Patterico's Pontifications

5/16/2010

The Lost Hiker’s Will to Live

Filed under: General — DRJ @ 9:29 pm



[Guest post by DRJ]

Last week I posted on a Houston woman who lost all her limbs to a ravaging infection but neither she nor her husband doubted her will to live. This week’s inspiring story details an Austin hiker and nature-lover’s will to survive after he became lost in the Big Bend:

Merritt Myers spent two days eating cactus and praying for rescue.
***
On the canyon floor, the 33-year-old Austinite walks to the far end, hoping to see the river. Instead he finds himself standing atop a sheer 70-foot cliff. He scrambles back to the ledge he’d just jumped from but finds the canyon walls too slick and steep to climb. His heart pounding, he searches the V-shaped canyon for an exit, a foothold, a less than deadly incline. He finds nothing. He screams in frustration. He is trapped.

Somehow, he thinks, he will have to keep himself alive in this rocky ravine.

Is this how it ends? he thinks. Will I ever see my wife again? Will I see anything again? My parents will worry so much about my last moments.

The thoughts tear through his body like a punch, leaving him doubled over and groaning.

He quickly banishes them. Crying means losing moisture, and he knows he’s got to conserve all he can. The sun is growing stronger. He spots a small opening in a stack of boulders and worms his way inside to escape the heat.

It’s Wednesday, April 7, just after noon. Myers knows that park rangers won’t come looking for him until Friday at the earliest.

Lost hikers have died in far less time in Big Bend.”

Myers lost 16 pounds in 2 days but he survived, thanks to his indomitable persistence and his mother’s long-ago lesson on how to get moisture from cactus. He also has a new perspective:

“He says he’s a much wiser, more cautious hiker now, with a stronger respect for the wilderness and its power. He advises other hikers to always bring more equipment and supplies than they think they’ll need.

“Never assume the itinerary that you have planned will go exactly according to plan,” he said. “And if you have a choice between two routes, when in doubt, take the sure route even if you know it’s longer. Don’t take a chance trying to find it on your own in the wilderness.”

Other lessons are less obvious. “I understand some things I couldn’t understand before,” he said. “When you experience near death and go through the process of letting go of your will, or of any plans you have, it’s a very freeing process. … It’s scary in the moment, but it sure is freeing and gives you a deeper and greater appreciation for everything at every moment.”

And something else became clear to him as he sat alone on the ravine. He had always gone to the wilderness to find his connection to higher forces, to replenish his spirit.

But trapped in the canyon, he imagined never seeing his wife again.

“That affected my perspective on needing to retreat to nature,” he said. “People, and love from people, come from God as well.”

— DRJ

14 Responses to “The Lost Hiker’s Will to Live”

  1. Good grief! How do you lose 16lbs in 2 days? Not comparing it to this story, but here in AZ we get a lot of, shall we say robust, mid-western visitors that decide to go on a big hike. Without so much as a bottle of water. It normally does not end well.

    gazzer (7c0559)

  2. I think it is easier to fight to live for others than for yourself. I’m not saying that from experience nor would I say I know it is true, but it occurs to me that if I was in a life-and death situation what would go through my mind would be living for my family.

    Years ago a friend related an experience rock/mountain climbing. He had “stretched” to get to the next foot-hold on the face of a cliff. Once there, he realized he could not go further. When he looked to go back, he wasn’t sure he could make that on the reverse. As he prayed and attempted “going back”, the person with him (from a distance to be of no help) literally turned their back to not watch, so sure he wasn’t going to make it.

    He said it was a great illustration that getting into trouble is easier than getting out of it.

    MD in Philly (ea3785)

  3. My dad got bit by a rattlesnake halfway through a climb we did in the Organ Mountains (near Las Cruces) – this was years ago, when my brother and I were still in middle school. My dad was leading, placing protection and whatnot; he decided that it would be safer to try to climb out then to try to rappel down. Over the course of that hike, my brother and I climbed a couple obstacles that I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have been able to climb without the motivation of… extenuating circumstances. It wasn’t pretty climbing, mind you, but we got out of there in a hurry, hiked back to the car, and drove to the hospital. My dad was there for a few days – no lasting harm, but the venom had spread all the way up his arm, into his armpit.

    It was a weird trip. I remember sitting in the hospital lobby on the first night watching TV with my brother – pro-wrestling. We were a little shell-shocked.

    Leviticus (30ac20)

  4. I swear, DRJ, I was afraid to read this post. I feared that the story was that he cut off his leg, cooked it and ate it, to survive.

    nk (db4a41)

  5. BTW, I have read (never tested it) that dried dates are the best survival food because they will provide you with enough hydration as well as nutrition and are easy to carry around. I have only read that it is so. I don’t know that it is so.

    nk (db4a41)

  6. Preparation is important but the most important is indeed attitude, will to live. A lot of people die in circumstances like these because of a lack of focus on the subject of survival and a lack of will.

    SPQR (26be8b)

  7. > He advises other hikers to always bring more equipment and supplies than they think they’ll need.

    Hardly new advice, yet so many continue to never hear it.

    IgotBupkis (79d71d)

  8. “He advises other hikers to always bring more equipment and supplies than they think they’ll need.” Like maybe a cell phone?

    ropelight (0433f3)

  9. SPQR is spot on. Will and resolve is usually the critical feature to survival. That, and not making Darwinian-stupid decisions.

    JD (b537f4)

  10. My daddy used to say, “Don’t go too near to the fire and you won’t get burned, don’t go too near to the edge and you won’t fall off the cliff”.

    I.e., don’t put yourself in danger.

    nk (db4a41)

  11. Dashiell Hammett put it this way: Most people don’t get killed, they get themselves killed.

    nk (db4a41)

  12. BTW, about Dashiell Hammett, I could not help admire a guy who wrote so tersely even though his publisher was paying him by the word.

    nk (db4a41)

  13. Eleven years ago, I was out on Utah’s west desert taking my 76 year old father to places I’d found interesting over the years. As we were heading north on the Painter Springs road towards a quarry where you can dig trilobites, the car threw up a rock and punctured the transmission pan bringing the car to a halt.

    We were on a section of the road that wasn’t traveled much, and we waited 24 hours to see if anyone would come. No one did. My father had medications he would need, and so I made the decision to walk out. The nearest highway was 14 miles away. I took some hostess apple pies, and a two liter bottle of water. Using a map I determined that the shortest way to go would involve a road on the map I hadn’t been on. I started out just after sunset so I wouldn’t have to deal with daytime heat. The problem was that the road I was going to take wasn’t the one I thought it was, it wasn’t short and it had a steep grade, but I couldn’t see that in the dark. Deciding that it was the wrong road, I turned around and went back to Painter Springs road and headed south. At the point I turned around though, I realized I was in trouble with dehydration and exhaustion due to the fact I started hallucinating. I thought that was cool since I’d never done drugs and had never seen them before and had always been curious what it was like. Medically speaking though, it wasn’t a good sign and it occurred to me that I might not make it. I kept thinking that I had to make it so my dad could be rescued, and kept plodding along. The hallucinations became more and more frequent until the only way I could get rid of them was averting my vision every half a second, and I finally gave up, and was content to get my bearings every five to ten minutes or so. Finally, I got to highway 6 and 50 just before the sun rose. With the daylight the hallucinations went away. Being a main highway didn’t mean getting rescued was going to be easy. To the east to Hinckley was 47 miles away and to the west the Nevada border was 33 miles away. Traffic on that highway is still sparse. My hitchhiking skills were poor, and 40 cars passed me by. One man in a truck stopped 50 yards away, went to the back of his truck and got a gun out, got back into his cab and invited me over. I asked him where he was going and he said Ely, Nevada, and I told him I was trying to get to Delta, Utah. I wasn’t thinking very well at that point and he left after letting me drain his canteen. As he was driving off I realized how stupid that was as what I really wanted was to go ANYWHERE that had a phone. It was now mid morning and it was starting to get hot (June 24, 1999) and I was very tired. So I laid down on the road, between the white line and the brush and covered my head with the plastic bag I was carrying the uneaten Hostess apple pies-I simply couldn’t eat them. I don’t know if I fell asleep or not, but the next thing I knew, a big RV pulled up on the other side of the road, so I got up to see if they’d give me a ride. They asked if I was ok, and I honestly answered “no”. They gave me a ride back to civilization.

    When I got to Delta, the county sheriff’s department took me back out and we got my dad. He’d thought I hadn’t made it out, and he was a little surprised when we showed up.

    Two weeks later I went back and measured the distance with the odometer at 27 miles. The place where I turned around to go back to the Painter Springs road was only a quarter mile from the main highway. I had the correct road, but couldn’t tell it in the dark. That cost me an extra 13 miles. It is also funny, that as bad and stiff as I felt, I realize that tens of thousands of people run that distance for fun in marathons around the country. As out of shape as I was, I wasn’t sure if I’d make the original 14 miles, so I count my blessings that I’m still here to tell the story. Never, never give up. My father survived for almost 11 years after that, so my investment paid off. He passed away this morning at 8:00 a.m. after suffering a broken hip from a fall. So I’ll ask for a little forgiveness for such a long post even if this is an abbreviated retelling.

    Jeff M (0204be)

  14. Comment by ropelight — 5/17/2010 @ 8:43 am

    There are a lot of places that people go “to find themselves” that have little if no cell-phone coverage. Better to pack a small satellite epirb that will get you found even when off the airline routes. A small GPS and topo maps come in handy too.

    AD - RtR/OS! (9ca326)


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