Becoming Dr. Q. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa
was supposed to be empty, we knew from removing hundreds of these lids to expect residual fumes once we undid the safety valves. Since we wore no protective masks, we were also accustomed to the smell—reminiscent of a gas leak from a stove.
Pablo, in his midforties, moved behind me at a slower pace. When he reached my side, the two of us began methodically undoing the valves and then loosening and removing a series of nuts and bolts so that we could finally lift and slide the hefty lid away from the one-and-a-half-foot-diameter hole it covered. With Pablo’s unruffled manner and my youthful energy, we made an efficient team. Not a big guy, Pablo was still in excellent shape, although I was the muscle man when it came to lifting the lids. My family joked that this was my “Rambo period.” Well, between my own workout regimen and conditioning on the job, I was at an optimal level of fitness—a lean and mean 138 pounds. Actually, at times this led me to underestimate certain physical challenges.
Such was the case on this day. After moving the lid to the side, still holding a wrench in one hand, I started to gather up the valves, nuts, and bolts we had just removed—each a valuable piece to be restored—when one of the metal nuts fell into the hole and tumbled to the bottom of the tank. Why it fell, I didn’t stop to think, but I wasted no time deciding to use a rope to shimmy down and retrieve it. A quick fix, I thought.
Pablo watched me tie the rope to a railing beside us and grab onto it as I prepared to squeeze into the hole and shimmy down the eighteen-foot drop to the bottom of the tanker.
“No, Freddy,” Pablo said abruptly, looking worried. “It’s too dangerous.”
“No problem, it will just take me a second.” I gripped the rope and took the plunge.
Almost halfway down, the petroleum fumes hit me like a sledgehammer—stirring up nausea, dizziness, and disorientation. It hadn’t yet dawned on me that I was headed for no-man’s-land. But as I dropped to the bottom and grabbed the fallen nut, feeling victorious for a split second, and then started to climb back up the rope, I realized with a sinking sick feeling that there was no oxygen down here.
This was where I was—just before briefly losing consciousness—when I first glanced up and saw the bright white light at the end of the tunnel.
This is where I am now, conscious once more, straining not to black out again, opening my eyes wide as I connect to that light and to the shadowy shape at the center of it, which I now discern is Pablo’s face peering down at me. I suddenly realize with blazing clarity that if I wait for help, I’ll die; the only way out is to climb back up on my own. Wasting no time, I grab the rope with both hands and with supreme effort, pull myself up, feeling like I’m lifting a derailed freight train, rising only a foot from the bottom.
“Pablo!” I shout as loudly as possible but hear my voice only as a distant whisper, as in a nightmare. Afraid of what my loss of hearing might mean, I climb harder and faster. But without oxygen, I am like a man underwater: the faster the seconds pass, the heavier my body becomes, and the slower time moves in this well of absolute silence—a deafening sound, both terrifying and mesmerizing.
With gravity pulling me down toward the void, I battle back harder, climb another foot, and intensify my focus upward on the light and on Pablo’s face.
“HELP!” I hear him shout as though he is at a great distance but with fierce urgency and in English, a language he barely knows, signaling the peril I’m in and jolting me into climbing even faster.
Everything is chaos. The harder I push and the higher I climb, the heavier and heavier my body feels, weighted impossibly by my gear. Fear sends shockwaves to my brain: if I let go, I die. The voice of logic taunts me: “You can’t get out of here alive. Nobody could!”
But another inner voice pushes me on, forcing my muscles to keep climbing, my senses to stay alert.
Halfway up the rope, I see Pablo with his mouth open screaming “HELP!” a second time.
To my horror, I can no longer hear him. Like a dreamer observing himself within a dream, I understand that losing my ability to hear is the beginning of the end, a descent into permanent sleep. Unwilling to give in to that possibility, I keep going, holding on fiercely to the belief that I can make it. Taunts of “you can’t” and “who do you think you are?” have never stopped me before, so why should they now?
As I climb, hand over hand, inch by inch, I have only one reality: If I’m going to die in this tank, I will not go without a fight, not without giving it everything in me.
And yet, more exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life, I fight an overwhelming temptation to rest—if only for a moment. My mind plays tricks on me, lulling me into a false sense of security that lets me think I’m out of danger and can take a break. But I battle back and dig into previously untapped energy reserves, climbing as though swimming up the side of a tidal wave.
With only five or six feet to go, I watch Pablo call “HELP!” for a third time. Again, I can only see him dimly and I still can’t hear him, even at close range. A disastrous sign. If my hearing is gone and my vision’s about to go too, what’s next? Will my lungs give out and my heart stop beating? Have I given my all and come up short? Am I done?
From the depths of my most primitive self, a place of last resort, a survival mechanism kicks in, giving me just enough energy to scale the final few feet of rope. Everything is now slow motion, every move a gargantuan effort. The view in front of me starts to slow into separate images, like still shots in a movie being run frame by frame. Pictures of past, present, and future—people, places, dreams, and fears—unfold in front of my eyes and then begin to fade.
Very close to the top, I watch with strange detachment as the last images disappear, thinking only how ironic it is that the story of my life will end here today. So many possibilities, no longer in sight. How sad that all my efforts will come to nothing. What a heartbreak for my parents, after all their sacrifices, to lose another child—this time their firstborn.
With only three feet more to go, through blurred vision and literally at the end of my rope, I recognize Pablo’s hand, outstretched toward mine.
Unbeknownst to me, when Pablo’s three calls for help rang out, they had alerted my father, Sostenes Quiñones Ponce, who was employed as a janitor in the shop where we did our restoration work. Also unbeknownst to me is that earlier this morning, Papá hadn’t been able to shake a dark premonition that something wasn’t right and that it somehow involved me.
This is why the instant my father heard Pablo calling from the tracks, he knew that I was in trouble and came running at lightning speed. Not waiting to find out what has happened, Papá now sprints up the ladder to the top of the tanker in the same moment that I’m reaching for Pablo’s hand. Others, responding to the commotion, follow close behind as my father—screaming and crying my name—flies toward Pablo. One of my co-workers sinks to his knees beside the tracks and begins praying loudly to God to spare my life.
None of this enters my awareness, which has narrowed to a singular focus: Pablo’s outstretched hand. Time has slowed almost to a standstill, and fractions of seconds feel like eons coming to a close, life winding down to its final heartbeats. And as I’m about to clasp the hand of my co-worker, I feel the presence of my grandparents, no longer living, waiting to welcome me, as always.
So relieved, so happy, I summon a final molecule of energy and grab Pablo’s hand—with an intensity he’ll later describe as having the force of ten men. The hardest part comes next—to accept that the only path through the darkness is to surrender, to know that I’ve done all that is within my power. I surrender to faith, putting my life in the hands of others. I let go all effort, all resistance, releasing my grip from the rope and from Pablo’s hand, giving in to the pull of gravity and relinquishing consciousness.
Pablo later told me that when I took his hand in mine, he thought first that I was going to crush it and then that I seemed to be shaking it good-bye. On my face,