127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston Read Free Book Online Page B

the end. The goal is not to reach the tops of mountains, but to improve the man.
    —W ALTER B ONATTI , Italian climber

    I N A UGUST 1987, when I was twelve, my family was preparing to move to Colorado from Indianapolis, Indiana, to follow my dad’s career. While visiting with a friend of our family in rural eastern Ohio that July, I found an encyclopedic book about the fifty states and looked up my future home. At the time, I had never been over ten miles west of the Mississippi River in my life. Facing this imminent displacement to the West, I wanted to find out what was in store for me. I admit I was prejudiced—I had preconceived images of horseback riders, skiers, and so much snow that it covered the state year-round.
    What I found in the book not only reinforced those notions, it terrified me. There was a photo of Pikes Peak, the view from which inspired the song “America the Beautiful,” according to the caption. To my twelve-year-old eyes, the peak was so rugged that it seemed a caricature of ferocious nature. I didn’t know at the time that there are both a railway and a road to the top of the peak, ending in a parking area beside a restaurant and gift shop. At that point in my life, the great outdoors was a concept limited to the woods behind my house, the dirt-bike course over on the lot near my friend Chris Landis’s house, and Eagle Creek Reservoir on the outskirts of Indianapolis. In my world, the outdoors did not include mountains. And it especially did not include mountains fourteen thousand feet tall. Intimidated, I turned the page.
    I found people skiing down improbably steep slopes at life-threatening speeds. Though I’d taken my metal-runner Flyer all over the embankments, ditches, and streets of our Indianapolis subdivision, and even ridden a sizable hill in the neighborhood north of our house, I was always able to drag my feet behind me to brake. How do you stop on skis?
    I flipped the page again, and this last picture shook me to my core. It was a photo of people cross-country skiing the streets of Denver after a winter storm. There were no vehicles on the roads, just lanes of people on their skis. I slammed the book shut in horror. My imagination went to work completing the scenario. People don’t drive anywhere in Colorado, they just cross-country ski. To school, to work, to the grocery store, wherever they went, people travel only on skis, as in some Nordic wonderland. Even in the middle of the summer. To a kid who’d been born in Ohio and spent his formative years as a Hoosier, raised on the holy trinity of basketball, basketball, and Indy car racing, skiing, even on flat ground, was as foreign a concept as riding a camel.
    As I developed more of an idea of this place where my family was headed, I came to believe in Colorado as an entire state of skiers, the landscape striated with ski tracks, social groupings segregated by skiing ability. How would I ever fit in if I couldn’t ski? I cried to myself in bed every night for a week after I read that book. While sad that we were parting ways, my friends were excited for me to move to Colorado. They told me how much fun it would be to go skiing. They didn’t realize that was exactly what terrified me so much. Having noticed my red eyes and sniffles, my parents grew concerned at dinner one night. “It looks like you’ve been crying. What’s wrong?” my dad inquired.
    “I’m scared,” I lied. I wasn’t scared, I was absolutely terrorized by the notion of moving to Colorado.
    My dad tried to console me, saying, “I know moving is hard. We’re all leaving our friends behind. You know you’ll make new friends, right?”
    “Yeah. That’s not why I’m scared.”
    “Why are you scared?”
    Once I had explained about the book, my parents smiled, reassured me that it didn’t snow that much that I would have to ski to get to school, and got me in a better mood. We flew out for a visit before we moved, and aside from the nasty sunburn I