One man's riveting "Miracle" of resolve

If you ask Nando Parrado what profound life lessons he learned during the remarkable ordeal that made him famous 34 years ago — surviving a plane crash high in the glacier-clad Andes Mountains for 10 weeks, then walking a rugged 70 miles to find help — he'd balk at the question. He had more pressing concerns.

"I was there lying on that glacier thinking, 'I am dying on this mountain,' " Parrado said recently while in Seattle to promote his harrowing new memoir, "Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home" (Crown, $25).

" What a stupid death,' " he told himself back then. " 'These mountains are depriving me, denying me a chance to live.' "

Parrado, members of his Uruguayan college rugby team and assorted relatives and friends were on their way from Argentina to Chile when their charter plane went down in bone-rattling turbulence, scattering the fuselage on a mountaintop 11,000 feet above sea level.

Parrado and the others lived on melted snow for a while, and later, in a desperate move to hold off starvation, ate the flesh of passengers who had died in the crash. People still ask Parrado how he brought himself to do that, how he survived at all.

Different rules apply

"After you have been abandoned on a glacier, with no water, in the freezing cold, your mind thinks in a different way," he said. "Also — this is very important — the rules of men don't apply there. The mountains rule."

Only 16 of the nearly four dozen passengers and crew lived. Parrado's mother, sister and two best friends were among the dead. He and fellow survivor Roberto Canessa, who walked down from the mountains together for help, were heroes.

The story attracted worldwide attention and soon after resulted in author Piers Paul Read's account, titled "Alive," and a film of the same name in 1993.

Parrado, now 55, is the first survivor to publish his own version of those horrific events, and what life was like in their aftermath.

The young men on board the plane were 20-something jocks from a religious school in Montevideo, Uruguay. Sports and girls had been chief on their minds before that crash.

Having faced down the mountains, and the limits of their own endurance, simply returning to normal became their main objective, not spreading higher truths.

"I almost died, like six or seven times," Parrado said. "You ponder and you have a lot of time to think and you go into a deeper relationship with that special being that we call God. But we didn't find answers there. Had we found any answers, we would have been transformed into the wisest men in the history of humanity — which we are not."

No book in mind

Writing a book about the incident didn't immediately spring to mind, he said. He was just trying move on.

"My father told me, 'You have to look forward. There's no way to retrace your steps and pretend this didn't happen,' " Parrado said. "I accepted that and looked forward, and I was busy for 33 years."

Time gave Parrado perspective and an opportunity to achieve the normalcy he sought after returning to Uruguay. He became a successful businessman and television producer, with a wife and two daughters.

But since the movie about the crash came out 13 years ago, he has traveled the world telling his own inspirational tale of survival at corporate gatherings and other events. He started taking notes on the book four years ago.

Change of heart? Parrado insists not.

He said his decision to open up about the crash was more personal. He wrote the book, he says, as a tribute to his father, Seler Parrado, 89, who was a wellspring of encouragement after the rescue.

Why not him?

While most of his teammates went home to the embrace of all their relatives and friends, Parrado had to grapple with the deaths of his mother and sister, the latter having died in his arms on the mountain. He had wondered again and again why they were killed and not him.

Parrado couldn't even cry over his losses while he and the others were struggling to survive in the Andes. An inner voice reminded him, he writes in the book, "Don't cry. Tears waste salt. You will need salt to survive."

Though Parrado was comforted by his father and an older sister upon his rescue, things weren't the same.

"For two months I was living alone in a flat, looking at a wall," Parrado said. "I had another Andes when I got back home.

"What do you do?" Parrado said. He tried to follow his dad's advice. "I loved sports and I loved girls, so I lived my life, you know?"

The newly famous Parrado hit the club scene in Montevideo, pursued auto racing, went on dates and even agreed to be a judge in a beauty pageant, a move that struck some of his surviving teammates as insensitive. Parrado had second thoughts and backed out of the pageant.

He acknowledges in the book that in his own youthful way, he was attempting only to overlay the tragedy he'd just experienced with mundane activities.

Today, Parrado can look back and clearly analyze what was happening to him, but it wasn't so clear then.

Time was finally right

"I couldn't have written this book 30 years ago," he said. "This book is written with the insight of my complete life."

How close he came to not having a "complete" life.

"I shouldn't be speaking to you on the phone now," he said at one point, still somewhat astonished at his fortune. "I should be buried on that mountain."

But instead of asking 'why me,' Parrado is now able to look back and say thank goodness.

"I look at my daughters and think, 'They wouldn't be alive, or the sons and daughters of the other survivors,' " Parrado said. "They wouldn't exist."

Parrado has gone back to visit the crash site many times. He remembers the "viscerally real" prospect of dying but also the swelling joy he felt over the idea of getting back to the people and life he loved.

"In that moment, I stopped running from death," he writes in the book. "Instead, I made every step a step toward love, and that saved me."

"We always say that we're never as good, as men, as we were up there," Parrado said.

Tyrone Beason: 206-464-2251 or tbeason@seattletimes.com