Miracle in the Andes Page 19

  At one point in the early afternoon, I found my way blocked by an extremely steep, snow-covered incline. I could see a level rock shelf at the far upper edge. Unless we could climb the incline diagonally and scramble up onto that narrow shelf, we’d have to backtrack. That could cost us hours, and with sunset growing closer by the minute, I knew that was not an option. I looked back at Tintin and Roberto. They were watching to see what I would do. I studied the incline. The slope was sheer and smooth, there was nothing to grip with my hands. But the snow looked stable enough to support me. I’d have to dig my feet into the snow and keep my weight tilted forward as I climbed. It would all be a matter of balance.

  I began to climb the frozen wall, carving the snow with the edges of my shoes and pressing my chest against the slope to keep from toppling backwards. The footing was stable, and with great caution I inched my way to the rock ledge and scrambled up onto level ground. I waved to Tintin and Roberto. “Follow my steps,” I shouted. “Be careful, it is very steep.”

  I turned away from them and began to climb the slopes above me. Moments later I glanced back to see that Roberto had made it across the incline. Now it was Tintin’s turn. I began climbing again, and had ascended thirty yards or so when a terrified shout echoed up the mountain.

  “I’m stuck! I can’t make it!”

  I turned to see Tintin frozen in the middle of the incline.

  “Come on, Tintin!” I shouted. “You can do it!”

  He shook his head. “I can’t move.”

  “It’s the backpack!” said Roberto. “It’s too heavy.”

  Roberto was right. The weight of Tintin’s backpack, which he carried very high on his back, was pulling him off the face of the mountain. He was struggling to shift his balance forward, but there was nothing to offer him a handhold, and the look on his face told me he could not hold out for long. From my vantage point I could see the dizzying drop behind him, and I knew what would happen if Tintin fell. First he would swim away from us for a long time in thin air, then he would hit the slope, or an outcrop, and tumble down the mountain like a rag doll until some drift or crag eventually brought his broken body to a stop.

  “Tintin, hold on!” I shouted. Roberto was at the lip of the rock shelf above the incline, stretching his arm down to Tintin. His reach was short by inches. “Take off your backpack!” he shouted. “Give it to me!” Tintin removed the backpack carefully, struggling to keep his balance as he slowly worked the straps off his arms and handed it up to Roberto. Without the weight of the backpack, Tintin was able to find his balance and climb safely up the incline. When he reached the ledge, he slumped to the snow. “I can’t go any farther,” he said. “I’m too tired. I can’t lift my legs.”

  Tintin’s voice betrayed his exhaustion and fear, but I knew we had to climb until we found a sheltered place to rest for the night, so I kept going, leaving the others no choice but to follow. As I climbed, I scanned the slopes in every direction, but the mountain was so rocky and steep there was no safe place to spread our sleeping bag. It was late afternoon now. The sun had drifted behind the western ridges, and shadows were already stretching down the slopes. The temperature began to fall. At the crash site below, I saw that our friends had retreated into the fuselage to escape the cold. A clot of panic was rising in my throat as I frantically searched the slopes for a safe, level place to spend the night.

  At twilight I scaled a tall rock outcropping to get a better view. As I climbed, I wedged my right foot in a small crevice in the rock, then, with my left hand, reached up to grab a horn of boulder jutting from the snow. The boulder seemed solid, but when I pulled myself up, a rock the size of a cannon ball broke free and plummeted past me.

  “Watch out! Watch out below!” I shouted. I looked down to see Roberto beneath me. There was no time to react. His eyes widened as he waited for the impact of the rock, which missed his head by inches. After a moment of stunned silence, Roberto glared at me. “You son of a bitch! You son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Are you trying to kill me? Be careful! Watch what the fuck you are doing!” Then he fell silent and leaned forward, and his shoulders started to heave. I realized he was crying. Hearing his sobs, I felt a pang of hopelessness so sharp I could taste it on my tongue. Then I was overtaken by a sudden, inarticulate rage. “Fuck this! Fuck this!” I muttered. “I have had enough! I have had enough!” I just wanted it to be over. I wanted to rest. To sink into the snow. To lie still and quiet. I can’t remember any other thoughts, so I don’t know what led me to keep going, but once Roberto had gathered himself, we started climbing again in the fading light. Finally I found a shallow depression in the snow beneath a large boulder. The sun had warmed the boulder all day, then the heat radiating from the rock had melted out this compact hollow. It was cramped, and its floor tilted sharply down the slope, but it would shelter us from the nighttime cold and wind. We laid the seat cushions on the floor of the hollow to insulate us from the cold, then spread the sleeping bag over the cushions. Our lives depended upon the bag, and the body warmth it would conserve, but it was a fragile thing, sewn together crudely with strands of copper wire, so we handled it with great care. To keep from tearing the seams, we removed our shoes before sliding in.

  “Did you pee?” asked Roberto, as I eased myself into the bag. “We can’t be getting in and out of this bag all night.”

  It reassured me that Roberto was becoming his grumbling self again.

  “I peed,” I answered. “Did you pee? I don’t want you peeing in this bag.”

  Roberto huffed at me. “If anyone pees in the bag it will be you. And be careful with those big feet.”

  When the three of us were all inside the sleeping bag, we tried to get comfortable, but the ground beneath us was very hard, and the floor of the hollow was so steep we were almost standing up, with our backs pressed to the mountain and our feet braced against the downhill rim of the hollow. That small rim of snow was all that kept us from sliding down the slope. We were all exhausted, but I was far too frightened and cold to relax.

  “Roberto,” I said, “you are the medical student. How does one die of exhaustion? Is it painful? Or do you just drift off?”

  The question seemed to irk him. “What does it matter how you die?” he said. “You’ll be dead and that’s all that matters.”

  We were quiet for a long time. The sky was as black as ink now, and studded with a billion brilliant stars, each of them impossibly clear and blazing like a point of fire. At this altitude I felt I could reach out and touch them. In another time and place I would have been awestruck by all this beauty. But here, and now, it seemed a brutal show of force. The world was showing me how tiny I was, how weak and insignificant. And temporary. I listened to my own breathing, reminding myself that as long as I drew breath I was still alive. I promised myself I would not think of the future. I would live from moment to moment and from breath to breath, until I had used up all the life I had.

  THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED so low that night that the water bottle we carried shattered from the cold. Huddled together in the sleeping bag, we kept ourselves from freezing, but still we suffered terribly. In the morning we placed our frozen shoes in the sun and rested in the bag until they thawed. Then, after eating and packing our things, we began to climb. The sun was bright. It was another perfect day.

  We were climbing above fifteen thousand feet now, and with every hundred yards or so the incline of the mountain tilted closer to the vertical. The open slopes were becoming unclimbable, so we began to work our way up the rocky edges of the winding couloirs—the steep plunging ravines that gashed the side of the mountain. Experienced climbers know couloirs can be killing zones—their shape makes them efficient chutes for all the rocks that tumble down the mountain—but the packed snow inside them gave us good footing, and the tall rock walls at their rims gave us something firm to grip.

  At times, one edge of a couloir would lead us to an impassable point. Then I would work my way across the snow-covered center of the coul
oir to the opposite edge. As we climbed the couloirs, I found myself worrying more and more about the lethal void behind me. Perhaps it was the dizzying altitude, perhaps it was fatigue or a trick of my oxygen-starved brain, but I felt that the emptiness at my back was no longer a passive danger. Now it had presence and intention, very bad intention, and I knew that if I didn’t resist it with all my strength, it would lure me off the mountain and toss me down the slope. Death was tapping me on the shoulder, and the thought of it made me slow and tentative. I second-guessed every movement, and lost faith in my balance. I realized with searing clarity that there were no second chances here, there was no margin for error. One slip, one moment of inattention, one bit of bad judgment, would send me headlong down the slope. The tug of the void was constant. It wanted me, and the only thing that could keep me from it was the level of my own performance. My life had collapsed to a simple game—climb well and live, or falter and die—and my consciousness had narrowed until there was no room in my thoughts for anything but a close and careful study of the rock I was reaching for, or the ledge on which I was about to brace my foot. Never had I felt such a sense of concentrated presence. Never had my mind experienced such a pure, uncomplicated sense of purpose.

  Put the left foot there. Yes, that edge will hold. Now, with the left hand, reach up for the crack in that boulder. Is it sturdy? Good. Lift yourself. Now, put the right foot on that ledge. Is it safe? Trust your balance. Watch the ice!

  I forgot myself in the intensity of my concentration, forgot my fears and fatigue, and for a while I felt as if everything I had ever been had disappeared, and that I was now nothing more than the pure will to climb. It was a moment of pure animal exhilaration.

  I had never felt so focused, so driven, so fiercely alive. For those astonishing moments, my suffering was over, my life had become pure flow. But those moments did not last. The fear and exhaustion soon returned, and climbing once again became an ordeal. We were very high on the mountain now, and altitude was making my motions heavy and my thinking slow. The slopes had become almost vertical and were harder than ever to climb, but I told myself that inclines this steep could only mean we were nearing the summit. To steady myself, I imagined the scene I’d see from the summit just as I’d imagined it so many times before—the rolling hills partitioned into green and brown parcels of farmland, the roads leading off to safety, and somewhere a hut or a farmhouse …

  How we continued to climb, I cannot say. I was shivering uncontrollably from cold and fatigue. My body was on the verge of complete collapse. Only the simplest thoughts could take shape in my mind. Then, in the distance above me, I saw the outline of a sloping ridge in sharp relief against a background of clear blue sky, and no more mountain above it. The summit! “We made it!” I shouted, and with renewed energy I clawed my way to the ridge. But as I pulled myself over its edge, the ridge gave way to a level shelf several yards wide, and above the shelf the mountain rose again. It was the steep angle of the slope that had fooled me. This was only another trick of the mountain, a false summit. And it wasn’t the last. We spent the afternoon struggling toward one false summit after another until, well before sunset, we found a sheltered spot and decided to pitch our camp.

  Roberto was sullen that night as we lay in the sleeping bag. “We will die if we keep climbing,” he said. “The mountain is too high.”

  “What can we do but climb?” I asked.

  “Go back,” he said. For a moment I was speechless.

  “Go back and wait to die?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Do you see across there, that dark line on the mountain? I think it’s a road.” Roberto pointed across a wide valley to a mountain ridge miles away.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It looks like some sort of fault line in the rock.”

  “Nando, you can barely see,” he snapped. “I tell you it’s a road!”

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “I think we should go back and follow that road. It must lead somewhere.”

  That was the last thing I wanted to hear. Since the moment we’d left the fuselage, I had secretly been tormented by doubts and misgivings. Are we doing the right thing? What if rescuers come while we’re in the mountains? What if the farmlands of Chile are not just over the ridge? Roberto’s plan seemed like lunacy, but it forced me to consider other options, and I did not have the heart for that now.

  “That mountain must be twenty-five miles away,” I said. “If we hike there and climb to that black line, and find that it is just a layer of shale, we won’t have the strength to return.”

  “It’s a road, Nando, I’m sure of it!”

  “Perhaps it’s a road, perhaps it’s not,” I replied. “The only thing we know for sure is that to the west is Chile.”

  Roberto scowled. “You’ve been saying that for months, but we’ll break our necks before we get there.”

  Roberto and I argued about the road for hours, but as we settled down to sleep, I knew the matter had not been resolved. I woke the next morning to yet another clear sky.

  “We’ve been lucky with the weather,” said Roberto. He was still inside the sleeping bag.

  “What have you decided?” I asked him. “Are you going back?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I need to think.”

  “I’m going to climb,” I said, “maybe we’ll reach the summit soon.”

  Roberto nodded. “Leave your packs here,” he said. “I’ll wait until you return.”

  I nodded. The thought of going on without Roberto terrified me, but I had no intention of turning back now. I waited for Tintin to gather his pack, then we turned to the slope and began to climb. After hours of slow progress, we found ourselves trapped at the base of a cliff towering hundreds of feet above us. Its face was almost dead vertical and covered with hard-packed snow.

  “How can we climb this?” asked Tintin.

  I studied the wall. My mind was sluggish, but soon I remembered the aluminum walking stick strapped to my back.

  “We need a stairway,” I said. I drew the stick off my back, and with its sharp tip, I began to carve crude steps into the snow. Using the steps like the rungs of a ladder, we continued to climb. It was excruciating work, but I kept at it with the dull persistence of a farm animal, and we ascended one slow step at a time. Tintin followed behind me. He was frightened, I know, but he never complained. In any case, I was just dimly aware of his presence. My attention was focused on the task at hand: Dig, climb, dig, climb. I felt, at times, that we were climbing the sheer sides of a frozen skyscraper, and it was very difficult to keep my balance as I dug, but I no longer worried about the void at my back. I respected it, but I had learned to tolerate its presence. A human being, as I’ve said before, gets used to anything.

  It was an agonizing process, inching up the mountain that way, and the hours passed slowly. Sometime in late morning I spotted blue sky above a ridgeline and worked my way toward it. After so many false summits, I had learned to keep my hopes in check, but this time, as I climbed over the ridge’s edge, the slope fell away flat and I found myself standing on a gloomy hump of rock and wind-scoured snow. It dawned on me slowly that there was no more mountain above me. I had reached the top.

  I don’t remember if I felt any joy or sense of achievement in that moment. If I did, it vanished as soon as I glanced around. The summit gave me an unobstructed 360-degree view of creation. From here I could see the horizon circling the world like the rim of a colossal bowl, and in every direction off into the fading blue distance, the bowl was crowded with legions of snow-covered mountains, each as steep and forbidding as the one I had just climbed. I understood immediately that the Fairchild’s copilot had been badly mistaken. We had not passed Curicó. We were nowhere near the western limits of the Andes. Our plane had fallen somewhere in the middle of the vast cordillera.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, staring. A minute. Maybe two. I stood motionless until I felt a burning pressure in my lungs, and rea
lized I had forgotten to breathe. I sucked air. My legs went rubbery and I fell to the ground. I cursed God and raged at the mountains. The truth was before me: for all my striving, all my hopes, all my promises to myself and my father, it would end like this. We would all die in these mountains. We would sink beneath the snow, the ancient silence would fall over us, and our loved ones would never know how hard we had struggled to return to them.

  In that moment all my dreams, assumptions, and expectations of life evaporated into the thin Andean air. I had always thought that life was the actual thing, the natural thing, and that death was simply the end of living. Now, in this lifeless place, I saw with a terrible clarity that death was the constant, death was the base, and life was only a short, fragile dream. I was dead already. I had been born dead, and what I thought was my life was just a game death let me play as it waited to take me. In my despair, I felt a sharp and sudden longing for the softness of my mother and my sister, and the warm, strong embrace of my father. My love for my father swelled in my heart, and I realized that, despite the hopelessness of my situation, the memory of him filled me with joy. It staggered me: The mountains, for all their power, were not stronger than my attachment to my father. They could not crush my ability to love. I felt a moment of calmness and clarity, and in that clarity of mind I discovered a simple, astounding secret: Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love. How had I missed that? How does anyone miss that? Love is our only weapon. Only love can turn mere life into a miracle, and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear. For a brief, magical moment, all my fears lifted, and I knew that I would not let death control me. I would walk through the godforsaken country that separated me from my home with love and hope in my heart. I would walk until I had walked all the life out of me, and when I fell I would die that much closer to my father. These thoughts strengthened me, and with renewed hope I began to search for pathways through the mountains. Soon I heard Tintin’s voice calling to me from the slope below.