Staying 'Alive': Survival novel sends Priory students on trek through Andes

By ANDREA GEMMET

While they were at the site of the plane crash, an out-of-season blizzard swept down the mountain, filling the air with snow and giving the students from Woodside Priory School in Portola Valley a taste of how truly inhospitable the precipitous peaks of the Andes can be.

After studying classic tales of heroes, from "The Odyssey" and "The Iliad" to the "Epic of Gilgamesh", in their Humanities class, the 12 senior high school students, led by teacher Jim Lawhon, journeyed to South America last month to the site of a contemporary heroic epic. After reading the book "Alive," the group spent two weeks visiting sites and meeting survivors and family members of an Uruguayan rugby team that was stranded high in the Andes mountains for 10 weeks in 1972.

The highlight of the trip was a four-day trek into the mountains of Argentina to visit the crash site and hold a memorial Mass for its victims. The snow storm gave the Woodside Priory group unexpected insight into what it's like to be cold, hungry, miserable and very far from home.

His students bore up bravely, riding for eight hours on horseback without eating to make it out of the mountains, said Mr. Lawhon. When they arrived at their base camp in the nearest village, the group found a rescue party assembling to go search for them.

"It didn't seem real to me until we were up at the crash site and stuck in a blizzard," said Tina Lally, one of the students on the trip.

She thought about how cold she was, she said, and how much worse the plane crash survivors must have felt, since they didn't have the advantages of cold weather Goretex gear, horses to ride, or knowledgeable guides to lead them out.

"The day we went up to the memorial site was the coldest day I have ever experienced in my life," Priory student Katelin Stasun said in an essay she wrote about the trip.

"The horses stumbled every now and then on the narrow rocky path through the snow. Sometimes small showers of rocks would fly from beneath their feet down the deep ravine."

For anyone not familiar with the story of the plane crash, the best-selling 1974 book about the event by Piers Paul Read or the movie, the story is this: In October of 1972, 40 people, members of an elite Catholic school's alumni rugby team and their friends and family, chartered a plane to fly from Montevideo, Uruguay, to a rugby match in Chile. While attempting to cross the Andes, the plane crashed, stranding 32 crash survivors high in the mountains with only the plane's wrecked fuselage for shelter.

The story of the 16 men who lived through the ordeal and survived against all odds for 10 weeks captivated the world's attention, not only because they had long since been given up for dead, but because of how they survived -- by eating the bodies of the crash's victims.

The survivors drew upon their Catholic faith and their conviction that it was their moral duty to keep alive to help them get past strongly ingrained taboos against cannibalism. Although that macabre aspect of their tale is one of the first things that attracts attention, many Priory students said it was one of the least important aspects of the story.

"The whole time we were at the (memorial) site, no one was thinking, 'So this is how they survived,'" said Mr. Lawhon. "It became almost irrelevant."

It did cause students to consider if they would have acted similarly if they had been there. Would they have acted courageously? Could they have eaten human flesh?

"I hope I would be able to, but I'm not sure how I would react," said Marcello Centofanti. "I hope I would be strong enough to do it."

It was less of an issue for two other Priory students. Mira O'Brien and Alex Meyer said they definitely would be able to eat the dead in order to survive.

"It was never a question," said Mira. "I know that's what I would do."

Still, the stark memorial they found on the cold lonely mountain was a grim reminder of the many lives lost in the plane crash and its aftermath.

Shortly after their rescue, a party returned to the site and gathered the remains of the dead and pieces of the plane and mounded them into a cairn. A cross of metal salvaged from the plane at the top marks it as a grave.

Katelin described her reaction to the memorial this way: "Even now I am squeamish when I think about seeing the human vertebrae in the snow. It was almost too much to handle."

Mr. Lawhon, who has read the book numerous times and has used it in his teaching for several years, said he was surprised at how emotional he felt when he reached the memorial.

"I wasn't anticipating feeling so sad," he said.

Focusing on the story of the survivors makes it easy to forget that more people died than survived, said Mira.

"We think of it as a hopeful story, but for the majority of them, it wasn't. It was a horrible tragedy," she said.

It wasn't until they were at the crash site that the reality of the story really sunk in for him, said Alex.

The students said they were most impressed by meeting several of the survivors. One of the survivors, Roberto Canessa, along with his wife Laura, accompanied the group on their trip to the crash site. While his presence lent gravity to the situation, he also added a great deal of levity to the experience.

"Before we took the trip, I was telling these guys that since we don't know what kind of a sense of humor they'll have, we need to be careful so we don't offend anybody," said Mr. Lawhon.

Instead, Roberto Canessa's manic sense of humor immediately relieved the group of that particular anxiety.

"Canessa was always joking about it, and not just the cannibalism," said Mira. "We were on a really hot bus, and he said, 'This is worse than the fuselage.' And he was telling everybody that his favorite movie is 'Silence of the Lambs.'"

They also met with several other survivors and families of victims when the students visited Montevideo, Uruguay's capital city where many of the survivors still live.

Mr. Canessa urged the Priory students to stand up and talk about what the trip meant to them. Mr. Lawhon recalled that one of the survivors, Coche Inciarte, was moved to tears by the students.

"Coche said he never imagined while he was up on the mountain that some day, a bunch of students from California, who are approximately the same age as they were then, would be moved enough to come there and talk to them," he said.

Meeting the survivors changed the students' perception of the men, from characters in an adventure story to real people.

"Throughout the year we had been studying books on an archetypal level, and I didn't see them as real people," said Mira.

Marcello said learning about the story gave him a new perspective on handling his own trials.

"I think it's a good thing to look at whenever there's a struggle in your life," he said. "It had a good message about the importance of teamwork and trust in each other."

It also brought up issues of heroism -- did their actions make the survivors admirable, and did they act heroically?

"In one way, I actually do admire the survivors," said Tina. "A lot of them grew a lot stronger (as a result)."

In the book "Alive," a large part of the story of the survivors is of the shifting group dynamics during the interminable 10 weeks on the mountain. By the end of the book it is hard to point to any one man as the hero, for as the group shrank and stress and hardship took its toll, roles in their small society shifted. Some who had been in the background stepped forward and assumed leadership roles, while others lost hope and became withdrawn.

"Not all those who survived were heroes and not all who died were not," said Mr. Lawhon. "The moral is that life is worth living."