Out of the Silence: After the Crash

by Eduardo Strauch Urioste

Roberto has said in reference to our life prior to the crash: “We were like young colts playing in a lush green meadow who believe that that green meadow is the world.”

My parents, Eduardo Strauch Wick and Sarah Urioste Piñeyro, were very close. They, along with my grandparents, uncles, and aunts, had built that gilded world that the younger generation grew up in. We were happy and carefree children who enjoyed everything we had at our fingertips and, as we grew older, life didn’t seem to present us with too many problems.

Affectionate but with that German way, which could seem a bit distant to our Latin sensibilities, she never let a birthday pass without coming to visit us and bringing us a great present, and the same when any of us were sick.

Could it be that in that magical moment my own existence and that of my siblings was marked somewhere in the universe?

I think that seemingly illogical prophecy was part of what my cousin Adolfo calls “the third perspective” regarding our story, something that deserves attention, just as we can relate the objective facts as they happened, or even how these things were felt and interpreted inside each of us.

“I was already acquainted with that gray area that lurks between logic and the most tenacious hope.” So how big is this gray area? Is it only a matter of faith, or does it also include premonitions, coincidences, and everything that seems inexplicable or suggestive to us?

The mind, educated in logic, searches for answers even to questions that might not have any answers and discovers connections between things that in principle do not have a reason to be linked and that appear to us as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that will always be incomplete.

Moments before the tail would fall into the void, some that had been sitting there were asked to move up to the front to make room for a crew member to unfold the flight charts.

Meanwhile, Pancho Delgado had just climbed the little stair ramp up to the airplane when he was suddenly struck with the certainty that a tragedy would take place. He kept moving forward, he said, led more by inertia than by the conviction.

But this is just what happened to Nando that night, when the intensity of his vision made him wake us up. He, without a doubt one of the most pragmatic members of the group, says that amid the cold and the darkness of the fuselage, he had suddenly felt an inexplicable rush of pure joy. He no longer felt cold; it seemed to him that he was bathed in a warm, golden light, and right then he was completely positive that he was going to survive. That was when he felt utterly compelled to share his certainty.

Everything that happened after the crash is also full of big coincidences that are worth noting. For example, the fact that several of the survivors came from each graduating year at school: Daniel graduated in ’62, I graduated in ’63, Adolfo in ’64, Nando in ’65, Pedro in ’66, Bobby in ’67, Roberto in ’68 . . .

Numbers would also have a big role in this story. The plane crashed on the thirteenth, a number that is the sum of the three numbers painted on the fuselage of the airplane: 571. There were sixteen of us who survived, which added to thirteen makes twenty-nine, the number of people left alive after the crash, and also the date of the avalanche. Marcelo died on the same date and at the same time as his father had exactly four years earlier.

This happened to us in certain moments, when the beauty and transcendence of the very inhospitable environment that threatened us also allowed us to connect with a spiritual dimension that we never knew existed. Maybe that is the miracle.

Rafael Ponce de León, a ham radio operator, never stopped monitoring the search and the news until we were found. In a time when telephone communications were slow and difficult, especially between remote places, Rafael’s house became the center of operations, where our parents and friends gathered at all hours.

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy, Hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

To Catholic and non-Catholic, believer and nonbeliever, the rosary symbolized something important to us in our situation of abandonment and helplessness.

My mother tells how, as they prayed the rosary at home in El Pinar, something extraordinary happened. They were on the fifth joyful mystery, the one that recalls the child Jesus, lost and found again in the Temple on the third day. “Why have you done this to us? Your father and I were so worried searching for you!” These were the words of the Virgin upon finding him, according to the Gospel.

“Where there is nothing, I found everything.” —Eduardo Strauch

Our intruding voices, faint but persistent, were the great exception in this ultimate solitude. So was the music of “Ave Maria,” a sublime result of human creation, which we heard one clear dawn in the mountain air. The melody that rang out in that superb natural amphitheater was the only thing to come close to matching its magnificent beauty. And we were there, too, not only as impassive witnesses. The landscape becomes complete with what arises in the human soul that contemplates it. We are no longer insignificant beings facing the void as long as our emotions make us participants in that immensity.

Words, so many words were extinguished one by one in the silence of the cordillera, which remains even now silent and unchanging in its illusion of eternity.

The peaks where the plane hit are right there, just as dark and tall as they were then. The glacier where I now find myself and where the remains of the Fairchild are hidden grows and shrinks throughout the year in that circular time that marks the seasons. It grows and shrinks very slowly, as if it were breathing, and some metal parts from the plane that are visible seem untouched by the rust that grows on them with the slowness of centuries.

The inaccessibility of the site would suggest the opposite. The journey by land takes two days on horseback, skirting the edges of cliffs, crossing the mad currents of rivers and torrents, enduring the increasingly intense effects of the altitude and harsh storms.

Before leaving the site, in an attempt to clean up the area, they doused the fuselage with gasoline and set fire to it, apparently hastily and incompletely, since even today, in every thaw, scattered parts appear everywhere.

On the first night that we twelve survivors camped next to the cross, there was such a strong wind that we began to feel afraid, which brought back our memories even more vividly. We had changed, grown and experienced so much in the last two decades, but the endless and brutal wind seemed to be exactly the same.

The first time I spoke in front of an audience about our experience was for a group of theater friends of the actor Gian DiDonna, who played me in the movie Alive. The talk was in an old building in New York where an off-Broadway institute was located.

The mountain also taught me a new meaning of friendship that I have carried with me all these years. In the Valley of Tears we were able to strip ourselves of what, almost incidentally, usually obscures the real essence of a person. Up there we had no costumes or masks. We were human beings disconnected from everything that often gives us consistency. It didn’t matter what family we came from or whether we were good or bad students, or how old we were, whether we were good at sports or not, whether our social lives were glamorous or boring. All of that had been left in another place, another world, inaccessible and for the moment useless.

Every expedition brings something new, and often the discoveries speak of events that took place here before our rescue, as if the before and after are intertwined in a continuous plot of endless revelations.

I hope to go on like this until the day comes when I will make my final visit to the Valley of Tears together with my family. My children will leave my ashes at the base of this iron cross, to rest forever near my brothers of the snow.

There were sixteen of us who survived: Adolfo Strauch, Nando Parrado, Roberto Canessa, Carlitos Páez, Javier Methol, Coche Inciarte, Pancho Delgado, Álvaro Mangino, Pedro Algorta, Gustavo Zerbino, Daniel Fernández, Bobby François, Roy Harley, Tintín Vizintín, Moncho Sabella, and me. And today, with our families, there are over one hundred of us.

His certainty gave me so much encouragement, and because of that, Seler, whom I hadn’t even met yet, had, without knowing it, played an important role in my life. No one could have imagined then that one day I would return to the Andes carrying his ashes, to lay them next to where his wife and daughter rest, at a spot not very far from the mountain that bears his name.

I celebrate the knowledge that this has been a great opportunity for me to grow and to meet so many friends and amazing people, through whom my discovery of humanity has been enriched. I didn’t always trust in that humanity, but I have experienced it, and I believe in it now with my whole being.

I celebrate the fact that this situation led me to find the silence and that I have been able to continue hearing it, being strengthened by it, decoding its message, trying to share it with others, and building my life around its quiet presence.

This is what I have come to understand: although nothing is certain, anything is possible. Something beyond us protects us, and it is found in solitude . . . in observation . . . and in silence. AFTERWORD