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Aron Ralston Cut Off His Own Arm | The Philosophy of Living When Everything Says Die — Transcript

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0:00For 127 hours, no one on earth knew
0:03where he was.
0:04He was alone in a canyon in Utah. His
0:07right arm pinned by an 800-lb boulder.
0:10And he had told no one where he was
0:12going.
0:13On the sixth morning, he broke his own
0:15arm and cut it off.
0:18Then he walked out.
0:20His name was Aron Ralston.
0:22He was 27 years old, an experienced
0:24[music] mountaineer who had climbed some
0:26of the hardest peaks in Colorado.
0:28And he went into that canyon the way he
0:30went everywhere, alone, unbothered,
0:33certain he could handle whatever the
0:34desert threw at him.
0:36The desert threw him a boulder.
0:39This is the story of 127 hours in a
0:42canyon [music]
0:43that had no interest in whether he lived
0:44or died.
0:46And what it takes to choose to live
0:47anyway
0:48>> [music]
0:48>> when nothing in the universe is asking
0:50you to.
0:52Aron Ralston grew up in Ohio, moved to
0:55Colorado, studied mechanical engineering
0:57at Carnegie Mellon, [music] and spent 5
0:59years working for Intel before deciding
1:01the corporate world wasn't where he was
1:03meant to be.
1:04He quit.
1:05What he did instead was climb.
1:08He was working his way through every one
1:10of Colorado's 59 [music] peaks above
1:1214,000 ft.
1:14Alone, in winter.
1:16An undertaking so extreme that no one
1:17had ever completed it.
1:19He was methodical. He was skilled. And
1:22he was comfortable in places that
1:23frightened other people.
1:25He was also the kind of person who
1:26sometimes didn't tell anyone where he
1:28was going.
1:302 months earlier, that habit had nearly
1:32killed him.
1:33Skiing off trail in the Colorado back
1:35country, he and two friends triggered an
1:37avalanche on a day a severe avalanche
1:40warning had already been posted.
1:42Ralston was buried under more than 5 ft
1:44of snow.
1:46His head stayed clear, and his friends
1:48dug him out.
1:49He lived.
1:50The mountains had shown him, plainly,
1:52[music] how little the snow cared
1:54whether he walked away.
1:562 months later, he went to Utah anyway.
2:00Blue John Canyon was not a grand
2:02expedition.
2:03It was a weekend.
2:05An ordinary canyoneering trip, a warm-up
2:07by his standards, the kind of outing
2:09he'd done dozens of times.
2:12He drove out on a Friday night, slept in
2:14the bed of his truck, and the next
2:16morning biked 15 miles into the canyon's
2:18edge.
2:20He had enough water for a day,
2:22two burritos,
2:23a small multi-tool.
2:25He expected to be back by evening.
2:28He told no one where he was going.
2:31Blue John Canyon is a slot canyon, a
2:34narrow, winding corridor of sandstone
2:36carved by ancient water, in places
2:39barely wide enough to turn around in.
2:41The walls rise hundreds of feet on
2:43either side,
2:45and the sky above is a thin strip of
2:46blue [music] that doesn't do much for
2:48you when you're at the bottom.
2:50Ralston had been in canyons like this
2:51before.
2:53He knew how to move through them,
2:54carefully, reading the rock, testing
2:57handholds before committing to them.
2:59He was working his way down through a
3:01narrow section when he grabbed a large
3:03chockstone, a boulder wedged between the
3:05walls, to lower himself down.
3:09The boulder moved.
3:11In the seconds that followed,
3:12>> [music]
3:12>> the stone rolled, his left hand got
3:14caught and scraped free, and his right
3:16arm
3:18his right arm went with the boulder as
3:19it slammed into the wall.
3:22The rock stopped. [music]
3:24His arm did not come out.
3:27For the first few hours, he was calm.
3:30He was a mechanical engineer. He
3:32understood forces and leverage.
3:34He tried [music] to lift the boulder,
3:36800 lb of sandstone, immovable.
3:40He tried to chip at the canyon wall to
3:41create room.
3:43He tried rigging his climbing rope to
3:44create mechanical advantage.
3:47Nothing moved.
3:49By By the canyon was cold, and the arm
3:52had begun to hurt in ways that told him
3:54the injury was serious.
3:56He drank carefully from his water, ate
3:58half a burrito,
3:59>> [music]
3:59>> and ran the numbers.
4:01The numbers were not good.
4:04He had less than a liter of water.
4:06The next day came and he tried again.
4:09The rock, [music] the rope, the wall.
4:12He rationed what was left.
4:14By the third day, he was drinking
4:15sparingly, [music]
4:16trying not to move too much,
4:18and understanding something he hadn't
4:20wanted to understand.
4:22The boulder was not going to move.
4:26The arm was not coming free.
4:28No one was coming.
4:31On the fourth day, the water ran out.
4:34He began rationing what his body
4:36produced, [music]
4:37drinking his own urine to stay alive.
4:40He understood this wasn't a rescue story
4:41anymore.
4:43What he didn't know yet was that the
4:45surrender was the first step.
4:48He had to give up on living before he
4:49could find the way to live.
4:52He took out his video camera and
4:53recorded a message for his family.
4:57He said goodbye.
4:58Then he picked up his multi-tool and
5:00carved into the sandstone wall,
5:02his name,
5:03his birth date, October 27th, 1975,
5:08and beside it, [music] the date he
5:10expected to die,
5:12April 30th, 2003.
5:15He had done everything a person could
5:17do.
5:18He had stayed calm. He had been
5:20methodical.
5:21He had tried every angle the physics
5:23allowed,
5:24and none of it had mattered,
5:26because the canyon didn't know he was
5:27there, and the boulder didn't care
5:29whether he lived.
5:31He had been beaten not by a person or a
5:33system or a mistake,
5:35but by a rock.
5:37A random, shifting, 800-lb rock that had
5:40fallen at the wrong moment for no reason
5:42at all.
5:45On the fifth night,
5:46something happened that Ralston has
5:48never fully explained and has never
5:50stopped talking about.
5:52He had a vision.
5:54A small boy, 3 years old, maybe four,
5:57running across a sunny room.
5:59And in the vision, Ralston reached
6:01[music] down to pick him up.
6:03And the arm he reached with ended at the
6:05wrist.
6:06He didn't know who the boy was. He only
6:09knew, with a certainty he couldn't
6:10account for, that the boy was real.
6:13That the boy was coming. That there was
6:15a life on the other side of the canyon
6:17that needed [music] him in it.
6:19Whether you call that hope or
6:20hallucination or something else
6:22entirely,
6:23what it did was simple.
6:25It changed the question.
6:27He had spent five days asking, "How do I
6:29get the arm free?"
6:32He woke up on the sixth morning asking
6:33something different.
6:36He looked at his arm,
6:38pinned for 127 hours now, beginning to
6:41decompose, the tissue darkening where
6:43the blood had stopped moving.
6:45He understood something he had known for
6:47days but hadn't been willing to act on.
6:50He could not cut through bone with a
6:51dull blade.
6:53He had tried on the fourth day and
6:55stopped. [music]
6:56But he could break the bones.
6:58The boulder had already compromised
7:00them.
7:00If he could torque the arm against the
7:02rock,
7:03he tested the angle.
7:05Then he did it.
7:07He threw his weight against his own arm
7:09and felt both bones, the radius and the
7:12ulna, snap.
7:14What came next he did quickly, because
7:16the only way to do it was quickly. The
7:18tourniquet first, then the multi-tool,
7:21dull, small, never designed for this,
7:24cutting through what needed to be cut
7:26through.
7:28It took less than an hour.
7:30And then, for the first time in 127
7:33hours,
7:34he stepped away from the boulder.
7:38He still had to get out.
7:40The canyon required a 65-ft rappel down
7:43a sheer drop, one-handed, bleeding,
7:45dehydrated, running on nothing but the
7:47decision he had just made.
7:50He rigged the rope with one arm and went
7:52over the edge.
7:54He landed.
7:55He started walking.
7:577 miles through the Utah desert, losing
8:00blood with every step, until he came
8:02around a bend in the trail and found a
8:04family,
8:05a couple from the Netherlands hiking
8:07with their young son,
8:08who looked at him and immediately
8:10understood that something had happened
8:12that required them to move fast.
8:14They gave him food and water. They
8:16flagged down a search helicopter that
8:18had been looking for him.
8:19>> [music]
8:20>> His family had reported him missing.
8:23He had been in the canyon for 127 hours.
8:28The canyon did not trap him on purpose.
8:30>> [music]
8:30>> The boulder did not fall because of
8:32something he did or something the
8:34universe decided he deserved.
8:36It fell because boulders fall.
8:39Because the rock had been balanced in
8:40that crack for years,
8:42>> [music]
8:42>> and the moment he touched it happened to
8:43be the moment it let go.
8:46There was no reason. [music]
8:48This is what makes the story so hard to
8:50look at
8:51and so hard to look away from.
8:53>> [music]
8:53>> The randomness of it.
8:55The total indifference of the stone.
8:57The fact that it could have been anyone
8:59>> [music]
8:59>> and that it was him.
9:01And that the only thing that stood
9:02between being the person who died in
9:04that canyon and the person who walked
9:06out of it
9:06>> [music]
9:07>> was a decision made in the dark on the
9:09sixth morning for no reason the canyon
9:12would ever understand or care about.
9:15Albert Camus wrote about this.
9:17>> [music]
9:17>> Not about canyons, not about boulders,
9:20but about the condition underneath it.
9:22>> [music]
9:23>> He called it the absurd.
9:25The collision between a human being who
9:26wants meaning,
9:27>> [music]
9:28>> who needs reasons, who looks at the
9:29universe and asks why,
9:32and a universe that looks back and says
9:34nothing.
9:36He said the universe is not hostile.
9:38It is worse [music] than hostile.
9:40It is indifferent.
9:42And the question he asked, the one he
9:44said was the only serious philosophical
9:46question,
9:47was this.
9:49Given that, [music]
9:50why go on?
9:52His answer was not faith. It was not
9:54optimism. It was not the promise that
9:56things would work out.
9:58His answer was what he called revolt.
10:01The decision to live fully, to choose,
10:03[music] to act, to be exactly
10:06alive in spite of the fact that nothing
10:08is asking you to be.
10:10He wrote about a man named Sisyphus,
10:12condemned by the gods to roll a boulder
10:14up a mountain for eternity, watch it
10:16roll back down, and do it again.
10:19No progress. No end.
10:21No reason.
10:23Camus said we have to imagine Sisyphus
10:25happy.
10:26Not because the boulder stops. Not
10:28because the mountain ends.
10:30But because the act of pushing,
10:33the choice [music] made again and again
10:35to climb,
10:36is the only answer available to a person
10:39in an indifferent universe.
10:41And it is enough.
10:44Ralston woke on the sixth morning in an
10:46800-lb version of that choice.
10:48>> [music]
10:48>> The boulder didn't care. The canyon
10:50didn't care. The universe had nothing to
10:53say.
10:54And he broke his own arm and walked out
10:56anyway.
10:58The helicopter flew him to a hospital in
11:00Moab.
11:01He had amputated his arm roughly 4 hours
11:03earlier and lost a quarter of his blood.
11:06Surgeons finished what he had started in
11:08the canyon, cleaned the amputation, and
11:11saved the life he had decided that
11:12morning was worth saving.
11:15He recovered. [music]
11:16He learned to climb again with one arm
11:18and a prosthetic.
11:20Within 2 years, he became the first
11:21person to climb all of Colorado's
11:2314,000-ft peaks alone in winter,
11:27the project he'd been chasing before the
11:28canyon.
11:30He went back to Bluejohn, too, to the
11:31boulder in the wall with his name carved
11:33in it. And he said he felt no anger
11:36there,
11:36no bitterness toward the rock.
11:39The canyon was just a canyon.
11:41The boulder was just a boulder.
11:44And there was one more thing the canyon
11:46gave him that he didn't understand until
11:47later.
11:49The boy in the vision had been blonde,
11:51blue-eyed, about 3 years old.
11:54At the time, Ralston had no children.
11:57He wasn't even seeing anyone.
12:007 years after the canyon,
12:01>> [music]
12:02>> he met a woman named Jessica.
12:04They married.
12:05And in February 2010, their son was
12:07born, a blonde, blue-eyed boy.
12:11They named him Leo.
12:13Ralston believes Leo is the boy he saw
12:15that [music] night.
12:16The child who pulled him toward living
12:19on the morning he was certain he would
12:20die waiting on the other side of it.
12:23He has called it the most astonishing
12:24fact of his life.
12:26You can believe that or not.
12:29Ralston does.
12:30But the vision didn't lift the boulder.
12:33It didn't loosen the rock or dull the
12:34pain or make the next part any less
12:36unthinkable.
12:38What it did was give him a reason to
12:39reach for a life he couldn't yet see.
12:42And then he was the one who had to
12:43reach.
12:44When the universe offered him nothing,
12:47>> [music]
12:47>> he found something anyway.
12:49Not in the rock, not in the sky,
12:52in the decision itself.
12:55You will face a version of the canyon.
12:57Not this one. Not 800 lb of sandstone
13:00and a dull blade in the dark.
13:03But the moment when the situation offers
13:04you nothing,
13:06>> [music]
13:06>> when no one is watching, when the
13:08question of whether you go on is
13:09entirely and only yours.
13:13What you do in that moment is yours.
13:15It always was.
13:17The fire doesn't end here.

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