Climbing Trail
The Andes Part 4
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Starting from here, the story switches to Nando Parrado's Point of view
On the third day I finally woke up from the coma, and as I slowly gathered consciousness, I was shocked by the shadow of the horror my friends had been living through. The tension they went through seemed to have aged them by several years. Their faces shriveled and pale due to mental tension and lack of sleep.
There were currently thirty-six survivors, most of them young people between nineteen and twenty-one years old, but some were still seven years old. The oldest was Javier Methol, thirty-eight years old, but he was severely wounded by disgust and fatigue.
Both the pilot and most of the crew have died. The only surviving crew member was Carlos Roque, the plane's mechanic, but the accident had left him confused so he could only fumble with a blank mind.
No one helped us, no one had knowledge of mountains or planes or survival techniques. We continued to live on the verge of hysteria, but we did not panic.
What was instrumental to our survival at that critical start was Marcelo Perez, whose leadership has saved countless lives. The quick rescue operation saved the lives of people who could be lifted from a pile of chairs, and without the wall of protection he made that night, we would all freeze the next morning.
Marcelo's leadership is heroic. At night he sleeps in the coldest part of the fuselage, and he always asks all the uninjured to do the same. He forced us to stay busy, when some of us wanted to always huddle on the plane and wait to be rescued.
More than anything else, he sustains our spirit by assuring that our suffering will soon end. He assured others that help was on its way to our place, and he was very excited to convince others that this was the case. Still, he understands that surviving in the Andes, even if it is only a few days, will test us to the limits of our abilities, and he made it his responsibility to take action that would give us the best chance of survival that long.
One of the first things he did was collect everything edible that could be found in a suitcase or debris around the cabin. Not enough some chocolate bars and candy, nuts and pastries, dried fruit, some jars filled with jam, three bottles of wine, some whiskey, and some bottles of liqueur.
Although he believed that help was only a few hours away, his natural instinct for survival told him to think at the worst possible time, and on the second day of the ordeal, he said, Marcelo began rationing food thoroughly every ration of no more than a small piece of chocolate or a dab of jam, washing the mouth with a wine tincture from the lid of an aerosol container. All of that is not enough to eliminate hunger, but as a ritual that can give us strength.
Every time we gathered to receive rations, we made fireplaces, for everyone and for ourselves, that we would do everything to survive.
Marcelo made sure our belief in the coming of help remained strong. Even though day after day had passed, and no help had come, he did not let us doubt the fact that we would all be saved.
On an afternoon on the fourth day, a small chartered plane passed over the crash site, and some of us who saw it were convinced it was playing its wings. This was regarded as a sign that we had been seen, and a moment later a feeling of relief and excitement overpowered the entourage. We waited until a long shadow formed from the afternoon sun crept into the mountains, but until night fell no help came.
Marcelo assured that the pilot of the plane would send help as soon as possible, but others who had been exhausted by the wait began to admit their doubts. Why did they find us so long ago? Someone asked. Marcelo answered this question in the same way
as he always did: Maybe the helicopter couldn't fly in the thin mountain air, he said, so the rescue team would have come on foot, and it would have taken some time.
"But if they know we're here, why haven't they dropped supplies?"
Impossible, said Marcelo. Anything dropped and the plane would easily sink into the snow and disappear. Most people accept Marcelo's logical explanation. They also believe in the power of God. "God has saved us from death in an accident" they said.
I listened to such discussions over the length of time I had missed to take care of Susy, my sister. I want to trust God like them. But God has taken my mother, Panchito, and all the others. Why did He save us and not them?
Every moment that passed was a pain for me, and in every second of mine, I listened intently in case the sounds of the rescuers approached. I never stopped praying for their arrival, or for God's help, but at the same time a cold-blooded voice that forced me not to cry always whispered in my subconscious, "No one will find
we're. We're gonna die here. We have to make a plan. We have to save ourselves."
From the very first moment I came to my senses, I avoided the worry that we were here alone, and it reminded me that people put so much faith and hoped we would survive. But soon I realized that people think like me. "People are realistic", as I call them, including Canessa and Zerbino, and Fito Strauch.
We've passed Curico, we've passed Curico. It was the words of our co-pilot who was raving as he was dying.
Arturo Noguiera, who was forced to stay on the plane because his legs were crushed, spent hours studying complex maps, searching for the city of Curico. Finally he found it, located on the Chilean border, on the outer slopes of the western Andes mountains.
Until now, we felt like victims of a sinking ship, lost in the ocean without knowing where the land might be. Now we feel we cannot control the situation. We only know a fact: The west direction is Chile. This sentence soon became a mantra for us, and we made use of it to encourage hope through this ordeal.
The next morning, October 17, was our fifth day in the Mountains. Carlitos, Roberto, Fito, and a twenty-four-year-old named Numa Turcatti decide the time to hike. Numa is not a member of Old Christians he joined our flight as a friend of Pancho Delgado and Gaston Costemale, but he is as healthy and burly as we are, and has made it through accidents
the heavy. I don't know him very well yet, but after the few days we spent together, he has impressed me and all my other friends with his calmness and fortitude. Numa never panics or gets out of control.he is never inferior or desperate. There is glory and sincerity in Numa.
Everyone knows it. He cares for the weaker person and calms the one who cries or fears.he cares for our salvation as much as he does himself, and I knew that if one day we were going to get out of these mountains, Numa would definitely do something, and I was not surprised that he willingly joined in to go hiking.
The weather was clear when they left. I wished them well, and then busied myself taking care of Susy. The shadow of the noon sun had shaded Fairchild when the climbers returned. I heard a furore in the plane, and I looked up to see them climb into the fuselage and throw themselves to the floor. They were exhausted and gasping for air. People immediately surrounded them, urging them with many questions, wanting promising news. I approached Numa and asked her how it was there.
he shook his head with a sour face. "It's really hard, Nando," he said while breathing heavily.
"It's very steep there. Steeper than it looks from here."
"There's not much air in there" Canessa said. "You can't breathe, you can only move very slowly."
Numa nodded his head. "The snow is too deep, every step is very heavy. And there's a deep hole under the snow surface. Fito almost got mired."
You see anything west? i asked.
"We've only reached half the height of the mountain" Numa said. "We can't see anything. The mountains blocked our view. Mountains are higher than they seem."
I switched to Canessa.
"Roberto," I said, "What do you think? If we try again, can we climb it?"
(Connected)
