While You Were Cutting Your Arm Off- An Essay

[layton]

“While you were cutting your arm off”

Or

“How I Spent Spring Break”

 

by:

Mike Layton

 

“Well at least you didn’t have to cut your arm off!” That’s the phrase I had come to expect people to say as I was about to wheel away in my chair. I had just told them how I became bound to my metal and pleather coach. That’s what search and rescue (SAR) had to say when they found me just a few yards from the car, “well…at least you didn’t have to cut your arm off!” That’s what the paramedics said as we drove away in the ambulance. The E.R. docs, the nurses, the x-ray techs, the surgeon, my climbing partners and friends, my girlfriend at the time, my mom, my dad, even the girls behind counters at restaurants, bars, and coffee shops…all would predictably, automatically utter those exact same words. They became nails across the chalkboard. I would mouth the words along with them, “well…at least you didn’t have to cut your arm off!”

For those unfamiliar with the story, Aron Ralston had to cut his arm off which was pinned beneath a boulder in the Utah desert in order to escape with his life. Pretty impressive feat. I mean it. I’ve cut off a man’s arm before, and boy it ain’t easy. There’s skin, meat, connective tissue, and bone. It’s hard enough with a razor-sharp scalpel and the arm of a cadaver. Take away the scalpel and add a dull knife, immense pain, blood – lots of blood, and forget the brittle bone. It’d be like cutting through a green bough of a fibrous sapling. You’ve got yourself quite a project to addend to there!

My project was a one pitch climb called “The Fox” in Red Rock, Nevada – just outside Las Vegas. This is where I had my own “epic”. I knew it was an epic since I had just lived through one just a couple months earlier. This all happened during the late winter / early spring of 2003. I was living in Bellingham, WA and Las Vegas, NV….

 

February, 2003 Big Four Mountain: Spindrift Couloir. North Cascades, Washington. “Sun’s goin’ down,” I thought to myself. Happens every day. This particular day, however, I was hanging off a shaky picket buried in sugar snow 4000’ up one of the biggest ice faces in the lower 48. This was the magic one day a year that aspiring alpinists of the Pacific Northwest could climb something monstrous.

Matt, a partner I had met a few nights before at the local YMCA, was currently trying to tunnel through the summit cornice at the rate of about 3 feet an hour. Several hours had passed.

 

 

 

It’s quite an experience topping out from inside a mountain. I took photos that would appear on the evening news a couple days later. (Hours later during our ill-fated descent we would unknowingly have our 15 minutes of fame. Three hundred miles away, my girlfriend’s dad would turn the T.V. to view his nightly news. He would hear that his daughter’s boyfriend had died in an avalanche. Motorists in four states and two Canadian provinces would shake their heads as their radios told them of my death. I didn’t know we were dead, but if I did, I would’ve thought that being dead was sure a hell of a lot of work.)

 

 

 

Matt and I screwed up the descent due to weak headlamps and a sneaky trick of geography. By the time we got back to the car, we had been climbing around forty-five hours, hiking over 25 miles, and summiting the mountain twice. The second time we summited was in the intense heat of the day, wallowing like hippos in a sea of slop.

That night of the descent we were rappelling off log jams into a series of many steep slick-walled canyons and getting totally soaking wet. We tried to sleep at one point, but with no bivy gear we just sat and shivered. I hallucinated a blanket at one point, but we finally got moving after about two hours of waiting for the sun to come up. We had to re-climb the series of canyons later on our way back. If those canyons were part of the climb, the route would be considered a futuristic mixed climb. Unfortunately, this was just another shitty descent in the North Cascades.

Matt and I came to a three mile wide basin below the south face of the mountain. We had descended the wrong side. It didn’t seem possible! We tried to climb a pass to the west, but found ourselves clawing at steep slabs covered in powder snow. It was time for a pow-wow.

 

 

 

We had been running off a ½ a pemmican bar each since the night before, but had plenty of water. It was 10 a.m. The sun was about to fry the 3000 foot 40 degree slope of the south face of the mountain interspersed with vertical sections of liquefying ice. Our hearts sank as we saw that we had about four horrifying canyons to re-climb, two miles of heavy bushwacking, and three thousand feet of liquid snow and ice to climb. The only way out was the way we came down. The other way was thirty miles of valley bottom to a maze-like series of logging roads. SAR already had a team on horseback looking for us on those roads. We were fucked.

Matt hit the wall as we started up the mountain again. I swam ahead and broke trail to the summit ridge during five hours of intense tool swinging, boot kicking, root grabbing, sugar snow stemming, and dolphin flopping. I have not clue how Matt followed after I destroyed what was left of the melting ice steps. We had clawed at the steep canyon walls with crampons and ice axes, looking for dirt or roots to swing at or grab all the while getting re-soaked.

 

I forgot to mention that since 7 am that morning, we had four helicopters buzzing back and forth across the sky. I took us awhile to realize they were looking for us. We weren’t even a day late, and someone had started a rescue! Sometimes they hovered so close that we couldn’t shout to each other. Most of the time they were background noise since we realized that they could not see us. We were glad because we did not want, or need to be rescued.

It was a police and media circus at the trailhead parking lot. Two rock and roll band sized tour busses were being utilized as police and SAR support. There were two news choppers and two SAR choppers. The whole Mountain Loop Highway was shut down. There was even a hot sandwich wagon that was dispensing chili and steak sandwiches! I found that a bunch of my friends had packed their bags and were ready to risk themselves on a serious mountain to help find me (although SAR and the police wouldn’t let them).

When the police got my statement, they asked if Matt and I spooned together to stay warm when we waited those two long hours for the sun to come up. I told the police officer, “hell no,” to which he replied, “that’s a good boy.” I immediately lost two big toenails and my voice.

 

May 2003. Red Rocks: Las Vegas, NV

“This isn’t going to be good for my relationship,”

I thought in the Las Vegas hospital emergency room. I decided that I was sick of rain, and being unemployed after the Spindrift Couloir epic on Big Four Mountain, so I moved to Las Vegas to climb long routes and work in the rock gym.

And I did just that. I said, “I’ll be back in a couple months” to my girlfriend, The Saint, and kissed her goodbye on the cheek. She had a cold that would erupt into full-blown pneumonia just after I left. She would be bed-ridden alone for a month while I climbed like a serial killer – crossing my tick list victims off in a drooling, maniacal fever. Then I’d boulder at the rock gym while I “worked” at night.

Then one day I had no partner and I didn’t have to work. I decided to top-rope solo a climb called “The Fox.” It was a cold grey weekday and nobody was around. I did laps up and down the fingers to hands to offwidth crack. Then I messed up by deciding to rappel off.

 

 

Doubled up, the rope didn’t reach, so having just top-roped the bejesus out of it, I decided to downclimb the last thirty feet while pulling the rope. Next thing I knew, I was powerless and falling. A hold must have broken off. I was angry that I couldn’t stop the free fall. I was scared because THIS was going to hurt! I was going to die. Then, WHAM!

The act of falling to the ground doesn’t feel like a regular fall. There’s no ticklish weightlessness and rush. The ground seems angry. It appears to be rushing up to hit you with all its force. Gravity feels exaggerated. Something is pushing down on you and won’t let you up. It’s like being body slammed by both the wrestler and the floor. My back broke the fall. (I took a fifty-footer onto it three years ealier falling onto my back through a hidden moat during the Pacific Northwest’s record one hundred foot snow year. It didn’t break that time, and it didn’t break this time. I must have a strong back.)

 

 

The base of “The Fox” isn’t really the ground. It’s a ledge that a trail leads to above a cliff. I fell off that cliff next. Then I bounced down the talus into the cactuses. There was no pain free grace period. My feet were in total agony and I screamed. Someone yelled, “Are you okay?” from up canyon. I did NOT want to be rescued and I was in shock so I yelled back, “Yeah. I’m fine. Thanks!” This was a very bad idea. My feet started to throb and I had a quick debate: a.) keep my rock shoes on to keep down the swelling and not have to see what was underneath, or b.) take them off and try to get my tennis shoes on before it would be too hard to do so.

I crawled back up to the ledge below the climb and took off my rock shoes. I kept from fainting and puking when I saw that my right foot was oddly purple and the skin bulged strangely in new places. My left foot hurt, but it wasn’t swollen or misshapen…yet. Being a cheap bastard, I put as much into my pack as I could stand to carry (including two after-climb beers). I pulled and left the rope. My epic had just begun.

There is about five hundred feet of large boulder talus scrambling to the base of “The Fox” from the lower trail. I thought I could hop it on my left foot. I tried standing and howled in agony! My left foot was also broken. “Probably more broken now,” I thought. I tried lowering myself off the boulders, but any pressure at all on my feet was unbearable.

There was now one option left for me. Water runoff from the hillside and cliffs had worn a groove-like gully through the sandstone. The problem was that where water goes in the desert, cactuses will follow. The gully was choked with them. I began to crawl. Each plant delivered a different kind of pain. I’d usually be able to avoid most of each cactus. I’d just get my ankle, or my forearm, or maybe my belly next. The worst were the creosote bushes. They greedily clogged the whole gully, so I had to just force my way through like a cactus car wash. There is just no give to the bushes in the desert. No soft parts or flexible stems like Cascade plants. They are 100% made for pain.

I escaped into the flat valley bottom covered in blood. I sat down on my pack and cracked a well deserved beer. Ahead of me was a long stretch of flat trail made of sharp, hard sandstone. I could only crawl with my feet up in the air and on my elbows and knees for ten minutes at a time due to the searing, self-inflicted pain as the sharp rocky tail chewed me into hamburger.

I crawled for about 6 hours from the base of “The Fox” to within spitting distance of The General, my truck. I had planned on driving with my heels and trecking poles to the hospital. My house was across the street from the hospital and it was only a few miles away! I could make it.

 

Then the helicopter came. A hiker had spotted me and called 911. Then the cowboys came: SAR They waved off the chopper and wouldn’t let me carry out my daring getaway. Instead they backboarded me. I told them to get me some poles and I’d hop to the ambulance on my heels. They refused, and I got strapped in tight and got the c-collar. They did not pad the backboard. This would become important to me later on.

The S.A.R. cowboys asked me what happened, and “at least you didn’t have to cut your arm off,” was uttered to me for the 1st time. They had to explain to me that this same day Aron Ralston had been found. The ambulance paramedic put an I.V. into my arm and hung up the I.V. bag. I get squeamish with needles, and I always envision someone accidentally tripping on the I.V. hose and ripping the needle out. My fears came true. The paramedic hung the bag on the opposite side of the ambulance from where I lay. Before I could shout, “STOP!” he turned around and walked right into the tube. It was as awful as I had imagined. The needle tore open my arm a bit before it broke off and spurted blood. I got a “sorry” and a bandage.

 

 

We drove past the hospital next to my house and proceeded to one about an hour away for some reason. The farther away hospital radioed the ambulance as we approached that I was to go back to the one near my house. They were full. The paramedics wheeled me in on a stretcher anyway, still strapped tight to the backboard, into a side hallway of the hospital to rot. I soon had to pee and a nurse tipped me sideways on my backboard. I made a total mess. Now, covered in dried blood and dried urine, the backboard started to really hurt. My feet had not yet received any ice or pain killers.

Three hours went by before I started yelling. My hips, heels, and back of my head were bruising badly from the tight backboard. I had been strapped without padding for five hours now. It hurt so bad I forgot that both feet were broken and half my skin was shredded off and stuck with cactus needles.

A doctor who was leaving for home passed me by and heard my moans. “Jesus Christ! How long have you been strapped there?” He quickly cleared my spine for injury and released the straps. Thank you.

I was finally put in a bed…to wait four more hours (where I enjoyed my last beer). My feet were throbbing balloons, tie-dyed with bruising by now. Finally, a nurse came in and grabbed my toes. He pulled hard and quick to set the bones. I have never screamed so loud or felt such pain in my life. Around 2 a.m. I was told my feet needed surgery and were now too swollen to operate. “Maybe if you gave me some goddamned ice and some pain-killers they wouldn’t be so fucking swollen!” I screamed to myself. The hospital had also neglected to clean or dress my many wounds which would later become a full-body scab. I was told that all the metatarsals on my right foot had shattered, and I had broken three metatarsals on my left foot when they sent me home. My friend Jason took me to his house and carried me like a sack of potatoes up his stairs.

So I got to sit and watch my feet slowly deflate over the next two weeks. My roommate Mark showed me how to get around, as he had recently broken many bones, including his feet. I was pretty lucky to have him around to help.

 

So I got the surgery and had pins and screws put in my feet. I found the hard way that pins actually protrude from inside your bone to outside the skin! It is absolutely disgusting and it gave me the creeps every time I took my bandages off. I should mention that even though my surgery went fine, I checked myself out of the hospital minutes after waking up. There was much protest from the hospital staff.

 

 

When I got home from surgery I was once again carried up the stairs and tossed in my bed. I lay on the bed, spinning with a anesthetic hangover and had to puke after filling my piss bottle. I frantically looked around for a vomit receptacle within reach of the bed. I couldn’t just run to the bathroom! There was my cowboy boot at the base of the bed. I quickly grabbed it and filled it in a projectile mess. A few minutes went by and I HAD to piss again. My bottle was full, and I felt more puke coming on. My other boot was nowhere to be found!!! I slumped out of bed and slowly, on my belly, wormed my way down the hall to the bathroom, pushing my vomit filled boot and piss filled bottle with my forehead towards the bathroom. “This is the bottom,” I thought, “I’ve finally hit bottom.”

 

 

 

Through the help of my friends Matt, and Mark, I made it back to Bellingham. Matt and Mark decided to make a pit stop at Smith Rock State Park to go climbing on the way home. I had no right to protest. So they wheeled me into a grassy area that overlooks the park and plopped me down with my walkman and a bottle of Black Velvet. As I watched people climb a school bus of children unloaded into the grassy field. They swarmed around me as they played games and yelled. I grumbled and looked sketchy. I wore a straw hat over my unkempt hair and scraggly beard. I couldn’t reach the sink to shave. I had bike gloves on to keep from blistering while pushing the wheels. I looked like a drunken bum (which I was) as I drank my whisky.

When I finally got home to Bellingham, my girlfriend, The Saint, was actually glad to see me. I learned how challenging it is to be wheelchair bound. My friends had bets on how long it would to take for me to actually go insane. My ridiculously tiny studio apartment I shared with my girlfriend lay above a coffee shop and had thirty-eight grueling stairs to crawl up and down. I would lock the chair to the bike rack out front. Even the homeless guys would get a chuckle when they saw me lock up my chair like a bike, wrestle the security door open, and then crawl up the stairs after an afternoon wheelchair “hike” around town or through a park.

I would find trails I could wheel, and after the pins came out, trails I could crutch. I slept, smoked cigarettes, and drank a lot during that time. My pain killers only lasted a few weeks, and I couldn’t get an appointment with my Bellingham doctor to get a new prescription. Somehow I managed to keep it together during the most miserable two months of my life. Sometimes I would stay up all night reading so I could sleep through the day and not have to see it daylight. The light just reminded me that people were out and about, having fun, and walking around. I could tell you at any time exactly how much time was left until my pins came out and I could start to walk again. The boredom and helplessness was more excruciating that then physical pain of my feet.

I guided Mt. Baker two weeks after the pins came out (they just take pliers and pull them out with no anesthetic). I was able to lead rock after about three weeks, and was soon putting up long run-out routes in the cascade backcountry. It did wonders for my climbing in the long-run!

So maybe if I had broken my feet before Aron Ralston had his accident, he would have heard, “well at least you didn’t have to crawl though the desert,” when he was found. Somehow I doubt that would have been the case. And now without any visible clues to my accident, and the faded memories of that guy who had to cut off his own arm to live, I miss hearing those familiar words. So Aron, this story is for you: to know that you had someone else out there, scared and alone, while you were cutting your arm off.

 

[layton]

So, I wrote this to publish it...but only Alpinist wanted it...in 500 words or less. So obviously, that's no good! I wanted to publish it here, but can't find the "publish" feature??

Can someone help.

 

I hope you enjoyed reading this. Some facts may be wrong by the way.

 

sorry if I clogged up the photo gallery by resubmitting some photos, but they need to be resized. my last photo disappead just a second ago, so i re-uploaded it for a total of 3...sorry.

 

p.s.

[Dru]

[layton]

oh yeah,

 

on the big four topo from Alan Kearney's book, the dark line isn't spindrift couloir...the penciled in line to the right is

[Bogen]

Awesome story! You are a tough SOB!

At least you didn't have to cut your arm off!

[ChrisT]

Yes - edit. Too many words. Take some classes from Uncle Tricky.

[catbirdseat]

Enjoyable? Okay, interesting. Thanks for posting it.

[Blake]

Great read! Worthy chestbeat, ignore dru.

[olyclimber]

There is definitely some editing you should do. There are whole sentences that don't add to the story that you could cut out. Also, keep track of the tense you are using, and be consistent (or at least keep tense the same within each narrative).

 

The best supporting pictures to your stories are: #1, #2, #3, (#3 or #4, but pick just one), the article, #7, #8, #9, #10 (this one is good), and maybe the next to last picture of your foot. Maybe choose those, and don't submit all of them?

 

I'm not sure if you where looking for criticism or not, but here it is. Nice start, interesting to read your story. Good luck on getting it published.

[Skeezix]

Yikes.

[treknclime]

Gonna have to read this one later...as it looks like it's worth the time.

 

Fairweather's gonna flip over this one.

[chucK]

Excellent story

Thanks Mike.

 

The publishing feature is probably broke or hidden due to the board "upgrade".

 

500 words? You'd certainly have to cut out a lot (but at least you wouldn't have to cut off your arm ).

 

I think if you focused more tightly and settled on a main point, you could get it into a tight 1000 word story. Regrettably you'd have to jettison a lot of the great anecdotes.

 

I urge you to work on honing it down. Make some tough cuts and resubmit. Maybe turn it into two, stand-alone stories?

 

Alpinist will be begging to publish it after you've become a well-known guide-book author!

 

[Alpinfox]

Good story Mike.

 

I'm glad to hear your recovery is going well.

 

[layton]

Hell yeah I'm bragging about those two points!!!

....but, you're right.

 

 

I wrote this story w/out any intention of publishing it...I just wrote it for fun. So I added whatever I wanted. Then I figured what the hell, I'll see if anyone wants to actually publish it and the answer is no, which honestly doesn't bother me.

 

Now on y'alls edititing criticisms, I really don't care. Isn't that what editors are for anyways?

And as for the photos...well since this is in cyberspace and not wasting ink, so I threw in all the photos...once again what editors are for.

 

I think folks misunderstood when I said how do you publish it on this site (which is what i asked) vs. actually publishing it. So unless you are a publisher and can get me published, save the editing tips! Folks are WAY too picky about what they read.

 

anyway, I'm glad folks enjoyed it or hated it!

[olyclimber]

So, I wrote this to publish it...but only Alpinist wanted it...in 500 words or less.

This lead me to believe you had wrote this for publication. I didn't know this part was fiction

 

Anyway, if you intend on getting published in anything other than an internet website, you're most likely going to need to improve your writing skillz. Otherwise, the editor is going to need to edit the story to such a point that it won't be yours anymore.

 

[layton]

Well, call me a moron! Ok, I was tired when I wrote that. I meant that I tried to publish it after writting it. Duh. You got me on that one!

[JayB]

 

Argh.

 

How about once every year or so we have an occaision when someone can actually post something where they are honest about what they were feeling and thinking without you reflexively whipping out the chestbeat card - Eh?

 

Mike - thanks for taking the time to post that stuff and share the stories. I sort of knew in a vague, offhand sort of way that both of those experiences had to suck - but I don't think that my imagination did them justice.

 

I especially liked the unwashed-surly-bearded guy amongst the schoolkids bit. I remember being in a similar state - except in this case I was just very sick rather than injured - after a few days out in the desert near Escalante Utah; dirty, bearded, and looking generally dishevelled while moaning to myself occaisionally, and in the process causing the migratory-mini-van set to look on in perplexed disgust while giving me a wide berth. On one level I was amused, but it didn't take long (like 1/2 hour) before the experience started to have a Stanford-Prison-Experimentesque feel to it - and I began to look forward to a shave, a shower, and a look that would not cause people to clutch their children and scuttle in the opposite direction...

[specialed]

 

Fuck you Dru. Mike - your piece is more or less relatively brilliant.

 

-Pete

[AlpineK]

I think your writing needs some work, but I thought the subject matter was good. With some work it could be something worth reading in a mag.

[layton]

Thanks again.

I'm sure you guys and gals know how it goes...I took a lot of time writing that and know that it's a little rough. But for now i really don't care because I had fun writting it and reading it too (even though I wrote it). So i'm not particularly pysched to edit it, or re-write it any time very soon. I have a slideshow, my t-shirts, and a guidebook to work on, on top of climbing, school, and a relationship (kinda).

 

So I am chestbeating cuz I earned it!!!!

I get put down all the time (mostly in jest!) and I put myself down all the time (even more -and I try to have that come across in all my SPRAY) so this time I'm not going to stand down because this came from the heart, and I PAID for the actions of this story more than you could imagine! My family thinks I'm hell-bent on dying young, and I lost the love of my life (the Saint) because of my selfishness. I have deformity in one of my feet that causes great pain after wearing any type of footwear for more than a couple hours. I can finally go trail-running for long distances, but I get achy pains for days later. And I still have major unpaid medical bills that I just hired an attorney to help me with b/c my credit is now ruined. Plus I had to live off my credit card for 6 months b/c I couldn't work so I've got huge financial debt too!

[specialed]

But its all OK because Jesus loves you.

[Bogen]

You should make a "While you were cutting your arm off..." T-shirt. You could put an xray of your broken feet or something!

 

Edited February 5, 2005 by Bogen

[mike1]

Michael ,

I enjoyed reading your essay - thanks for sharing.

Mike

[Dru]

Where did you put "broke feet" and "rescue called on Big Four" on your climbing resume spreadsheet? In the accomplishments section how do you grade breaking feet - maybe Grade IV/TD-? Have you gotten any sponsorship offers from orthotics companies yet?

 

Since you already described both of these incidents in detailed trip reports on the website when they happened last year, and all your pictures in this essay are also on the website, couldn't you have just gone Link One and Link Two and then filled in the extra details that weren't in those two trip reports, namely that you pissed yourself while tied to a backboard and that your then-girlfriend left you?

 

If the answer to the last question is "No", is posting second TRs for things that have already happened going to be an annual event? Maybe you can rewrite this and post it again in 2006?

[jordop]

Jesus Dru, you get dumped on the Holodeck again or something? Combining and synthesizing a pretty shitty year (with oddly enough, some funny moments) into one piece was pretty cool and you are just fucking bitter that the only camera crew that tracked you down was after you won the Chilliwack Dungeons and Dragons Marathon

 

And Mike, "The Saint"? don't you think you're romanticizing and revising the past, when you weren't so poor and had working feet. Try to remember the other reasons why you left for Vegas