In the First Hours

An excerpt from Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado with Vince Rause

In the first hours there was nothing, no fear or sadness, no sense of the passage of time, not even the glimmer of a thought or a memory, just a black and perfect silence. Then light appeared, a thin gray smear of daylight, and I rose to it out of the darkness like a diver swimming slowly to the surface. Consciousness seeped through my brain like a slow bleed and I woke, with great difficulty, into a twilight world halfway between dreaming and awareness. I heard voices and sensed motion all around me, but my thoughts were murky and my vision was blurred. I could see only dark silhouettes and pools of light and shadow. As I stared at these vague shapes in confusion I saw that some of the shadows were moving, and finally I realized that one of them was hovering over me. 

"Nando, podès oirme....? Can you hear me? Are you okay?"

The shadow drew closer to me and as I stared at it dumbly it gathered itself into a human face. I saw a ragged tangle of dark hair and deep brown eyes. There was kindness in the eyes-this was someone who knew me-but behind the kindness was something else, a wildness, a hardness, a sense of desperation held in check. 

"Come on Nando, wake up!" 

Why am I so cold? Why does my head hurt so badly?  I tried desperately to speak these thoughts but my lips could not form the words, and the effort quickly drained my strength. I closed my eyes and let myself drift back into the shadows. But soon I heard other voices, and when I opened my eyes more faces were floating above me.

"Is he awake? Can he hear you?"         

"Say something, Nando!

"Don't give up, Nando. We are here with you. Wake up!"

I tried again to speak but all I could manage was a hoarse whisper. Then someone bent down close to me and spoke very slowly in my ear. 

"Nando, el avion se estrellò...!. Caimos en los montanas."

We crashed, he said. The airplane crashed. We fell into the mountains.

"Do you understand me, Nando?"

 I did not. I understood, from the quiet urgency with which these words were spoken, that this was news of great importance. But I could not fathom their meaning, or seize the fact that they had anything to do with me. 

I hovered in this haze for hours, but at last my senses began to clear and I was able to survey my surroundings.  Since my first bleary moments of awareness I had been puzzled by a row of soft circular lights floating above me. Now I recognized these lights as the small rounded windows of an airplane. I realized that I was lying on the floor of the passenger cabin of a commercial aircraft, but as I looked forward to the cockpit I saw that nothing about this aircraft seemed right. The fuselage had rolled to the side, so that my back and head were resting against the lower wall of the plane's right side, while my legs stretched out into the upward-slanting aisle. Most of the plane's seats were missing. Wires and pipes dangled from the damaged ceiling and torn flaps of insulation hung like filthy rags from holes in the battered walls.

The air was very cold, and even in my dazed state, the ferocity of the cold astonished me.  Never had I imagined anything like the bitter sub-zero gusts that blew through the fuselage. This was a savage, bone-crushing cold that scalded my skin like acid. I felt the pain in every cell of my body, and as I shivered spastically in its grip, each moment seemed to last an eternity.

Lying on the drafty floor of the airplane, there was no way to warm myself. But the cold was not my only concern. There was also a throbbing pain in my head, a pounding so raw and ferocious it seemed that a wild animal had been trapped inside my skull and was clawing desperately to get out.

Carefully, I reached up to touch the crown of my head. Clots of dried blood were matted in my hair and three bloody wounds formed a jagged triangle about four inches above my right ear. I felt rough ridges of broken bone beneath the congealed blood, and when I pressed down lightly I felt a spongy sense of give. My stomach heaved as I realized what this meant -- I was pressing shattered pieces of my skull against the surface of my brain.  My heart knocked against my chest. My breath came in shallow gasps. Just as I was about to panic, I saw those brown eyes above me, and at last I recognized the face of my friend, Roberto Canessa.

"What happened?" I asked him. "Where are we?"

Roberto frowned as he bent down to examine the wounds on my head. He had always been a serious character, so strong willed and intense that our nickname for him was "Muscles", and as I looked into his eyes I saw  all the toughness and confidence he was known for. But there was something new in his face, something shadowy and troubling that I hadn't seen before. It was the haunted look of a man struggling to believe something unbelievable, of someone reeling from a staggering surprise. 

"You have been unconscious for three days," he said, with no emotion in his voice. "We had given up on you."

These words made no sense. "What happened to me?" I asked, "Why is it so cold?"

"Do you understand me, Nando?" said Roberto. "We crashed into the mountains. The airplane crashed. We are stranded here."

I shook my head feebly in confusion, or denial, but I could not deny for long what was happening around me. I heard soft moans and sudden cries of pain, and I began to understand that these were the sounds of other people suffering.  I saw the injured lying in makeshift beds and hammocks throughout the fuselage, and other figures bending down to help them, speaking softly to each other as they moved with quiet purpose back and forth through the cabin. I noticed, for the first time, that the front of my shirt was coated with a damp brown crust. The crust was sticky and clotted when I touched it with the tip of a finger, and I realized that this sad mess was my own drying blood.

"Do you understand, Nando?" Roberto asked again. "Do you remember, we were in the plane.going to Chile ." I closed my eyes and nodded. I was out of the shadows now; my confusion could no longer shield me from the truth. I understood, and as Roberto gently washed the crusted blood from my face, I began to remember.