diminished, and my body’s resources are utterly depleted. Even in the early evening, I can’t keep from shivering. I cut off a strand of my anchor webbing from behind the knot and wrap it loosely a half-dozen times around my neck, just to add some fabric to cover the exposed skin. Maybe that will keep me half a degree warmer, I figure.
I want to keep smashing at the chockstone with my hammer rock, but I can’t bear the suffering it imposes on my left hand. It’s like punching a brick wall again and again. I have an idea to use my left sock around the rock as a pad between it and my hand. Each smashing impact still damages my left hand, but I am making tremendous progress compared to hacking with my ineffective knife. With the series of attacks I’ve made over the course of the afternoon, I have removed more material from the boulder than in the first four days put together. The debris is plentiful enough that I’ve laid the black camera sack I was using as a long sleeve for my left arm over the bandage on my right arm to protect my knife wound from the pulverized grit. Just after six P.M., I take a break to relax my aching left hand and pull out the digital camera again. I take a picture of my right forearm covered with the debris of my effort-an inch-thick layer of sand and rock chips. Putting the camera down, I brush off the rubble, trying to keep the day-old stab wound clear of dirt. A rushing sense of hopelessness overtakes me. Even at this accelerated rate, I can’t possibly obliterate the chockstone to the point where it will release my hand. Not before I die. And that’s even assuming that I could keep up the demolition, which has already caused enough pain in my left hand that I think I might have broken my pinky and ring fingers, or perhaps a bone in my palm above their highest joints. I look forlornly at the hammer rock, wearing my gray SmartWool sock like a stocking cap, and decide to abandon the effort yet again.
I put my sock back on my foot and pull it as high as it will stretch on my calf, knowing I can’t afford to lose any of its insulating effect during the coming night. Somewhere inside my mind, I know I won’t survive tonight in Blue John Canyon. 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. Contrasting my burst of anger earlier during my entrapment, when I lashed out and hit the boulder with the palm of my hand, I accept this statement with a peaceful sense of acknowledgment that I am not in control of this situation. If my time is up, then it is up, and there’s not a thing I can do to stave it off any longer. And if my time isn’t up, then it’s not, and there’s nothing further I need to worry about. But I think the former is much more likely than the latter. I understand that this is the end, that I won’t survive the night, and the thought does not stir me, because I have stopped fighting for control. Letting go of my desire to dictate the outcome of my entrapment releases a disconnected feeling of lightheartedness that vaguely approximates bliss. I wonder if this is what rapture feels like, that mystical experience when each soul relinquishes its earthly embodiment and connects with the divine. It’s not the same as when I have my out-of-body trances, and it’s not apathy or resignation, it’s more like I’ve let go of a spiritual burden. I feel like I’ve recognized a great truth: Some other marvelous force is in control, and has been all along. 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.
Clammy supernatural breezes suck the heat from my body, and my shivering escalates intensely. The canyon is an ice box. Each night has been progressively harder, but these are the killing winds.
Counting from dusk till dawn, I get through only two of the painfully frigid nine hours before I decide it is time to make a final annotation. My watch confirms that it is April 30, for another hour, at least. I had lost interest in time during the afternoon, but now every minute seems important, as any one of them could be my last. I re-etch my name in the sandstone wall over my left shoulder, tracing over the letters I carved with my knife on Saturday after I wrote “Geologic Time Includes Now.” Above the four capitalized letters of my first name, “ARON,” I scratch into the red rock, “OCT 75.” Below my name, I make the complementary scratching “APR 03.” It doesn’t occur to me to write “May,” as I am certain I won’t see the dawn at the far end of this hideously cold night. I finish the epitaph by carving “RIP” above my name and birth month, then I lean back in my harness and set the knife on top of the chockstone before I slip off into a trance.
Color bursts in my mind, and then I walk through the canyon wall on my own this time, stepping into a living room. A blond 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 intuitive perception, 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. This interaction is a powerful departure from the previous trances; in the others, I was spellbound and restrained from engaging other people. But now I am actively participating in the action. I’m mobile and free.
The boy happily perches on my right shoulder, holding my arms in his little hands 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 as we twirl together. Then, with a shock, the vision blinks out. I’m back in the canyon, echoes of his joyful sounds resonating in my mind, creating a subconscious reassurance that somehow I will survive this entrapment. 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.
Twelve
– JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
BY NINE A.M. on Wednesday, April 30, my twenty-four hours were up. Brion After walked across the sales floor at the Ute Mountaineer, brooding: “Where the hell is he?” He paced among the racks of skiwear, snowshoes, and camping supplies, his concern mounting. My shift had started at nine o’clock, and for the second day in a row, I hadn’t shown up or called. At nine-fifteen A.M., Brion looked at his watch and decided he had waited long enough. He went upstairs to the office. First he called the house on Spruce Street to check if I’d come home yet, but no one answered. Brion knew what he needed to do next, but he was interrupted by Leona’s phone call from Boulder.
“Did he come in?” Leona’s directness barely disguised her fear. Despite her effort to keep herself collected, her voice wavered. She was taking an emotional brunt from my disappearance, and it had worn on her through her first night back in the Front Range.
“No, he’s not here. He was supposed to start twenty minutes ago, at nine.” Brion’s anxiety over my whereabouts was straining his voice. “He’s so diligent, I know something’s really going on.”
Leona was also certain something was wrong. “This has gone on long enough. We need to get his parents involved.”
“I was just thinking about that. There’s an outside chance that he called them to tell them what’s going on. Would you mind calling them? I need to get the shop ready to open here in the next half hour.”
It was more than Brion’s sense of duty to the Ute that motivated him to ask for Leona’s assistance. Neither he nor Leona wanted to be the person to tell my mother and father that their son had gone missing and was most likely in a lot of trouble. Leona found a way to avoid the messenger’s job. “I don’t have their number. But you do, Brion.”
“I do? Where?”
“In his paperwork. I bet you he put his parents as his emergency contact on his application. Do you have his file?”
“Oh. Yeah, just a second…it’s in my drawer…here.” Brion pulled my manila employment folder from his file drawer and flipped the cover open. There, on top of the thin stack, was my employment application, with my parents’ names and phone number, as Leona had predicted.
At nine-thirty A.M., Brion called my parents’ house in Denver. My dad was in New York, leading a group on the
