Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself (8 page)

I worked through the process in the order of events sequentially. First, I would need to make sure my anchor was secure. I’d proven I could use my ATV as an anchor, and the dog and crate would not add substantially to the load on the line.

I was more concerned about abrasion. A tensioned line is easier to cut through than an unloaded one. As the rope passed over the edge of the canyon, it would take a near ninety-degree downward turn, making it the most likely spot for failure. I would also be on the rope longer than I was the first time I’d dropped in, and working my way back up the rope was not going to be quick or easy. The additional time meant the rope would have that much longer to abrade at the fail point. Fortunately, I’d brought an edge guard with me, an eighteen-inch-long piece of heavy fire hose that could be folded over the rope lengthwise and secured to itself with Velcro. If I could get it to stay in place at the edge of the cliff, I thought, I should be fine.

I continued going down my list. I checked my harness for wear. I clipped onto it more carabiners than I’d probably need, but I’d be bringing in and out extra gear and wanted to overcompensate. I checked my descender. I added my heavy leather gloves, because the extra weight was going to generate extra heat, and given the length of the drop, I wanted as much protection from the heat as possible. I’ve seen pictures of climbers who ripped the skin off their hands because their gloves weren’t equal to the task.

I added my ascending kit to the pile—the most critical piece of equipment I had. An ascender is an aluminum or steel device that locks onto the rope, with a cam inside that allows the rope to pass in one direction as you move up the rope, but prevents the rope from moving in the opposite direction. When climbing a free-hanging rope, you use two, one to hold your place while you move the other up the rope. Each ascender is attached to your harness, and to a sling your foot goes in, and then you step your way up. To someone who’s never done it, it looks like you’re doing most of your climbing with your legs, but it actually requires a fair amount of upper body strength. I once ascended a hundred-foot rope wearing a thirty-pound backpack and I was absolutely exhausted by the time I reached the top, mostly due to the extra load on my arms. My climb to rescue the dog would be more than twice as long, with more weight, and I had probably been in better shape then than I was now. That was why I was being as careful as I could, planning what I would take with me. Every ounce was going to count, because when you’re repeating an action three or four hundred times, it can add up. Bringing something I wouldn’t need would be almost as bad as forgetting something essential.

Last, I examined the dog carrier, though it was small enough that it was probably intended for cats. It was a lightweight plastic shell, held together with a few rivets, with a door at one end, held shut with a plastic handle on the top. That it was lightweight was a plus, but it seemed too fragile for the task. I couldn’t hold the crate in my hand as I climbed, so my plan was to tether it to my harness and let it dangle about three feet below me. It would, I was certain, bounce against the rocks, and possibly (hopefully not) get snagged or caught and require tugging to free it.

I had the solution in my gear, and pulled out a long strip of climber’s webbing, like seatbelt material, but an inch wide, and softer, with a tensile strength of about four thousand pounds. I basically wrapped the crate the way you would a Christmas package, then secured the vertical bands from slipping around the corners by knotting them with clove hitches to a piece of cord that girded the circumference. I could tie on with a carabiner where the straps intersected at the top of the package, where the bow and ribbons would go. The straps along the sides would prevent the door from accidentally opening, preventing a potentially disastrous moment.

For a tether, I would use an adjustable daisy chain, a length of webbing with a fixed loop at the end that clipped to my harness and an adjustable slide at the other, preceding a second loop I could use to clip to the crate. By adding or removing slack, I would be able to adjust the distance between myself and the crate, depending on the circumstances I found myself in. To ensure I would have as much freedom of movement as possible, I decided I would clip the tether to my harness at the rear, near the small of my back, leaving my legs free to work the ascenders or push away from the rock in front of me. Then it occurred to me that there was an overhanging ledge about a hundred feet up from the canyon floor. I had enough rope to attach a long tethering line to the crate, climb to the ledge, rest, attach a pulley to my main climbing rope with a Gibbs cam to grab the rope and serve as a dead man’s brake, just in case I were somehow forced to let go, and hoist the crate to the ledge with the pulley. Working with any rope system, and in particular when you’re climbing solo, in addition to double and triple-checking the mechanical elements, you have to take into account the possibility of unexpected human failure, such as a heart attack or a stroke. You have to plan for what you can’t plan for. If I dropped dead, for some reason, the Gibbs cam would save the dog from a fatal plummet.

I turned off the lights and lay on the bed with my eyes closed, mentally rehearsing what I would do in the morning, visualizing each step in the process to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. It was hard to stop thinking about it. I needed to be rested, but falling asleep was difficult. I wasn’t worried about whether I’d be able to do it, because I wasn’t allowing failure to be an option. I would be exhausted afterward, I thought, maybe more than I’d ever been before, but I would find a way to do it. I would summon the strength from somewhere.

But there are always surprises. The worst case scenario would be a sudden rainstorm, somewhere up-canyon in the catchment. I pictured myself in the pothole, on my knees, trying to get the dog into the crate but stopping at the sound of something growing louder, like the rumble of a train approaching, and then I’d turn to look up-canyon, where I’d see a wall of raging water about to crash down on me. I’d take a deep breath and grab hold of my rope, but the dog . . .

Or maybe the worst case scenario was something simpler, quieter. Something more likely. I would climb down into the canyon, and cross to where I left the dog, and kneel down, and put my hand on him, and feel something cold and lifeless. I would shine a light into his eyes, and maybe hold my eyeglasses in front of his nostrils to see if they fogged up, but they wouldn’t, and then I would know I was too late. That I should have acted sooner, should have found a crate and brought it with me when I brought the food and water in, should have . . .

I have lived my whole life with “should have”s and “could have”s and “would have”s. If I didn’t get the dog out, alive, it might be the biggest disappointment I’d ever feel, and I would have nobody to blame but myself. Michelle and everyone else would assure me that I did everything I could, but I’d know I didn’t. And I obsess over my failures. Lying in bed at the Motel 6, I understood that I was setting myself up for a colossal failure. Some people fail over and over again and seem completely oblivious to it. My mother, for instance.

Oh great,
I thought
Another happy thought to fall asleep to
.

I am eight years old, at home, in my room, in bed. It’s 2:30 in the morning when I hear a noise and awaken to realize the lights are on. The noise I hear is my mother cursing. I am a neat child who keeps a spotless room. When I’m finished with my Lincoln Logs, I put them back in the cardboard container they came in. When I’m done with my Matchbox cars, I put them back in the display case that holds them. My closet is next to my bed, and my mother is pulling boxes out of my closet, muttering, “That damn kid never puts things away properly.” Her language is more violent than that. She is removing neatly stacked boxes of my toys, only to put them right back where she found them. I close my eyes and pretend I’m still asleep. After fifteen minutes, she’s done rearranging my toys and leaves the room.

This happens perhaps five more times in the next few years.

I am too young to understand what it means when she spends an hour polishing the kitchen sink until there’s not a speck or watermark on it, while there’s dust and grime on the bathroom shelf thick enough to write your name in. I am too young to understand why she’ll scrub the kitchen stove, over and over again, while junk mail and collection notices pile up on the dining room table. Or why she’ll have panic attacks and be unable to move. Or why she would tell me to lie next to her on the floor and then she’d clean my ears with metal tweezers for forty-five minutes, digging so hard it made me cry. Or why she is always so late that I know I have to get a ride from someone else’s parents because if I wait for a ride from my mother, I won’t get to my soccer game until the second half.

All I know is that I can’t count on her. I can’t talk to her. I don’t want to be seen with her. I am on my own, because something is not right with her.

I
awoke before the alarm clock rang, but I usually do when I have something important on my calendar. I dressed, checked the television for the weather report—no rain was expected—and ran down to the lobby for the continental breakfast, which is how the hospitality industry tries to make cereal and toast sound more interesting than it really is. I was thinking of food only as fuel. I wondered if the dog had managed to eat any of the food I’d left him. I needed fuel to power my muscles, though in truth, I knew I could probably get down and up without eating anything, just on adrenaline. The dog needed fuel like a car with a tank so empty it was running on fumes. I saw the food I’d left him in terms of hours, or minutes. One bite would give him fifteen more minutes of life.

In my room, I checked my gear one more time and then packed up. It only then occurred to me that I didn’t have much of a plan beyond getting the dog out of the canyon. If I was staying in Page another night, I might want to keep the room, but I didn’t know if I was staying. My plan was only to get the dog to the animal hospital. Beyond that, I might want to explore a few other canyons I’d had my eye on.

At the same time, a kind of oppressive feeling had come over me, something I’d never felt before. I tried, at first, not to think about it, but it was hard to shake. It was something more than the occasional global pessimism I’d experienced from time to time. I had a new responsibility. A life was in my hands. As I carried my gear down to my truck, I felt a sense of purpose, a new meaning to the day, if not to my life, and I felt myself rising to the challenge in a way that quickened my step, but . . . I also felt the weight of something dark and heavy pressing me down. It wasn’t fear of failure, but more a kind of gloom when I thought about the dog and, more to the point, how he got there. My task was to undo a single wrong, but it was just one wrong, one little dog in a world full of dogs and canyons and people who derived pleasure from abusing those who were weaker than them. Maybe it was that my belief in justice had been shaken, because I knew I’d never know who’d put the dog in the hole—unless the dog had a subcutaneous chip that might let the vet identify the owner, a modern improvement on the traditional collar-tagging system. But I highly doubted the dog had been chipped; it just didn’t seem likely.

While I was still close to town and had cell-phone reception, I called Michelle.

“I’m heading out,” I told her. “If you don’t hear from me by six o’clock tonight, you can call the police and tell them where I am. I should be out way before that.”

“Be careful,” she said. “Do you have everything you need?”

“You didn’t seriously just ask me that, did you?”

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sure you were up half the night, planning everything.”

“Not quite half the night,” I said.

“I’m sure everything is going to be okay and that you’ve thought of everything, but I’m going to say it anyway—be careful. You have to take care of yourself just as much as you have to take care of the dog.”

“I will,” I said.

“Anything I can do from here?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “You can call the Page Animal Hospital and tell them I’ll be bringing in a malnourished puppy. I’m hoping I can be there around noon.”

“I will,” she said. “Love you.”

“Love you.”

I drove for an hour on a washboard gravel road, blasting the soundtrack from the movie
Gladiator
on the CD player in my truck to cut above the rumble and distract me from the anxiety I felt. It felt like the drive was taking forever, my agony accentuated by the corrugated road surface, but I found that if I sped up and took the road between fifty-five and sixty miles per hour, the jarring and the noise lessened.

According to what I knew about the biology of starvation, time was of the essence. Starvation works something like this: If you can compare a human (or a canine) body to a locomotive, it’s a machine that has to keep burning fuel to move forward and continue to exist. Normally, we eat food, it enters our stomachs, and it breaks down into various elements. Carbohydrates become blood glucose, which the muscles convert to glycogen for energy. The reason there’s a national obesity epidemic has much to do with how we evolved during an ancient time when we had to go long periods between feasting on wooly mammoths: we’d evolved to burn the things that gave the most energy first—sugars and proteins—and store the heavier fuels, meaning fat, for later. We evolved to endure a cycle of feasts and famines, but now, for most of us, we eat foods high in sugars, burn that, and store the fats for the famine that never comes. If there’s no new ingestion of food as fuel, the body consumes the fuel in the stomach in about twenty-four hours and then starts burning up fat reserves (lipolysis). When there’s no fat left to burn, the body starts burning muscle and organ tissue for fuel (proteolysis) to keep the engine going and the onboard computer, the brain and central nervous system, functioning to prevent everything from falling apart. Car by car, the train starts to consume itself.