trying to signal to the helicopter. We are in the middle of the canyon, the tallest, darkest shapes in a hundred-foot- diameter area on a flat sandbar that is sparsely covered with short grasses and stunted rabbit brush, but even still, I’m not sure the helicopter’s occupants see us until the bird banks at low altitude and loops back to soar over our heads a second time. I look around for the best landing zone and decide it will be in the wash in front of us. I hastily hike the fifty yards to the edge of the sandbar as the helicopter banks into another U-turn and hovers two hundred feet above the dry streambed. Eric catches up to stand beside me, and we watch the helicopter begin its descent. I take ten short steps into the streambed and turn my back to the landing zone, anticipating that the rotor wash will kick up a bunch of sand. I bring my remaining energy to bear on keeping my legs strong. My knees are weak, and every instinct tempts me to drop and kiss the earth to praise my deliverance, but I am well aware that my brain is tired of supporting the burden of my pain and the demands of the discipline that has sustained me. It wants to abdicate, but I cannot let it, not until I am in a hospital.
The engine whine falls, and the dusty wind at my back dies to a breeze. I turn around to see a stiff-legged passenger hop awkwardly out of the rear door of the helicopter. The figure motions for me. I walk briskly in a wide curve to where the man is standing at the side door of the chopper. He yells, “Are you Aron?”
I nod and shout into his ear, “Yes. Can I get a lift?” and turn to find a uniformed officer of some type sitting at the far side of an all-leather backseat, gaping at me. There are no paramedics wielding IV bags, nobody has latex gloves, and there’s not a single piece of medical equipment in sight. I wasn’t expecting a medevac flight, but I wasn’t expecting full leather, either.
For some reason, the urgency of my own situation dissolves, and I want to give the pilot or officer a fair chance to put down a cloth or jacket before I stain the leather red. I shout into the helicopter over the engine and rotor noise to no one in particular, “I’m bleeding-it’s gonna make a mess of your backseat!”
A voice booms, “Just get in!” and I clamber across two stacked backpacks to the middle of the backseat. I shout to the man who motioned me to the door, “Please get my backpack!” and nod to where Eric is standing with my pack in his hands some eighty feet in front of the helicopter. Running out from under the rotors and around to Eric, he then races back with my nearly empty backpack in his hands. The only contents are the water bottle and CamelBak, with a few ounces of mud in each, my headlamp, multi-tool, and two cameras, a measly five pounds total. Yet its weight had felt five times that in the last two miles before I found the Meijer family. “After carrying it all that way,” I think, “I’d hate to leave it behind.” All aboard, we fasten our seat belts, and the pilot brings the engines to full power, kicking up the dust of the canyon floor.
Someone hands me a headset to put on, and the officers help me get it on over my blue Arc’teryx ball cap. The pilot asks if I can hear him, and I respond, “Yes,” as I settle into the leather seat, lifting my injured arm above my head. Elevated, the insistent throbs are a little more bearable. I watch droplets of blood slither down the dangling strand of webbing at my elbow. One by one, they reach the end of their rope and drip onto my already soaked shirt.
We lift off, and my attention lifts from my shirt to the canyon. We fly higher and higher, and my gratitude again brings me nearly to tears, but dehydration has sealed shut my tear ducts. Although I’m wedged between the two passengers in the backseat, I can still see out the windows of the aircraft quite clearly. Staring straight ahead, I watch the twin black figures of Wayne and Eric recede to small blotches on the red canvas of Barrier Creek’s gravel streambed until the chopper’s window frame blocks them from view.
As we crest the rim of the canyon, my mind fumbles when it tries to comprehend the sudden shift of the horizon. The line demarcating the edge of my universe had been claustrophobically penned in for the past six days, trapped as I was, but now it leaps a hundred miles in a single moment, receding over the magnificent landscape of Canyonlands into the haze surrounding the La Sal Mountains in the east. My vision reels.
The vibrations of the helicopter engines mount to a dull roar, only barely muted by the headphones. “How long until we get to Green River?” I ask, unnecessarily straining to raise my voice.
The pilot comes back, clearly audible over the scratchy background static: “We’re going directly to Moab. It’ll be about fifteen minutes.”
Oh, wow, good. “Is there any water I can have?”
Both of the officers scramble, as if my request has shaken them out of their astonishment. I can’t blame them. If a blood-soaked guy came and sat next to me, it’d be a few minutes before I would think to offer him a drink, too. The man on my left turns up a screw-top bottle of spring water and hands it to me. After I’ve held it for a second staring at it dazedly, he realizes the top is still on, so he unscrews it and gives it back. We shift around, and the uniformed officer on my right moves a jacket under my arm to soak up the bloody runoff.
In just two minutes, we come to a massive river below us, and from its color and our position, I’m certain it is the Green River. The pilot says over the headsets, “Keep him talking.”
I reply, “I’m still drinking the water.” I can hardly believe I’m still able to stomach any more liquid, or that I still feel thirst. Including what I’ve got in my hand now, I’ve drunk over two and a half gallons of water in the past three hours.
“Don’t let him pass out,” the pilot warns the officers. I’m not worried I’m going to pass out, as the pain won’t even let me rest, but I do want to get to a hospital as soon as possible.
“How much longer do we have?” I inquire, sounding to myself like a whiny kid pleading for a bathroom break on a road trip with his family.
“Twelve minutes from here,” the pilot says. We follow the river north for a minute or two in silence as I take another three gulps of water, finishing the bottle. When we bank to the right, I see a winding dirt road that drops over a canyon wall to the river. “See that road?” I ask.
The man on my right looks out the window and nods. “Yeah?”
“That’s the beginning of the White Rim, uhh, Mineral Bottom, it’s called. I biked that with some of my friends a couple years ago. It’s over a hundred miles.” The officer seems slightly slow to absorb what I’m saying. Perhaps it’s all in my perception of him, or perhaps it’s his disbelief that I’ve turned the flight into a scenic tour. We’re over the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands, heading northeast. I know this area well enough to judge our progress. I ask the pilot, “Will we go by the
“I don’t know what those are,” the pilot explains.
The officer on my right asks me what happened, and I begin to tell him about my week. I wriggle around enough that I can get the map out of my left pocket, and I show him where I was stuck. I explain about the chockstone, how it moved and I became trapped, how I shivered through five nights, how I ran out of water and drank my own urine, how I finally figured out how to amputate my arm. In recounting the story, I begin to wonder about the timing of the helicopter and how it found me in the canyon at the perfect moment when I needed it. If it had been an hour later, I would have died waiting for help. Or, if I had figured out how to cut off my arm two days earlier, when I stabbed myself, there wouldn’t have been a helicopter, and I would have bled out before getting to my truck, let alone Green River. I had been right on Sunday when I said on the videotape that amputating my arm would have been a slow act of suicide.
After six minutes or so of explaining my story, I see two thin sandstone buttes out the front window. The formations of eroded rock resemble two submarines engaged in battle, and I declare, “Look, that’s them, the
“Less than five minutes. We’ll fly over that drop-off, and we’ll be right over town.”
A question digs at me. “How did you find my truck? I mean, I could have been anywhere.”
“Your mom called our dispatcher yesterday and had us searching all the trailheads.”
Four minutes later, the helicopter bursts over the rim rock, leaving Canyonlands behind, to reveal a lush valley, green with fields, and a forest of trees engulfing thousands of buildings. We cross the Colorado River and slow down as we approach the center of Moab, Utah, passing row upon neat row of houses and streets, ball fields, stores, schools, parking lots, and parks.
Circling around once, I see an open green lawn that we’re apparently going to use as a landing zone. As the pilot touches the bird gently down on the vibrantly green grass, I notice that the building off to the right of the lawn is a hospital.
