127 Hours

The other day we had an annoucement in our newspaper that Aron Ralston was going to be speaking in Sequin Thursday night. I would like to have gone but I'm not sure where Sequin is other that it is somewhere around here. We didn't go and according to an article in today's paper I wish we had.

If you don't remember him, he is the man that cut his own arm off to live. He went hiking up in the Utah mountains by himself and no one knew where he was. Some how a boulder wedged him against a rock in a canyon. His only hope was to cut his arm off.

He wrote an autobiography named "Between a Rock and a Hard Place" which led to the movie being made "127 Hours." He said the movie tells the story just like it happened.

He said he used to be selfish and a difficult person, but he said this incident changed him. He must be a real inspiration to be around now. On his last night in the narrow canyon he had a dreamlike out of body experience, walking out of the trap and into a room where he saw "a little boy with bright blue eyes" being held by a one arm man. He said he came out of the dreamlike state, out of the room he felt like he was in and was then back in his trap. He described what he had to do to get his arm out. He had to cut into his arm, break his ulna and radius "using torque against the trapped arm." Chop through muscles, sinews and nerves. A pain that burned "like thrusting your arm into a fire."

About that time in the lecture, Ralston put up a slide of an adorable blond, blue-eyed boy, Leo Ralston was born in February 2010.

In the first article I read about his lecture coming to Sequin, he told just little about his story and ended it by saying "Everyone has a boulder in their life." In his lecture Ralston said anyone could do what he did.

Note: You can view a series of videos on www.youtube.com. concerning his ordeal in the canyon. Very interesting and inspirational.