127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place Read Free Page B

smiles.
    “Oh, sorry. I was listening to my headphones, kind of wrapped up in my thoughts,” I explain. Returning the smile, I extend an introduction: “My name’s Aron.”
    They relax noticeably and share their names—they are Megan, the brunette who spoke to me and who seems to be the more outgoing one of the pair, and Kristi. Megan’s shoulder-length hair whirls attractively around her hazel eyes and rosy-cheeked face. She’s wearing a blue zip-neck long-sleeved shirt and blue track pants and carries a blue backpack—if I had to guess, I’d say she likes the color blue. Kristi’s blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail that reveals the sunny freckles on her forehead and her deep grayish-blue eyes. Besides her clothes—a plain white short-sleeved T-shirt with blue shorts over black long underwear—I notice that Kristi has accessorized for the day, wearing small silver hoop earrings and dark sunglasses with faux tortoiseshell frames and a snakeskin-pattern retaining strap. Unusual to have earrings on in a canyon, but I’m hardly dressed to kill, so I skip issuing a fashion citation. Both women are in their mid-twenties, and I learn in response to my first question that they both hail from Moab. I briefly work on memorizing their names, and which one is which, so I don’t goof it up later.
    Megan doesn’t seem to mind joining me in conversation. She fires off a story about how she and Kristi overshot the Granary Spring Trailhead and got lost in the desert for an hour before they found the start of the canyon. I say I think it is easier to navigate on a bike than in a vehicle because the landscape passes more slowly.
    “Oh my God, if we’d been on bikes, we’d have dried up in the wind before we got here,” Megan cracks, and it serves to break the ice.
    The canyon is still just a shallow arroyo—a dry sandy gulch—nestled between two sets of thirty-foot-tall sand dunes. Before the terrain becomes more technical, we ease into a friendly exchange, chatting about our lives in the polarized resort communities of Moab and Aspen. I learn that they, like me, work in the outdoor recreation industry. As logistics managers for Outward Bound, they outfit expeditions from the company’s supply warehouse in Moab. I tell them I’m a sales and shop worker at the Ute Mountaineer, an outdoor gear store in Aspen.
    There’s a mostly unspoken acknowledgment among the voluntarily impoverished dues-payers of our towns that it’s better to be fiscally poor yet rich in experience—living the dream—than to be traditionally wealthy but live separate from one’s passions. There is an undercurrent of attitude among the high-country proletariat that to buy one’s way back into the experience of resort life is a shameful scarlet letter. Better to be the penniless local than the affluent visitor. (But the locals depend on the visitors to survive, so the implied elitism is less than fair.) We understand our mutual membership on the same side of the equation.
    The same is true of our environmental sensibilities. We each hold Edward Abbey—combative conservationist; anti-development, anti-tourism, and anti-mining essayist; beer swiller; militant ecoterrorist; lover of the wilderness and women (preferably wilderness women, though those are unfortunately rare)—as a sage of environmentalism. Remembering an oddball quote of his, I say how he delighted in taking things to the extreme. “I think there was an essay where he wrote, ‘Of course, we’re all hypocrites. The only true act of an environmentalist would be to shoot himself in the head. Otherwise he’s still contaminating the place by his mere presence.’ That’s a paraphrase, but it’s effectively what he said.”
    “That’s kind of morbid,” Megan replies, putting on a face of sham guilt for not shooting herself.
    Moving on from Ed Abbey, we discover that we’re each experienced in slot canyoneering. Kristi asks me what my favorite slot canyon is, and without