Miracle in the Andes, Review
MIRACLE IN THE ANDES
BY NANDO PARRADO (With Vine Rause)
CROWN PUBLISHERS $25.00
Once in a very long time a book arrives on my bedside table that changes the way I see the world and the people within it. At first, when Nando Parrado’s Miracle in the Andes made it to the top of my bedside pile, I rolled my eyes. Having glanced at the front cover – the image of a wrecked airplane on a mountainside – and scanned the text on the back, I thought to myself, ‘I know this story’. After all, it had wrenched my emotions twenty years ago under the title Alive. I felt as if I had little stamina left to hear the tale all again.
While I worked on my stamina, my wife snatched the book and started reading it on her side of the bed. Every night for a week she sobbed herself to sleep. By the time I had gathered the strength needed to begin, the book looked as if it had been swept away in a flood. My wife passed it over to my side of the bed, along with a half-empty box of Kleenex, ‘You’ll need this,’ she said.
The story begins when a small plane filled with young rugby players took off from the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, en route to play a match in Santiago, Chile. The date: Friday the 13th October 1972. The flight across the mighty Andean range was hampered by bad weather, but the brash young members of the Old Christians Rugby Team wouldn’t hear of turning back. Dodging pockets of extreme turbulence, the pilots aimed the plane at the heart of the cordillera, hoping to guide it through the narrow Planchón Pass.
Inside, the team and a handful of their supporters were in high spirits – swapping seats, playing cards, throwing a rugby ball around. Outside, nothing but thick fog, crags, and sheering mountain walls almost within arm’s reach. Then… ‘There was a terrible howl of metal grinding. Suddenly I saw open sky above me… I was torn from my seat with incredible force and hurled forward into complete darkness and silence.’ [QUOTE FROM PAGE 32].
Three days later, Nando Parrado woke from a coma, a ball of snow pushed up to his mouth by a fellow survivor. His skull was fractured, but he was alive. His mother who had been on the flight too, was dead; and his little sister Suzy, was hovering in limbo between life and death.
Forty-five passengers and crew had been aboard the aircraft. Of these, thirty-two survived the impact, including one of the pilots. He was trapped and so badly injured he begged for the revolver he kept in his flight bag. In the first days, Parrado nursed his sister and took stock of the situation. The odds of survival were almost nonexistent. They were stuck at 17,000 feet, dressed in short-sleeved summer shirts, many of them with appalling wounds.
Marcelo, the captain of the rugby team, had taken charge in the most heroic way. He hunted the baggage for food, had the dead pulled out and buried, and organized for a snow wall to be built, to plug the end of the fuselage. Without it no one would have lived through the first night. But most of all, he coaxed the living to keep faith.
With no proper supplies, the wounded had little chance of survival. They began to drop off one at a time. Parrado’s little sister, Suzy, died in his arms, while he himself had to wait for nature to repair ‘the shattered fragments’ of his skull. Those who had survived had nothing to drink except a few daily drops snow melted by the sun. And then there was the matter of food. In one of the most moving passages, Parrado explains how he and his companions faced the grim reality of survival: if they did not eat the raw flesh of their dead comrades, they themselves would die – ‘I knew those bodies represented our only chance of survival’, he says.
Soon after, a frail transistor radio coaxed into life spewed out the dreadful truth: that the search to save them had been called off. Morale plummeted. The only hope of survival was sending a team for help. Parrado and three others volunteered to go – to scale the sky-scraping peaks standing between them and civilization. But, before they could leave, an avalanche in the night smothered eight more members, including their captain, Marcelo, and trapped the rest of them in the wreck of the fuselage.
Finally, packing the warmest clothes and a supply of human meat as food, Parrado and his ‘expeditionary team’ set off over the mountains in search of salvation. Eventually, after ten days of indescribable hardship and more than seventy days in the Andes, he and one other spotted a peasant on the far bank of a roaring river. Nando Parrado scribbled a note, tied it to a stone and threw it across. It began: ‘I come from a plane that fell into the mountains.’
Miracle in the Andes tells much the same story as is recounted in Piers Paul Read’s book Alive, published more than thirty years ago. The difference is that it contains a level of emotion only a first hand account can provide. Parrado’s narrative paints the terrible tale in vivid pastel colors for the first time. It would be hard to find another book written with such engaging sensitivity and, at the same time, so charged with sheer humanity. Parrado’s extraordinary quality is to remind those of us living within the firm safety net of society, that we are all capable of pushing ourselves to the limit. But more importantly it teaches us not to waste a single moment, or a single breath.
(Written for The Washington Post)
(C) Tahir Shah, 2006
Ends
BY NANDO PARRADO (With Vine Rause)
CROWN PUBLISHERS $25.00
Once in a very long time a book arrives on my bedside table that changes the way I see the world and the people within it. At first, when Nando Parrado’s Miracle in the Andes made it to the top of my bedside pile, I rolled my eyes. Having glanced at the front cover – the image of a wrecked airplane on a mountainside – and scanned the text on the back, I thought to myself, ‘I know this story’. After all, it had wrenched my emotions twenty years ago under the title Alive. I felt as if I had little stamina left to hear the tale all again.
While I worked on my stamina, my wife snatched the book and started reading it on her side of the bed. Every night for a week she sobbed herself to sleep. By the time I had gathered the strength needed to begin, the book looked as if it had been swept away in a flood. My wife passed it over to my side of the bed, along with a half-empty box of Kleenex, ‘You’ll need this,’ she said.
The story begins when a small plane filled with young rugby players took off from the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, en route to play a match in Santiago, Chile. The date: Friday the 13th October 1972. The flight across the mighty Andean range was hampered by bad weather, but the brash young members of the Old Christians Rugby Team wouldn’t hear of turning back. Dodging pockets of extreme turbulence, the pilots aimed the plane at the heart of the cordillera, hoping to guide it through the narrow Planchón Pass.
Inside, the team and a handful of their supporters were in high spirits – swapping seats, playing cards, throwing a rugby ball around. Outside, nothing but thick fog, crags, and sheering mountain walls almost within arm’s reach. Then… ‘There was a terrible howl of metal grinding. Suddenly I saw open sky above me… I was torn from my seat with incredible force and hurled forward into complete darkness and silence.’ [QUOTE FROM PAGE 32].
Three days later, Nando Parrado woke from a coma, a ball of snow pushed up to his mouth by a fellow survivor. His skull was fractured, but he was alive. His mother who had been on the flight too, was dead; and his little sister Suzy, was hovering in limbo between life and death.
Forty-five passengers and crew had been aboard the aircraft. Of these, thirty-two survived the impact, including one of the pilots. He was trapped and so badly injured he begged for the revolver he kept in his flight bag. In the first days, Parrado nursed his sister and took stock of the situation. The odds of survival were almost nonexistent. They were stuck at 17,000 feet, dressed in short-sleeved summer shirts, many of them with appalling wounds.
Marcelo, the captain of the rugby team, had taken charge in the most heroic way. He hunted the baggage for food, had the dead pulled out and buried, and organized for a snow wall to be built, to plug the end of the fuselage. Without it no one would have lived through the first night. But most of all, he coaxed the living to keep faith.
With no proper supplies, the wounded had little chance of survival. They began to drop off one at a time. Parrado’s little sister, Suzy, died in his arms, while he himself had to wait for nature to repair ‘the shattered fragments’ of his skull. Those who had survived had nothing to drink except a few daily drops snow melted by the sun. And then there was the matter of food. In one of the most moving passages, Parrado explains how he and his companions faced the grim reality of survival: if they did not eat the raw flesh of their dead comrades, they themselves would die – ‘I knew those bodies represented our only chance of survival’, he says.
Soon after, a frail transistor radio coaxed into life spewed out the dreadful truth: that the search to save them had been called off. Morale plummeted. The only hope of survival was sending a team for help. Parrado and three others volunteered to go – to scale the sky-scraping peaks standing between them and civilization. But, before they could leave, an avalanche in the night smothered eight more members, including their captain, Marcelo, and trapped the rest of them in the wreck of the fuselage.
Finally, packing the warmest clothes and a supply of human meat as food, Parrado and his ‘expeditionary team’ set off over the mountains in search of salvation. Eventually, after ten days of indescribable hardship and more than seventy days in the Andes, he and one other spotted a peasant on the far bank of a roaring river. Nando Parrado scribbled a note, tied it to a stone and threw it across. It began: ‘I come from a plane that fell into the mountains.’
Miracle in the Andes tells much the same story as is recounted in Piers Paul Read’s book Alive, published more than thirty years ago. The difference is that it contains a level of emotion only a first hand account can provide. Parrado’s narrative paints the terrible tale in vivid pastel colors for the first time. It would be hard to find another book written with such engaging sensitivity and, at the same time, so charged with sheer humanity. Parrado’s extraordinary quality is to remind those of us living within the firm safety net of society, that we are all capable of pushing ourselves to the limit. But more importantly it teaches us not to waste a single moment, or a single breath.
(Written for The Washington Post)
(C) Tahir Shah, 2006
Ends
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