127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (37 page)

The man speaks, his single short sentence coming through to me as through a mental fog until something clicks in my mind. Realizing he has a Germanic accent, I decipher the six words:

“They told us you were here.”

It takes me a good five seconds to process the full meaning of his statement, and the next thing I know, I’m hiking at full speed down the canyon, barking at this innocent family to start hiking. “We have to get moving. We’ll talk while we walk. Can you understand me all right?”

The dad nods but protests, “You should stop and rest.”

I reiterate my command—“No, we need to keep hiking”—and then begin barraging them with questions: “Who are ‘they’? Who told you I was here? Do you have a phone of any sort that works down here?”

The family trots to catch up to me as the dad replies, “There are police at the parking. They told us to keep an eye out for you. We told them we would.”

“Do you have a phone?” I ask again. They do not. The dad has a GPS on a string around his neck. “Can you tell me how far is it to the trailhead?”

“It is, ahh, three kilometers.”

Oh, man, how can that be? I check my map, and it looks much closer than that, maybe a mile to where the trail leaves the canyon bottom and another mile of steep hiking. “Are you sure?”

He shows me the GPS screen. He’s benchmarked the route, and the display indicates that we are now 2.91 kilometers from and 220 meters below the trailhead. The elevation will be the devastating part. I can feel the strain that comes with hiking up over the ten-foot-high sandbars where the trail cuts the corners off the meandering wash channel. I start to have doubts that I will make it to the trailhead after all. Maybe it is the knowledge that there are rescuers there, and that they might be able to come get me, but I begin to understand my body is failing. I’ve lost too much blood. Even minor obstacles cost me a great deal of energy and cause my heart rate to skyrocket.

Thinking through the sequence of events that will most quickly lead to definitive medical care, I ask the hikers for their names so I can plan what I’m going to ask them to do.

“I am Eric, and this is Monique and Andy,” the dad replies. “We are the Meijers, from Holland.” (That explains the accent as well as the excellent English.) I haven’t yet heard Monique or Andy speak, but I can safely assume their English is just as good as Eric’s.

“OK, Eric, you guys look pretty fit. I need one of you to run ahead and get to the police at the trailhead.” I am fairly certain that the people there aren’t actually police, but that’s what he called them. “I need them to send down a litter and a team of people to help carry me out. I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it out of the canyon. Will you do that?”

“Monique can run—she is fast.”

Still hiking along, I look to his wife, and she nods. “Do you understand what I need?” I ask.

“Yes, a litter and a—”

I interrupt her. “Wait. Did the police have radios and phones?” The two adults nod. “OK, I need you to ask them for a helicopter.” Why I didn’t think of this first, I don’t know—maybe because of my fatigue—but a helicopter will be much better than a litter team. All I’ll have to do is get up to a place where a helicopter can land, and then wait. I think I can manage that. I look at Monique. “Please, now, go fast.”

[The following passage is from a letter from Eric Meijer, giving his account of our unplanned rendezvous.]

As Monique takes off at a jog, Andy follows her. I almost ask the boy to stay with us so Monique can go faster, but more immediately, I think of asking Eric if he has any food. He thinks and calls out to Monique, and she stops. “We have a couple Oreos left, but Monique has them,” Eric explains to me, and shouts to her to get out the cookies as we catch up to her. She hands over the clear plastic sleeve that held fifteen cookies with an apology that she and Andy ate most of them already. She and the boy turn and run off again.

There are only two Oreos left, but they are heaven-sent, and I dispose of them in a single chomp each, pausing after the first one to unscrew the lid on my water bottle and take a swig of tadpole water to wash it down. After I munch the second cookie, Eric hands me an unopened half-liter bottle of distilled spring water. It doesn’t taste as good as the Big Drop puddle water, but it’s a vast improvement over the sandy sludge currently in my Nalgene. I thank Eric for the water, and I ask him if he will carry my pack. He says certainly, and I shrug it off, lightening my burden by a few pounds.

Eric talks with me and asks a few questions about what happened. I’m trying to walk with the water in my mouth still, but each time I reply to one of his questions, I swallow the water. When I finish talking, almost always keeping my answers short, I take another few ounces into my mouth and hold them there. After a half-dozen rounds of inquiries, I let Eric know that I need to stop talking and focus on hiking.

About five minutes after Monique and Andy leave us the second time, Eric and I come across another hiker, in his early forties, headed in the opposite direction with an older woman who looks to be his mother. He asks if we need any assistance, and I reply with a question: “Do you have a cell phone or a satellite phone?” He does not have a phone of any kind, but he offers that he is medically trained. Relieved to have come across someone with more medical knowledge than my meager education by osmosis from search-and-rescue missions, I ask him to join us as we hike. He leaves the woman who continues hiking and introduces himself as Wayne, and I engage him in a back-and-forth to double-check that I’m doing everything I can at the moment to help myself. We walk together through endless stretches of tamarisks that whip at my arm and face, as I ask questions like “Is it OK that I eat?” (“If it doesn’t make you throw up, sure”) and “Should I worry about drinking too much water?” (“If it doesn’t make you throw up, you’ll be OK.”)

I assume that Monique and Andy Meijer are running farther ahead to climb out and ask for a helicopter, but I haven’t seen them for about ten minutes. As we come up on yet another long sandbar covered in brush and a few scattered trees, I have to stop to empty the sand in my shoe again. The grating friction on my bare left foot is so intense that it pushes the agony of my arm into the background. I find it ironic that my foot is distracting me from the fact that I’ve cut off my arm. I think it’s doubly ironic that now, when I tell Eric I’m going to stop, he is the one who protests, “No, you must keep going.”

“No, listen, I am going to sit down and empty the sand out of my shoe, and then you are going to help me retie my shoe when I’m done.” I can be a bossy SOB when I’m tired and in pain, but Eric takes it in stride, and after I find a seat on a downed tree trunk and dump half a sandbox out of my sneaker, he ties my shoe for me.

It is mile seven, and a few minutes after three
P.M.
The sun is beating down hard on the shadeless sand at the bottom of the eight-hundred-foot-deep Horseshoe Canyon. Eric and Wayne and I have just come around a wide bend in the open canyon, and I see what must be the beginning of the exit trail that leads to the parking area, zigzagging up the steep hillside ahead on the left. Somewhere on the rim, some seven hundred feet above me, the rescuers are waiting. Oh, how I wish I were a raven and could simply open my wingspan and, with a husky-voiced ca-caw, catch a rising thermal current in the air; I’d be at that trailhead in two minutes.

It will kill me if I try to hike out of this canyon. I’ve lost too much blood; I’m on the verge of deadly shock. I contemplate sending Eric up to get help as well, but before I can spit out the idea, the rapid stutter of a booming echo interrupts my thoughts.

Thwock-thwock-thwock-thwocka-thwocka-thwocka.

Two hundred yards in front of us, the metallic body of a wingless black bird rises over the canyon wall.

The sight shocks me into an abrupt halt and then inundates me with emotion. In disbelief, I try to sort out how Monique and Andy got to the trailhead and the rescuers brought in a helicopter so quickly, but I then understand that this bird was already here. My astonishment yields to immense relief, and it’s all I can do for the moment to remain standing in the sand. Also stunned to a standstill, Wayne and Eric begin waving their arms over their heads, 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.