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Dan Kennedy (1:08)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Okay, here's some news for our listeners in Pennsylvania. Join us in Pittsburgh on Thursday, August 23rd, when Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures and Essential Public Radio present the Moth main stage at the New Hazlett Theater. For ticketing information and for a list of all of our upcoming tour stops, visit themoth.org the story you're about to hear by Warren McDonald was told at a Moth mainstage presented with the Penn World voices festival in 2011. The theme of the night was what went wrong?

Warren McDonald (1:53)

So I spent my entire adult life searching, searching for meaning, wondering why it is that we're even alive. And I say my entire adult life because that hasn't always been the case. I grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne and I can tell you that the only searching that was going on was for the next party and the only questioning are we drinking beer or bourbon and Coke? Now this all changed at 18 years old. I was taken on a four day Outward Bound style hike and I'm embarrassed, really embarrassed to tell you that I actually, I hated it. I hated it. That hike almost broke me. I wasn't in good enough shape and at the end of each day I just felt beaten and weak and incompetent. There was only one consolation on the last night we got sent out. Those of you familiar with Outward Bound will know about the solo. We got sent out to be on our own for the night we got sent out with no sleeping bags, no. No food, save for a bag of flour and no water and a box of matches, and you had to survive the night. Now, a lot of the other guys that were on this course couldn't make it. They scurried back to the main camp during the night. And that night, I fell into my element. I discovered this piece that take everything away, and I can be okay. And that night, I actually. I felt this connection. I felt overcome by this connection. And for one of the first times in my life, I actually felt at home. For the next decade, I drifted in and out of actually of feeling, chasing that connection down, and periods of being lost where I would switch back to my old ways. April, 1997 found me once again lost. And whenever I'd had that feeling before, I did what I had always done. I reached for my backpack and my hiking boots. I'd heard about an island called Hinchinbrook island off the coast of the Great Barrier Reef in the northeast of Australia. And what I'd heard about Hinchinbrook island is that it was this amazing wilderness island. And to get across, you have to catch a ferryboat across takes a couple of hours. And when I say ferryboat, for those of you that have cruised the Greek islands, like, forget thousands of passengers, I'm talking a boat that can hold 12 people, max. And so I catch the ferryboat across and I start hiking. And at the end of the first day, I come to a beach, and I meet a guy on the beach who introduces himself as Geert Van Coulen, a Dutchman. And Geert tells me what he wants to do. His plan is to climb to the top of the island's tallest peak, Mount Bowen. And I got to tell you, when you look across from the mainland at Hinchinbrook Island, Mount Bowen dominates. Absolutely dominates. And so before, as soon as Geert started telling me about his plan, I didn't really have to wait for him to ask me. I knew I was in. Right. I'm in. I'm all over this. We break camp at first thing the next morning, and we start making our way up the side of Mount Bowen. Now, there's something that I should point out. There's no trail to the top of Mount Bowen. All right? We're on a wilderness island. So the way that you get to the top is you follow a creek bed up, and you bushwhack and you boulder hop. And this is what we did all day. We found a place to set up camp for the night and strung up a tarpaulin in case it rained. We were kind of, you know, we were kind of tough hiking guys. We were way beyond tents. We set the tarpaulin up and cooked dinner. Geert had just got into his sleeping bag. I was just about to climb into mine when I realized, hang on a minute. Before I do that, I need to use the bathroom. Which is kind of nuts because there are no bathrooms in the middle of a wilderness island. But basically, I needed to take a leak. If you've ever spent much time in the backcountry, you'll know that it's not really a good idea to go and take a leak into a creek that's your water supply, especially when you're coming back down the same way in a couple of days. So I figured, you know what, the best way for me to move far enough away from this creek is I should make my way to the other side. And I should mention the creek at this point is literally just a trickle running down the center. And on the other side is a steep rock wall about 12 or 14 foot high. And I thought, that's perfect. I can scramble up over that. I'll be fine. So I make my way across. And as luck would have it, at least I thought it was luck. I found a crack. I got my hands in that crack. I got my left hand up as high as I could, got my other hand in the crack, put my right foot up against the wall, and as I pulled up, the world literally gave way. As I pulled up, a refrigerator sized piece of rock broke loose from the rock wall and absolutely slammed me back down into that creek bed. And I'm talking slammed. I was instantly in this world of pain. I just, I screamed out, Geert came running across to be greeted by this scene of me pinned from the hips down underneath this huge piece of rock. And things got pretty frantic at that point. I can't even begin to describe what that pain felt like. Just this incredible weight just grinding, grinding down into my legs. And there was only one thing going through my mind. I need this thing off me. I need it off me right now. So I'm pushing at it. Geert jumps in beside me. We're both pushing at this thing with all our might. I feel like I'm going to tear myself in half. But nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. You know, when something really serious happens, there's only two ways that things are going to go. You're either going to freak or things are going to get crystal clear. And luckily for me, things became crystal clear. I took charge. I told Geert what he needed to do. We started out. We tried a series of levers to lift the rock. It didn't work. We tried using a wedge shaped stone driven by another stone as a hammer stone to try and lift it that way. Didn't work. Nothing worked. Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse, I felt the first few drops of rain. I'm in a creek bed. Those drops turned into a torrential downpour and within 45 minutes I had water swirling around my hips. Within an hour and a half I had a raging flooding creek up around my waist. And things got desperate. Git had started to build a dam. I'm starting to think back about my new backpack. Whether it has the same kind of frame as a previous backpack I had years before that had an aluminum frame made out of aluminum tubing. Because I'm thinking if it has, I can take that and I can stretch it out and I can use that as a snorkel when the water goes over my head. Because I'm convinced the water is going over my head. Because I can see by the high water mark on the wall beside me that it's gone over my head before. As suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. And gradually, over the next couple of hours, the water level started to subside. But we still had a problem. I was still stuck underneath a one tonne piece of rock. I spent the longest night of my life before we decided that Geert would hike out in the morning. That's the only way that I'm coming out, is for him to hike out and organize a rescue. As the sun came up the next morning, I watched Geert pack together his things. He packed together some things for me. We put him in a plastic bag and slung it over my shoulders, around my neck in case the water would come up again while he was gone. Here's this guy. I can tell you I have never, ever felt so lonely as watching this guy hugging this guy goodbye and watching him turn around and hike back down off that mountain. Because I know I'm going to be there for at least another 24 hours on my own. He's got to make it back down to the beach where we'd met the day before. He's then got to hike back along the beach to where the ferryboat dropped us off. The ferryboat that only comes in once a day, right? I knew I was staring down the barrel in my ultimate test. So after he went, I did the only thing that I could do. And I settled in to wait. To wait and to think. I thought about all the people that I would probably never see again. Actually wrote letters to some of those people. I wrote letters to my mum and dad. I didn't think I'd ever be seeing them again. I got angry, actually, I got really angry. I wondered why I couldn't be happy staying at home watching TV and mowing the lawn on a Sunday afternoon like a lot of my friends that I grew up with. Why couldn't I be satisfied with that? Why did I always have to be traveling around the world chasing, chasing, looking for something, searching. And then I remembered, ah, the connection. Chasing the connection. Then I think, great, how's this? Is this connected enough for you? They're going to find you out here in a couple of days, dead under this rock. And then I would pull myself out from that trough and bring myself and psych myself that you've got to hang in there, you're going to get through this. And I rolled that roller coaster ride all day and all in the next night. By the next morning, I'd started to hallucinate. I thought I was hallucinating when I saw a red pool around my right foot. I could actually see my right foot the way I was trapped. And I thought, this is interesting, it's a little late now to start bleeding. And then I saw why. I saw a nipper of a freshwater crayfish pop up out of the water. And I couldn't believe it. I just thought, you opportunistic bastard, how dare you take on a guy that's stuck under a refrigerator sized piece of rock like that. I couldn't believe the cheek of that guy. And I spent the next couple of hours trying to kill him with a long stick. Now you've got to remember now as this is happening, I'm starting to think that I'm in some kind of David lynch movie movie. Just when I thought though that it couldn't get any more bizarre, I felt a sting in my groin and then another sting and I started swatting ants. I looked down and realized that I had quite a few ants running all over me. And I noticed to my horror, a trail that led back to a now exposed nest that was behind this refrigerator sized piece of rock that I was now underneath. And I realized that these guys were actually looking for a new home. And I freaked, right, I just freaked. I just had visions because by now I'm starting to lose it. And I knew that I couldn't let myself go to sleep. I thought that if you go to sleep now, you might not wake up. And I just had visions of these ants getting into my ears and my eyes and it was like a horror movie. I freaked. I remembered that in my first aid kit I had a tube of bug goop and I prayed that Geert had put that first aid kit in the plastic bag around my neck and he had. I pulled out that goop and I'm telling you, I just rubbed it all over my face, all over my head, all over my clothes. I rubbed it into my eyes. I didn't care how much it stung. I just covered myself this stuff and hoped that it would work. And eventually I drifted off. I woke up to the sound of a helicopter. I don't think I've ever been so happy to see another human being. As Chip Jaffers, the paramedic made his way towards me and started to stabilize me. Two more guys came down and they spent the next two and a half hours lifting this rock off of me before they winched me into a helicopter and sped me straight to Cairns Base Hospital. I woke up the following afternoon into a whole new world. I woke up minus both legs, amputated at mid thigh. And so begun my new life. I had to learn how to do everything again. To learn how to use a wheelchair, I had to learn how to use prosthetic legs. But at the same time I was driven by this purpose. The clarity that had come to me under the rock was still with me. And so I pushed, pushed, pushed to just reclaim all these different parts of my life. But there was one thing, one burning question away in the back of my mind, and that was, this is great, but am I ever going to feel that connection again? Am I ever going to experience a wild place, experience nature on its own terms? Is there any way that that can happen? I eventually discovered that you can put fat wheels, mountain bike wheels, onto a wheelchair. I said, where do I get them? I started, quote, unquote, hiking. And it was on one of those first hikes, I just hiked five miles and I just had my first swim in a water hole in a river. My first swim outside of a swimming pool and this light bulb got off. And I thought, if I can do this already, I wonder if I could climb a mountain. I wonder if a guy with no legs could climb a mountain. And I got this picture of a mountain in Tasmania that I'd climbed twice before called Cradle Mountain. It had taken me about 5 hours car to car, and I thought, do you know what There is only one way to find out. So I started training and a couple of months later, just 10 months after losing both legs, I set out from the parking lot and over the course of two and a half days I wheeled, I dragged, I scraped, I crawled on my guts at times until I got to sit on top of Cradle Mountain. And I gotta tell you, sitting on top of that mountain, I just got completely, completely overwhelmed with emotion. I felt like I'd got hit by a semi trailer load of emotion. Everything came flooding back at me. The accident, the rescue, the months and months of rehabilitation, everything that I'd lost. But in that moment I realised that I might have lost my legs, but I had gained so, so much more. The thing that most overwhelmed me was that feeling of being connected. And I realized in that moment that I'd actually found my way home. Thank you.