Miracle in the Andes Read online

  But for all the different kinds of courage I saw around me, the blatant and the subtle, I knew that every one of us lived each moment in fear, and I saw each survivor deal with those fears in his or her own fashion. Some of them vented their fears through anger, raging at the fates for stranding us here, or at the authorities for being so slow in coming to save us. Others begged God for answers and pleaded for a miracle. And many were so incapacitated by their fears, by all the forces stacked so grimly against us, that they sank into despair. Those boys showed no initiative at all. They would work only if forced, and even then they could only be trusted to do the simplest chores. With each day that passed, they seemed to fade more deeply into the background, growing more depressed and listless until finally some of them grew so apathetic they would lie all day in the same spot where they had slept, waiting for rescue or death, whichever might come first. They dreamed of home and prayed for miracles, but as they languished in the shadows of the fuselage, tortured by fears of dying, with their eyes dull and hollow, they were becoming ghosts already.

  Those of us who were strong enough to work were not always gentle with these boys. With all the pressures we were facing, it was hard at times not to think of them as cowards or parasites. Most of them were not seriously injured, and it angered us that they could not summon the will to join in our common fight to survive. “Move your ass!” we would shout at them. “Do something! You aren’t dead yet!” This emotional rift between the workers and the lost boys created a potential fault line in our small community that could have led to conflict, cruelty, and even violence. But somehow that never happened. We never surrendered to recrimination and blame. Perhaps it was all the years together on the rugby field. Perhaps the Christian Brothers had taught us well. In any case, we were able to rein in our resentments and struggle as a team. Those who had the heart for it, and the physical strength, did what had to be done. The weaker ones, and the injured, simply endured. We tried to prod them into action, sometimes we bossed them, but we never despised them or abandoned them to their own fates. We understood, intuitively, that no one in this awful place could be judged by the standards of the ordinary world. The horrors we faced were overwhelming, and there was no telling how any one of us might react at any given time. In this place, even simple survival required heroic effort, and these boys were fighting their own private battles in the shadows. We knew it was useless to ask anyone to do more than he could. So we made sure they had enough to eat and warm clothes to wear. In the coldest hours of the night we massaged their feet to protect them from frostbite. We made sure they covered themselves well at night, and we melted water for them when they couldn’t muster the optimism required to go outside and breathe fresh air. Above all, we remained comrades in our suffering. We had lost too many friends already. Every life was precious to us. We would do what we could to help all of our friends survive.

  “Breathe once more,” we would tell the weaker ones, when the cold, or their fears, or despair, would shove them to the edge of surrender. “Live for one more breath. As long as you breathe, you are fighting to survive.” In fact, all of us on the mountain were living our lives one breath at a time, and struggling to find the will we needed to endure from one heartbeat to the next. We suffered each moment, and in many ways, but always the source of our greatest suffering was the cold. Our bodies never adjusted to the frigid temperatures—no human body could. It was early spring in the Andes, but very wintry still, and often blizzards raged around the clock, keeping us trapped inside the plane. But on clear days the strong mountain sun beat down and we spent as much time outside the fuselage as possible, soaking up the warming rays. We had even dragged some of the Fairchild’s seats outside the plane and arranged them on the snow like lawn chairs so we could sit as we basked in the sun. But all too soon the sun would dip behind the ridges to the west, and in what seemed like seconds the crackling blue sky would fade to deep violet, stars would appear, and shadows would stream down the side of the mountain toward us like a tide. Without the sun to warm the thin air, temperatures would plummet, and we would retreat to the shelter of the fuselage to prepare for the misery of another night.

  High-altitude cold is an aggressive and malevolent thing. It burns you and slashes you, it invades every cell of your body, it presses down on you with a force that seems strong enough to crack bone. The drafty fuselage shielded us from the winds that would have killed us, but still, the air inside the plane was viciously frigid. We had cigarette lighters, and could easily have lit a fire, but there was very little combustible material on the mountain. We burned all the paper money we had—almost $7,500 went up in smoke—and we found enough scrap wood in the plane to fuel two or three small fires, but these fires burned themselves out quickly, and the brief luxury of warmth only made the cold seem worse when the flames had died. For the most part, our best defense against the cold was to huddle together on the loose seat cushions we’d scattered over the aircraft’s floor and draw our flimsy blankets around us, hoping to gather enough warmth from each other’s bodies to survive another night. I would lie in the dark for hours, my teeth chattering violently, and my body shivering so hard that the muscles of my neck and shoulders were constantly in spasm. We were all very careful about protecting our extremities from frostbite, so I always kept my hands tucked under my armpits as I slept, and my feet beneath someone’s body. Still the cold made my fingers and toes feel as if they’d been struck by a mallet. Sometimes, when I feared that the blood was freezing in my veins, I would ask the others to punch my arms and legs to stimulate circulation. Always I slept with a blanket over my head to trap the warmth of my exhaled breath. Sometimes I would lie with my head close to the face of the boy next to me, to steal a little breath, a little warmth, from him. Some nights we talked, but it was difficult, since our teeth chattered and our jaws trembled in the frigid air. I often tried to distract myself from my misery by praying, or by picturing my father at home, but the cold could not be ignored for very long. Sometimes there was nothing you could do but surrender to the suffering and count the seconds until morning. Often, in those helpless moments, I was certain I was going mad.

  The cold was always our greatest agony, but in the earliest days of the ordeal, the greatest threat we faced was thirst. At high altitude, the human body dehydrates five times faster than it does at sea level, primarily because of the low levels of oxygen in the atmosphere. To draw sufficient oxygen from the lean mountain air, the body forces itself to breathe very rapidly. This is an involuntary reaction; often you pant just standing still. Increased inhalations bring more oxygen into the bloodstream, but each time you breathe in you must also breathe out, and precious moisture is lost each time you exhale. A human being can survive at sea level for a week or longer without water. In the Andes the margin of safety is much slimmer, and each breath brings you closer to death.

  There certainly was no lack of water in the mountains—we were sitting on a snow-packed glacier, surrounded by millions of tons of frozen H2O. Our problem was making the snow drinkable. Well-equipped mountain climbers carry small gas stoves to melt snow into drinking water, and they guzzle water constantly—gallons every day—to keep themselves safely hydrated. We had no stoves, and no efficient way to melt snow. At first we simply scooped handfuls of snow into our mouths and tried to eat it, but after only a few days our lips were so cracked, bloody, and raw from the arid cold that forcing the icy clumps of snow into our mouths became an unbearable agony. We found that if we packed the snow into a ball and warmed the ball in our hands, we could suck drops of water from the snowball as it melted. We also melted snow by sloshing it around inside empty wine bottles, and we slurped it up from every small puddle we could find. For example, the snow on the top of the fuselage would melt in the sun, sending a trickle of water down the aircraft’s windshield, where it would collect in a small aluminum channel that held the base of the windshield in place. On sunny days we would line up and wait our turn to suck a little water out of the cha
nnel, but it was never enough to satisfy our cravings. In fact, none of our efforts to make drinkable water were providing us with enough fluid to fight off dehydration. We were weakening, growing lethargic and thickheaded as toxins accumulated in our blood. Surrounded by a frozen ocean, we were slowly dying of thirst. We needed an efficient way to melt snow quickly, and, thanks to Fito’s inventiveness, we found one.

  One sunny morning, as he sat outside the fuselage, craving water like the rest of us, Fito noticed that the sun was melting the thin crust of ice that formed every night on the snow. An idea came to him. He quietly rummaged through a pile of wreckage that had been dragged out of the fuselage and soon found, beneath the torn upholstery of a battered seat, a small rectangular sheet of thin aluminum. He turned up the corners of the aluminum sheet to form a shallow basin, and pinched one of the corners to form a spout. Then he filled the basin with snow and set it in the bright sunshine. In no time the snow was melting and water was trickling steadily from the spout. Fito collected the water in a bottle, and when the others saw how well his contraption worked, they gathered more of the aluminum sheets—there was one in every seat—and fashioned them in the same way. Marcelo was so impressed with Fito’s contraptions that he formed a crew of boys whose main responsibility was to tend them, making sure we had a constant supply of water. We could not produce as much as we really needed, and our thirst was never quenched, but Fito’s ingenuity did give us enough hydration to keep us alive. We were holding our own. Through cleverness and cooperation, we had found ways to keep the cold and thirst from killing us, but soon we faced a problem that cleverness and teamwork alone could not resolve. Our food supplies were dwindling. We were beginning to starve.

  In the early days of the ordeal, hunger was not a great concern for us. The cold and the mental shock we’d endured, along with the depression and fear we all were feeling, acted to curb our appetites, and since we were convinced that rescuers would find us soon, we were content to get by on the meager rations Marcelo doled out. But rescue did not come.

  One morning near the end of our first week in the mountains, I found myself standing outside the fuselage, looking down at the single chocolate-covered peanut I cradled in my palm. Our supplies had been exhausted, this was the last morsel of food I would be given, and with a sad, almost miserly desperation I was determined to make it last. On the first day, I slowly sucked the chocolate off the peanut, then I slipped the peanut into the pocket of my slacks. On the second day I carefully separated the peanut halves, slipping one half back into my pocket and placing the other half in my mouth. I sucked gently on the peanut for hours, allowing myself only a tiny nibble now and then. I did the same on the third day, and when I’d finally nibbled the peanut down to nothing, there was no food left at all.

  At high altitude, the body’s caloric needs are astronomical. A climber scaling any of the mountains surrounding the crash site would have required as many as 15,000 calories a day simply to maintain his current body weight. We were not climbing, but even so, at such high altitude our caloric requirements were much higher than they would have been at home. Since the crash, even before our rations had run out, we had never consumed more than a few hundred calories a day. Now, for days, our intake was down to zero. When we boarded the plane in Montevideo, we were sturdy and vigorous young men, many of us athletes in peak physical condition. Now I saw the faces of my friends growing thin and drawn. Their movements were sluggish and uncertain, and there was a weary dullness in their eyes. We were starving in earnest, with no hope of finding food, but our hunger soon grew so voracious that we searched anyway. We became obsessed by the search for food, but what drove us was nothing like ordinary appetite. When the brain senses the onset of starvation—that is, when it realizes that the body has begun to break down its own flesh and tissue to use as fuel—it sets off an adrenaline surge of alarm just as jarring and powerful as the impulse that compels a hunted animal to flee from an attacking predator. Primal instincts had asserted themselves, and it was really fear more than hunger that compelled us to search so frantically for food. Again and again we scoured the fuselage in search of crumbs and morsels. We tried to eat strips of leather torn from pieces of luggage, though we knew that the chemicals they’d been treated with would do us more harm than good. We ripped open seat cushions hoping to find straw, but found only inedible upholstery foam. Even after I was convinced that there was not a scrap of anything edible to be found, my mind would not rest. I would spend hours compulsively racking my brain for any possible source of food. Maybe there is a plant growing somewhere, or some insects under a rock. Maybe the pilots had snacks in the cockpit. Perhaps some food was thrown out by accident when we dragged the seats from the plane. We should check the trash pile again. Did we check all the pockets of the dead before they were buried?

  Again and again I came to the same conclusion: unless we wanted to eat the clothes we were wearing, there was nothing here but aluminum, plastic, ice, and rock. Sometimes I would rise from a long silence to shout out loud in my frustration: “There is nothing in this fucking place to eat!” But of course there was food on the mountain—there was meat, plenty of it, and all in easy reach. It was as near as the bodies of the dead lying outside the fuselage under a thin layer of frost. It puzzles me that despite my compulsive drive to find anything edible, I ignored for so long the obvious presence of the only edible objects within a hundred miles. There are some lines, I suppose, that the mind is very slow to cross, but when my mind did finally cross that line, it did so with an impulse so primitive it shocked me. It was late afternoon and we were lying in the fuselage, preparing for night. My gaze fell on the slowly healing leg wound of a boy lying near me. The center of the wound was moist and raw, and there was a crust of dried blood at the edges. I could not stop looking at that crust, and as I smelled the faint blood-scent in the air, I felt my appetite rising. Then I looked up and met the gaze of other boys who had also been staring at the wound. In shame, we read each other’s thoughts and quickly glanced away, but for me something had happened that I couldn’t deny: I had looked at human flesh and instinctively recognized it as food. Once that door had been opened, it couldn’t be closed, and from that moment on my mind was never far from the frozen bodies under the snow. I knew those bodies represented our only chance for survival, but I was so horrified by what I was thinking that I kept my feelings quiet. But finally I couldn’t stay silent any longer, and one night in the darkness of the fuselage, I decided to confide in Carlitos Paez, who was lying beside me in the dark.

  “Carlitos,” I whispered, “are you awake?”

  “Yes,” he muttered. “Who can sleep in this freezer?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Puta carajo,” he snapped. “What do you think? I haven’t eaten in days.”

  “We are going to starve here,” I said. “I don’t think the rescuers will find us in time.”

  “You don’t know that,” Carlitos answered.

  “I know it and you know it,” I replied, “but I will not die here. I will make it home.”

  “Are you still thinking about climbing out of here?” he asked. “Nando, you are too weak.”

  “I am weak because I haven’t eaten.”

  “But what can you do?” he said. “There is no food here.”

  “There is food,” I answered. “You know what I mean.”

  Carlitos shifted in the darkness, but he said nothing.

  “I will cut meat from the pilot,” I whispered. “He’s the one who put us here, maybe he will help us get out.”

  “Fuck, Nando,” Carlitos whispered.

  “There is plenty of food here,” I said, “but you must think of it only as meat. Our friends don’t need their bodies anymore.”

  Carlitos sat silently for a moment before speaking. “God help us,” he said softly. “I have been thinking the very same thing …”

  In the following days, Carlitos shared our conversation with some of the others. A few, like Carlitos,
admitted to having had the same thoughts. Roberto, Gustavo, and Fito especially believed it was our only chance to survive. For a few days we discussed the subject among ourselves, then we decided to call a meeting and bring the issue out into the open. We all gathered inside the fuselage. It was late afternoon and the light was dim. Roberto began to speak.

  “We are starving,” he said simply. “Our bodies are consuming themselves. Unless we eat some protein soon, we will die, and the only protein here is in the bodies of our friends.”

  There was a heavy silence when Roberto paused. Finally, someone spoke up. “What are you saying?” he cried. “That we eat the dead?”

  “We don’t know how long we will be trapped here,” Roberto continued. “If we do not eat, we will die. It’s that simple. If you want to see your families again, this is what you must do.”

  The faces of the others showed astonishment as Roberto’s words sank in. Then Liliana spoke softly.

  “I cannot do that,” she said. “I could never do that.”

  “You won’t do it for yourself,” said Gustavo, “but you must do it for your children. You must survive and go home to them.”

  “But what will this do to our souls?” someone wondered. “Could God forgive such a thing?”

  “If you don’t eat, you are choosing to die,” Roberto answered. “Would God forgive that? I believe God wants us to do whatever we can to survive.”

  I decided to speak. “We must believe it is only meat now,” I told them. “The souls are gone. If rescue is coming, we must buy time, or we will be dead when they find us.”