Between a rock a hard place excerpt

I reach for my hammer rock. Adrenaline channels into anger, and I raise the hammer, in retribution for what this wretched piece of geology has done to my hand. I strike the boulder. The rage blooms purple in my mind, amid a small mushroom cloud of pulverised grit. I bring the rock down again.

I growl with animalistic fury in response to the pain pulsing in my left hand. Whoa, Aron. You might have taken that too far. I've created a mess once again. To brush the dirt off my trapped arm, away from the open wound, I pick up my knife. Sweeping the grit off my thumb, I accidentally gouge myself and rip away a thin piece of decayed flesh. It peels back like a skin of boiled milk before I catch what is going on. I already knew my hand had to be decomposing.

Without circulation, it has been dying since I became entrapped. Whenever I considered amputation, it had always been under the premise that the hand was dead and would have to be amputated once I was freed. But I hadn't known how fast the putrefaction had advanced since Saturday afternoon.

Out of curiosity, I poke my thumb with the blade. It punctures the epidermis as if it is dipping into a stick of room-temperature butter, and releases a tell-tale hiss of escaping gas. Though the smell is faint to my desensitised nose, it is abjectly unpleasant, the stench of a carcass.

All I want now is to simply rid myself of any connection to this decomposing appendage. I don't want it. It's not a part of me. I scream out in pure hate, shrieking as I batter my body to and fro against the canyon walls, losing every bit of composure that I've struggled so intensely to maintain.

Then I feel my arm bend unnaturally in the unbudging grip of the chockstone. An epiphany strikes me with the magnificent glory of a holy intervention and instantly brings my seizure to a halt: if I torque my arm far enough, I can break my forearm bones. Holy Christ, Aron, that's it. That's fucking it! I put my left hand under the boulder and push hard, to exert a maximum downward force on my radius bone. As I slowly bend my arm down and to the left, a pow!

I don't say a word, but I reach to feel my forearm. There is an abnormal lump on top of my wrist. I pull my body away from the chockstone and down again, simulating the position I was just in, and feel a gap between the serrated edges of my cleanly broken arm bone. Without further pause and again in silence, I hump my body up over the chockstone, with a single purpose in my mind. Smearing my shoes against the canyon walls, I push with my legs and grab the back of the chockstone with my left hand, pulling with every bit of ferocity I can muster, hard, harder, and a second cap-gun shot ends my ulna's anticipation.

Sweating and euphoric, I again touch my right arm two inches below my wrist. Both bones have splintered in the same place. I am overcome with the excitement of having solved the riddle of my imprisonment. Hustling to deploy the shorter and sharper of my multi-tool's two blades, I push the knife into my wrist, watching my skin stretch inwardly, until the point pierces and sinks to its hilt. In a blaze of pain, I know the job is just starting. With a glance at my watch - it is You're in it now.

Once I've opened a large enough hole in my arm, I stow the knife, holding its handle in my teeth, and poke first my left forefinger and then my left thumb inside my arm and feel around. Sorting through the bizarre and unfamiliar textures, I make a mental map of my arm's inner features. I feel bundles of muscle fibres and, working my fingers behind them, find two pairs of cleanly fractured but jagged bone ends.

Now I know that soon I will be free of the rest of my crushed dead hand. Prodding and pinching, I can distinguish between the hard tendons and ligaments, and the soft, rubbery feel of the more pliable arteries. I should avoid cutting the arteries until the end if I can help it at all, I decide. Sort, pinch, rotate, slice. Ten, 15, or maybe 20 minutes slip past me. I am engrossed in making the surgical work go as fast as possible. The surgery is slowing down now that I have come to a stubbornly durable tendon, and I don't want to lose blood unnecessarily while I'm still trapped.

I'll need every bit of it for the hike to my truck. Setting the knife down on the chockstone, I pick up the neoprene tubing of my CamelBak, which has been sitting there unused for the past two days. I cinch the black insulation tube in a double loop around my forearm, three inches below my elbow. Next, I quickly attach a carabiner into the tourniquet and twist it tight.

It took me six days to figure out how I could cut off my arm. Continuing with the surgery, I clear out the last muscles surrounding the tendon and cut a third artery. I still haven't uttered even an "Ow! I now have relatively open access to the tendon. Sawing aggressively with the blade, I still can't put a dent in the amazingly strong fibre.

It's like a doubly thick strip of reinforced box-packaging tape. I can't cut it, so I reconfigure my multi-tool for the pliers. Using them to bite into the edge of the tendon, I squeeze and twist, tearing away a fragment.

Yes, this will work just fine. I tackle the most brutish task. Grip, squeeze, twist, tear. Hell, I can barely believe it, and I'm watching myself do it. There is also a pale white nerve strand, as thick as a swollen piece of angel-hair pasta. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon,for each day to have a new and different sun.

Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind is surfing on euphoria. The goal is not to reach the top of the mountains, but to improve the man.

We are not grand because we are at the top of the food chain or because we can alter our environment - the environment will outlast us with its unfathomable forces and unyielding powers. I enjoy photographing the otherworldly colors and shapes presented in the convoluted depths of slot canyons and the prehistoric artwork preserved in their alcoves.

Good Christ, my hand. Then we have a close call, and we become acutely aware of what that fraction of an inch or that split second means. I don't think that's it at all. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

The goal is not to reach the tops of mountains, but to improve the man. To believe in the face of utter helplessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long lived human characteristics.

To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of life, that there is no remedy for basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself I learned from them the infected loneliness that comes at the end of every misspent day. I knew I could do better.

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