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Outside Magazine September 2004

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

DAY FIVE: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30, 3 A.M.
In the piercing brutality of night, I repeatedly escape into trances. If heaven turns out to be as comfortable as the trances, then what I return to in the canyon is nothing short of hell. There is only one emotion in hell: unmitigated despair wrapped in abject loneliness, and I am enveloped in it.

9 A.M.
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 with no fresh water. The exercise evokes no emotion, only matter-of-fact acknowledgment.

Suddenly, I have a new idea—what about using a rock as a wrecking ball to smash into the chockstone? Or maybe this is an old idea. Have I thought of this already? I can't remember.

2 P.M.
"It's Wednesday afternoon," I say into the camera. "Some logistics still to talk about." I've covered what to do with my possessions, so now I begin talking about where I'd like my remains to be scattered—Big Sur, Havasupai Creek in Arizona, New Mexico's Sandia Peak, a little spot on the Rio Grande ...

Looking straight into the lens, I bid one last adieu: "I'm holding on, but it's really slowing down, the time is going really slow. So again, love to everyone. Bring love and peace and happiness and beautiful lives into the world in my honor. It would bestow the greatest meaning for me. Thank you. I love you."

Somewhere inside my mind, I know I won't survive tonight in Blue John Canyon. The day has been cool; this night will be the worst yet. It's not something I debate or internally discuss, but when I consider that I am going to die in a matter of hours, it rings true. If my time is up, then it is up, and yet I have a disconnected feeling of lightheartedness that vaguely approximates bliss. I wonder if this is what rapture feels like. Give it whatever name I want—all I know for sure is that I don't have to sweat it out anymore, because I'm not in charge.

11 P.M.
The canyon is an icebox. These are the killing winds.

I only get through two of the frigid nine hours of darkness before I decide it is time to make a final annotation. My watch confirms that it is April 30, for another hour at least. Above the four letters of my name, ARON, I scratch into the red rock, OCT 75. Below my name, I make the complementary scratching: APR 03.

I lean back in my harness and slip into another trance. Color bursts in my mind, and then I walk through the canyon wall, stepping into a living room. A blond-haired three-year-old boy in a red polo shirt comes running across a sunlit hardwood floor in what I somehow know is my future home. By the same intuition, I know the boy is my own. I bend to scoop him into my left arm, using my handless right arm to balance him, and we laugh together as I swing him up to my shoulder.

The boy happily perches on my left shoulder while I steady him with my left hand and right stump. Smiling, I prance about the room, tiptoeing in and out of the sun dapples on the oak floor, and he giggles gleefully. Then, with a shock, the vision blinks out. I'm back in the canyon, echoes of his joyful sounds resonating in my mind. Despite having already come to accept that I will die where I stand before help arrives, now I believe I will live.

That belief, that boy, changes everything for me.

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