You're Wrong About
You're Wrong About
Flight 571: Survival in the Andes with Blair Braverman
Our survival correspondent Blair Braverman is here to tell us the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes on October 13, 1972. Of the 45 people on board, 16 ultimately lived. Their survival made them heroes, until the way they survived shocked the world. This week, a story of glaciers, peanuts, and friendship.
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Sarah: I'm sure we've talked about this many times in the past and I just don't remember it, but you can totally eat me if we're in that kind of a situation. I mean, duh.
Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about Flight 571. This is a story I bet you've heard of, even if you don't know you've heard about it. It's the basis for the book and film, Alive. It is another survival story, and much like our recent episode on the Donner Party, it's a story that many of us remember entirely as a story about cannibalism. The thing we're talking about today is all about the human events and strength and love and behavior surrounding cannibalism. This is the final chapter in our ‘Accidental Survival’ trilogy, which we began earlier this year with the Dyatlov Pass episode.
And I'm very happy that we're releasing this for you on Halloween. To me, it's the best kind of scary story as survival stories often are because as scared as we might be of what we would encounter in our survival situation, and as much as we might believe that it brings out the worst in us, quite often we can see the best of humanity or the most human within ourselves so clearly in these stories. This is a story about what people can do, and I'm very excited to bring it to you. If you want bonus episodes, you can get them on Patreon or at Apple+ subscriptions. And we have another Halloween episode out for you today with our dear friend Chelsea Weber-Smith, talking about the Spiritualist Movement, which will be familiar to you if you were at one of our live shows. But even if you were there, you got to hear about it a lot more.
As with our Dyatlov Pass episode and our Donner Party episode, this is a scary one. This is one where we're going to get into the details of what happens when a plane crashes on a glacier. What happens in a plane crash, what happens when you're trying to survive on a glacier, what happens when you're trying to hike down off the glacier? And really all the horrors of having a human body. It gets scary in these human bodies, but without shying away from the details, we also want to tell the story in a way that respects the reality and the humanity of what happened there. So, we're going to tell you what happened, but we're going to try and not be ghoulish about it even though it is Halloween.
Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where for Halloween, we tell you a story about how you both should and shouldn't be afraid to be out in the wilderness, I think. With me today is Blair Braverman. Hello, Blair.
Blair: Hi, Sarah.
Sarah: I really wanted to talk about this with you because, well, a couple things. Because I feel like it was also hard for you to not tell me about this because you know that I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about disasters in the natural world. I feel like I grew up reading a lot of true crime and then had the good fortune to make thinking about crime related stuff and true crime media into my job somehow. Incredible. But then that did become work and also it becomes more apparent to you as you get older that the true crime media is a complicated moral enterprise.
There's something about stories of disasters that I now turn to try and think about, I think a lot of the themes people try to get from true crime, thinking about how do people behave in extreme situations? What would I do? And reminding yourself that death is always potentially very close. So I feel like this is a story that falls into both of our areas of interest, because there's that for me. And I feel like for you there's a) this is literally about a glacier. You've lived on a glacier
Blair: I have. Yep.
Sarah: And also that this is about Something that really scared people I think when it came out in the news and that we made a lot of jokes to cover up our feelings about, and our fears about, but that I suspect when we tell the actual story of it's scary in a different way and maybe hopeful as well.
Blair: I found this story really beautiful. That's my spoiler alert.
Sarah: And Blair, you have also written a book called, Small Game, which I love. It's one of the only novels I've read recently, and I find it horrifying and gripping and hopeful and very feelings-forward and also a terrifying survival story. And it's out tomorrow.
Blair: It's out tomorrow. I know. I can't believe it. Thank you. Small Game is out tomorrow. You can read it now.
Sarah: I give it truly my endorsement. I truly believe that this book will probably scare the bejeezus out of you if you're into that kind of thing.
Blair: Thank you. I remember you told me that when you first read it, and I was like, that is high praise. That's high praise from Sarah.
Sarah: Who loves to be scared more than anything. Yeah.
Blair: Shall I jump in?
Sarah: Yeah, please jump in. Tell me just wherever you want to begin. Let's begin our tale.
Blair: There was one factoid you told me. Do you want to tell the audience What you know?
Sarah: I'm haunted by the fact that one of the survivors ate only three peanuts over the course of a day. Or was it a week? Or was it one peanut over three days? And I've landed on that as what I think I remember. But yeah, I'm all over the place.
Blair: I think it's so interesting that everyone is horrified by the story and fascinated by it because it involves eating people. And you are horrified and fascinated about it because it involves eating a peanut really slowly.
Sarah: And I guess it's a knowable thing, right? You're like, I know how big a peanut is.
Blair: Absolutely.
Sarah: Yeah. It's just like torturous to think about.
Blair: It's October 1972 in Uruguay. We meet this group of boys. They are former students at a private Catholic school called the Stella Maris School for boys aged 9 to 16. Did you go to Catholic school?
Sarah: I went to Episcopalian school, which in my understanding is that it's like none of the scariness of Catholicism, but a lot of the gold. So that was pretty good.
Blair: Oh, interesting. Catholicism plays a big role. I am not Catholic. I had to ask a lot of Catholic friends questions to help me get context for the story. But all of these boys are Catholic. They went to the school that was run by Christian brothers. And at the time, soccer was very popular in Uruguay. The Christian brothers could not stand soccer. They thought that soccer led to egotism. And instead of teaching their boys soccer, they taught them rugby. Because in their mind, rugby brought humility and suffering and devotion. The Christian brothers were not allowed to physically hit the boys to discipline them because the boys were from wealthy families who had basically demanded that the school not hit them. And so the brothers implemented a rugby program because they thought it would have the same effect as hitting students. These boys loved it. They loved it so much. They were obsessed with rugby.
And after they graduated, they could not stand that they weren't playing rugby anymore. So the alumni of the school came together and they formed an alumni club. And that rugby club turned out to win the National championships in 1968 and 1970. So we're looking at an alumni rugby club. These kids are young. The oldest is 26, the youngest is 17. Most of them are like 19 to 20, and they're rock stars in their country.
Sarah: Okay. This is incredible. I feel like I'm so proud of them.
Blair: Anyway, so they're all Catholic. Many of them are devout. The team captain is a sworn virgin until he gets married. They come out of a very religious background, and they are incredibly devoted to rugby and each other. So they're already incredibly, deeply bonded.
Now the team gets invited to a game in Chile that's an exhibition game. It's not really competitive, they're just going to have fun. And they decide to go, it'll be like a vacation for them. They charter a military plane over the Andes to get into Chile. They have to pay for this themselves. They don't fill the plane, so they sell the remaining tickets to the extra seats on the plane to help subsidize the trip. That is who is on the plane; the rugby guys, a couple of their friends who are coming to support them, and a few random people who just needed a cheap ticket to Chile.
In retrospect, there are a number of things about this flight that raise red flags. The plane is a Fairchild FH227D. It is nicknamed the ‘lead sled’ because it has a reputation for not having a lot of power.
Sarah: Does it have any advantages or is it just, this plane just sucks, that’s its thing.
Blair: I don't know. It must have some advantages, but power is not one of them. Second, the Andes has altitudes of up to 20,000 feet, this plane can only fly to 22,500 feet. So it's going to have to navigate, go between the mountains, instead of going high over them.
Now there's two pilots, there's a pilot and a co-pilot. The one pilot, Ferradas, has served in the Air Force for 20 years, over 20 years. He's flown over the Andes 29 times, so he's very experienced. However, he is not going to be the one flying the plane, his co-pilot Lagurara is going to be flying. He does not have that experience. He is much, much less experienced.
And finally, they're not supposed to fly over the Andes in the afternoon because the air currents become very dangerous at that time. So they set out, everything seems fine, but when they get over Argentina the weather is turning bad and the plane has to make sort of an emergency landing. It's fine. They're just like, we're not going to go all the way over the Andes. We have to stop here overnight and wait for the weather to get better.
Now the boys do not like this because they see it as losing a day of their vacation. So they're determined to make the best of it. They're spending this night in Argentina. They go out partying, they go to a car race, they see Barbra Streisand in What's up, Doc?
Sarah: Oh, okay. At least I was like, how did they fit in a concert? This is like Ferris Bueller's Night Off.
Blair: No, they just met Barbara Streisand.
Sarah: And I love how in each of our stories, because we talked about this in the Dyatlov Pass incident too, our characters - not our characters - our human beings who we are talking about and trying to understand. But I guess we all become characters when somebody tells a story about us, maybe too. But anyway, the people we're talking about saw a fun movie the night before things got complicated.
Blair: Correct. They saw a really fun movie. They're out partying. Perhaps most impressively, they find a bunch of Argentinian girls and are out partying and dancing with these girls until four in the morning. So they're having fun. Now in the morning, the weather is still iffy. And the boys start heckling the pilots to try to get them to fly over the mountains. They're like, “Are you cowards? Why aren't you brave enough to fly over the mountains?”
Sarah: Oh, boys, I know that Barbra Streisand movie put hair on your chest, but no.
Blair: The pilots have a dilemma. They're in a military aircraft and there's a law that foreign military aircraft cannot stay for more than 24 hours on Argentinian soil. So they have to go back or go forward. And even though the weather is bad, they decide to go forward. This means flying over the Andes in the afternoon.
Sarah: The very thing we know we're not supposed to be doing.
Blair: The very thing. But they think it's going to be okay. Another pilot comes in and says, “Hey, things are fine.” They decide to go for it. They think they can do it. They're thrilled that they're going to take off. They're going back to their vacation. They are basically having a blast on the plane. They're throwing a rugby ball around. They're playing cards.
Sarah: It's so easy to picture.
Blair: Suddenly the clouds part, and they look out the window and they see a mountain 10 feet from the right wing. Everybody knows something is really wrong. People are screaming. The plane starts shaking violently because the co-pilot is desperately trying to climb and get over this mountain, but he cannot. The wing hits the mountain. It breaks off. As it's breaking off, it cuts off the tail of the plane. So there's now an opening in the back of the plane. People start getting sucked out of the opening. The steward, the navigator, and three boys are sucked out the back. And one moment later, the left wing breaks off, too. So all you have is the fuselage, the torso of the plane, flying through the air.
Miraculously, what remains of the plane lands on its belly on the snow at such an angle that it begins to slide. If it had landed at a slightly different angle, it would've begun to cartwheel. But it hits at the exact angle where it begins to slide. And it's sliding at 200 miles an hour down this slope and crashes to a stop in a snowbank. The nose crumbles. Many of the seats are ripped from the floor and pile up in the front of the plane and people are trapped between them. One boy named Coche looks down, he sees his tie has been shredded by the wind. That is how strong the forces are. Suddenly everything is still. Some of the boys are very injured and some of them are basically fine.
Sarah: How many people do we have on the plane or how many people did we start out with even?
Blair: We started out with 45. The team captain is named Marcelo Perez. He's injured himself, but he immediately begins to organize the rescue of the people who are trapped between the seats. Two other people that are medical students, their names are Canessa and Zerbino jump in to help. Now these two boys are going to have a lot of medical responsibility in this. They actually have very little experience. So Zerbino has only attended one year of medical school and spent half of it on psychology and sociology.
Sarah: I guess that'll be useful, too.
Blair: It is. For instance, Zerbino sees a boy with a metal tube sticking out of his stomach, but he knows that doctors should be reassuring. So he's like, “That looks fine. That seems fine.” And the boy is, “Are you sure? I have a pipe sticking outta my stomach!” And Zerbino’s like, “It's fine. Give me a hand moving these seats.” Now as soon as the boy turns to start moving the seats, Zerbino reaches over, grabs the tube, and yanks it out when the boy's not looking.
Sarah: Wow. That's great.
Blair: Six inches of intestine come out with it. The boys are looking down at his intestines.
Sarah: Blair, we’ve never had a jump scare on this show before. I just got jump scared by that. Wow.
Blair: I'm so horrified by this. I don't know why I laugh when I tell it. I think it's a horror response.
Sarah: Exactly.
Blair: I am not amused. I'm absolutely horrified.
Sarah: Yeah. I am somebody who when I'm scared, when I'm nervous, when I'm talking about things like this, I get very giggly. So, fair warning to everybody. I don't think it's funny. One of the things that I can't stand in horror movies is when characters know they're in a horror movie and they're not funny and they're somber the whole time and they don't really feel like real people. And I feel like when we are in extreme situations, or even describing them, our natural response a lot of us is to be like, let's make jokes. We're going to get through this if we keep making jokes.
Blair: One of my favorite things about this story is that the boys will continue to play pranks on each other throughout this entire thing.
Sarah: I do love humanity. I do.
Blair: Yeah. Anyway, the medical students know that they have a social responsibility, that people are turning to them for comfort, for medical decisions, and they step up to that immediately. Everything is a mess after this crash. There are people with amnesia, there's people with altitude sickness. One guy has been hit in the head and keeps trying to just leave and walk away.
Sarah: I can't even handle going to Denver, honestly, altitude-wise.
Blair: Denver. Correct. Denver's not this high. Everything all at once. This one boy, Rafael Echavarren’s calf has been ripped off and is wrapped around his shin. There's a boy with two broken femurs. There was a woman who had nothing to do with anyone. She had nothing to do with the team, and she was just buying a ticket to go to her daughter's wedding. And she's crunched between the seats. Both her legs are broken. She's screaming and no one can get her out. No one can do anything. Every time someone is freed from their seat, they immediately join the efforts to rescue the others.
So there is a boy named Nando Parrado, whose skull has broken into pieces and he's in a coma, nonresponsive. They count him among the dead, basically. Meanwhile, what's going on with the pilots? They were up in the cockpit. The door to the cockpit is blocked and Canessa, the medical student, manages to get in. The pilot is dead. The co-pilot, who was flying, is screaming and keeps repeating again and again, “We passed Kudi Co. We passed Kudi Co.” Nobody knows what this means. He begins begging to be shot with his own gun. The boys will not shoot him. But they also can't get him out. So they have to leave him there as they return to the rest of their team.
That night, obviously we don't know for sure the exact temperatures, but the temperatures dip to probably around 40 below. We've talked about the cold, right? And the Dyatlov episode, we talked about 40 below. The thing to know about it, if you haven't been in those temperatures, is it stops feeling cold and it starts to feel like pain unless you are really dressed well. You experience that kind of cold as pain and these boys are wearing blazers, cotton shirts, a lot of them have never seen snow before. They are certainly not prepared to be in the mountains.
Marcelo Perez, the team captain, he's still taking the lead. He has people carry the dead outside, carry the injured inside. He has people build a wall of luggage across the opening in the fuselage so that they can have a little bit of warmth inside. Nando Parrado, the guy with a broken skull, was outside with the dead, but at the last minute, someone drags him in even though it doesn't seem like he has a chance. At this point, 32 people are alive out of 45, and night falls.
At one point, Zerbino, the med student, thinks he sees the light of dawn. He's like, I made it. I made it through the night. And he looks at his clock and it's 9:00 PM. So endless hell night. By morning, everyone is covered in thick frost. The co-pilot has stopped moaning, he's died. They had eight bottles of wine with them, and they drank five to get through the night.
Sarah: Something that occurs to me just haven't gotten this far into it, is that to remember this as a cannibalism story is actually to forget the worst parts. Arguably, the cold and the pain of people's injuries and the hunger already, I'm sure. And then also just what sticks with me is being in such close, prolonged proximity to people who are suffering and dying, and you can do literally nothing about it.
Blair: We, I say we as a society, as people like this is what I knew about it too before I started researching it. Yeah. It's a cannibalism story. And it's like we fixate on that as an example of humans at their worst when the story is actually an example of humans at their best. But they do think they're going to be rescued. They know a search party's gonna get sent out. Over the next few days, Marcelo, the team captain, continues to take the lead and the boys already see him as a leader. So this is a natural progression. He's assigning tasks and he's keeping people busy because things need to be done. Things need to be cleaned and shoveled, and the wounds need to be tended to. But also, he knows that tasks are gonna keep people out of despair.
Sarah: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. He is a good captain.
Blair: And he sets an example. He takes the hardest jobs himself. He sleeps in the coldest parts of the fuselage, and he's responsible for dividing up the rations. They gather everything they have that's edible and he's dividing up meals. So at this point, a typical lunch would be a square of chocolate. And a cap from a deodorant can filled with wine for each.
Sarah: So it's like a little communion, really.
Blair: Sarah, you don't even know what's coming. Now we're starting to see differences in the boys' attitudes. Some are optimists and they're like, we're about to be rescued. They see planes overhead and they're like, they're coming to get us. Some consider themselves realist. Some people are physically fine, but emotionally paralyzed and really can't do or participate or help with anything. There are others who are physically incredibly messed up and are still doing everything they possibly can. So, for instance, Arturo Nogueira has both legs broken, but he devotes himself to studying maps in order to figure out where they are. And he finds the only clue they have is the name Kuri Co, which the co-pilot kept repeating again and again. And he finds it on a map finally and determines that if they've passed it, they have flown almost entirely across the Andes. So this is really good news. It means they're in the western foothills, right over the mountains to the west are the green fields of Chile. They're just trapped by that seemingly impermeable barrier.
Now one of the boys, Fito, is the inventor of the group. He immediately becomes the inventor. He figures out how to make snowshoes from passenger seats, and he figures out a way to melt snow by putting it on aluminum foil and folding it in such a way that it's funneled into containers. And so Marcelo organizes the survivors into three groups. There's a medical team who are doing things like cleaning that one guy's intestines with cologne.
Sarah: God, that's smart. God.
Blair: It is smart. There's a group that's keeping the cabin tidy and there's the water makers and their biggest job actually is finding clean snow because so much of the snow around them is filthy. It's dirty from blood. It's dirty with oil from the plane. They paint SOS on the plane using lipstick and nail polish from the women's purses.
Canessa, the second medical student, volatile guy, he screams at injured boys to shut up. He steps on them sometimes when they can't get out of his way, but he also is constantly serving them. He figures out how to make hammocks so that they don't get stepped on by other people when they're lying on the floor of the fuselage. So he's already turning into a really interesting character. And meanwhile, they're learning about the place they are on this ice field surrounded by mountains. It is a place that is completely incompatible with life, right? There's no birds, there's no plants, there's no soil. Absolutely nothing. There are no algae that they can see. Just nothing. Nothing with calories, nothing alive.
This is where I found myself really weirdly relating to that particular part. I lived on a glacier for seven months when I was 19 and 20, the same age as these boys were. In no way was my experience comparable. We had a cook, we lived in tents, in no way am I comparing my experience to theirs, but I'm somewhat acquainted with that kind of landscape. And even in the best of circumstances, living on a glacier took an incredible toll.
So I can only imagine these boys in the worst of circumstances. When you're in a place like that, you need to wear glacier goggles, which are incredibly intense eye wear that have leather flaps around them so that no sun gets in anywhere, because otherwise you can go snow blind, which is UV burning of your eyes. And I lived there for seven months. I wore very intense goggles every day. I'm now 34, so it's 14 years later, and my eyes have still never been the same, even though I had the best possible eye protection. So these boys are there. They don't have sun protection, they don't have clothing. They're in rugby boots. It's 40 below. I cannot fathom it. Day three on the ice. Remember the guy with a broken skull?
Sarah: What is his name?
Blair: Nando Parrado. He wakes up. He wakes up, he reaches up, he touches his head. It's spongy. He's pressing on his own brain.
Sarah: Oh God. Which luckily doesn't feel pain, right? You can just be like, oh, hey.
Blair: It turns out that probably he survived because the intense cold prevented his brain from swelling. And if he'd been in more normal temperatures, he would not have survived an injury like that. But he wakes up, he's basically fine as soon as he wakes up. So Nando rises from the dead on day three.
Sarah: Good for Nando. My God.
Blair: Just so you meet this guy, he's a follower, he's like a little, not nerdy, but he's a would-be Playboy who only gets girls because he's inseparable with his best friend, who's genuinely very good with girls. And he's like the hanger on. He wakes up, he discovers that his best friend Panchito has died, and also his mother has died in the crash.
Sarah: Oh, God.
Blair: And his sister is gravely injured. The moment he's awake, he devotes himself to his sister. His entire focus is on helping her. Her name is Susie. He wraps himself around her to keep her warm. He's massaging her, he's talking to her. He's just embracing her constantly all the time to keep her from freezing.
Now day five, October 17th, we've only been five days. Several boys decide they're gonna climb and scout. They're gonna try to learn more about where they are, and they want to find the tail of the plane, which broke off because they know it has supplies. Among them a battery, with which they hope to work the plane radio. And they also want to locate the bodies of the boys and the people who are sucked out the back.
So they have these snowshoes made out of plane seats. The snow is super punchy as they start climbing. They're falling in waist deep. They're struggling, they haven't eaten. There's very little oxygen. They come back from this trip gasping for breath. They say the mountain is much steeper than it looks, there are crevasses. It's incredibly treacherous. It appears that they are stuck.
Sarah: I feel like it might be hard for people who haven't experienced this to imagine how taxing walking through deep snow can be. It feels like one of the most calorically demanding things I can think of.
Blair: Absolutely. So a mountaineer in this type of condition would need to eat 15,000 calories a day to maintain weight. 15,000 per person.
Sarah: It's truly hard to believe.
Blair: They're starving at this point. It's been five days, but they're burning that many calories a day. Their bodies are breaking down. Day eight, Susie dies, Nando’s sister. His obsession with protecting her shifts. He's now obsessed with escape. He's like, “I'm walking over the mountains.” Everyone thinks he's a little nuts. Clearly, he can't. Now without Susie, there's one woman left among the survivors. Her name is Liliana, she's 35. She was there with her husband, Javier, who's 38, and they have four young kids back home.
Liliana is instantly like a mother to these boys. She is kind to them. She's reassuring them. She's reminding them to wear hats. She's rubbing their feet to help their circulation. The boys adore her and they're trying to give her special treatment. They want her to sleep in the warmest part of the plane. She refuses. So her being there is incredible for the morale of these boys who are all missing their mothers desperately.
Sarah: Classic mom move.
Blair: Now, you may be wondering, where are their mothers? There is a search effort, but very quickly, the official search effort decides that they are not looking for living survivors. They know it's 30 or 40 below at night. They believe that they're looking for bodies.
Sarah: To what do you attribute the fact that they're not dying of hypothermia?
Blair: Teamwork. At night they're punching each other. Which sounds terrible, but it's how they all describe it. They're like constantly punching each other's feet to keep up circulation, which is something I've never tried.
Sarah: Now you have that in your pocket.
Blair: They are very devoted. Remember, they're a rugby team that were trained to suffer and devote themselves to each other. And it's not a coincidence that those are the actions they immediately begin implementing when they're in this situation. The families of the boys have not given up and they're not going to give up. One dad decides to try to search by himself, by horseback.
Sarah: Classic Dad move.
Blair: Classic Dad move. Other families are consulting psychics, mothers are organizing prayer vigils. They are desperately continuing the efforts to bring the boys safely home. Meanwhile, days are going by. The survivors are getting very discouraged and very hungry. They are at an altitude 12,000 feet where they dehydrate five times faster than at sea level, because they have to breathe so quickly to get oxygen. And with every exhalation, they're losing moisture.
Sarah: I love it when you explain this kind of thing.
Blair: Oh, good. I'm happy to explain it all the time. Happy to get very deep in the weeds with extreme cold and wilderness stuff.
Sarah: My body starts to shut down if I forget to drink water for a day and a half. I feel like we're all skating on a thinner margin than we would like.
Blair: And I'm gonna read you a quote from Nando Sarah, about a peanut he eats toward the end of the first week. It's a chocolate covered peanut. He has one. “I slowly sucked the chocolate off the peanut. Then I slipped the peanut into the pocket of my slacks. On the second day, I carefully separated the peanut halves, slipping one half back into my pocket and placing the other half in my mouth. I sucked gently on the peanut for hours, allowing myself only a tiny nibble now and then. I did the same on the third day, and when I had finally nibbled the peanut down to nothing, there was no food left at all.”
Sarah: Oh, Nando. What is he doing about his exposed brain? Does he have that wrapped up or something?
Blair: There's skull pieces on top of it. So it's like he can press on his skull and the pieces go in like buttons. He's not a Halloween decoration.
Sarah: It just remains so fascinating to me how the human body is like, you can have a perfectly healthy teenager, nothing wrong with them, a completely healthy life, and one day they choke to death for no reason. Or you can have somebody with a shattered skull in 40 below weather who just keeps trucking. We're so fragile and we're so hard to kill in the same body.
Blair: I know. And it's unpredictable.
Sarah: Yeah. And it's I'm sure it comes down to a random part of a millimeter a lot of the time.
Blair: I know. I was just thinking about it because it was Yom Kippur yesterday. So I was at synagogue. And on Yom Kippur you hear a list of all the ways you could die in the coming year. And I was like, yep, yep. Any of those could happen. It's very vulnerable.
Sarah: Yeah. You got your menu of death.
Blair: Who by fire? Who by plane crash in the Andes?
Sarah: That's a lost Leonard Cohen lyric.
Blair: Yeah, it was. It's from his notebooks. Obviously, the boys are searching for food everywhere.
Sarah: A plane is so inedible.
Blair: So the plane is inedible and it's also not burnable. They can't build fires. They burn money. The money they have, but they can't be building fires. They don't have fuel. So I'm gonna read you another quote from Nando, and these quotes are both, by the way, from his book, Miracle in the Andes, which came out in 2006. Two big books about this, and they're both fantastic and you should read them both. They tell the story from two different perspectives. So good. Anyway, this is from Nando's book. He's looking around and he notices the “leg wound of a boy lying near me. The center of the wound was moist and raw, and there was a crust of dried blood on the edges. I could not stop looking at the crust, and as I smelled the faint blood scent in the air, I felt my appetite rising. Then I looked up and I met the gaze of other boys who had also been looking at the wound. In shame, we read each other's thoughts and quickly glanced away. But for me, something had happened that I couldn't deny. I had looked at human flesh and instinctively recognized it as food.”
Sarah: I wonder if Catholicism enters into this as a survival plan in any way. Because, and I'm sure many Catholics would disagree with me on this, Episcopalians take communion, I don't know, occasionally, and we're not very literal about it. And I wasn't Episcopalian, but I lived among them. There are many schools of thought on this, but one is that the cracker and the wine are literally the body and blood of Christ, right? And the body and blood of Christ is what saves you, and you have to consume it. And it's like this good, holy thing. And I don't know, maybe that would help in thinking about this.
Blair: Sarah, you're so good. Yeah, just wait. Okay. Nando, not alone having this thought, whispers are going around the group. And finally Canessa, remember, our volatile med student brings it up to everyone together. Now he is one of the more religious boys and he makes a religious argument. He says, morally they should eat the meat. God wanted them alive. God gave them a way to stay alive.
Other boys begin weighing in, Zerbino says if he dies, they better eat him, or he's gonna kick their asses from beyond the grave. And they realize that everyone in the group is in consensus about wanting to be eaten if they die. Every single one of them would want their body to be eaten. They make that vow to each other. They make a promise altogether. Every single one.
Sarah: I'm sure we've talked about this many times in the past, and I guess don't remember it, but you can totally eat me if we're in that kind of a situation. I mean, duh.
Blair: Oh, yeah. You are absolutely correct because the argument that ends up being the most meaningful to them is that eating the flesh of the dead would be like taking communion. They need to, it will give them strength. They are meant to. It is morally correct. It is not a sin, and they wouldn't be going to hell for it.
Now, there are some people, including Lilian, who say, “Look, I just can't do it. I'm not gonna be able to do this.” But none of those people try to stop the other boys from eating human flesh. So Canessa goes and he makes the first cuts. He cuts tiny slivers off one of the bodies. He dries them in the sun, and he brings them back. And many of them eat the meat. Now one of the boys, Gustavo Nicolich, who's a vet student, wrote to his girlfriend about this day. And I can read you a little bit of the letter that he wrote while he was out there.
Sarah: Yeah, please do.
Blair: He said, “I prayed to God from the bottom of my heart that this day would never come, but it has, and we have to face it with courage and faith. Faith because I come to the conclusion that the bodies are there because God put them there. And since the only thing that matters is the soul, I don't have to feel great remorse. And if the day came and I could save someone with my body, I would gladly do it.”
Sarah: I didn't expect this to be so much about faith and how we answer theological questions. But this is so much about who are you. Are you your body or are you, however we define the spirit that animates the body, and is the body what you leave behind?
Blair: Absolutely. They're talking about all of this. They're having theological discussions constantly. It becomes quite literally a religious experience for many of the boys, they're all thinking about this in deeply religious contexts while they're out there and after they leave. So, day 11, the boys have found a small radio, and a few of them hear on the radio that their search has been canceled. Nobody is looking for them anymore.
Finally, Nicolich says, “I'm gonna do it.” He goes to the group, he says, boys, good news. We've learned that the search has been canceled. Immediately there's an uproar. Why is this good news? What are you talking about? This is horrible. He says it's good news because now we know we have to get out on our own.
Sarah: Wow. This is like the classic kid with a room full of toys and kid with a room full of pony shit, story.
Blair: What?
Sarah: It's like a classic fable of optimism versus pessimism that my dad used to tell me. The classic tale that maybe my dad made up.
Blair: The classic tale of the kid with a room full of pony shit?
Sarah: Yeah. This is a story my dad used to tell and it's about the kid with the room full of toys starts crying because the toys will all break someday. And that's pessimism, I guess. And there's another kid that's given a room full of pony shit and he's like, oh my God, this is amazing. Somebody got me a shovel. And they're like, why? And he's if there's so much pony shit here, there must be a pony.
Blair: Oh, I love it. I actually love it. I wasn't expecting to.
Sarah: It is pretty great. Yeah. The title gives you low expectations.
Blair: God, how do we become that second boy? I need to channel that more.
Sarah: We all have flickers, and we just have to try and expand them to take up more time, I think.
Blair: Oh my gosh. They needed the boy with the room full of pony shit out here on the glacier. Because at this point, even the most optimistic boys are shattered. And Marcelo, the captain who had immediately taken the lead is really losing heart. He was the one who chartered the plane. So he blames himself for all of this and for all the deaths so far.
Sarah: Oh, Marcelo.
Blair: And when he finds out that the search is canceled, he breaks down and the other boys are terrified because they've been leaning on him. Now, the person who remains the most reassuring at this point, Liliana. Nando becomes so obsessed with escape that the other boys have to stop him. They're like, Nando, you can't just walk into the mountains. And the holdouts who haven't been eating meat pretty much stop holding out.
So now they know they're gonna have to get out on their own. Three climbers go on an expedition up the mountain, they're gone overnight. They come back. One of them has gone blind from snow blindness. And even worse, when they were high up the mountain, they were able to see looking down that the plane is nearly invisible against the snow. They now know there was no chance any plane was ever going to see them from above.
Sarah: And is it because it's too small to be seen from that distance and what color is it?
Blair: It's white.
Sarah: Oh God. Why aren't all planes like hot pink or hot orange after this?
Blair: I don’t know. Because if you were flying over fields of mud, then the white would stand out.
Sarah: Yeah. I guess that's helpful. Yeah. For the mud disaster planes.
Blair: So now leadership is being shaken up. The new leader who starts to emerge is Nando, because he has such a fixation on getting out. And that fixation gives the boys confidence. They're like, this is a guy who has a plan. Right. This is highly unusual for Nando. He has never been a leader in his life, but he has this intensive session.
And remember Nando has also lost much of his family on this flight, so he's in a different position. He is there with his dead mother and his dead sister. He becomes obsessed with getting back to his father, who must think that they're all dead. He says, one more quote from him, “My greatest fear was that we would grow so weak that escape would become impossible. That we would use up all of the bodies and then we'd have no choice but to languish at the crash site as we wasted staring into each other's eyes waiting to see which of our friends would become our food.”
Nando, implementing his plan, starts thinking about who he's gonna bring with him as an escape team. And he picks Canessa. Canessa, volatile guy. He also picks Fito, who's been the inventor of the group, and a boy named Numa. And these four boys become known as the Expeditioners. They are preparing to escape, and they begin to get special treatment. They're getting extra food. They don't have to get woken up, they have fewer chores. They become an elite group within the group of survivors.
Now one night they're all asleep and a guy named Roy, who is among the youngest of all of them, happens to be awake and he hears a vibration coming from the mountain.
Sarah: Oh, God. Oh no.
Blair: I know.
Sarah: They have enough to deal with!
Blair: I know. He hears the sound of metal falling and the sound is unusual enough that it makes him jump up. In that moment, the fuselage, the interior of the fuselage becomes packed full of snow. An avalanche has hit them. And Roy only survives because he jumped up at that moment. And so he is not completely submerged. All around him, people are buried. The snow settles hard as concrete almost immediately, and the surface almost immediately begins to freeze over and turn to ice.
Roy, he begins to dig. He digs out Fito, he digs out Canessa. Fito was completely buried under the snow and felt another boy bite his toe. So they know that whoever bit his toe is still alive and that guy gets out. But it all starts with Roy. He has to start digging everyone up, and then it's like the crash all over again. As soon as someone's dug up, they begin to dig up. The others, several of those who are buried, have described their experiences of being buried and realizing that they were going to die and mostly describe it as relief.
Sarah: Yeah. It's like the end of season five of Buffy.
Blair: Correct. Javier gets dug out. He's Liliana's husband. He begins to scream, “Someone dig out Liliana, we have to dig out Liliana.” It's too late. She's never dug out or she's not dug out in time. By the time they get her, she's dead. Eight more died in the avalanche. At this point, the depths of despair are surreal to everyone. They had started to think they were all going to make it. They had started to think that maybe they were even chosen to survive. And they're still trapped inside the wreckage of the plane.
But now they are in a space that is so much tinier because they're surrounded by this packed snow, and they can't easily get out. There's 19 people left alive at this point. We've gone from 45 to 19, and they're packed in a space that would comfortably fit four people. Everything they need is buried under feet of snow. They have no insulation. Their friends' bodies are all around them. It's dark, they're trapped there. They're waiting out the night. And then people begin to cough, and they realize they're running out of oxygen. And they cannot get out because the fuselage itself is buried in snow.
Nando finds a pole somewhere and he somehow has the strength to stab it through the entire ceiling and roof of the plane, it punches a hole all the way through the snow. And in this way, he begins to get a little oxygen into the tiny space they're in.
Sarah: Nando is fucking stepping up.
Blair: He is fucking stepping up. Everything they need is buried under feet of snow. They're in this tiny coffin space surrounded by their dead friends under feet of snow. Slowly they start taking turns, digging out, digging a tunnel out.
Finally, the tunnel gets to the surface. Roy pokes his head up. He finds out there's a raging blizzard. They're trapped. They cannot get out. These are the worst. They spend days waiting out the blizzard. Days in the space meant for four people. They say that these are the worst days of the entire thing.
Sarah: I'm just thinking about all the times when my Netflix show won't load and I'm like, ah, what kind of a God would allow this.
Blair: Sarah, you can't say that anymore.
Sarah: I know.
Blair: One of the boys remembers a taxi driver saying that summer starts on the 15th of November.
Sarah: Oh. Thank God. We're in the southern hemisphere. Oh, I love you, southern hemisphere.
Blair: I know.
Sarah: Look at you. You have penguins.
Blair: So they decide to wait until the 15th of November, until summer has started. Hopefully conditions will be easier. Obviously, they're still getting trapped in blizzards. That would be incredibly dangerous if he leaves on a journey and gets trapped in a blizzard. So the expeditioners continue to get special treatment. It does lead to some resentment among some of the other boys.
Sarah: Fair enough.
Blair: And you're also really starting to see differences in strength between those who are really able to eat sufficient amounts of meat and those who struggle to get it.
Sarah: So are there some people who just psychologically are like, I can barely do this at all?
Blair: There are, and it's not that they don't want to, it's that physically it's very difficult to make themselves eat it in any sort of sufficient quantity. There are also many who are working hard and there are some boys who sit all day in the sun. So the workers begin to think of those boys as parasites. They even discuss, should people be given food if they aren't helping? I know.
They do ultimately decide that everyone needs to be given food and kept alive, but there is discussion about it. They are incredibly constipated. They start a competition to see who is gonna go the longest before having a bowel movement.
Sarah: I do love guys.
Blair: The winner goes 34 days. They also have to search for the bodies that were buried in the avalanche, and it's hard to find them. One of their strategies is that they all assign themselves to pee in the same place, and the pee melts a tiny tunnel through the snow so they can look down and see if there's a body under there.
Sarah: That's brilliant.
Blair: It is brilliant.
Sarah: When we tell these stories, I just want us to highlight more of these moments of incredible inventiveness that are also sometimes gross.
Blair: Canessa and Nando don't have great shoes and socks for their expedition. They make socks out of human forearms. The skin from human forearms for their trip. The 15th of November comes and the expeditionaries set out. They're hit by a storm and immediately forced back. They get to the plane just in time. If they had started an hour earlier, or if the storm had hit an hour later when they were farther from the fuselage, they would've died out there. They're stuck inside for two more days waiting out the storm.
One of the expeditionaries’ leg, Numa, is getting infected. He is told he cannot come anymore. November 17th, it's finally a clear day and they leave again, and they decide they're gonna go down the slope instead of up, which sort of means going in the wrong direction. But they're like, look, if we follow this valley, hopefully it'll turn. Also, we won't have to climb this incredibly hard mountain.
So they start going down and they actually find the tail section of the plane, which they have been looking for. It has warm clothes, it has chocolate, it has cigarettes in it, it has a camera, it has meat pastries. And most important, it has the plane’s batteries, which they've been dying to find so they can try to radio out for help. Meanwhile, for these boys, they are in bliss. The expeditionaries eat the moldy sandwiches. They're able to turn on lights and read comic books after dark.
Sarah: Imagine the joy of reading fiction at this time in your life.
Blair: They have found the pony in the room full of pony shit. They stay there for a day, just luxuriating, and they decide that if they continue down the valley, they think they might be walking deeper into the mountains after all. They decide what they're gonna do is go back to the other boys and figure out if they can fix the radio.
The survivors back at the crash site are not thrilled when they see the expeditioners come back because they had been gone for six days and they, the guys at the crash site had begun to hope that the Expeditioners were in civilization by then. And they find this guy Roy, the young one, not super motivated, but they have collectively decided that Roy is the most experienced with electronics, even though Roy does not actually think that about himself. And they're like, Roy, you have to fix the radio. And he's like, I cannot fix the radio. And they're like, Roy, you don't have a choice. You have to fix the radio.
Sarah: Somebody saw him using a calculator once and they were like, ah, it's the electronics guy.
Blair: They force him to walk back and forth in the snow to train as he's sobbing. He has a personality that some of the boys find annoying and they're taking it out on him. Guess what, Roy finally makes it to the tail. The radio doesn't work. He's doing his best. It doesn't work. He's able to play some music. They hear some news, but they're not able to send a signal out. They arrange luggage on the snow in the shape of a cross to make a signal. But they give up on the radio. It's time to go all the way back to the fuselage again. A big journey. A huge storm hits while they are en route, and Roy does begin to cry.
Sarah: Yeah, I get it.
Blair: He's like, it's too much. Leave without me. I am staying here in this blizzard. Nando refuses to leave him, but Nando is also furious at him. Nando’s like, get your ass up. We're all gonna die if you don't move.
Sarah: We're bullying you into surviving.
Blair: Correct. So Nando's like, okay, fine. And leaves, leaves him to die. And then he changes his mind, and he goes back. And he is so angry that he begins to attack Roy. He's yelling at him. He's kicking him very hard in the ribs. He's punching him in the face, he's stomping on him. He is taking out all his anger from all of this on Roy. He's screaming at him. Things like, “you motherfucker, you son of a whore, stand up or I'm going to kill you.” Which is fucking terrible, but it works.
And Roy stands up, and then Nando shoves him all the way back to the fuselage and they both survive. They're back at the fuselage again. It's the first week in December. We start seeing signs of life. Two condors appear in the air. And the survivors become terrified that the condos are going to come down and take the carcasses they're eating. They also see two flies and they see a butterfly. And then they hear on the radio that now that it is summer, the search has been resumed.
Sarah: Oh God. I also, I feel like if I saw a butterfly in that situation, I would be like, oh my goodness. Life and beauty and God's creation. And then I'd be like, how many calories are in that butterfly?
Blair: Who gets the wings?
Sarah: Who gets the drumstick?
Blair: So Canessa, the expeditionary, is like, okay, the search has been resumed. Let's stay here and wait for rescue. Everybody gets pissed because he's been getting special treatment for a long time. And they're like, you're trying to get out of the expedition that we have all been working to get you ready for. There is a big drama because they find out they've all been sharing a tube of toothpaste as dessert, and they find out that Roy had his own tube of toothpaste.
Sarah: Roy. My goodness. I get it, but you know, I get it. Big drama. I get it on both sides.
Blair: I know. And they hear on the radio that the search team has spotted a cross in the mountains. We have been spotted, but it turns out it is another random cross in the mountains that was part of a geophysical expedition.
Sarah: Come on!
Blair: A cross that was built by scientists to gauge the speed of snow melt. So it was not their cross.
Sarah: Again, it's like, imagine getting your hopes up and then having them dashed and then do that 50 times and you're starving.
Blair: On the 11th of December, Numa dies. And that is what finally spurs Canessa to be ready to go. Now the boys have not eaten Nando's mother and sister out of respect for him. And he has been glad for that. But as he's leaving, he says, look, if you have to, you have to.
And the three boys start up the mountain. They do not know how to climb a mountain. They do not even know that you're supposed to find the gentlest route up the mountain. And so they go straight. They don't know how to avoid avalanches. They don't know how to avoid crevasses. They think they're at like 7,000 feet because that's what the plane’s altimeter said. But they're actually at 12,000 feet. And it turns out that this mountain they are setting up to go over is one of the highest in the entire Andes.
Sarah: Again, it's just this is reminding me of the Land Before Time, funnily enough, where it's like, how else can we torture these cute little dinosaurs? What other horrible thing can happen to them?
Blair: I know. But climbing with the snowshoe made out of plane seats feels like climbing the mountain with manhole covers bolted to my shoes.
Sarah: Ah, yeah.
Blair: Yeah, in the first morning they climbed 2,000 feet, which is twice as far as you're supposed to climb a day in altitudes like that because going too fast contributes to altitude sickness, which can cause things like pulmonary edema, rapid death. They don't know. They go really fast and it's so steep that they are literally pressing their chest to the snow at times to keep from falling off backwards. It is almost vertical. No ropes, no safety equipment, hour after hour, rocks falling past them. The third expeditionary, whose name is Tintin, gets stuck at one point because his backpack is pulling him backwards and he can't move. They find these ravines, which are like vertical shoots, and they realize it's a little bit easier to climb up those ravines. So they start doing that. They do not know that these are basically funnels for avalanches that climbers would not go in if they knew anything. So at any moment, any one of them could die. It is so incredibly treacherous. And to make it worse, every time they think they're reaching the summit, it isn't a false summit. Have you climbed a mountain?
Sarah: No, I love that you asked me that. Yeah, no. So this mountain is playing mind games with them, essentially. Not intentionally.
Blair: Yeah. As my friend Craig would say, my perspective on mountains has always been, can't you go around?
Sarah: Which is such a good point.
Blair: I've never been a mountain climber myself. I have climbed mountains, but I prefer more horizontal wilderness challenges myself.
Sarah: We're talking about the thing that I think scares people about the natural world and about being in the wilderness and having any kind of experience out there, the kind of thing that you do very often. Because a grizzly could come and scratch my face off. And it's like, yes. But also, I would submit that living in our day-to-day industrialized life in cities, working with machines, driving cars, being on freeways, just the risks that we take on without thinking about them because they seem so familiar that like we are as much or more in jeopardy in the civilized world as we are in nature.
Blair: I always think it's interesting that as a culture we have decided to locate survival stories in the wilderness. We have decided that's what survival means, it's something I've thought about a lot. I was on a survival TV show, a reality show. And I had the strong sense while I was out there that even though I wasn't eating and had no shoes and stuff, that it was totally real, but it didn't feel like survival to me because I was there by choice, even though it looked like survival from the outside in that I'm surrounded by hyenas every night. And then there have been times in my life where I am completely comfortably at home but going through things that are so difficult that it feels a lot more viscerally like survival to get through those time periods. And so why have we assigned the term survival specifically to wilderness? How would you define the word I? What does survival mean? Do you have to be that far out?
Sarah: Right. I think we're maybe hiding from ourselves how difficult daily life is and just our emotional lives and the emotional trauma that is historically expected to go unaddressed for us. As you know, I have done some research on the Satanic panic, and one thing that taps into is people who've been through serious abuse, serious trauma, various kinds, fairly often say something like how could I have PTSD? That's for Vietnam War vets. And it's no, PTSD is for everyone.
Blair: That sounds like an inspirational line.
Sarah: It’s like music or sunshine. It's for everybody. Yeah, it kind of is because I feel like people have this feeling of oh my God, if I say I have PTSD, it'll be like stolen valor. And it's like, no. Everybody has a right to feel sometimes that the bear of their emotions is scratching their whole face off. And also literally the difficulty of getting food, shelter, and water in America, which is the country I know best. Yeah.
Blair: Correct. If you're spending all your time working to cover your basic needs and they're still not met, that is absolutely a survival situation. That is huge swaths of our population are in survival situations every single day. If you can't get the medical care you need, I'm saying even when people are going through very difficult, simpler griefs, that survival too. But our structure, our system is designed to keep people in survival mode.
Sarah: Yes. Oh my God. Yeah. And also to disguise the fact that's what's happening, I think, and I do think that this kind of false binary that you're pointing out, where it's like if you're in the wilderness, you're doing survival. Even if you're surrounded by producers who are there to at least notice what's going on and witness it as opposed to everyday life where nobody's following you with a camera to the welfare office to be like, wow, this is a devastating turn of events. And then in day-to-day life in civilization, you're supposed to not feel like the bottom could drop out at any time, even though it could.
Blair: Yeah. It's almost like we don't want to acknowledge that and that's why we assign survival stories, or we assign the word to situations like this one as a way of denying how close we all are to survival at any given time or to death. To be on that edge of surviving or not.
Anyway, they climb all day, these guys. To return to our team on the mountain. And they get to the top and they're finally going to look down into Chile and see the green valleys. The green fields they've been thinking about. And they look down the other side and all they see are Andes continuing endlessly in every direction. It turns out they were not at the edge of the Andes like they had thought the whole time. The pilot was wrong. In fact, that's why they crashed because the pilot was wrong about where they were and had started to descend. So they thought they were at the edge of the mountains. They're actually in the thick of them.
Far in the distance they see two mountains that don't have snow on them, and they're like I guess we'll aim for those. But they realize they don't have enough food with them because it is so much farther than they anticipated. So they vote Tinton off the expedition, leave your food here and you go back. We're gonna continue on our own. Tinton goes back. Meanwhile, Nando and Canessa, the two remaining expediters, it's down to the two of them. They rest for the rest of the day looking out over the endless mountains. Nando says, “Can you imagine how beautiful this would be if we were not dead men?” Canessa replies, “You and I are friends, Nando, we've been through so much. Now let's go die together.” So they just keep going. Now, Sarah, Canessa had seen Fiddler on the Roof.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Blair: I know. And he was struck by the memory of Tevye arguing and speaking to God as a friend. So he decided to try that on the trek, he decided to imitate Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. In his mind, he's spending this trek negotiating with God like Tevye.
Sarah: He's like, but on the other hand…
Blair: He's saying, you can make a tough God, but you can't make it impossible.
Sarah: Oh. Oh, that's amazing.
Blair: Day eight, they hear a sound. It's rushing water. They come to the base of an ice wall and there's a river coming out of it. It's the first moving water they've seen. And they decide to follow the river. They follow the river, and they reach the end of the snow. They reach dirt. They cross the dirt. They enter Boulder fields. They're going over the boulders. Then Canessa sees cows.
Sarah: Oh my god. A cow. Wouldn't you just, I would just run at one with a fork.
Blair: Continuing in the tradition of Sarah being one step ahead of us, they find an old can that holds soup. Nando cannot allow himself to believe it. He's like, I think the soup can fell out of a plane. Canessa’s like yeah, because planes have opened windows for soup cans to fall outta. Canessa starts shouting. He says he sees a man on the other side of the river. Nando can't see anything, and Canessa can't move because he's sick. So Canessa starts shouting at him like, run right, run, left, run right. Nando was like running in a zigzag, trying to run toward this man he can't see bumping into things, trying to find the river. And by the time he gets close to it, the guy is gone.
And then they hear a voice, and they turn around and there is a man on horseback across the river. And they cannot hear what he's saying over the rushing water, but they hear the word ‘mañana’. And then the man disappears. The next morning is December 21st. It's day 10 of the trek. When they wake up, there are three men across the river sitting by a fire. So Nando starts trying to mime falling out of an airplane to try to explain who they are and the situation they're in, and the message is not getting across. And finally, one of the men ties paper and a pencil to a rock and throws it across the river.
Sarah: What a great idea.
Blair: And Nando writes on the paper, “I come from a plane that fell in the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for 10 days. In the plane, there are still 14 injured people. We have to get out of here quickly and we don't know how. We don't have any food. We are weak. When are you going to come and fetch us, please? We can't even walk.” He does not even know if he's strong enough to throw the rock back across the river, but he manages to. And the men read it and they understand.
Sarah: I'm like crying a little bit.
Blair: Another guy arrives and throws them cheese.
Sarah: Ah, cheese!
Blair: The peasant comes back, his name Sergio Catalán. And he guides them to a place to get across the river and they have now reached help. They're now with someone else. He leads them to some huts. They're in an area called Los Maitenes. This man, Sergio, is incredible.
So the nearest police station, it turns out, is 10 hours away by horseback. And they go to the huts, they meet another guy there, and they start telling them the story while the peasants feed them beans, macaroni, and bread. They eat seconds. The story is pouring out of them. They nap, they wake up, they eat more food, they eat cheese, they eat milk, they eat stew, they eat dulce de leche on bread. They're interrupted by two police on horseback who are there waiting to be led to the site. Oh, my gosh. And they think they could ride their horses to the site.
Sarah: Oh my God. It's like, oh really?
Blair: Correct. Nando and Canessa are like, “No. You are not understanding.” So they have to send people back to town to radio for a helicopter from Santiago, which will take at least a day to do the rescue if the weather's good, longer if not.
At this point, they're really starting to get worried about the boys back at the crash site. Because it's been 10 or 11 days and they know that some people were in pretty dire conditions when they left. They're waiting for rescuers to come and who comes up the trail, but a ton of journalists from around the world who have gotten there before the helicopters.
Sarah: Oh my God. Of course.
Blair: They talk to the journalists a little bit, but like obviously they have other priorities.
Sarah: They're like, let's talk later after I have also had cheese.
Blair: Nando finds the helicopter pilots. He's like, we need to go now. And the pilots are like, we can't do it. It's too foggy. We can't go now. And they pull out a map and they're like, show us where the crash site is. And so Nando points out where the crash site is and the pilots are like, you're wrong. You couldn't possibly have come from there. That's in the Andes. That's 70 miles away. Back at the crash site, at this point multiple boys are having premonitions that Nando and Canessa have been found. It turns out we learn a little bit more about their geography now, once they're on the outside. If they had followed the valley beyond the tail, instead of climbing the mountain to the west, they would've come to a road in three days.
Sarah: Oh, Jesus Christ.
Blair: Also, five miles east of the crash site, there was a hotel which was closed, but full of canned food. Back at the plane, the boys hear on the radio that they have been found. Immediately they smoked the cigars they were saving for Christmas, and they started joking about how they're gonna meet the rescuers. They want to play pranks on the rescuers. They're like, we should be on the plane. And when someone comes up to the door, we'll be like, what do you want? Why are you here? And they also decide to clean up, which they do by taking off their outermost and their innermost layers. So they are wearing their middle layers, which are the cleanest.
Sarah: They're like, company is coming.
Blair: Exactly. And they also become aware of how gruesome the scene is and they try to clean that up body parts around and things like that. Just when everything seems great, somebody screams that an avalanche is coming. Oh god. And they see a wall of white coming toward them and it turns out to be Fito playing a prank with a fire extinguisher.
Sarah: Ah! Incredible. Wow. Now that's what I call gallows humor.
Blair: That is the darkest humor I've ever heard of. Ever.
Sarah: Oh. That's amazing.
Blair: Back in civilization. Yeah. Finally, the pilots can take off, but Nando has to ride in the helicopter to guide them. He is terrified, absolutely fucking terrified to get in the helicopter.
Sarah: I'd be like, all right, God. You know what’ll be really backhand of you after all this.
Blair: Nando guides them. And they make it to the crash site. And they can only take some of the boys. Meanwhile, the boys back at the crash site get upset when the rescuers who are left there start taking photos. Because they do not want evidence out there of what they had to eat. But they are promised that the photos will only be used as proof for the Army and will never be published.
Sarah: Huh. I'm inclined to be concerned about that.
Blair: Yeah. The next day is the 23rd of December, and the rescuers do indeed come back for the eight who were left there. The boys are all brought to a specific wing of a hospital. They have their own wing, they're getting checked out. Nando, who walked out, actually gets turned away from the wing because the nurses are like, you can't go in there, it's just for survivors. And he looks too good.
Sarah: Ah, Nando.
Blair: They're being checked out. They're mostly in good shape. And that is when the doctors begin to realize that the boys have been eating something out there. And there's only one thing they could have been eating.
Sarah: Why not just not bother them about it, honestly.
Blair: The doctors are the first to realize. And it starts to get out. God, some of their families obviously thrilled, ecstatic. They cannot believe their boys are back from the dead when they hear on the radio they're survivors. Then the parents have to find out once more if their boys survived or not, because many of them didn't. But they overall are ecstatic.
And then some of the families are also shocked when they find out what the boys had been eating. And the boys are so hurt because they interpret that to mean that their parents would've rather they died and starved.
Meanwhile, a newspaper publishes a photo of a half-eaten human leg in the snow and the media goes wild. Some people even start to suggest that the avalanche never happened and was invented as an excuse for the fact that the strong boys killed the weak ones to eat them. This is terrible. This is terrible. A Chilean newspaper headline says, “May God forgive them”. Oh, God. The boys have made it out and the world seems to be turning against them, using them as an example of losing humanity instead of holding onto it at all costs. However, guess who comes to their rescue?
Sarah: Oh my God. I have no idea who?
Blair: The Catholic church. The Catholic church defends them.
Sarah: Sometimes they do some good work.
Blair: I know. However, they also specify that eating human flesh is not actually like taking communion.
Sarah: Oh, right. Whatever.
Blair: It's very important to the church to get that out. However, they defend the boys. And that means the world to the boys' families also. And so the tide does turn a little bit at that point. They're rescued, they're saved. They become national heroes back home. Stores are refusing to take their money. A lot of the boys keep their long hair because they like being recognizable. They're treated like rock stars, as they should be, but also their adjustment back home is not easy. People come up and tell Nando in the street that they envy his experience and wish they could have been there.
Sarah: Good Lord.
Blair: They're ravenously hungry. They have lost their systems for moderating what they eat. And they all adjust in different ways. Now, Nando in particular, remember he was a wannabe playboy before all this but he was never that good at it. And now suddenly he is good at it. Everybody wants him.
Sarah: Oh my God. He's like, you know, I almost died.
Blair: Exactly. And he walked, I feel like he deserves every single bit of attention more. He's going to glamorous nightclubs. He's a celebrity and more than the other boys. He really leans into this lifestyle.
Sarah: He's the Sully Sullenberger of his time.
Blair: At some point the other survivors are like not totally thrilled. And they finally step in when he signs on to judge a beauty contest of women in swimsuits.
Sarah: I knew you were gonna say beauty contest. It's always the beauty contests.
Blair: And the other survivors are like Nando, really? And he does step down out of respect for them. Everyone's grappling with it in different ways. Other survivors become very pious, but they stay close. The group stays incredibly close to this day. So if you'd like, I can tell you a little bit about where they ended up.
Sarah: Yeah. Oh my God. Please do.
Blair: Nando became a race car driver.
Sarah: Oh my God. Nando, always with the Pivots.
Blair: I know. I know. He became an international race car driver.
Sarah: He's like, I haven't almost died enough. Or maybe, I guess don't notice anymore when it's happening to me. I don't know.
Blair: It's what he dreamed of beforehand.
Sarah: Oh, that's so great.
Blair: Two years after the crash, he and his father returned to the crash site. People have discovered a route that's possible in summer. It involves eight hours in off-road vehicles and then two and a half days by horseback. So Nando and his father returned to the crash site to honor his mother and his sister. Every year, I know this went on for at least 30 years and probably still, the survivors reunite on the 22nd of December. They consider it their communal birthday, the day they were all reborn together. Nando and Canessa are best friends. Canessa is a pediatric cardiologist. He ran for the presidency. Nando is the godfather to Canessa’s son who plays on the old Christian rugby team.
Sarah: Wow. I forgot about the rugby in the midst of all this. Did the rugby continue?
Blair: It did. The team continues on. Tintin’s son plays for the Old Boys Rugby Club, which is the old Christian's archrival.
Sarah: The drama.
Blair: I know. Coche, one of the boys who spent a lot of time telling the other boys about cheese while they were out there, became one of the largest dairy producers in the country.
Sarah: I love how much cheese is a part of the story. Cheese is a character.
Blair: Two of the boys became partners in ostrich farming.
Sarah: What? Amazing.
Blair: Roy Harley, if you'll remember, who was the young one who was really struggling at one point, is an engineer and apparently a big fitness buff who has the best abs of anyone left. Sergio Catalán, the peasant who found them, has been completely adopted into the group. So in 2005 for his 50th wedding anniversary, the boys flew out to surprise him, and they did so by approaching him on a road and saying, excuse me, we're lost. Can you help us one more time?
Sarah: I don't want to harp on this too much, but I do feel like this is the thing that we miss when we try to create fiction, or even represent real stories of unbelievable disaster and survival, where we're like everyone was serious the whole time.
Blair: I know. I think the humor surprised me. The word inspirational is so trite to use about a story like this but it's incredible. These people are incredible. They got through something astounding. They kept so much dignity. We tell these horror stories about cannibalism as if people are holding onto their humanity by a thread, and if we cross certain lines it will be shattered. This idea of fragile humanity, like fragile masculinity. You do one wrong thing and it's gone.
Sarah: And poof, you're not human.
Blair: But in fact people hold onto their humanity as much as they possibly can. And it seems like in this sort of situation, in extreme situations, humanity comes out more. It doesn't matter if these people are eating human flesh. They are so human. They see each other with so much kindness in humanity. And why do we fixate on the cannibalism as a symbol of the loss of that when we're just as likely or far more likely to lose our humanity here in our everyday lives, in how we see and exclude people.
Sarah: Yeah. And I'm sure that there is an extent to which we're hiding the bigger, scary thing, which is scary not in a, little kids telling ghost stories kind of a way so much as just, it's not promising you that your humanity is gonna snap and it'll be gone. It's telling you that the capacity of your human experience is more vast than you'll probably ever feel even most of the time you have to be alive, which is maybe scarier in a way. I don’t know.
Blair: I don’t know. I don't know. I love that I'm gonna be thinking about all of this for a long time. I find this story, I keep saying it, I find it so moving. It's a humanity that we all in our everyday lives could learn from.
Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you so much to our special guest, Blair Braverman, whose book Small Game is out tomorrow. And if you're listening the day after this came out, then it's out today. And if you're listening the day after that, then it was out yesterday. What are you doing? Get a copy. It's great.
Thank you so much to Miranda Ziegler who co-edited this episode along with Carolyn Kendrick, our producer. By the way, Carolyn has a new song out on November 4th. It's called Break of Day. You can listen to it on Band Camp or somewhere else, but you know, Band Camp. From the bottom of my scary heart to yours, Happy Halloween. We'll see you in two weeks.