fullspate

DAY FOUR
Stress turns into pessimism. Without enough water to wait for rescue, without a tool to crack the boulder, without a system to lift it, I have one course of action. I speak slowly out loud: "You're gonna have to cut your arm off."

I take my multitool and, without thinking, open the long blade. I hold it with the blade against the upper part of my forearm. Surprising myself, I press on the blade and slowly draw it across my forearm. Nothing happens. Huh. I press harder. Still nothing. No cut, no blood, nothing. Back and forth, I vigorously saw at my arm, growing more frustrated with each attempt. Exasperated, I give up. Sh*t! The damn blade won't even break the skin. How the hell am I going to saw through two bones with a knife that won't even cut my skin?

DAY FIVE
Slowly, I become aware of the cold stare of the second shorter blade of my knife. Gathering my courage, I take the handle in my fist, I pick a spot on the top of my forearm. I hesitate. Then I violently thrust the blade down, burying it in the meat of my forearm. "Holy crap, Aron," I say out loud. "What did you just do?"

I am suddenly curious. There is barely any sensation of the blade below skin level. My nerves seem to be concentrated in the outer layers of my arm. I open an inch-wide hole and note that there is remarkably little blood; the capillaries must have closed down for the time being. Fascinated, I poke at the wound with the tool. Ouch.

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 wooden floor in what I somehow know is my future home. The boy is my own. I bend to lift him up with my left arm, using my handless right arm to balance him, and we laugh together as I swing him up to my shoulder.

Then, with a shock, the vision disappears. I'm back in the canyon, although there are still echoes of his joyful sounds in my mind. Before this I had thought that I would die where I stood before help arrived, but now I believe I will live.

That belief, that boy, changes everything for me.

DAY SIX: THURSDAY, MAY 1, 9:30 A.M.
With five days of desert dust on my contact lenses, my eyes hurt at every blink, and I can no longer see properly. Sip after sip of acidic urine has left my mouth sore. I can't hold my head upright; it leans against the canyon wall. I am a zombie. I am the undead.

Miserable, I watch another empty hour pass by. The boost I felt from my vision of the boy has vanished entirely. I have nothing whatsoever to do. I have no life. There is nothing that gives even a slight hint that this awful stillness will break. But I can make it break.

Out of curiosity, I poke my thumb with my knife blade twice. The second time the blade breaks the skin as if it were cutting into butter, and there is a hiss of gas escaping. The rot has advanced more quickly than I guessed. Though the smell is faint it is the unmistakeable smell of death.

I react in a fury, trying to pull my arm straight out from under the rock, never wanting more than I do right now to disconnect myself from this rotting limb.

I don't want it. It's not a part of me. It's garbage.

I thrash myself forward and back, side to side, up and down, down and up. I scream out in pure hate, shrieking as I hit my body against the canyon walls. And then I feel my arm bend unnaturally. This is when I suddenly see the light. Something like a holy intervention brings me to a halt.

If I bend my arm far enough, I can break my forearm bones. My God, Aron, that's it, that's it. THAT'S F***ING IT!

There is no hesitation. I barely realize what I'm about to do. I put my left hand under the boulder and push hard, harder, HARDER! to put a maximum force on the bones above my wrist. As I slowly bend my arm down to the left there is a sudden snap like a distant gun shot.

Sweating and euphoric, I touch my right arm. Both bones have broken in the same place, just above my wrist.

I am overcome with excitement. Hurrying to get to work with the shorter and sharper blade, I place it between two blue veins and push it into my wrist.

The skin hurt quite a lot but the muscles don't hurt as much. As I cut them I have to be careful not to sever the arteries until I get the tourniquet on my arm. A really tough part is the tendon because the knife just won't cut through it. There are no nerves in the tendon so I don't hesitate to put the blade away and take out the little set of pliers on the multitool to grab and tear the tendon to pieces bit by bit. Then I come to the nerve, which I know is going to be the most painful part of it. Little do I know just how agonizing it is going to be. I try to cut through it as fast as possible and I suddenly feel as if my entire arm has been thrust into a tub of boiling water - the sensation of burning shooting up my arm.

Now there are only a few more sections of muscle, a little bit of skin left. I stretch my body tight against that last piece of skin and chop it with the knife, and at last I am free. I have liberated myself. I drop back against the canyon wall and for the first time in six days my feet are in a different part of the canyon than where I had been trapped. And my body, all of a sudden, is evercome with euphoria. It is as if I am recalling all of the happiest moments of the past 27 years and tasting in them the promise of at least another 27 years of life. I am reborn. Having been standing in my grave, writing my will and scratching "Rest in peace" on the wall of the canyon, all of that is gone - I am alive again. It is undoubtedly the sweetest moment that I will ever experience.

Tricky words:
capillaries - the smallest blood vessels
harness - straps around the waist and thighs used by climbers to tie the rope to
trance - dreaming while you are awake
forearm - between the wrist and the elbow
pliers - tool for pulling out nails or cutting wire
tub like an open barrel

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