Out of the Silence: After the Crash

by Eduardo Strauch Urioste

But there was no Virgin Mary present in my mind, no Jesus, and no holy saint, not even my guardian angel. I had my friends, but my spirit was very alone in the cordillera, and it was soaring over the peaks, exploring the infinite blue sky.

The silence of the mountain instilled in me the possibility of inner silence, and it was in that silencing of my thoughts that I found a lasting peace capable of expanding all the abilities and gifts that humans possess.

Those who were able set off on expeditions with various objectives and results; I was never able to join them because of my difficulty in breathing at that altitude.

It was the thirst of knowing that there simply was nothing to drink and that even if you had all the money in the world, you would be powerless to attain a single sip of clean water.

The perfect machine that they had taught me about in school was now outside its range of use. If only the human body was able to produce its own energy with the help of the sunlight, as plants do.

But for humans, profound hunger comes with the additional problem that we are acutely aware of the consequences of not satisfying that hunger, so that for us, the hunt—as desperate as any animal’s—is compounded by anxiety. The absent food that we were so feverishly seeking became the possibility of life itself, trapped as we were in that lifeless world of rock and snow.

Up to that point, most of us had never faced a decision more difficult than what subject to study at school, whether to start or end a relationship, whether to accept or reject a job offer. But up there in the snow, with our bodies exhausted and on the brink of starvation, laboring to breathe the oxygen-deprived air, we had to decide whether or not to eat the flesh of the dead who surrounded us, and that decision was nothing short of the choice between life and death itself.

Those of us who were alive could express our consent, yes, and so we mutually offered each other our bodies, which, being Catholic, many of us compared to communion. Jesus, too, had offered his flesh and his blood to give us life.

The desire to be useful, to help create life, prevailed over the idea that after death we would be sacrosanct, and we all understood that there was a value higher than the innate respect for the inanimate flesh that somehow, sooner or later, is destined to disappear anyway because it is part of the material and corruptible world.

We had become blood brothers: those of us who miserably shared that chalice and the others, those who were no longer with us but who had left us their flesh as a gift of life.

We were abandoned, left to our own fate in the middle of the cordillera of the Andes, with no tools but our own minds and our quickly weakening bodies.

Why did those distant sounds disturb me so much? The night, although mysterious and profound, was foreign to us. Our pressing concern was being able to escape, to go home. Nevertheless, every distant sound startled me, perhaps because it awakened my fears of the night, the eternal night, the one that would separate me forever from my family, from my home, from my loved ones. Forever, because I no longer believed in the joyful heavenly reunions I used to imagine when one of my grandparents died.

I couldn’t breathe, and I had very little air in my lungs. Death, which we had spoken of so often, was now present with total certainty, and not because of starvation or even injury. It came as it usually does, in the most unexpected and ruthless way.

In those perfectly clear images, in full color but with no sound, I could see my grandparents, my parents, and my siblings in a dizzying span of different ages. Scenes of my life that I had thought were lost forever in my memory flashed by swiftly, as if they were building a sign of identity that was accompanying me to an unknown dimension that was slowly revealing itself to me, until I stopped feeling sorrow at departing life and I became conscious of an indescribable pleasure.

My silent pain, muffled by the circumstances, was not the only pain. Javier Methol had lost his Liliana in the avalanche, the mother of his children, the only woman left in the group of survivors. Seven other friends had also died.

I discovered Marcelo, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully. I want to think that he didn’t stop on the road to that state of indescribable happiness that I had only glimpsed from that mysterious and vague threshold that separates life from death.

On the tenth day we heard the news that the search had been called off.

Then the avalanche destroyed everything and killed eight members of what was already much more than a group of friends, showing us that death could arrive at any moment in the most unexpected way, whether we ate or not, whether we were unhurt or badly wounded.

Of course there were moments when we were completely shattered, and I don’t think any of us made it through the whole time without experiencing periods when he thought he was losing his sanity. We all occasionally fell into bouts of deep depression, but then the group would notice it and act in support of that person, like a living organism trying to rebuild its own weak cells.

The truth is that we functioned as an integrated system whose individual parts gave support to each other, with each individual change that could affect the group being compensated for by the rest, as a way of maintaining the whole in an equilibrium. It’s difficult to understand at first glance because everything moves, and everything loses its balance at one time or another, as happened to each of us individually. But as a group we were able by our very interaction to restabilize the center, which kept us active and sane.

To do so, it was essential to strip away the deep associations of the past from our actions and maintain that strict separation to be able to act.

I used to choose a time when I was especially calm, and I tried to concentrate on airplanes, helicopters, people gathered around maps discussing our probable location. It was to those people that I tried to send my message. We are here, we are here, we are alive, we are here . . .

I am alive, I am alive, we repeated tirelessly in our transmissions. I am alive, Mom, I am alive, I repeated, thinking of my mother.

Some time later we learned that precisely those mothers and girlfriends being addressed in our rudimentary telepathic messages were the ones who, throughout our entire absence, never doubted for a single moment that we were alive.

The weather might be bad, but even so I would prefer to be outside, breathing deeply in the cold air and seeing once again my friends the mountains.

Smiling, I joined them in the task. Like one who has lived something indescribable and extraordinary, I guarded it closely in my heart. Nothing had really changed, but everything felt suddenly easier for me.

That capacity of the mind to embrace infinity, that path toward an authentic spirituality, is one of the most beautiful lessons that my life on the mountain left me with.

We were also conscious of the likelihood that they were dead, and we remained in that duality of optimism and resignation, making the same conjectures about them that the world as a whole was no doubt making about us.

Almost immediately after the crash, Marcelo, in his immutable desire to reassure us, had shared his utterly logical conclusions with us. The plane had crashed at three thirty in the afternoon, so it made sense to think that our disappearance wouldn’t have been noticed until about four, and the soonest the rescue party would have been able to leave would be around five, a time when a flight into the cordillera was unthinkable because there were so few hours of daylight left.

Why some and not others? What was that strange distribution of life and death based on, that distribution that seemed completely random? But Marcelo insisted that we couldn’t understand the enigmatic ways of God with minds that are only human.

But, inevitably, even I came to the conclusion that the supposed group of people was always in the same spot and that I had been wrong, just as I had been the day before, and just as I surely would be again the next day.

As a boy I had never been fearful. Like any boy who lives in a happy and secure home, my only fear had been the vague one that my parents might die.

It made hope, its enemy, fade away from us or disappear altogether, until hope persistently emerged once again, and that quiet but continual battle between fear and hope was exhausting for us.

And in both cases my fear was justified, but even so, it was useless.

You can’t know when fear is truly justified, but in any case, it is always lost energy, useless strain. Yet even so it seems unavoidable in any situation of risk and uncertainty.

Then life flooded back into everyone like a beam of light that suddenly lit up all eyes. They all got to their feet and began to hug each other. It was the resurrection of the dead.

I knew they must be remembering me now, and they were surely talking about me a lot, and this in some way made me feel important. I felt a sense of superiority being far away, on a different plane of existence, in a world of uncertainty or death.

Each one of those steps that, no matter how great his fatigue, a hiker takes almost without noticing, was a chore in itself on that hard climb because the climbers had to lift their knees to their chests and clean the snow off their boots before stepping down again.

What did I learn about love in the silence of the mountain? That it is the most important thing in life. And that if it is not present in some form, no action, however right it may seem, makes any sense at all.

“Our time on the mountain, if we compare it with other tragedies, was very long. That’s why I feel that in just seventy-two days, we traveled through thousands of years.”

Time’s reversibility shows clearly in the equations of quantum mechanics, and physicists believe that at the most fundamental level of matter, time has no direction.

you should put in effort only where it really matters, in areas that help bring you closer to your fundamental values.

Stripped of the trappings of civilization, we were connecting deeply with nature, capable of reclaiming our place in it.

We think that nature is outside of us, and while we don’t go to meet it, we let it peek timidly out of the flowerpots decorating our balconies or from an aquarium with fish swimming back and forth in a way that makes us think of the bottom of the sea.

The situation was not going to improve, and in fact could get even worse, but feeling myself as part of something bigger than me eased a little of the tremendous weight of wanting to control the events around me.

Nature could be violent or contrary, but it was never illogical.

But nature is neither good nor bad, it simply is. So perhaps its only indisputable quality is its magnificence.

A differentiation between the two would not occur in a holistic view of nature. As knowledge advances, the natural world is recognized more and more as a creative and dynamic entity, a complex network of relationships very different from the vision of a mechanical and hierarchical nature, whose conception in the past was reduced to the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, with categorical divisions that are no longer interpreted as such today.

In the cordillera I missed the father I had had as a child, that wise and protective presence who always had a solution for everything. Of course his skilled hands that I had admired so much as a child wouldn’t have been able to repair the plane, but even if not it would have been enough for me to enjoy conversations with him during those idle hours, like so many discussions we had had in the past that were so interesting and educational for me.

“My father moved heaven and earth in the mountains, and my mother moved heaven and earth in the ethereal realm of prayer.”