There was once a Chattanooga man – I’ll call him Zero – whose life had fallen apart.
Living on the streets, he was forced to reduce his possessions to what he could carry in his overstuffed backpack. The zippers nearly bursting, the pack was estimated by some to weigh more than 70 pounds. Wherever Zero went, his pack was sure to follow.
It is interesting to consider: If you were forced onto the streets with only one bag, what belongings would you bring?
For Zero, the answer was simple. Buried beneath a thin layer of white socks and clean shirts was his treasure: dozens and dozens of books.
Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Shakespeare. His backpack was a portable library.
“I lost my home. I lost my family. I lost my job. I lost my dog, my car, all my belongings,” Zero once said. “But I will not lose my stories.
“They are all I have left.”
Stories can save our lives. For Zero, they were the last fabric left on a torn life. For many of us, stories are like medicine, working deep into parts of our soul and mind where other things can’t reach.
“Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive,” said the writer Barry Lopez.
The story of Aron Ralston is circulating through America these days. The subject of a best-selling book, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” and an Academy Award-nominated film, “127 Hours,” Ralston will be in town March 30 for the Red Cross Hometown Heroes luncheon, where he will talk about the day he lost his arm to save his life.
In the spring of 2003, Ralston found himself trapped in the Utah desert. Miles from anyone, Ralston was hours into a two-day trek and descending into a canyon – near Butch Cassidy’s old hideout – when an 800-pound boulder became dislodged and tumbled down onto his right arm.
It crushed his hand against the canyon wall. Even after rigging a pulley system out of climbing ropes, Ralston was unable to move the boulder the slightest inch.
Ralston suffered for five days. After eating his only meal (a burrito) and licking up the last of his water, he drank his own urine. Close to death and hallucinating, Ralston was visited by the image of a boy, whom he believed was his future, yet-to-be-born son. Seeing that loving face, Ralston found the strength to do the unthinkable.
Snapping in half his radius and then ulna, Ralston used a giveaway multitool to saw all the way through the flesh, tendons and nerves in his right arm and liberate himself from his canyon prison. A homemade tourniquet around his half-arm, Ralston then stumbled out into the desert in the direction of his parked truck (a stick shift). He was discovered by hikers who called for an emergency helicopter.
This story is our 21st-century myth. His desert accident – which Ralston now calls a blessing – likely will never happen to us, yet there is something within his story that mirrors our own. Ralston’s experience is the story of the human experience.
Perhaps we know what it feels like to be trapped by domestic violence, chemotherapy, unpaid bills, a harassing boss or a wound that won’t heal.
Perhaps the immovable boulders of suffering in our lives have pushed us to the point of death, and we are forced to drink the bitter cup.
Perhaps we’ve lost something closer to us than our own arm.
Perhaps we are stumbling in the dark night of our soul when one smiling face appears to guide us home.
Perhaps what was once a curse is now a blessing.
Ralston’s story is your story, mine and Zero’s.
And the best part: The desert didn’t last. Ralston found his way home.