Miracle in the Andes Read online

  Roberto had finished dressing. We exchanged a silent nod, then I slipped Panchito’s watch onto my wrist and followed him outside. There was a sharp chill in the air, but the temperature was well above freezing. It was a perfect day for climbing; the wind was light and the sky was brilliant blue.

  “Let’s hurry,” I said. “I don’t want to waste this weather.”

  Fito and the cousins brought us some meat for breakfast. We ate quickly. There was very little talk. When it was time to leave, we stood to say our good-byes. Carlitos stepped forward and we embraced. He was smiling happily, and his voice was full of strong encouragement. “You will make it!” he said. “God will protect you!” I saw the wild hope in his eyes. He was so thin, so weak, his dark eyes had sunk deep into his skull and the skin was drawn tightly across the bones of his face. It broke my heart to think that I was his hope, that this hopeless trek we were about to begin was his only chance of survival. I wanted to shake him, to let my tears flow, to scream at him, What the fuck am I doing, Carlitos? I am so afraid! I don’t want to die! But I knew that if I allowed those feelings to rise in me, what was left of my courage would crumble. So, instead, I handed him one of the tiny red shoes my mother had purchased in Mendoza for my nephew. The shoes were magical for me because my mother had chosen them with such love for her grandson, and had handled them so tenderly on the plane. “Keep this,” I told him. “I’ll keep the other one. When I come back for you, we’ll have a pair again.”

  The others said good-bye with embraces and glances of quiet encouragement. Their faces showed so much hope and so much fear, it was hard for me to look them in the eyes. After all, I was the one who had planned the expedition. I was the one who had insisted most forcefully that it was possible to reach Chile on foot. I know the others saw my behavior as confident and optimistic, and perhaps it gave them hope. But what looked to them like optimism was really nothing of the sort. It was panic. It was terror. The urge that drove me to trek west was the same urge that drives a man to jump from the top of a burning building. I had always wondered how a person thinks in such a moment, perched on the ledge, cringing from the flames, waiting for the split second when one death makes more sense than another. How does the mind make such a choice? What is the logic that tells you the time has come to step into thin air? This morning I had my answer. I smiled at Carlitos, then turned away before he saw the anguish in my eyes. My gaze fell on the soft mound of snow marking the place where my mother and sister were buried. In all the time since their deaths, I had not allowed myself a single sentimental thought about them. But now I relived the moment when I laid Susy in her shallow grave and covered her with the sparkling snow. Two months had passed since that day, but I could still see her face very clearly as the white crystals fell softy across her cheeks and brow. If I die, I thought, my father will never know how I comforted her and kept her warm, and how peaceful she looked in her white grave.

  “Nando, are you ready?”

  Roberto was waiting. The mountain was behind him, its white slopes blazing in the early sunlight. I reminded myself that those brutal peaks were all that blocked my path to my father, and that the time had finally come to begin the long walk home, but these thoughts inspired no courage. I was very close to panic. All the fears that had tormented me since the moment I woke from my coma were converging, and I trembled like a doomed man about to climb the steps to the gallows. If I were alone, I might have whimpered like a baby, and the only thought in my mind was the plea of a frightened child: I do not want to go. For months I had sustained myself with thoughts of my escape, but now, on the verge of that escape, I wanted desperately to stay with my friends. I wanted to huddle with them in the fuselage tonight, to talk with them about our homes and our families, to be comforted by their prayers and the warmth of their bodies. The crash site was an awful place, soaked in urine, smelling of death, littered with ragged bits of human bone and gristle, but to me it suddenly felt safe and warm and familiar. I wanted to stay there. How badly I wanted to stay.

  “Nando,” said Roberto, “it’s time to go.”

  I glanced at the graves once again, then turned to Carlitos.

  “If you run out food,” I said, “I want you to use my mother and Susy.”

  Carlitos was speechless for a moment, then he nodded. “Only as a last resort,” he said softly.

  Roberto called again. “Nando?”

  “I’m ready,” I said. We waved one last time and then began to climb.

  NONE OF US had much to say as we followed the gentle incline of the glacier up to the mountain’s lower slopes. We thought we knew what lay ahead, and how dangerous the mountain could be. We had learned that even the mildest storm could kill us if it trapped us in the open. We understood that the heavily corniced snow on the high ridges was unstable, and that the smallest avalanche would whisk us down the mountain like a broom sweeping crumbs. We knew that deep crevasses lay hidden beneath the thin crust of frozen snow, and that rocks the size of television sets often came crashing down from crumbling outcrops high on the mountain. But we knew nothing about the techniques and strategies of mountaineering, and what we didn’t know was enough to kill us.

  We didn’t know, for example, that the Fairchild’s altimeter was wrong; the crash site wasn’t at seven thousand feet, as we thought, but close to twelve thousand. Nor did we know that the mountain we were about to challenge was one of the highest in the Andes, soaring to the height of nearly seventeen thousand feet, with slopes so steep and difficult they would test a team of expert climbers. Experienced mountaineers, in fact, would not have gone anywhere near this mountain without an arsenal of specialized gear, including steel pitons, ice screws, safety lines, and other critical gadgets designed to keep them safely anchored to the slopes. They would carry ice axes, weatherproof tents, and sturdy thermal boots fitted with crampons—metal spikes that provide traction on the steepest, iciest inclines. They would be in peak physical condition, of course, and they would climb at a time of their own choosing, and carefully plot the safest route to the top. The three of us were climbing in street clothes, with only the crude tools we could fashion out of materials salvaged from the plane. Our bodies were already ravaged from months of exhaustion, starvation, and exposure, and our backgrounds had done little to prepare us for the task. Uruguay was a warm and low-lying country. None of us had ever seen real mountains before. Prior to the crash, Roberto and Tintin had never even seen snow. If we had known anything about climbing, we’d have seen we were already doomed. Luckily, we knew nothing, and our ignorance provided our only chance.

  Our first task was to choose a path up the slopes. Experienced climbers would have quickly spotted a ridge winding down from the summit to meet the glacier at a point less than a mile south of the crash site. If we had known enough to hike to that ridge and climb its long, narrow spine, we would have found better footing, gentler slopes, and a safer and swifter path to the top. We never even noticed the ridge. For days I had marked with my eye the spot where the sun set behind the ridges, and, thinking that the best path was the shortest path, we used that point to chart a beeline path due west. It was an amateurish mistake that would force us to weave our way up the mountain’s steepest and most dangerous slopes.

  Our beginning, though, was promising. The snow on the mountain’s lower flank was firm and fairly level, and the cleats of my rugby boots bit well into the frozen crust. Driven by an intense adrenaline surge, I moved quickly up the slope, and in no time I had pulled fifty yards ahead of the others. But soon I was forced to slow my pace. The slope had grown much steeper, and it seemed to grow steeper yet with every step, like a treadmill that constantly increases its incline. The effort left me gasping in the thin air, and I had to rest, with my hands on my knees, after every few yards of progress.

  Soon the sun was strong enough to warm us as we climbed, but it warmed the snow as well, and the firm surface beneath my feet began to weaken. Now, with every step, my foot was breaking through the thinning c
rust and I would sink up to my knees in the soft, deep drifts below. Each step required extreme effort. I would lift my knee almost to my chest to clear my boot from the snow. Then I would swing that foot forward, shift my weight onto it, and break through the ice again. In the thin air I had to rest, exhausted, after every step. When I looked behind me I saw the others struggling, too. I glanced at the sun above us, and realized that we had waited too long that morning to start the climb. Logic told us it would be wiser to climb in daylight, so we’d waited for the sun to rise. Experts, on the other hand, know that the best time for climbing is in the predawn hours, before the sun can turn the slopes to mush. The mountain was making us pay for another amateur mistake. I wondered what other blunders lay ahead, and how many of them we’d be able to survive.

  Eventually all the crust melted away, and we were forced to wade uphill through heavy drifts that sometimes were as deep as my hips. “Let’s try the snowshoes!” I shouted. The others nodded, and in moments we had slipped Fito’s makeshift snowshoes off our backs and strapped them to our feet. They worked well at first, allowing us to climb without sinking into the snow. But the size and bulk of the cushions forced us to bow our legs as we walked, and to swing our feet in unnaturally wide circles to keep the fat cushions from colliding. To make things worse, the stuffing and upholstery quickly became soaked with melted snow. In my exhausted state, I felt as if I were climbing the mountain with manhole covers bolted to my shoes. My spirits were rapidly sinking. We were already on the verge of exhaustion, and the real climbing hadn’t even begun.

  THE INCLINE OF the mountain grew steadily sharper, and soon we reached slopes that were too steep and windblown to hold deep drifts of snow. With relief, we removed the snowshoes, strapped them to our backs, and kept climbing. By midmorning we had worked our way to a dizzying altitude. The world around us now was more blue air and sunlight than rock and snow. We had literally climbed into the sky. The sheer altitude and the yawning openness of the vast slopes left me reeling with a sense of dreamlike disbelief. The mountain fell away so steeply behind me now that when I looked down on Tintin and Roberto, I saw only their heads and shoulders outlined against two thousand feet of empty sky. The angle of the slope was as steep as a roofer’s ladder, but imagine a ladder you could climb to the moon! The height made my head swim and sent tingling spasms along my hamstrings and spine. Turning to look behind me was like pirouetting on the ledge of a skyscraper.

  On steep, open slopes like these, where the incline seems intent on tipping you off the mountain and good handholds are hard to find, experts would use safety lines tethered to steel anchors driven into rock or ice, and they’d count on their crampons to give their footing a secure grip on the mountainside. We had none of those things, but only the fading strength of our arms, legs, fingertips, and freezing toes, to keep us from sailing off into the blue void behind us. I was terrified, of course, but still I could not deny the wild beauty all around me—the flawless sky, the frosted mountains, the glowing landscape of deep virgin snow. It was all so vast, so perfect, so silent and still. But something troubling was hiding behind all that beauty, something ancient and hostile and profound. I looked down the mountain to the crash site. From this altitude it was just a ragged smudge on the pristine snow. I saw how crass and out of place it seemed, how fundamentally wrong. Everything about us was wrong here—the violence and racket of our arrival, our garish suffering, the noise and mess of our lurid struggle to survive. None of it fit here. Life did not fit here. It was all a violation of the perfect serenity that had reigned here for millions of years. I had sensed it the first time I gazed at this place: we had upset an ancient balance, and balance would have to be restored. It was all around me, in the silence, in the cold. Something wanted all that perfect silence back again; something in the mountain wanted us to be still.

  BY LATE MORNING we had climbed some two thousand feet from the crash site and were probably fourteen thousand feet or more above sea level. I was moving inch by inch now as a vicious headache tightened like an iron ring around my skull. My fingers felt thick and clumsy, and my limbs were heavy with fatigue. The slightest effort—lifting my head, turning to speak to Roberto—left me sucking for air as if I’d just run a mile, but no matter how forcefully I inhaled, I couldn’t fill my lungs. I felt as if I were drawing breath through a piece of felt.

  I would not have guessed it at the time, but I was suffering from the effects of high altitude. The physiological stress of climbing in oxygen-depleted air is one of the great dangers mountain climbers face. Altitude sickness, which generally strikes in the zone above eight thousand feet, can cause a range of debilitating symptoms, including headache, intense fatigue, and dizziness. Above twelve thousand feet, the condition can lead to cerebral and pulmonary edemas, both of which can cause permanent brain damage and rapid death. At high altitude, it’s hard to escape the effects of mild and moderate altitude disease, but the condition is worsened by rapid climbing. Experts recommend that climbers ascend no more than one thousand feet per day, a rate that gives the body a chance to acclimate itself to the thinning air. We had climbed twice that far in a single morning, and were making matters worse by continuing to climb when our bodies desperately needed time to rest.

  In response, my oxygen-starved body was struggling to cope with the thinning air. My heart rate soared and my blood thickened in my veins—the body’s way of conserving oxygen in the bloodstream and sending it more rapidly to vital organs and tissues. My respiration rate rose to the brink of hyperventilation, and with all the moisture I lost as I exhaled, I was becoming more severely dehydrated with every breath. To supply themselves with the huge amounts of water needed to stay safely hydrated at high altitude, expert climbers use portable gas stoves to melt pots of snow, and they guzzle gallons of fluids each day. Our only source of fluids was the snow we gulped in handfuls, or melted in the glass bottle we had in one of the packs. It did little good. Dehydration was rapidly sapping our strength, and we climbed with a constant, searing thirst.

  AFTER FIVE OR SIX hours of hard climbing, we had probably ascended some 2,500 feet, but for all our striving, the summit seemed no closer. My spirits sagged as I gauged the vast distance to the top, and realized that each of my tortured steps brought me no more than fifteen inches closer. I saw with brutal clarity that we had taken on an inhuman task. Overwhelmed with fear and a sense of futility, I felt the urge to sink to my knees and stay there. Then I heard the calm voice in my head, the voice that had steadied me in so many moments of crisis. “You are drowning in distances,” it said. “Cut the mountain down to size.” I knew what I had to do. Ahead of me on the slope was a large rock. I decided I would forget about the summit and make that rock my only goal. I trudged for it, but like the summit it seemed to recede from me as I climbed. I knew then that I was being tricked by the mountain’s huge scale of reference. With nothing on those vast empty slopes to give me perspective—no houses, no people, no trees—a rock that seemed ten feet wide and a hundred yards away might really be ten times larger and more than a mile distant. Still, I climbed toward the rock without resting, and when I finally got there I picked another landmark and started all over again.

  I climbed that way for hours, focusing my attention completely on some target—a rock, a shadow, an unusual ruffle in the snow—until the distance to that target became all that mattered in the world. The only sounds were my own heavy breathing and the rhythmic crunch of my shoes in the snow. My pace soon became automatic, and I slipped into a trance. Somewhere in my mind I still longed for my father, I still suffered from fatigue, I still worried that our mission was doomed, but now those thoughts seemed muted and secondary, like a voice on a radio playing in another room. Step-push, step-push. Nothing else mattered. Sometimes I promised myself I’d rest when the next goal was reached, but I never kept my promise. Time melted away, distances dwindled, the snow seemed to glide beneath my feet. I was a locomotive lumbering up the slope. I was lunacy in slow motion. I kept up t
hat pace until I had pulled far ahead of Roberto and Tintin, who had to shout to make me stop. I waited for them at an outcrop that offered a level place to rest. We ate some meat and melted some snow to drink. None of us had much to say. We all knew the kind of trouble we were in.

  “Do you still think we can make it by nightfall?” asked Roberto. He was looking at the summit.

  I shrugged. “We should look for a place to camp.”

  I looked down to the crash site. I could still make out the tiny shapes of our friends watching us from seats they’d dragged outside the fuselage. I wondered how things looked from their perspective. Could they tell how desperately we were struggling? Were their hopes beginning to fade? If at some point we stopped moving, how long would they wait for us to start moving again? And what would they do if we didn’t? These thoughts occurred to me only as passing observations. I was no longer in the same world as the boys down below. My world had narrowed, and the feelings of compassion or responsibility I had felt for the other survivors were now crowded out by my own terror and my own furious struggle to survive. I knew it was the same for Tintin and Roberto, and while I was certain we would fight side by side as long as possible, I understood that each of us, in his desperation and fear, was already alone. The mountain was teaching me a hard lesson: camaraderie is a noble thing, but in the end death is an opponent each of us would face in solitude.

  I looked at Roberto and Tintin, resting sullenly on the ledge of rock. “What did we do to deserve this?” muttered Roberto. I looked up the mountain, searching for a cliff or a boulder that might give us shelter for the night. I saw nothing but a steep endless blanket of snow.

  AS WE WORKED our way up the mountain, that snow-cover gave way to an even more difficult landscape. Now rocks were jutting from the snow, some of them huge and impossible to climb. Massive ridges and outcrops above us blocked my view of the slope ahead, and I was forced to choose my path by instinct. Often I chose wrong, and found myself trapped under an impassable ledge, or at the base of a vertical rock wall. Usually I could backtrack, or inch my way diagonally across the slope to find a new path. Sometimes I had no choice but to press on.