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Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors
Piers Paul Read (Open Road)
This is ultimately a story about the indomitable human spirit and the will to survive. It’s a story of courage and heroism, faith and hope, resilience and rugged determination. It’s a compelling read and it will give you chills. If it were not a true story, the reader could be forgiven for saying the story was far-fetched. But it’s real. It happened and 16 survivors battled through tragic circumstances for ten weeks to tell the tale.
The story involves 45 individuals — a rugby team, their families, friends and the air crew — who leave Montivideo, Uruguay, to fly to Santiago, Chile, for a rugby game that would never be played. The plane crash lands in a remote part of the Andes and the battle for survival begins. The survivors must battle bitter cold, starvation, altitude, terrible injuries, the hostile terrain and utter loneliness. When they learn that the search for them has been abandoned, they commit to finding a way back, despite the incredible odds stacked against them.
But this is also a story about families who never gave up hope. Despite the official pronouncements that their loved ones were almost certainly dead and that it was a waste of resources to continue searching, they fought on in a vain hope. Searching. Waiting. Daring to hope when everything looked hopeless.
The most compelling part of the story comes when the survivors confront the bitter reality that, abandoned in the barren and snow covered terrain, they will starve. Unless they resort to the only food source available to them — the frozen bodies of their fallen companions. The revulsion of this necessity will impact the reader but not nearly as strongly as it impacted the survivors.
In a compelling moment, one of them leads the way:
“Most of the bodies were covered by snow, but the buttocks of one protruded a few yards from the plane. With no exchange of words Canessa knelt, bared the skin, and cut into the flesh with a piece of broken glass. …
He prayed to God to help him do what he knew to be right and then took a piece of meat in his hand. He hesitated. Even with his mind so firmly made up, the horror of the act paralyzed him. His hand would neither rise to his mouth nor fall to his side while the revulsion which possessed him struggled with his stubborn will. The will prevailed. The hand rose and pushed the meat into his mouth. He swallowed it.”
Concluding thoughts
The tale of the survivors’ ordeal is gripping. But with the agony of the tale comes the ecstasy of the rescue. The reader’s emotions are torn as parents meet surviving children, while other parents have their hopes dashed yet again.
Equally compelling is the change in the survivors and their new understanding of the things that matter in life. Perhaps one of the most poignant comments comes late in the book where the author reports:
“They all agreed, however, that their ordeal on the mountain had changed their attitude towards life. Suffering and privation had taught them how frivolous their lives had been. Money had become meaningless. No one up there would have sold one cigarette for the five thousand dollars they had amassed in the suitcase. Each day that passed had peeled off layer upon layer of superficiality until they were left with only what they truly cared for: their families, their novias, their faith in God and their homeland.”
Would that all of us could attain such an understanding of life, without having to face such an ordeal.
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