the way, he had found my harness and belay/rappel device where I’d abandoned them, and he returned them to me. He told me he had seen the pool of water at the bottom of the rappel, the one I drank from, and he asked me, “Did you see the dead raven floating in it?”

  Once I was off the most potent narcotics, St. Mary’s released me. My parents and I drove home to Denver, where friends from six states had flown in for a surprise reception. In one weekend, I fulfilled two of the three things on my “looking forward to” list. It wouldn’t be until I weaned myself off the eighteen pills I was taking each day that I would be able to enjoy a big ol’ salty marg.

  By Thursday, May 15, I was in the hospital again, this time St. Luke’s Presbyterian Hospital in Denver. Only two days earlier, my doctors had discovered a potentially lethal bone infection in my right arm. The same dirty knife that had saved me was now killing me. After yet another surgery, I was put on the strongest intravenous antibiotics available (needles), and then had battery after battery of blood tests (more needles) to check that the drugs were fighting the infection. The next day, Friday, was to be my sister’s graduation from Texas Tech University. With more tests and another surgery pending, I cried with my parents as it became clear that I wouldn’t make it to Texas to see Sonja receive her diploma. Then, just twenty hours before the ceremonies in Lubbock, my doctors and nurses came up with a plan that would allow me to leave the hospital for three days. With intricate instructions on how to inject the intravenous antibiotics ourselves, my parents and I sped off on a ten-hour midnight drive to Lubbock, Texas. While my dad steered us down the two-lane highways of the Texas panhandle at 70 mph, my mom ran my IV system from the backseat, hanging the drip bags on the coat hook above the side window. By the time we arrived in Lubbock, the car looked like a MASH unit, littered as it was with spent supplies and torn packaging, but we were in time for the Honors College awards banquet where Sonja was honored as the Texas Tech Outstanding Student of the Year. Once all the weekend festivities were over, my parents and I helped my sister pack up her belongings, and then we sat down with my grandma Ralston for a family tradition: playing round after round of euchre. It was just like old times.