A love more powerful than death:

Nando Parrado, survivor of the 1972 Andes plane crash, reflects on spirituality, faith and what one can learn from death

 

 

IN OCTOBER 1972, A PLANE CARRYING AN URUGUAYAN RUGBY team slammed into the Andes, immediately killing 12 of the 45 people on board. After waking from a four-day concussion with a fractured skull, 20-year-old Nando Parrado found himself stranded in the harsh and frozen mountains. The 72 days that followed the crash mark one of the most grueling and tragic survival stories of our time, from the impact that killed his mother, his sister and most of his teammates, to his nine-day trek across the frozen Andes that ultimately ended in the rescue of 16 survivors.

Soon after the rescue, Parrado worked with Piers Paul Read, who wrote the best-selling Alive, and 20 years later, served as technical advisor for the film of the same name. The success of the movie sent Parrado on an international lecture circuit, where he continues to deliver inspirational talks about his experiences during the crash and afterward. Now, Parrado has written Miracle in the Andes (Crown, 2006), a moving and complex tale of strength, camaraderie and perseverance in which Parrado details the crash and the horrifying events afterward, reflects on the ability of nature to conquer man, and ponders fate, faith and the power of love.

RD: The name of your book is Miracle in the Andes. I’m curious: do you believe in miracles?

NP: I think I have to believe in events that might be similar to miracles. It’s a miracle that 29 guys survived an airplane crashing into a mountain. That’s not normal. We crashed at cruising speed against a mountain, and of the 45 people that were on the airplane, 29 survived. There was a second impact against the second mountain, then we slid down 1500 feet to the worst impact, against a wall of ice in a glacier. That impact killed the pilots and some other people in the airplane. But 29 of us survived all three impacts and, incredibly enough, 24 did not have a single scratch.

I was raised as a Christian Catholic, and we were taught that miracles exist. Now I think that I am a part of a miracle, because I shouldn’t have survived that crash and the events afterward. I was so convinced I was going to die, that I was absolutely doomed. Maybe it was just luck, will power, human spirit, friendship, teamwork, whatever you want to call it. But by all accounts, I shouldn’t be here speaking with you.

RD: I’d love for you to read this passage from your book, and then comment on it.

NP: I like this passage you’ve chosen: “How can I make sense of a god who sets one religion above the rest; who answers one prayer and ignores another; who sends 16 young men home and leaves 29 dead on a mountain. There was a time when I wanted to know that god, but I realize now that what I really wanted was the comfort of certainty. The knowledge that my god was a true god, and that, in the end, he would reward me for my faithfulness. Now, I understand that to be certain about God, about anything, is impossible. I have lost my need to know.” And I have earned the right to have doubts about religion and spirituality without any guilt. Religion punishes you if you doubt, if you don’t believe in God. In the church’s eyes, you have lost your faith.

Now I think we have found a god that’s a little bit different. Probably it’s the same god, but we like to think about Him in a different way. Why should a god who’s so generous and almighty choose us and let the other ones die? Why? If I had an answer for that, I would have the answer to everything else.

The good thing about religion or spirituality is that you’re always looking. I think the god who saved us, if He did save us, is not the god almighty who killed the other ones, or allowed the Jews to die in concentration camps, or let children’s hands be chopped off with machetes in Sierra Leone. Why should that happen?

RD: What do you do when you pray? Who or what do you pray to?

NP: I pray now more than ever before. And I pray the prayers that have been taught to me-—the Hail Marys, the Our Fathers. I also pray for my loved ones. I don’t pray for myself, because I know that those prayers will probably not be answered. But I always say, “If you exist, if you are there, please take care of my loved ones.”

RD: If you are there?

NP: Yes, because I’m not sure. How can I know? Even just today, I was flying on the airplane over the mountains. I was looking at the mountains, and the snow and a small river going by, and I imagined all the physics involved in creating this planet. The mountains have peaks. In those peaks there is snow. That snows melts into water, and that water flows by gravity. But the world is round. Who created a world that doesn’t let the water fall off a round thing, with the complicated physics and logics of the water running down into the oceans? Why don’t they run up? Why don’t the oceans flood? How creative is it! It’s too creative and intelligent to be based on evolution of nature alone. The architect did his homework.

RD: Could you read this other passage from your book?

NP: Okay. “People are curious about the psychological effects of such an ordeal. And I am often asked how I have dealt with the trauma. Do I suffer nightmares? Flashbacks? Have I struggled with survivor guilt? These people are always surprised and sometimes, I suspect, dubious when I tell them that I have experienced none of those things. I have lived a happy life since the disaster. I have no guilt or resentment. I look forward to tomorrow, and I always expect the future to be good. But how is that possible, they often ask. How can you be at peace with life after what you suffered? I tell them that I am not at peace in spite of what I suffered, but because of it. The Andes took so much from me, I explain. But they also gave me the simple insight that has liberated me and illuminated my life. Death is real. And death is very near.”

RD: Very few people come as near to death as you have, especially over such a long period of time. I’ve heard that death is an amazing teacher.

NP: I was so close to death, I felt it brush me so many times, I feel like I died. When the plane hit the mountain; I was knocked out for four days, with my skull fractured in four places. I went into a complete blackness in a millisecond, and spent three days in a coma. I think that must be the closest thing to dying. I came back to my senses slowly, but then I was trapped under an avalanche. I didn’t die after three or four or five seconds. How long can you breathe under an avalanche? How long can you hold your breath? [An avalanche filled the fuselage with snow 16 days after the crash while the survivors slept, killing eight people.]

RD: How long were you under the avalanche?

NP: For about two minutes.

RD: But you write as if you can remember vividly what it was like.

NP: Yes, I remember it. It was a very long 120 seconds. It’s like being under the water; you cannot breathe. I had snow in my eyes, in my nose and mouth. I was completely compressed, as if by concrete. I couldn’t even move, and I felt like I was dying. How can you get out of an avalanche in complete darkness at night?

RD: Were you asleep when the avalanche hit?

NP: Yes, then I heard the noise, and it hit so fast I didn’t even have time to raise my hands, so imagine how fast it was. I knew I was dead, and I just relaxed and felt at peace. I was suffering so much that death seemed like a relief. We were sure that we were going to die anyway. Nobody was looking for us. We were going to starve or freeze; who wanted to suffer the long agony of death.

So I said, “Okay, let’s see what’s on the other side.” Then I relaxed. It’s like when you’re so tired, nothing matters. Then suddenly somebody scratched the snow off my face, and a cold blow of air went into my lungs. But the eight guys who were around me all died. I was the last one to be dug out. It was too late for the other ones.

RD: So you faced several near-death experiences at the age of only 20, and then you became a race-car driver—a profession that seems like it involves many opportunities for near-death experiences.

NP: Yes, it might look like that from the outside. But I think it’s sometimes safer to race a car than to drive on the street. You’re well protected. You have roll cages, fire-proof suits, seatbelts, helmets, everything, and all the other cars on the “road” re driven by professionals. Things can go wrong, but I approach racing in a very logical and technical way—I don’t have a pedal-to-the-metal approach. I crashed only once in 20 years of racing, and it was my mistake.

After the plane crash, when I was able to have a new life, I said it would be worthless if I lived that life without doing what I thought was the most important thing for me. And for me, it was car racing. I want to do it with strength and conviction, and try to do it the best I can. When I’m racing, I get into a self-hypnotized rhythm. It’s an art, like playing an instrument. You need technique, you have to train, you have to move your feet and your hands, everything must be synchronized.

Some of the nicest, most exhilarating moments in my life were driving a race car. I knew it was dangerous, but that’s not what drew me. It was the art and beauty of driving a car with passion and technique. Sometimes I take people in my racing car, and they say “How can I drive like that?” It’s like a guy who plays piano in a concert; he has been studying that for 35 years everyday. I’ve done that with a racing car.

RD: I’d like to ask about another part in your book. In this passage, you are writing about Marcelo, the captain of the rugby team, who chartered the flight and who believed God would not abandon you. He believed the search parties would never leave you there to die. Marcelo heard on the radio that the authorities believed that no one had survived the crash, and the search for you had been called off. Marcelo’s belief in God and his faith, you suggest, were shattered by this news. You write, “I vowed to myself that I would never pretend to understand these mountains. I would never get trapped by my own expectations. I would never pretend to know what might happen next. The rules here were too savage and strange, and I knew I could never imagine the hardships, setbacks and horrors that might lie ahead. So I would teach myself to live in constant uncertainty, moment by moment, step by step. I would live as if I were dead already, with nothing to lose; nothing could surprise me.”

NP: You must take into account that most of us on that plane had never seen snow before in our lives. Everything in that environment was strange and new to us. We didn’t know what we were going to face: crevasses, snowstorms, cold, all those things. We had seen that there was nothing that would assure us that we would survive. Marcelo was so strong and gentle at the same time, and he was very religious. Everything that happened in the crash shattered his beliefs in God, that God was saving us and taking care of us, that rescue was coming and that we would survive. When he was absolutely convinced by the radio that we were dead, he just collapsed. He said, “I killed all of you. This is my fault. I organized the trip. I charted the airplane. I organized the match in Chile. I did everything, and now I have killed you.”

He couldn’t take it; he collapsed in one second. It’s incredible how the mind can control us. It’s like someone hit him on the head with a baseball bat. It was a big lesson for me; you can’t predict how you’ll react in a situation until you are there. People who seem to have weak personalities emerge much better than you would have thought, and guys who you’d think would be strong fall apart.

RD: Did Marcelo’s collapse make you decide that you weren’t going to try to anticipate what was going to come next, or have the kinds of beliefs that he did that might cause you to be shattered in that way?

NP: It’s hard to express. When we heard on the radio that we were presumed dead, I thought, “I know that we are going to die. I don’t care. But I cannot imagine myself dying in agony from cold and hunger in a small space with my friends. Who will die first? How would it feel to die like that, slowly? Will we sleep? Will we collapse? What happens when the first one dies?” So I said “I’m going.” I looked at the mountains and said “I don't know what’s there, but when I crash against the ice, that’s how I’ll die. I will be dead of exhaustion, of tiredness, but I won’t die sitting down.”

RD: You weren’t going to wait for it to come.

NP: I was not going to wait. It’s hard to explain the feelings that you have when you’re condemned to die. It’s like if you were to learn you had a serious illness and only had two months to live. How does your mind change? We were similarly condemned to death. How much life did we have? One week? Ten days? We didn’t know. We had no food, water, warm clothing, nothing. No one was looking for us. We did not know where we were.

RD: But soon after, when the group decided that you and others would try to hike out, there was a shred of hope.

NP: Hope is always there, in a way. It’s what made me decide to try to get out of there. It was my personal decision, not a group decision. Then it evolved into a group effort; we created a team that started with six guys. Then they started to fall out because of illness and weakness, and at the end, we were only two, me and Roberto.

RD: One of the experiences you relate in your book is the moment when you crest the mountain that you’ve been climbing for days. And you were hoping that the mountain was on the western edge of the Cordillera, that you would be looking down into green valleys. When you get to the top of the mountain, you see that you are in the middle, not at the edge, of the mountain range. And then you described a moment of elation, when you were positive that you were going to die. Can you talk about that?

NP: There are three or four moments that are key in my life; one was that moment when I crested the summit, and I looked to the west. It was unforgettable. I stopped breathing. I could hear Roberto shouting, “Do you see anything green? Do you see anything green?” Up to then we had seen nothing but snow and black rocks; it was almost traumatic, never seeing anything green. And when I got to the top of the mountain, everything I saw was black and snow. And I stopped breathing. It was like another baseball bat hitting me in my head. Once again, I was dead.

Roberto reached the summit, grabbed my hand, knelt down in the snow and said “We are dead. We have had it.” It’s not like a movie or a book or anything very poetic. The next 30 seconds were very important for me, because I decided the way I was finally going to die. I said “Roberto, I am going. I can’t go back. I won’t die here with you looking at the ice. Come on, let’s go.” He said, “We have done so many things together, let’s die together.” And we just wept.

RD: You hiked back down the way you had come, to find some shelter and camp that night. Then you climbed back over the ridge the next day, right?

NP: Yes. And everything that has been created in this world on a mountain range we went by in nine and a half days. We hiked for 45 miles over mountains in the snow and ice, with no food, no equipment, nothing. I had lost 90 pounds, so you can imagine the stress our bodies were under. Roberto was very weak, and I had to help him to walk. We were so exhausted that we couldn’t stop. But we just kept going, going, going. And with each step, I got closer to my father.

RD: You write about that moment on the peak, when you first arrived. You say, “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. The opposite is not merely living. It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love. How could I have missed that? How does anyone miss that?”

NP: Love is the strongest, the most powerful thing that exists in this world. Love allowed us to survive those endless nights, those cold days, and it gave me the strength to go over those mountains. Each long night, the thing that kept us alive and gave us hope was the love of the people who were away. We wanted to go back to those people. It was not money, greed, success, politics, businesses. When you’re in survival mode, those things are erased from your mind; what you think about is love.

Love gave us the strength to keep on living and surviving the extreme cold at nights, because every single one of us was thinking about going back to our families. That is engraved in our backs with ice. The cold that we always say burns like acid really left a mark of love in us, because love helped us to survive. That love for my father made me cross those mountains, and made me realize those mountains were not going to kill me. I was young. I wanted to experience love. I wanted to get married. I wanted to have a family. And these mountains were not going to steal those opportunities from me. Death was there, but love is as strong as death.

That’s what I want to convey: love is the boost, the energy, the fuel that gives you the energy to transcend. When I was in my early teens in Uruguay, I used to think, “Will I be able to get married? To buy a house? Where will I live? What will my wife look like? Where is she now?” I was in the mountains and I was telling myself, “There’s a girl someplace in the world, now, who doesn’t know that she’s going to marry me, because I’m going to die. She’s somewhere in the world, and if this plane crash hadn’t happened, I would have met her. But now she will never meet me. She will have another life. And I don’t want that to happen.”

Those were the thoughts that fueled me, that gave me strength. People think that an adventurer or a climber or a guy who survives like that has to be superhuman, devoid of feelings, operating like an animal. Part of it is an animal mentality, but the other part—the thoughts and feelings of my future, my family, love—is what really drove me.

RD: When you’re going about your life now, do memories of the time on the mountain come to you very often?

NP: Since the first night when we got back and I slept in a hospital, I have never had a nightmare about the crash. I have memories. I never think, “Oh, let me think about that crash for a while now,” but things will remind me. When I look at food in a supermarket, I may think, “How long would I survive with that? With all that food over there, I could have survived four months instead of two.” I had nightmares during those 72 days when I was trying to survive. In my dreams, I would say, “I'm going to wake up, I’m going to be in my room, with my racing car posters, and my bed, and my desk.” Then I opened my eyes, and I wasn’t. Afterwards, never.

RD: So you don’t have survivor’s guilt.

NP: Guilt for what? In some ways, it was worse for me than those who died. I cracked my head open. My mother died. My sister died. My two friends died. I went through all those experiences on the mountain. I crossed the Andes on foot. Then I went back home, and my second Andes started.

RD: What do you mean, “The second Andes started?”

NP: I went back home, and two months later, I was living alone in a rented apartment; my father sold our house. All the other survivors went back to their homes, and as soon as they got there, everything was the same. So I lived through the ordeal, and then I went back home, and everything was different. But I never look back. What can I do? Nothing but look forward.

RD: You write that many of your father’s lessons and stories would come to you at times when you were ready to give up.

NP: Yes. My father saved my life, because of a story that he used to tell me when I was very young. He was a single skull rower, and he was once in an international race in Argentina, where he faced the best guys from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, all over. Three guys were 50 yards from the end of the race, and all of them were at the same level. My father didn’t have any more strength; his chest was burning, his muscles were exploding. He looked at the others and thought, “These guys must be feeling the same way I am.” That’s when he pushed more, and he won the race by two inches.

When I was climbing on all those false summits and couldn’t take one more step, I remembered that story and said to myself, “Okay, this is when I have to push.” A simple story like that helped me through all that. Every single thing added up to help me survive: my father’s story, love, my will to have a wife someday.

RD: When you have decisions or difficulties now, do you still hear those same voices you heard on the mountain that day? Does your father’s voice still come to you?

NP: I’ve never thought about that in that way. Nothing I have faced afterwards can compare with that ordeal. People ask me, “Why are you so optimistic?” Because nothing really matters. If I crash my car, I have insurance and I send it to be repaired. If I lose the tickets to the theatre, okay, they’re lost; I’ll go another day.

My experiences after the crash taught me many things, especially that you cannot be sure what’s going to happen tomorrow. Nobody knows. My father had everything planned in his life up to the moment of his retirement—everything, except the plane crash. And that changed everything. He changed the way he lived, the way he approached life. He’s much more relaxed now; he enjoys every day. I have the same approach. I enjoy everything. I enjoy being with my friends, going to the movies, drinking water, just being here. If I don’t want to go somewhere or do something, I don’t make a fuss of it; I just don’t go.

RD: You said, “I shouldn't be here.” That sounds like a kind of mantra.

NP: It is. It’s a phrase I use with myself many times. By all accounts, I shouldn’t be here. I should be buried inside a glacier, inside a crack or a crevice there. But I am here, and I’m going to enjoy the ride.

RD: How do you think others—those of us who haven’t gone through this kind of intense, life-changing experience—view life? Do you think it is different for other people?

NP: No, I think everybody is afraid of death. I am afraid of death. What I see is that sometimes, people get uptight or agitated and stressed by things that don’t stress me. Like a guy who missed his plane because he had a meeting and then he gets all stressed and fights with the poor ticket agent at the counter. My approach is, “Oh, well, that’s life. You missed the plane. Take the next one.”

RD: Does your wife ever say there’s something different about you from other people because of your insights that came from this experience?

NP: No, she usually tells me, “I don't know how you do it. You are not very intelligent” (she is much more intelligent than I am), “but you are so tenacious. You get everything you want, slowly but surely. How do you do it?” And I say “I don’t know. For me, everything I’ve done seems easy and I enjoy it.” She enjoys being with me, I think, because we make a good team, but she always tells me, “you are not very intelligent, but somehow you always get what you want.” And my daughters, they found my high school grades.

RD: Before you were married to your wife, when you had just returned after the plane crash, you were very popular with women; it sounded like you were depressed, and you were going out every night. Then you write, “But now, I began to understand that my ordeal in the Andes was not an interruption of my true destiny, or a perversion of what my life was supposed to be. It simply was my life. The future that lay ahead was the only future available to me… It wasn’t the life I wanted or expected. I understood it was my duty now to live that life as richly and hopefully as I could. I would savor every moment, and I would try every day to become more human, more alive.” Are you still doing that?

NP: Yes. In the first few months after the crash, I understood that this was just part of my life, these were just things that had happened and I couldn’t blame myself or anybody else for them. I also knew that my previous life was not going to exist anymore. I knew I should follow my road in this new life, that I would always respect and remember and honor my friends with deep appreciation and tenderness. I loved these men; we had spent our lives together up until the crash. But they died. And what can I do about it? Nothing, except remember them and say, “Okay, this beer is for you. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”

RD: And, indirectly, your friends who died saved your life; in your book, you talk about how you and the survivors of the crash came to the realization that you must consume the bodies of the dead, in order to survive yourselves. You talk about the days you spend trying to eat strips of leather torn from pieces of luggage, and tearing apart cushions in hope of finding straw to eat. How did you finally come to what must have been a painful but necessary decision?

NP: 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 would 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 others’ 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 know those bodies represented our only chance for survival.

RD: Because of your religious upbringing, did you have any guilt about eating the bodies of the deceased?

NP: I reminded myself that this was no longer part of a human being; this person’s soul had left his body. I felt no guilt or shame. I was doing what I had to do to survive. I understood the magnitude of the taboo we had just broken, but if I felt any strong emotion at all, it was a sense of resentment that fate had forces us to choose between this horror and the horror of certain death.

Some of the others told themselves that drawing life from the bodies of their dead friends was like drawing spiritual strength from the body of Christ when they took Communion. Relieved that they were nourishing themselves, I didn’t dispute their rationale, but for me, eating the flesh of the dead was nothing more than a hard, pragmatic choice I had made to survive. I was moved by the knowledge that even in death, my friends were giving me what I needed to live, but I felt no uplifting sense of spiritual connection with the dead. My friends were gone. These bodies were objects now. We would be fools if we didn’t use then.

RD: One thing that struck me about the latter part of your book, when you’re reflecting on the whole experience, was your comfort with not knowing who God was. It sounded as if you had found your own spiritual compass or anchor in that uncertainty. Could you talk about this?

NP: We looked so much for spirituality in the experience, for God, for religion. Then we lost our fear, when we realized we had nothing to lose. And I lost the fear of God, of religion. We were condemned to die, so we analyzed religion, asking questions like “What is the Bible? Why do so many religions base themselves upon the Bible? What is it in the context of the universe?” It’s only the Old Testament and the New Testament written 2,500 years ago by human beings in an area of this planet. It’s only a story.

But Christianity and so many other religions are based on that story. Why should we believe it? Why should this religion be more powerful than Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism? There are many more of them than us, they are more ancient, they have more knowledge. Yet we try to convince them we have the right religion, that we are “saved” because Christ was crucified for us. What would happen to galaxies that are 10 million light years away from here, with their own civilizations? Christ wasn’t there, so does that mean they won’t be “saved?” What about the cavemen, or the Egyptians, who lived before Christ was even born?

In the days following the crash, we lost the fear, not the respect, for religion; that’s how we earned the right to doubt. Even today, some of the guys say, “God saved me. I always knew that I was going to be saved. I prayed a lot.” And I said, “Yes, God saved you. But all the other guys who died were also praying. Why did he save you and not the other guys? I think that I also saved you. What would have happened if you had died in the avalanche? You would be dead. You are alive because it just happened, not because God saved you.”

We were Catholics and we asked ourselves, “Why should we believe this? Why should we go to confession and tell our 'sins' to another guy who’s maybe better than we were, maybe worse?” We lost a little bit of Christianity, but we became more spiritual. We still pray and speak about it. Sometimes I go to church with my family. But I sometimes don’t get it. The priests are still saying the same things they said when I was 11 or 12 years old. But I think religion has to evolve; the world is evolving, the universe is evolving.

Today, when I was on the airplane and looking at the mountains, I thought, “How clear it is. How perfect.” It seems to me proof that there is a creator, but I don’t think we have an answer to who or what that creator is. Yet, I see preachers on television with their strong convictions, as if they really have the answers, and they’re talking to 10,000 people in a stadium, who are saying “hallelujah, hallelujah.” These guys act like they think they are something special, as if they think they’re God.

RD: Many Chilean media reports called your close-to-Christmas survival “the Christmas miracle,” and claimed it was almost divinely timed to coincide with Christmas. How did that strike you at the time? You and Roberto were the ones who saved your friends by hiking out, but God was given the credit.

NP: Yes, that’s true. People said to me “God sent you,” and I thought “Well, I never felt Him push me or anything like that, but maybe He gave me a chance to do it.” But why was I given the chance? Why am I so special? Marcelo, Guido, Panchito, my mother, my sister, were much better than I am. Why did they die? I don’t know. So maybe the rescue happened around Christmas, but it was a coincidence.

RD: You have returned a number of times to the crash site. What drew you back to that place?

NP: My father and I just go there to put flowers on the grave of my mother and my sister and my friends as a sign of respect and love. That’s all. There’s nothing esoteric; there’s no sense of needing to relive, or take revenge against the mountains. It just made me feel good to go and put some flowers on the graves.

RD: You wrote that the first time you went with your father, he was feeling lots of grief, and you didn’t; you felt peace.

NP: Imagine how hard it is to go to the grave of your wife, your daughter and guys you’ve known since they were six years old. They were all there in a collective grave, and for him to be there and finally put some flowers on that grave was hard. But I had been there; I survived there. It just wasn’t as hard.

RD: You also said that you felt a sort of stillness and peace on the mountain, that even the people who died were then at peace.

NP: Yes, the mountains finally regained their domain. This is what happens; the mountains are always there. They’ll kill you if you stay there long enough. The environment is like that. We don’t belong there. Humanity does not belong at that altitude, at that place. So everything was at peace. The fuselage was swallowed by the glacier, which opened and then closed over it, and then the snow covers it and it’s like nothing had ever happened.

RD: And had the front section of the plane landed on anything other than that steep, snowy slope, you wouldn’t have survived. The only way you survived was that you crashed high up in the mountains and then skidded down that slope.

NP: Yes, and the miracle is that we landed exactly on the only spot in the whole range of the Andes mountains that the front of the fuselage could have landed. Five yards to the right, five to the left, there were rocks coming out. Had we hit there, we would have disintegrated against the rocks.

RD: Is there anything that you are especially hopeful that people will gain from reading your book? A change in their lives? A different perspective?

NP: I want to be completely honest about this. I didn’t write this book from that perspective, that someone would get something out of it. But if they do, it’s maybe that there is life after a tragedy. Everybody has tragedies in their lives; everybody has pain and sufferings and illnesses and accidents and financial crisis and whatever in life. Maybe someone can apply our experiences to their life; maybe they can think, “If these guys could have gone through this, maybe I can go through what’s happening in my life.”