“He didn’t have much of a clear plan before he left—he just wanted to go climbing and hiking and get the heck out of Dodge. You know, off-season stuff. I didn’t ask him to sign in blood that he was going to come. I think we should get going so we can find that billboard.” One of Brad’s friends had promised to leave more specific directions stuck to a billboard at the entrance to the state park, to cover for any last-minute changes.
Within five minutes of departing the hump in the road, the truck’s left rear tire went flat. Brad discovered that the spare was dangerously low as well. Moving at a sluggish 5 mph, the couple continued on toward Goblin Valley State Park. Brad retrieved the directions, the main navigation being to turn left at the Scooby-Doo stuffed animal stuck in a juniper tree. The evening sun hammered straight into Brad’s eyes, turning the dust-frosted windshield into a glass curtain. They missed the turnoff for the party and drove around for an hour as the sun went down and the desert sank into darkness.
Exhausted from a full day in the truck, they quickly lost interest in cruising the back roads of the state park at 5 mph, so Brad pulled over in a finger canyon off a spur road, found a flat parking spot, and they retired into the camper for the night. It was not a big loss to them to have missed the party—they were an easygoing couple out on a road trip for whatever fun they found, and there’d be plenty more parties through the off-season. With daylight aiding them on Sunday morning, Brad and Leah puttered around until they found the aftermath of the party—friends lying about the desert as if a plane had crashed into a nearby ravine. One friend revived enough to take them on the hour-long drive into Green River to repair the tires. They returned in the early afternoon.
Assuming that I had either found the party or come up with something more interesting to do, Brad and Leah were unalarmed that they didn’t see me in Utah. With only two days back in Aspen before their honeymoon trip to the Bahamas, they had pressing preparations on their minds, though they figured they would see me at the Spruce Street party on Monday night.
Monday was hectic at my house. My roommates were getting ready for our first party of the off-season, a big blowout to rejoice in the transition of seasons and of roommates. With the four Aspen ski areas closed, the season was officially over. After working with me at the Ute all winter, Leona Sondie was leaving for Boulder, where she planned to work as a landscape gardener for the summer. Elliott Larson was moving in to join his mountain-bike–racing teammate Joe Wheadon, rounding out the foursome with Brian Payne and me. Brian was back in town after a two-month absence—his January ski accident had forced him to move in with his parents in Ohio for recovery and rehab—and I would be back from my vacation. It would be a rare occasion that we’d all be together. That it was a workday night was inconsequential to the scale of the party; few of the attendees would have serious responsibilities the next day, off-season bringing with it a respite from significant duties on the job. Party planning included getting a keg, stocking up on grilling supplies, stringing decorative lights around the house, inviting fifty people to come over, and rolling up the living-room-wall garage door to add some extra party space to our thousand-square-foot home.
Typical of older buildings in the Smuggler Mine area of Aspen, 560 Spruce had gone through several renovations throughout its 115-year life. Consequently, the house had a funky character, including a roll-up garage door installed in the west wall of the living room. The Smuggler Mine Company had built the house as an assay office where assessors weighed silver ores and measured their purity. In 1894, when the largest silver nugget in the world was extracted from the mine, it most likely passed through 560 Spruce, though no one at the time was much excited by the find, since the silver crash of 1893 had dropped the bottom out of the silver market. As it sat on the assessor’s scales, the largest nugget in the world held little more value than a decorative rock.
In the postwar era of Aspen’s history, 560 Spruce was reincarnated as a fly-tying shop that added the roll-up garage door to the west wall of the first floor and remodeled the assay office into a one-bedroom apartment. Later renovations and additions divided the two-story barn-style building into two apartments, one studio unit upstairs and a four-bedroom place downstairs. In the lower unit, the kitchen surrounded an afterthought of a bathroom, with two entrances into the shower, one from directly behind the kitchen sink. The garage/shop space became the living room, with the remnant roll-up door still in place. With a deck installed outside the garage door where the driveway had been, the warm weather of spring and summer brought the opportunity to roll up the wall of the living room and enjoy the sun and breeze in the house, or push one of the house’s beat-up couches onto the deck for an outdoor nap.
Friends started showing up on Monday evening, including Brad and Leah and Rachel Polver, and before the sun had set in a dazzling light show over Mount Sopris, the food from the grill-your-own potluck was gone. Rachel thought it was odd that I hadn’t shown up for a grubfest, given my seldom satisfied appetite, but Leona reassured her that I’d be back from Utah in time for the main party. As more friends and acquaintances gathered and the party rocked on into the night, music blared out the open wall, and my roommates shouted over the stereo regarding my nonappearance.
A cupful of beer in his hand, Elliott raised the question: “Hey Briguy, have you seen Aron yet? I thought he had to work tomorrow.”
“He’s probably still out on his trip. I haven’t seen him since Wednesday. Does he know about the party?” Brian asked Leona.
Leona repeated what she’d told Rachel earlier. “Yeah, when he left, he said he’d be back here for it. I told him I was leaving on Tuesday, and it’d probably be our last chance to hang out, and he said he’d be here. It’s my going-away party. He better not miss it. I’ll be pissed.”
“What time is it? If he’s real late coming back, he’s probably gonna be ready to walk in and crash.” Elliott was concerned that they’d have to tone down the party if I came home wanting to go to bed. “He’s gonna have a hard time getting to sleep with the party raging. Maybe he figured that and stopped to sleep someplace.”
“That’d be better than having to kick everybody out. It looks like this could go on a while.”
Brian was right—it did go on a while. Though he went to bed shortly before midnight, by the time Joe and Leona ushered the last partiers out to catch buses and walk home, it was well after two A.M.
However, come eight-fifteen Tuesday morning, I hadn’t shown up at the Ute Mountaineer for work. My manager, Brion After, called the house at Spruce. Leona had just woken up and was stumbling around in her room, groggy-eyed and hungover.
“Hey, Leona, it’s Brion. Is Aron there?” Brion sounded more hopeful than curious, and slightly anxious.
“What? No. Isn’t he there?” Leona was instantly awake with worry.
“No, he hasn’t come in or called. I was thinking he might be sleeping off his vacation. Is his truck there?” Leona roamed around the house with the cordless phone in her hand, peeking out through the kitchen window to see if my truck was in one of the parking spaces in front of the wood-slat fence. Knowing my habit of stuffing a vacation to the chockablocks, she thought I might have driven through the night and rolled straight to work that morning. She checked my room for any indication that I’d been there and left, but there was nothing. Something wasn’t right.
“Did he pull a Leona? Maybe he forgot his shift changed.”
Brion and Leona chuckled at her self-effacing joke. She had gained a reputation after she’d missed a shift she was supposed to cover, and then compounded the goof-up a week later when she came in to work and wasn’t even on the schedule.
“It’s possible, but he said ‘See you Tuesday’ on his way out the door. He knew today was his project day.”
“He must still be on his way home from Utah, then,” Leona said. “Maybe he’ll be there in an hour or so.”
“Maybe. I’m gonna go, but I’ll check back. When do you leave?”
&nb
sp; “In an hour, once I get the car packed.”
“OK, call me if you see him.”
“I will. Bye.” Leona hung up and paced around with a heavy heart. She started packing her aunt Leslie’s Subaru with her belongings, readying for the drive down to Boulder, but the more full the car got, the more worried she became.
Aware that I had never been over fifteen minutes late in the past, Brion was also starting to get concerned. He went down to the sales floor around eight-thirty A.M. to talk the matter over with another employee and climber, Sam Upton. “Have you seen Aron come in yet?”
Sam looked up from organizing the trail-running shoes in the display room. “Uh, no—he’s supposed to be redoing the camping wall this morning, right?”
Ignoring Sam’s question, Brion pressed. “He hasn’t called or anything?”
Sam sensed the tension in his voice. “No. Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. I just talked with Leona, and he wasn’t home. She said it didn’t look like he’d been there at all. It’s eight-thirty now. The only time Aron’s ever been more than a few minutes late was when he had that epic up on Pearl Pass.” Remembering the time a month earlier when I had spent the night bivouacking in a hand-dug snow pit at 12,000 feet, Brion had confidence that I would show up unless I was in serious trouble.
Understanding the implications, Sam asked, “Do you think he’s had an accident?”
“Aw, I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is he’s not ditching work. It’s possible something bad might have happened.”
“He could be lost or hurt. But I doubt he’s lost—he’s always wearing his compass and altimeter watch, and he’s good with it,” Sam said.
“No, I know. Even if he were fifty miles out in the middle of nowhere, he could cover that in a day. It’s not a panic situation. I mean, he’s strong enough that if something happened, he’d get himself out. Anything short of a broken leg wouldn’t even slow him down. And if he broke his leg, he’d crawl back. It’d take him awhile, but he’d get out. We have to give him twenty-four hours,” Brian concluded, and Sam agreed.
Leona called in to the Ute once an hour, speaking with Brion and Paul Perley, the general manager. She recounted the last time she’d seen me, on Wednesday night almost a week before. “He had his boxes of climbing equipment out and his biking stuff. He said he was going to do some climbing, some canyoneering, and maybe some mountain biking. He was packing like ‘Oh, I should take this just in case I go biking,’ and ‘Oh, I should take this in case I want to do some climbing.’ He usually would have it all figured out ahead of time, but this time I don’t think he knew where he was going. He said he was going to Utah, to the Canyonlands area. The question is, did he make it to the desert?”
As the afternoon slipped away, Brion reiterated his decision with Paul. “We have to give him until nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Any mountaineer would want the chance to get himself out of trouble before the helicopters start flying. If he isn’t here at the start of his shift tomorrow, I’ll call his parents and get the ball rolling.”
Tuesday evening around six-thirty P.M., right after their shifts, my roommates Brian and Joe were sitting in the living room at Spruce Street, relaxing with the garage door rolled up, testing the quality of the beer left in the keg.
“Hey, what’s the story with Aron?” Joe inquired.
“He’s still gone,” Brian replied. “I think Leona called the Ute this morning. He didn’t go in to work.”
“What do you think we should do, call the cops or something?” Joe wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do, but it struck a chord with Brian.
“You know, we probably should,” he said after thinking about it for a long moment. He pulled the phone book out from under the coffee table at his feet and leafed through the pages for the number of the Aspen police department. He dialed the nonemergency number and spoke with the dispatcher after the first ring. “A friend of ours was due back from a trip last night, and he hasn’t come home, and it’s been a day. I just wanted to let you know we think he’s missing. It’s pretty low-key—we’re worried about him, but we’re not freaking out. What can we do about it?”
“We can file a missing person’s report. You said it’s been twenty-four hours?”
“Yeah, he was supposed to come back from Utah yesterday, and he missed work today.”
“What’s his name?”
Brian provided my name, age, approximate height, weight, and description to the dispatcher, who typed the data into the police computer system.
“Do you have his license-plate information?”
“Uh, yeah, hold on, I think I can get it for you.” Brian went in my room and found an old climbing itinerary from when I had soloed the Bells two months earlier. It listed my license number—NM 846-MMY—and the year and model of my truck.
“Where do you think he went? You said Utah?”
“I know he was heading out to ski Mount Sopris on Thursday, but he was all packed up for a trip. I think he said he was going to the Moab area in Utah.”
“Anything more specific than that, or just the Moab area?”
“That’s it. He usually leaves itineraries, but he didn’t leave one this time.”
“All right. That’s a start.” They hung up.
What the dispatcher didn’t tell Brian was that I hadn’t been missing long enough for the police to do anything yet.
Eleven
Day Five: Trance Sanctuary
The real test of any choice is, “Would I make the same choice again?”
No one can see beyond a choice they don’t understand.
—THE ORACLE, The Matrix Revolutions
BEATIFIC IVORY FACES SMILE AT ME. They are half protruding from red womblike walls, surreally pale and bald, like contenders in a Patrick Stewart look-alike contest who have been doused in flour. The walls seem to form a scarlet tube of organic tissue, a fibroid tunnel pulsing in waves that could be an eight-foot-tall empty blood vessel, except that I’m inside it. In my dreamy vision, I reach out, brushing the tissue’s sponginess with my fingers. It responds to my touch with welcoming caresses. As though I’ve triggered a release, I sense I have begun moving along the tube, passed along by the wave motion. Stringy pulp drapes cling to my face and arms with the invisible softness of a wildflower petal as I float through the veiled twists and turns of the passage. Passing the saintly faces one at a time, I am vaguely aware of their blurred animations, like adoring mimes calling out to me, but I can’t hear their voices. An uncertain familiarity compels me to look more closely at the faces, but I can’t pause long enough in the tube, and they continue to drift past me before I can place any particular one. I can’t quite tell their sex, either, but they seem to be about my age or maybe a little older. In any case, I feel comfortable here, like the faces are my friends—or, more exactly, like the faces are the faces of my friends—but I can’t tell.
The forward movement continues for some time, relaxingly passing me along the placenta-like corridor. I feel like I’m enjoying a gentle crowd surfing, but I’m worried, too. What’s happening? What is this stuff around me? Where am I? Is this a dream? Where’s the canyon? My surroundings seem to respond by supporting me more firmly, and then the tube slopes up in front of me. Until this point, my journey has been strictly horizontal. I couldn’t feel the pull of gravity before, but now it’s like I’m riding the uphill portion of one very bizarre roller coaster. There are no more faces, just the lining of the walls slipping by in monotonous progression minute after untold minute. How high have I gone? Several hundred feet, I imagine. The grip of the fleshy waves on my body becomes subtler, with the exception of slight vibrations that add to the roller-coaster sensation, tugging at my legs, waist, torso, and back.
Intensifying, the vibrations shake me more and more, distressing me. Now I want to find out what’s at the end of this incline. I get the feeling there will be some kind of gateway. I want to see it, perhaps pass through it, but I somehow kn
ow I will shake free of the delicate wall lining before I make it to the end. Vibrations cause me to have tumultuous spasms. I won’t make it to find out what comes after the incline. I peel free of the lining, seizures ripping me away from the vanishing walls of the vessel. Without their support, I somersault backward in suspended slow motion, shuddering violently, as though I am about to detonate. Blackness eradicates the tunnel, and the dream-state quaking resolves into real shivers, my body trying to free itself from the tenebrous clutches of the canyon night.
It’s Tuesday night, just after sunset, and my sleep-deprived mind is fabricating delusional flight from my entrapment, if not for my body, at least for my spirit.
Distracted by fatigue and the relative warmth of the day, I haven’t yet redonned my Lycra shorts, but the evening’s oncoming chill signals another nine hours of weary battle. I had removed the shorts prior to my surgical attempt this morning. Thinking I might succeed, I was planning to use their padded liner as an absorbent bandage on my stump, but of course I hadn’t needed it. For never having been formally trained in backcountry medicine, I’m proud to have covered so many medical needs with my improvisations. I’m almost disappointed that I won’t get a chance to test their efficacy, but I have resolved not to make another attempt at amputating my arm. I’ve proved to myself it’s infeasible to cut through the bones. Bound by my own disintegrating capacities, I know any further efforts to cut off my arm will be certain suicide.
Death by dehydration is turning out to be even more psychologically grueling than I was anticipating on Saturday. Waterlessness stalks me, the indomitable leviathan of the desert drawing in closer every hour. Enforced insomnia compounds my body’s anguish, loosing a fourth-dimensional aberration in my head. I no longer exist in a normal space-time continuum. Minute by minute, my sleep deprivation dismantles yet another brain function. Considering my deteriorated state, seeing Wednesday morning will be another accomplishment altogether. I’ve outlasted my first predictions that I wouldn’t live to see Tuesday evening. Maybe I’ll outlast myself again.