Meeting the Boulder 19 comments

By Sara Zarr

As soon as I settled into my theater seat to watch 127 Hours, I felt uneasy. Why had I decided to spend the next ninety minutes of my afternoon watching what I knew would be a story of one person, virtually alone, in a desperate struggle for life?

It's not like I didn't know how it would end. (If you don't, you may wish to stop reading this post here.)

The real-life story on which Danny Boyle's film is based took place here in Utah; Aron Ralston, the movie's hero and, arguably, villain, is a local figure in my world. I've been hearing his story told and retold, and have heard all the opinions about it, since it happened in 2003.

I guess that's why I wanted to see the movie, despite the signs posted on the theater door stating that NO REFUNDS would be given to moviegoers who were made physically ill by the sight of James Franco as Ralston cutting off his own arm. The story is part of my personal history, however peripherally.

On screen and in real life, it's a pretty simple story: Ralston goes solo-canyoneering, without telling anyone what he's up to. In a fall, a boulder comes loose and pins him in a slot canyon by the forearm.

As soon as the movie became totally about Ralston and the boulder, I felt pinned along with him—more than a little uncomfortable, and nervous about how I'd fare through the remaining hour. I considered walking out. Maybe I would have felt that palpably trapped any time I saw the movie, but on this particular day there was a heavy weight on me, too.

Two years ago, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. The news had been a shock, as sudden and violent as a landslide. I was only thirty-eight and felt alive and in good health and excited to enter my forties. I don't care how common the disease is or what people think about what causes it or how “easy” it is to manage—for those of us who get the diagnosis, it feels like a life-ender.

It's the end of life as we know it, anyway.

For me, it also felt like a punishment. A see this is what you get situation I'd somehow caused, though I now understand that despite what the media might have you believe it's indescribably more complicated than eating too many cookies and being a couch potato. At the time, it felt like a shameful, crushing reality I'd never be able to escape.

But I dealt with it, all of it, the emotional complications and the practical changes and the fear and the facing of mortality. I went into problem-solving mode, as Ralston did, laying out tools and taking inventory of my knowledge and whispering: Okay. Okay. This is my new reality.

Because it's such a daily disease, diabetes has become my metaphor for everything. And there are plenty of other see this is what you get situations in my life, relationally and spiritually, things that caused pain for me and/or for others.

The thought of them brings shame and regret, and also confusion. Was that my fault? Was it not my fault? Was it anyone's? Was that consequence a punishment, or simply an outcome?

Sometimes, when something as simple as a high number on my glucose meter sends me into a downward spiral over diabetes, it's as though a closet door within has been opened, and out tumble the memories and regrets of every self- or other-destructive thing I've ever done.

The day I saw 127 Hours was one of those days. I'd cried through breakfast, my shower, and getting dressed, enduring wave after wave of despair as I recited a list of charges against myself and knew in my gut there was no mercy for me, no hope, no life.

It's amazing how easily you can forget about grace. How certain you can become that God is so over you.

As I witnessed Ralston's battle with the boulder that he's certain has been waiting for him since the dawn of time, I had the palpable sense that in nearly every moment in the film, he's within a hair's breadth of death. And at every moment he is just as close to life.

That felt familiar. Diabetes makes it concrete, but it's not really the issue. We'll all die of something, physically. Meanwhile, there's an offer extended to me every day, every moment. Life, or not life.

Ralston has been criticized for everything he did wrong that day he met the boulder, for getting himself into that situation, for being reckless. Maybe all of that is true. Yet just a couple hours past my crying-in-the-shower episode, I felt this question in my cells: No matter what dead-end-seeming I am utterly screwed circumstances—spiritually, relationally, physically—you get into, by your own fault or not, what are you going to do now?

Take life, or give over to hopelessness?

Would I break my own bones, I wondered, cut through my own flesh, tendons, muscle, nerves? Maybe not literally. But struggling for life in the spiritual realm, against death, is not pretty, either. Nor is it painless, even in the presence of grace, even if the thing you're cutting off has long since stopped receiving blood and oxygen.

I don't generally think of myself as a courageous person; still, I recognized myself in Ralston. I want life. I will go far for it. I will sever what needs severing. I knew it when I got my diagnosis, and I know it when self-condemnation would threaten to bury me. Though it often hurts to get there, I always come back to the offer of life. I always take it in the end.

And, the warning on the theater door notwithstanding, when the surgery began I didn't look away.