127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston Page A

means by which I can exert even a small degree of control over my circumstances.
    I resume my excavation as darkness seeps from my penumbral hole and spills into the desert above me, turning dusk to night. I turn my headlamp back on and pick a new target on the chockstone—a beige-pink heart of sandstone ringed by hard black mineral features. This spot is two inches above my wrist, so I am cautious with my strikes until I can chisel out a starter hole that allows me to jab harder at the chockstone. I establish a rhythm, pecking at two jabs per second, pausing to blow away dust once every five minutes. Time slips past. I can see a tiny measure of progress as a small salmon-colored flake emerges beside the shallow trough I’m carving out of the chockstone. If I’m right, I might be able to dig out enough material around this pastel nugget so that I can pop it out as a single chip.
    I slip into the flow of intent action. Before I know it, three hours are gone, and it’s nearly midnight. I have isolated the little flake on three sides—left, top, and bottom—by a channel about an eighth of an inch wide, and I’m ready to pry it off the boulder. Not wanting to accidentally break off the tip of my knife blade, I switch my multi-tool to the file. The file is not only thicker and sturdier, it’s also somewhat more expendable. With the file tip positioned in the in-cut groove, I lever the handle toward the rock and watch for the flake to come flying for my eyes, holding my breath. I feel my tool biting into my palm just as the flake crumbles and breaks away. Yes! A dimesized piece of rock pops off the chockstone and falls onto my trapped wrist. It’s not as big as I could have hoped, but I’m pleased that my strategy paid off with at least a little progress. With the flake removed, I’ve exposed some softer rock that I can extract more easily. Pecking for another hour eradicates almost as much stone as what came off in the flake. I save the largest chips that fall on my trapped arm, setting them side by side on the top of the boulder. My collection grows as I enlarge the minute crater, but as my line of chips increases, so does my fatigue. The aching pain of my arm nags at my mind too much for my grogginess to matter; I need to work at getting out of here while I have my strength. Besides, even if I wanted to sleep, I couldn’t. The penetrating chill of the night air and occasional breezes urge me to keep attacking the rock to generate warmth, and when my consciousness does fade, my knees buckle and my weight tugs on my wrist in an immediate and agonizing call to attention.
    Perhaps because of my growing fatigue, a song is playing over and over in my head. The melody is from the first Austin Powers movie, which I watched a few nights ago with one of my roommates, and now just a single line of the ending credits’ chorus is repeating on an infinite loop.
    “Yeah, that’s not annoying at all, Aron,” I say sarcastically. “Can’t you get something else on the juke?” It doesn’t matter what else I try to hum—even some of my favorite standbys—I can’t free myself from the mind-lock of Austin Powers.
    Taking a break, I extract from my main pack the rope bag, my harness and climbing hardware, CamelBak pack, and water bottle, then strap the large backpack on my back for the first time since the afternoon. I figure—correctly—that the pack’s padding will help me retain my body heat. I remove the CamelBak’s blue water reservoir and slide its empty pack alongside my pinned arm. I can get the inch-thick insulation only a few inches past my elbow, because the boulder has my arm pressed tight against the wall from my wrist to my middle forearm. But with the small pack in place, most of my arm and shoulder is held off the cold slab. I remove my rope from its bag, leaving it neatly coiled, and stack it on a rock sitting on the canyon floor in front of my knees. With the rock padded by the rope, I can bend my knees