Really Lost

Two days later, recalculating their food supply, Canessa and Parrado sent Vizintin back to camp on a toboggan made of a plane seat.  What had taken them two gruelling days to travel uphill took Vizintin only a few hours sliding downhill. 

Canessa and Parrado continued alone in unfamiliar territory, hiking in the street clothes they had crashed in, huddled together at night in a sleeping bag made from seat covers, wearing sunglasses fashioned out of a pilot's visor, cardboard and a bra.  They made it to the summit of the mountain and descended.

Six days later, they saw a man on a horse, across a river.  At that distance, over the roar of the water, the only word they could make out of what he shouted was "tomorrow."  They slept that night in the open, hungry, desperate, but still alive.  The rider returned in the morning, helped them to a nearby cabin, and fed them.

The next day, December 22, 72 days after the crash, Nando Parrado rode in a helicopter to help locate the wreckage and the remaining 14 survivors.  They returned to lives ended.  Families who had accepted that they were dead.  Nando Parrado returned to a devastated father, who had believed his wife, son and daughter were all dead.  Still, they survived.  The 16 of them went on to lead normal, happy lives.  They're still friends.  Many of them have made pilgrimages to the crash site, where the steadily advancing glacier devoured the fuselage of the plane long ago.

Half of the equation of how they survived is still immortalized on bumper stickers and t-shirts: Rugby players eat their dead.

The media made a great fuss of it, trying to make their story about cannibalism instead of survival.  To the survivors, the solution was the only pragmatic one.  The dead were dead, but the rest of them were still alive and unlikely to stay that way for long without food.  They ate their friends, their teammates, their relatives.  They ate them raw, because there was no fuel to cook with.

The other half of the equation is rarely discussed: the brutal will to live.  A will that transcends our mental or emotional state.  A will we share with all the other animals. 

In an interview marking the 30th anniversary of the crash, Nando Parrado discussed how he went on after his mother and sister died.  "When I was there I become a survivor machine, completely cold, without any feeling. After their deaths, I buried them in the snow and I stopped feeling in that moment. I thought that if I collapsed in that moment, if I lost my energies crying, I was going to die too."

On the frequently asked question of whether the crash and his survival were God's will, Parrado said, "Roberto [Canessa] and I saved ourselves. I insulted God so much for the things we lived that I guess that he’s already used to it. It was so horrible: avalanches, precipices, hunger, and cold. The cold was unbearable. We felt our bodies hardening, we were exhausted. We wanted to die. We spent hours and hours feeling that… day after day wanting to die… and you don’t die....The truth is that it was much more horrible than any of you can imagine."

As for what he fears, more than 30 years after that experience: "I’m afraid of illnesses, I’m afraid even of thinking on losing my people. I’m afraid of death. Some people believe that for having it so close, death doesn’t affect me, but it’s exactly the opposite: you never get used to the death. When I fly the turbulence scares me a lot."

Asked how the experience changed him: "People tend to worry about nonsense things. They are on a restaurant and shout to the waiter because the food doesn’t come, when the waiter has nothing to do with that....I try, within my possibilities, to enjoy everything I can: a meal, a good wine, a chat with friends.  I have the feeling that nothing is irremediable, everything has a solution, besides I think I’m not limited by the society. I always do what I feel, I just don’t care about what the others might expect me to do."

Of the future, he says, "I try not to care about the future, it’s not always easy, but I try...My life is the present, Now this minute."

On the topic of heaven: "Heaven for me is making love for ever with the woman I love."  (His wife of 30+ years, Veronica.)

It's a strange pep talk, but a good one.  We're all fragile and afraid and dying.  To survive, we have to rely on ourselves.   Simple happiness is real happiness.  Worrying about the past or the future is wasted energy.  The emotional bonds we form with other people are the most valuable things we have.