September/October 2006

editorial

Close to death

By RAVI DYKEMA

How can we each find happiness? One way we pursue this question here at Nexus is by talking with people who have traveled to extraordinary places and have come back enriched, and, at least eventually, happier. A few months ago I sat with a man who never chose to undergo such a journey. He simply dropped from the sky into an extraordinary place when he was 23 years old. He lived for over two months in a fiercely hostile land that was full of death. His story about his subsequent trek out of there, and eventually to happiness, astounded me.

The man is Nando Parrado. In October of 1972 the airplane he was riding in hit a mountain and broke in two. The front half fell like a missile onto a vast glacier and rocketed down it at hundreds of miles per hour. But the glacier's oozing downhill creep had produced a ripple in its smooth back, a ridge of snow, into which the missile rammed, crushing many who were inside. Nando almost died. His skull broke into four pieces. He awoke from a coma four days later in a stinking cramped fuselage surrounded by a freezing white world, and death. His mother was dead and his sister was near death, and she soon died in his arms. His best friend was dead. He and his companions knew nothing about mountains, snow, alpine climbing or living at sub-zero temperatures. They thought they would be rescued, but soon learned that they were irretrievably lost.

Sixty-eight days later, after nearly dying again under an avalanche, after seeing many more friends die, after eating the bodies of the dead to survive, after walking into near-certain death for 10 days by climbing an ice-covered 14,000 foot high mountain and down the other side into a hopeless wilderness of endless peaks, Nando spotted a peasant on horseback.

Nando told me, I was so close to death, I felt it brush me so many times... But I discovered that love is as strong as death. What I thought about up there was love. So love gave us the strength to keep on living and surviving the extreme cold at night. Every single one of us was thinking about going back to our families, to their affection. 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. Love is the strongest, the most powerful thing that exists in this world.

The Andes, he said, took from him so much, but it also gave him this insight about love which he says has illuminated his life. He also said he learned that, you cannot be sure what's going to happen tomorrow. Nobody knows. So I enjoy everything. I enjoy being with my friends. I enjoy drinking water. I enjoy going to the movies. I enjoy being here, in your office. I wouldn't have come if I had thought I wouldn't enjoy doing this interview. No, really. I don't need the money [from books sales] or anything like that. And that's what I do. I enjoy my life.

Nando Parrado, now 56, lives with his wife of 27 years and two daughters in Montevideo, Uruguay, in the same neighborhood as nine of the other 15 Andes crash survivors. He is a former professional race car driver, is a prominent TV producer and business owner, and is a motivational speaker who travels the world.

Please see my interview with Nando Parrado.