Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (9 page)

The body also needs food for more than just raw fuel. It needs the vitamins and minerals in food to fight off diseases and maintain a chemical balance. Without them, victims of starvation come down with diseases such as scurvy, pellagra, beriberi, or anemia, which can lead ultimately to edema and heart failure. In a weakened state, the body becomes vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, bacterial or fungal infections, that it would otherwise be able to fight off. The brain needs energy to keep functioning, and when the brain runs out of gas, there can be permanent brain damage. Eventually, the train burns itself up and the locomotive grinds to a halt.

At my former campsite, I found a flat spot to park and unloaded my ATV. I drank as much water as I could, because I’d be working in the hot sun. I planned to bring only a single water bottle down the rope with me so that I’d be carrying as little weight as possible. With my gear strapped to both the front and rear cargo racks of the Grizzly, I paused for a second before pressing the starter.

I listened.

I would say I was listening to the sound of the desert, but the desert doesn’t make a sound. Even on a windy day, you might hear the wind pushing past your ears, but there are no trees that sway in the breeze and no leaves that rustle against each other. Even when there are birds, it seems as though they keep their voices down, rather than give away their locations. Some people like to go to busy restaurants or sit in the food court at a shopping mall and lose themselves in the white noise and the din of human community and commerce, but I’ve never been one of them. For me, my soul stops circling and comes to rest and I find the calm, still center of myself in a place like this—the open empty silent desert.

When I say I paused to listen, I mean I paused to
not
listen, to hear nothing, to breathe the cool morning air and set myself. Against the backdrop of silence, the danger and the risk of what I was going to do stood out and moved to the foreground, but simultaneously became clearer and more manageable. I subtracted from my thoughts anything that didn’t address the task before me and took a deep breath before starting the ATV and heading for the drop in, skirting small boulders and following the tracks I’d left in the sand the day before, still visible in the slanting morning light.

From the surface, slot canyons are virtually invisible. You can’t see them, gazing at the horizon, and because they’re so narrow, if you’re crossing the desert on an ATV at high speed, you could drive right into one before you’re able to stop. In the open desert, there aren’t any warning signs to tell you where they are. That was why I decided to start from my original campsite, and why, even following my own tracks, I could only run at half throttle.

Then I reached the rim. It was perhaps fifty to sixty yards across the chasm. Looking down, I remembered a rappel I once did off a piece of rock in Yosemite Valley called Taft Point, one of the higher ledges in a valley known for its multi-thousand-foot cliff walls. For some reason I can’t recall, I thought, mistakenly, that it would be amusing to hang suspended above a bottomless void, a two-thousand-foot emptiness below me. I tied off to a massive rock at the top and went over the edge, partly to test my own level of confidence. It’s hard to explain, but when you’re two-thousand feet above the ground but you still have contact with the rock and your feet are connected to the earth, the height doesn’t bother you. When you’re dangling above the ground like a yo-yo at the bottom of a string, however, it’s disorienting and intolerable, even though the depth of the crater you’re going to make if you hit the ground, or the square footage of the splat if you land on flat rock, are the same.

In Yosemite, I lowered myself about fifteen feet into the void, with another hundred feet of rope below me, and then I changed my mind because in no time, I started spinning and my muscle groups started clenching in ways they weren’t meant to clench, and my palms started sweating inside my gloves, and I was gripping the rope with my braking hand so hard my hand started to cramp. Even experienced climbers can get vertigo, because when you’re at the end of a rope spinning in space, you don’t have a frame of reference, and it feels like the world is spinning, a big disk on a turntable beneath you, and there’s nothing you can do to arrest your motion. It took considerable concentration just to loosen my grip. I tied off and started rigging my ascender kit, but between the adrenaline and the fear (assuming those were two different things) and spinning in space, it was monumentally difficult to function, physically or mentally, and it felt like it took an hour to secure my foot loops and clip on my ascenders.

Yosemite had humbled me. The slot canyon in front of me presented a similar opportunity for failure, even though I’d done it successfully the day before. The term Navy and Air Force aviators used in Tom Wolfe’s book
The Right Stuff
was “screw the pooch,” meaning “mess up royally,” although “mess” isn’t the word most people use. In my case, “screwing the pooch” had taken on a slightly more literal meaning. I remembered that there was a dog down there, and I’d made a promise to it that I’d be back to save it, and, to me, it made no difference that it was a dog that didn’t understand English. A promise is a promise is a promise. Maybe he didn’t, but I understood English just fine.

I used the ATV as an anchor, as I had the day before, chocking the wheels with stones and tying the hand brakes with cords, anchoring my rappel line to the rear hitch and tying a redundant hitch to the front bumper. I joined my two longest lengths of rope together, 465 feet combined (that’s a bit more than one and a half football fields), with a figure-eight knot and made sure I hadn’t somehow inadvertently tied a knot I didn’t need in the middle of one of my lines. I glanced one last time to the west, where any bad weather was likely to come from, but the sky was a cloudless blue. I set my camera up on my ATV to make a video of myself as I threw my line over the edge and into the canyon. When I watch this video, I can count off almost twenty seconds before I see the camera suddenly shake, indicating that the line had jerked taut as it reached the end.

I gulped involuntarily.

I wrapped the heavy canvas edge guard around my line and then donned and attached my harness rig, which I’d set up the night before, clipping on in front of the edge guard, which I would slide down the rope behind me to make sure it positioned properly. The last thing I did, before putting on my climbing gloves, was don my backpack containing the rest of my gear with the dog crate clipped to the backpack where it would be out of the way.

I began my descent, walking backward down a slope that got steeper and steeper until, perhaps thirty or forty feet from my ATV, I reached the place where my line angled sharply down. I set my edge guard and was thankful I had it.

I fed line through my figure eight slowly and worked methodically, careful not to overheat my line or my braking glove. At the ledge, halfway down, I paused to gather my thoughts and again, as I had the day before, passed my joining knot through my figure eight. Before continuing my descent, I remembered to take up the slack above me. A rope with a lot of stretch is called “dynamic,” and a rope with no or little stretch is called “static.” I was using a static rope, but I still had over 150 feet above me that I’d released from gravity when I stopped on the ledge, which meant it had considerable slack in it. An inexperienced climber can forget about that slack, resume a descent, and take a very sudden and unexpected, if brief, plunge.

I was grateful that I was not an inexperienced climber, and then something odd occurred to me. It was an idea I hadn’t quite been able to put my finger on before, but it seemed as if everything in my life had both led me to this point and prepared me for it. It seemed strange and grandiose to consider, but it felt like I was meant to do this, and that nobody else would have responded to the situation the way I did. Nobody else would have been as prepared or as ready, because somehow, now, all my suffering had a meaning, or a purpose. I was fighting back, even though the demons I was battling were years behind me.

It’s seventh grade, still early in the school year, but I now know that nothing is going to change, certainly not for the better, and probably for the worse. But I’ve been carrying this weight with me for a long time all by myself, without talking to anybody about it. That is often what bullied kids do. They feel completely embarrassed to admit what’s happening to them. One day, feeling like nothing is going to change, I make the mistake of telling my mother how I’m being picked on. It has occurred to me that she should have noticed by now that something is wrong, but she has never been that attentive or engaged.

Her response is to make me feel like it’s my fault.

“Why do they pick on you?” she asks me. “Why don’t you just make friends?”

Gosh
, I think.
Why didn’t I think of that?

To her credit, rather than ignore it, she feels she has to do something about it, but it feels like it’s mostly because of how it looks to the neighbors. She decides to walk me to school one day, which only adds a new layer of humiliation. As I feared it would, now in addition to being pathetic and an easy target, I am also seen as a baby who has gone crying to his mommy.

Being bullied devalues you as a person in a subtle but pernicious way, because not only do other people identify you as an easy target, but you start to identify yourself as such. My mother’s reaction to the news makes me feel like she’s disappointed in me. As we walk to school, all I can think is that I am
that
kid, the one no parent wants. We go in the back door to avoid the mass of kids hanging out front before school. We meet with the principal, and as expected, nothing of significance happens. I hear a few platitudes about how my teachers will be told to be more vigilant. The truth is, faculty members are seldom in a position to help a bullied child. Bullies are smart enough to know when and where to pick on their targets. Bullies are adept at knowing how not to get caught. This is simply my reality. This is why I don’t bother talking to adults about my situation.

After that, when my mother asks me how things are going, I lie and say everything is okay because I am hoping to salvage what little pride I have left.

Only once does a teacher notice anything is wrong. I’m coming back from lunch one day when my homeroom teacher sees me and asks me what was going on. Mrs. Kulba is, in a way, the quintessential junior high school teacher, with horn-rimmed eyeglasses and colorful sweaters, in her late fifties and a bit heavy, with an unshakably even temperament, the kind that only comes from years of dealing with kids. I tell her I’m getting picked on, and that it’s bad, and that I’m afraid. She tells me a story she thinks will cheer me up.

“It’s about a girl I knew. She can laugh about it now,” my homeroom teacher confides, “but a few years ago, there was a girl who was being picked on by some of the other girls, and she fought back pretty hard and actually hurt one of the girls who was picking on her. And the teachers saw it, but somehow, when we were asked, none of us remembered what we saw, if you know what I mean.”

But telling a scared kid “fight back” is a meaningless thing to say. What she’s saying is, “I’m not going to help you—you’re on your own.” All I can think is that fighting is dangerous. Confrontation is the last thing I want. I think, “Why should I have to fight? Why should I have to? Other kids didn’t have to—why should I? Why me?”

My feet hit the ground with a thud. I could feel the air getting cooler and cooler the deeper I went, and here at the bottom in the early morning, the temperature was at least ten degrees lower than at the top. As I unclipped from my rope, I was once again overcome by the fear that I was too late and the dog had died in the night. The concept of “fighting back” took on a new meaning, because now it meant fighting against time or fighting to simply survive another day—fighting the urge to just give up.

I didn’t exactly tiptoe to the lip of the pothole, but I moved furtively, as though I could lessen the impact of any potential bad news by sneaking up on it. As I descended, I realized the coolness might have been a good thing. In the winter, the dog at the bottom of the hole might have frozen to death, but in the summer, an animal exposed to the hot sun in the heat of day without food or water would not have lasted long. Too hot would have been as bad as too cold, but here, three hundred feet below the surface in June, conditions for survival were almost optimal. When I peeked over the lip of the pothole, I saw the black shape of the dog on the blue towel, where I’d left him, but it appeared that the food and water I’d left him had been partially consumed, and none of the small Styrofoam bowls had been knocked over.

I whistled.

Nothing.

“Hey,” I said in a voice loud enough to be heard but soft enough not to startle. I watched, waiting for a response. This wasn’t good.

Then I saw one of his ears twitch.

Now it was a race against time, but I had to maintain situational awareness, when a mistake could still be fatal to both of us. I reset a hand line to take me down into the hole, using the same bolt I’d rigged yesterday, before donning my backpack, the crate still attached, and then I lowered myself into the pothole. I took my backpack off when I reached the bottom and knelt beside the dog.

“Hey buddy,” I said as I laid my hand on his side. “I told you I’d be back.”

He didn’t open his eyes, but I could feel his lungs expanding, just barely, as he breathed. I thought of those scenes in the movies where someone is hurt and some doctor says, “It’s too dangerous to move him.” The dog and I didn’t have a choice.

Closer now, I could see that he’d managed to eat more of the vile canned goop I’d left for him, and he’d drunk some of the water. I couldn’t see any vomit on the ground beside him, so I assumed he’d kept down whatever he’d eaten. The ember of life inside him was still glowing, if only faintly.

“We’ll get you some more food and water once we get you out of here,” I said, picking up the bowls and placing them in a trash bag I’d brought with me.