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Outside Magazine September 2004

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Excerpt: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Trapped (cont.)

2 P.M.
For the first time, I seriously contemplate amputating my arm. Laying everything out on the surfaces around me, I think through each item's possible use in a surgery. My two biggest concerns are a cutting tool that can do the job and a tourniquet that will keep me from bleeding out. Of the multitool's blades, the inch-and-a-half one is sharper than the three-inch one. It will be important to use only the longer blade for hacking at the chockstone and preserve the shorter one for potential surgery.

Even with the sharper blade, I instinctually understand that I won't be able to hack through my bones—I don't have anything that could approximate even a rudimentary saw.

For the first time, I seriously contemplate amputating my arm. But even my sharpest blade won't be able to hack through my bones—I have nothing that approximates even a rudimentary saw.

The likeliest method available for cutting off my arm, cutting through the softer cartilage of my elbow joint, simply never occurs to me.

I turn my attention to the tourniquet. Experimenting with the hose from my empty CamelBak, I cut the tubing free from the reservoir and manage to tie it in a simple knot around my upper forearm just below my elbow. But I can't cinch it down; the plastic is too stiff.

So much for that idea.

I have a piece of purple webbing knotted in a loop that I untie and wrap around my forearm. A five-minute effort yields a double knot, but the loops are too loose to stop my circulation. I need a stick, or a carabiner, to twist the loops tighter. Clipping the gate of my last unused carabiner through the loops, I rotate it twice. The webbing presses deeply into my forearm and the skin nearer my wrist grows pale. Seeing my makeshift medical setup working brings me a subtle sense of satisfaction.

Nice work, Aron.

Despite my optimism, I realize there's a darker undercurrent to my brainstorming. Until I figure out how to cut through the bones, amputation isn't a practical choice. But I wonder about my courage levels if cutting off my arm becomes a real plan of action. As a test, I hold the shorter blade of the multitool to my skin. The tip pokes between the tendons and veins a few inches up from my trapped wrist, indenting my flesh. The sight repulses me.

What are you doing, Aron? Get that knife away from your wrist! What are you trying to do—kill yourself? That's suicide! You'll bleed out. You slice your wrist and it's as good as stabbing yourself in the gut.

I can't do it.

I picture my blood spilled on the canyon walls, the torn flesh and ripped muscles of my arm dangling in gory strands from two white bones pockmarked with divots, the result of my last efforts to chisel through my arm's structural frame. And then I see my head drooped to my sagging torso, my lifeless body hanging from the knife-nicked bones. I set down my knife and retch.

I hate this boulder. I hate it! I hate this canyon. I hate the morgue-cold slab pressing against my right forearm. I hate the faint musty smell of the greenish slime thinly glazing the bottom of the canyon wall behind my legs.

"I ... hate ... this!" I punctuate each word with slaps of my left palm against the chockstone, as tears well in my eyes.

No expectation has prepared me for this tormenting anxiety of a slow death, thinking about whether it will come tonight in the cold, tomorrow in the cramps of dehydration, or the next day in heart failure. This hour, the next, the hour after that.

But then another voice speaks coolly. That boulder did what it was there to do. Boulders fall. That's their nature. You did this, Aron. You chose to come here today; you chose to do this slot canyon by yourself. You chose not to tell anyone where you were going.

9 P.M.
Night fills the sky. Time swells, my agony expanding with it. I've fallen into a wormhole where I endure excruciating maltreatment for immeasurable eons, only to return to consciousness. In the hazy freedom of my imagination, I fly out of the canyon, dipping and weaving in the whispering clouds over the sea, whitecaps changing to swells as I head still farther west, glancing back to watch the land turn into a green frame around the cobalt ocean.

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