Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival (9 page)

In the days that followed, they worked furiously on the radio. Eventually, they got it to the point where it might work and hiked back to the tail section, where they had stashed the batteries. The device yielded nothing but static. Although his friends still held out hope for rescue, Nando was resolute: he was heading up over the mountain and to the west. The hike back to the fuselage was hampered by a raging blizzard. In the midst of the whiteout, Nando had to rescue Roy Harley, who had fallen and curled up in the snow, waiting for death to come. Somehow, they made it back to the Fairchild, utterly spent.

The survivors began to sink deeper into despair. Their food supply was running out, and the gruesomeness of the situation had assumed stark proportions. Where they once limited themselves to the most generalized pieces of flesh of their comrades, starvation had forced their hand. Now they had no choice but to broaden their diet to organs, hands and feet, brains—even the blood clots that formed in the large blood vessels of the hearts. Even so, the bodies of the three women who had died—Nando’s mother, Eugenia, his sister, Susy, and Liliana—all lay untouched under the snow. Even in desperate times, the survivors had stayed true to their promise not to touch those three bodies. They never would.

By the first week of December, Nando and his fellow expeditionaries had regained enough of their collective strength to once again begin preparing in earnest for their westward journey. As part of these preparations, they again trolled the depths of their human inventiveness to make the trip as comfortable as possible. The key innovation was a sleeping bag they sewed together from the quilted batts of insulation they had gathered from the tail section of the plane. They hoped it would keep them alive as they slept out in the open. The sleeping bag was ready by the first week of December, but Nando encountered resistance from the one person he counted on most to accompany him on the journey: Roberto. Roberto was still adamant that help was on its way, thanks to a radio report he had heard earlier, and wanted to give his rescuers a chance. Nando was unconvinced; he was set on leaving on December 12, and would go alone if need be. The wait was not without tragedy: Numa died on December 11.

Nando and his fellow expeditionaries needed no further sign. Slowly and inexorably, they were all dying. To wait for rescue was to wait for death. If anything, the crash site spoke to the now-barbaric nature of their existence: the once-pristine snow was soaked in blood, urine, and feces, was littered with bits of human bodies, and reeked of death.

On December 12, Nando, Tintin, and Roberto finally set out. Either they would find rescue or die doing so, but they would not come back. Nando already considered himself a dead man, so he saw no risk in trying to scale the mountain. Before leaving, Nando turned to Carlitos and told him, in a soft voice, to use his mother and Susy as food, if need be.

The climb up the mountain, which rose to a height of some fifteen thousand feet, was incredibly difficult. The expeditionaries had no idea of the technical challenges of mountain climbing, the negative effect that altitude was about have on their bodies, and were wearing little more than jeans and sneakers. Before the crash, few of them had ever seen snow before. I think this was one of those situations where ignorance was truly bliss. Had they really known what they were in for, they might not have set out at all.

The sun shone down mercilessly, softening the snow to the point that, with each step, the hikers sunk in to their hips. The air grew thinner, and Nando and his friends gasped for air. Still, fueled by the knowledge that they were the only hope for their friends who clung to life in the fuselage below, they forged on. After they had climbed some 2,500 feet, Nando was dismayed to find that they seemed no closer to the summit above. On the verge of desperation, he was once again calmed by the voice in his head, which told him to stop considering the mountain as a whole and instead cut the task into small, attainable pieces. He looked slightly ahead and chose one reachable landmark after another. This was a brilliant strategy, and can be used in any number of situations. When the task at hand seems too much—whether it’s making a fire, building a shelter, or gathering food—break it down into its component parts. You’ll not only be empowered by your successes, you’ll find the job goes by much more quickly. As author Rick Canfield puts it, “You can drive across the country in the dark, and yet you can only see the first two hundred feet in front of you with your car headlights. So, it’s all the way—two hundred feet at a time.”

The trio settled in for their first night on the mountain in their makeshift sleeping bag. Although their collective warmth kept them from freezing to death at what was likely fourteen thousand feet of altitude, they suffered terribly through the night. When dawn finally arrived, they slid their stiff feet into their frozen shoes and set out once again. Although hard to imagine, the second day on that precipitous slope was even more difficult than the first. Nando’s existence was reduced to a single purpose: put one foot in front of the other and climb. Guided by the voice, he narrowed his focus so that nothing else mattered. Roberto seemed ready to give up on several occasions—he thought he could see a road far to the east—but Nando refused to give in.

The third morning of their climb found them at the base of a near-vertical wall encased in snow and ice. With no choice but to climb, Nando used a stick from his pack to carve steps in the wall. Step by excruciating step, they inched their way up. Many hours later, they attained the summit. It was certainly not what any of them would have expected. The view that met their eyes was one of the most depressing things Nando could imagine. In every direction, there were nothing but snow-covered mountains as far as the eye could see. They had been wrong all along. The plane had not crashed on the western edge of the Andes. They were right in the middle of them.

For a moment, despair got the better of Nando. He fell to the ground and cursed his fate before recovering his senses. Once again, with death knocking at his door, Nando chose to control his own destiny. Then and there, he and Roberto reaffirmed their pledge to one another: if they were going to die, they were going to do so on their feet, walking toward the sun to the west, not on their backs in the fuselage. They scanned the horizon for any sign of civilization, to no avail. Then Nando noticed two smaller peaks on the western horizon that were not capped with snow. A valley wound its way from the base of the mountain they now stood atop, in the general direction of the two peaks. It would take days, even weeks, to make it such a great distance, and by then their food would surely have run out. With no other choice, they decided that two would have a better chance of making it than three. Tintin would have to go back to the plane.

They rested for what remained of the afternoon in anticipation of the arduous trek that lay ahead. The next morning, Nando and Roberto bade farewell to Tintin. He headed down the mountain to the east, they to the west. Roberto was sure they were walking to their death. If the climb up the mountain had almost killed them, the descent was even worse. Though they didn’t have to deal with the same kind of physical exertion, the footing was unsteady, and each step came with the risk of falling to their deaths. At one point, Nando lost his senses, sat on one of his seat-cushion snowshoes, and began to slide down the mountain, narrowly escaping serious injury. They made it down the mountain at around noon the next day, and looked down the valley they hoped would lead them to salvation.

For days, they trudged along the glaciated valley floor, picking their way across and around ice blocks, the rough edges of the windblown snow gnawing slowly at their feet. On the seventh day of their journey, December 18, the snow slowly began to yield and patches of loose rubble appeared at their feet. Later that day, Nando was roused from his almost-maniacal focus by the sound of water ahead. He rushed forward to see a jet of water shooting from an ice wall and down into the valley below, where it formed a fast-flowing stream. Nando and Roberto knew this was the birth of a river and wisely decided to follow it.

Soon, the snow released its grip completely on the ground underfoot, though the hiking was no less difficult. The weakening pair picked their way slowly around the boulders and rocks strewn across their path. The days wound into nights, and yet Roberto and Nando soldiered on. They grew weaker with each passing hour, and their shoes were beginning to come apart at the seams, but they were fueled by a fierce sense of purpose. The force of good luck was on their side, and their eighth day away from the fuselage dawned bright, sunny, and warm.

Later that afternoon, Roberto found the remains of a rusted soup can on the ground, their first sign of so-called civilization in more than two months. More followed: cow and horse dung, a tree stump that still bore ax marks. Later that afternoon, they spotted a small herd of cows a few hundred yards away. They camped that evening with hope rising in their hearts. As the ninth day of their journey dawned, Roberto found it increasingly difficult to move. With the prospect of rescue so tangible, however, they continued in the face of their weakening condition. With every bend in the well-worn path they now walked, Roberto expected to come across a peasant’s hut. It never materialized. But as they reached the top of a broad plateau later in the day, they saw the stone walls of what they assumed to be a farmer’s corral in a meadow. The only thing stopping them from reaching it was the river, which now raged with a fury before them.

The afternoon skies were darkening toward evening, when Nando heard Roberto shout from across the meadow. He had seen a man on horseback! Nando, whose eyes were not as good as Roberto’s, could see nothing, but he let Roberto guide him to a spot on the slope where the dim outline of the rider became clear. They shouted and waved frantically. The man looked up and waved back! Though the river drowned out most of what he said, one word rang clear across the river:
mañana
—tomorrow. They were saved.

Nando woke before dawn the next day, their tenth since leaving the Fairchild, and saw the dim glow of a fire across the river, around which three men sat. Nando screamed and gestured, then saw one of the men scribble on a piece of paper, tie it to a stone, and throw it across the river. The note said a man was coming later and asked Nando and Roberto what they wanted. Nando’s return note described who he was, where he came from, and the desperate situation of his comrades who were still perched on the mountain. The peasant read the note, nodded, and made a hand gesture that told Nando and Roberto to wait. A few hours later, a man on horseback, Armando Serda, rode up on a mule. They were saved.

The hours and days that followed were a blur for Nando and Roberto. They were first taken to the peasants’ huts, where they ate the prodigious amounts of food put in front of them, then slept the afternoon away like dead men. The police arrived the next morning, as did a horde of reporters. When the helicopters arrived, Nando pinpointed the exact location of the Fairchild on their flight chart. The officers were skeptical. There was no way these two near-skeletons could have walked more than seventy miles through the High Andes with little more than the clothes on their backs. Nando persisted. A short while later, the choppers were in the air, with Nando in tow. The helicopters pitched and bounced as they struggled to climb over the massive walls of Mount Seler. The engines whined dangerously as they pushed the chopper over the peak, only to have a massive updraft throw the helicopter backward. With no other choice, the pilot sought another route to the crash site.

The light was bad and the winds heavy, but the pilot and other crew members decided they would make one final push to the plane. They circled around Mount Seler (as Nando later named it, to honor his father), where Nando regained his perspective and guided them to the crash site. The chopper couldn’t land because of the angle of the slope, but the rescue team hopped out. Daniel Fernandez and Alvaro Mangino jumped into one helicopter; Carlitos Paez, Pedro Algorta, Eduardo Strauch, and Roy Harley got into the other. Tintin and the rest would have to wait for the second trip, but by the afternoon all the survivors were together again, in a small town called Los Maitenes.

They were later flown to a military base near the town of San Fernando, where waiting ambulances took them to a nearby hospital. Each person was led to a small, clean room, where they peeled off their dirty clothes, showered, ate, and rested. Nando’s reverie was disturbed by a commotion outside his room. He opened the door to see his sister Graciela and her husband making their way down the hallway. He held his sister and brother-in-law for a few beautiful minutes, then saw the bowed figure of his father, Seler, at the end of the hall. Nando gently broke the news of his mother and sister’s death to his father, and felt him sag in his arms. Later, they sat together in Nando’s room, sharing what Nando called “the simple miracle of being together again.”

To this day, mountain climbers have hailed the ten-day journey of Nando and Roberto as one of the greatest mountaineering feats of all time. In total, sixteen of the forty-five passengers who boarded the Fairchild lived to tell their tale.