Free Will to Live: Dispatches from the Edge of Survival by Les Stroud Page B

loss of appetite, and swelling of the hands, feet, and face.
    Adding to the confusion is the fact that people react differently to the stresses of high altitude. What seems perfectly bearable to one person can be excruciating to another. Yet few are immune to the most serious forms of altitude sickness: high-altitude pulmonary edema and high-altitude cerebral edema, both of which can prove fatal if untreated.
    High-altitude climbers and mountaineers prevent altitude sickness by ascending slowly and methodically, thereby acclimatizing their bodies to the stresses altitude places on them.
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    Yet Nando was certainly not alone in his will to survive on that snowy mountainside. Not long after the crash, Arturo Nogueira, whose legs had been shattered in the crash and who was confined to a makeshift hammock in the fuselage, spent hours poring over the flight charts recovered from the cockpit. Using those, as well as information gleaned from the copilot before he died, the survivors determined they had crossed the Andes and were now somewhere in the western foothills of the great range. They became fixated on one fact: Chile was to the west. And while that knowledge would ultimately lead to their salvation, the survivors ran the risk of becoming too rigid and stubborn in their beliefs. Chile may have been to the west, but their attempts to scale the mountain that stood between them and their destination—instead of following its natural course down—nearly killed them several times over.
    This is where gaining knowledge is tricky. For while knowledge is indeed power, it still needs to be tempered with reality. There is no place for stubbornness in a survival situation. There was no way of truly knowing for sure that Chile lay to the west, so alternative answers should never have been counted out.
    As their fifth day on the mountain dawned, Nando and his friends realized they would have to take matters into their own hands if they were going to stand a chance of surviving. Four of the fittest among them decided to head out on a reconnaissance mission to the top of the mountain, to see what the horizon held. Carlitos Paez, Roberto Canessa, Fito Strauch, and Numa Turcatti were also seeking the plane’s wrecked tail section, which they believed held vital food and clothing, and batteries for the plane’s radio. They were aided by Fito’s stroke of sheer MacGyver genius: a few days earlier, he had fashioned snowshoes from the plane’s seat cushions and used bits of cable or seat-belt webbing to attach them to the hikers’ feet.
    Yet despite their best efforts, the climbers were unable to attain the summit. The mountain was too high, the air too thin, and their experience too little. They concluded they would have to find another way off the mountain.
    Nando spent nearly all his time at his sister’s side, holding her, whispering to her, encouraging her to fight to stay alive. But on the eighth day of their ordeal, Susy died in his arms. He spent the night hugging her now-lifeless body, desperately trying to maintain sanity in what seemed like an increasingly cold, cruel world. With his mother and sister now gone, depression became a real possibility for Nando. Unlike panic, which manifests itself as a sudden rush of debilitating emotion, depression is more insidious, but no less dangerous. Indeed, as time passes in a survival situation, loneliness, boredom, and apathy begin to creep in. Depression is never far behind.
    Yet Nando’s instinct was strong. He didn’t allow himself the luxury of tears or of sinking into depression over the loss of his friends, his mother, and his sister. Spurred on by the inner voice he often described as cold and unfeeling, Nando stayed in survival mode, suppressing more complex emotions and narrowing his focus to one thing: staying alive and returning to see his father and sister once again.
    As driven as he was to survive, Nando was, on some level, convinced that it was only a matter of time