Five years ago Aron Ralston, his right hand pinned beneath a two-thousand pound boulder in Utah’s Blue John Canyon, sat in a jerry-rigged harness and prepared to die.
Today, Ralston is so busy he has to multi-task in order to be interviewed. Between answering e-mails about the film adaptation of his memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Atria Books) and a business appointment, he sits for telephone interviews as he drives.
After his accident in 2003, Ralston became an overnight celebrity, a modern-day Hegesistratus, the Ancient Greek warrior who amputated his own foot to escape his enemies. On a spontaneous solo trip through Blue John Canyon, Ralston descended through the slot canyon and was pinned by a toppling boulder. An engineer-turned-professional-outdoorsman, Ralston (who always left expedition itineraries with his family, except for this fateful trip) survived five days with little food and less than a liter of water, finally self-amputating the crushed hand, rappelling down a 65-foot face, and then hiking several miles out of the canyon toward the parking lot and his waiting truck. A stick shift.
His memoir chronicles those days with a breathlessness that seems paradoxical to his imposed stasis, and the final pages speak triumphantly of the life he gained, not the limb he lost. With five years of hindsight, Ralston’s worldview remains the same as it was after his epiphany and escape.
“Gratitude for having my life,” Ralston said, “started with the escape and has continued with nary a dip.”
While acknowledging that the extraordinary circumstances of his injury helped him frame it as a blessing, not a curse (the balance sheet between losing a limb and losing a life was easy to tally), he admits to having had his moments with “the darkness” through the intervening years.
The amputation caused a bone infection that gave him a 50-50 chance for survival, and as he convalesced from it he thought, “This is not the life that I fought like hell to get out of the canyon to get back to.” All his outdoor experiences, all the good times with his friends seemed to be out of reach forever. Ralston remembers one night from that convalescence with a palpable intensity: lying in bed, he saw all the bottles of high-powered pain pills and knew he could end his life.
Before the accident he’d already completed winter solo ascents on 45 of Colorado’s fourteeners, the collective name of the 54 mountains in Colorado with elevations more than 14,000 feet, but that night he took the first step on the scariest looking route he’d seen: he vowed to endure, and he vowed to get better, and from that moment the route turned out to be a little less daunting.
He used the loving relationships he had with friends and family to set goals for himself, and soon he was active again: walking with his sister, then attending the Telluride Bluegrass Festival where his friends helped administer intravenous meds to him in his tent at night.
The day after he received his first prosthetic arm, a myoelectric with a $50,000 price tag, he went rock climbing. Thinking about that first prosthetic, Ralston laughs like a little boy when he says, “I scratched it to hell!”
However, Ralston’s karma is sound: As an engineer and gear-hound, Ralston worked with ingenious minds at Trango, Therapeutic Recreation Systems Inc., and Paradox Sports, a non-profit whose mission is to provide inspiration, opportunities and adaptive equipment to the disabled community, to design a custom prosthetic. Working together, the team turned Ralston’s napkin sketch into a veritable Swiss-Army Arm, one with enough different attachments to meet Ralston’s intense, activity-specific demands. As a result of the collaboration, Ralston does quite a bit of outreach on behalf of Paradox Sports, and he now sits on the Board of Directors.
In less than two years he’d finished off the winter fourteeners, written a book, made the rounds of television talk shows, been interviewed by Tom Brokaw for NBC Dateline, appeared in then-Miller Brewing Company’s “Man Law” ads, and become a public speaker with a full calendar that took him around the world almost as frequently as his climbing. Ralston regularly donates his honoraria to environmental and political causes, and Utah Wilderness Coalition is close to his heart.
In June 2008 Ralston completed a solo ascent and ski descent of 20,320-foot Denali, a feat he describes as one his proudest climbing accomplishments.
“The rangers at Denali told me I was the first person with a disability to ski-descend Denali,” Ralston says. When Ralston told a friend what the rangers had said, she laughed at the seeming paradox: as if anyone, with or without an impairment, could ski Denali and not be fully “able.”
Sometimes the darkness still seeps in, but Ralston doesn’t let it stay long. Living such an active life, Ralston admits to sometimes having a hard time reconciling how he feels about himself as a whole person with what he sees in the mirror, an experience common among many people with different disabilities.
After a recent breakup, Ralston wondered if he’d ever find another “love of his life” who would accept his body as it is. Although culture teaches us that bodies who climb mountains look a certain way, that one must be perfect (or at least average) to find love, Ralston used his injury to break down barriers in his thinking, and that breakage spreads to people who meet him or hear him speak.
“After one of my talks a woman approached me,” he says, “and she told me that my story had changed her life. Because of what happened to me, she switched majors to become a nurse, and as she studied she realized that she really loved physical therapy.”
Now that woman lives her dream as a physical therapist, and Ralston knows that his story reaches beyond the margins of his own life. His story, like all stories, is not important because of how he fell, but because of what he did when he stood up again.
Links:
Paradox Sports, http://www.paradoxsports.org/
Utah Wilderness Coalition, http://www.uwcoalition.org/
All pictures courtesy of Aron Ralston
