Mortal Rituals - Preface and Introduction

Preface

Saturday, September , , a few miles west of Independence, Louisiana (about fifty miles northwest of New Orleans). I just had my first shower in four (hot and stormy) days. Hurricane Isaac came through on Tuesday and Wednesday, knocking out the power on Wednesday afternoon. It did not return until earlier today. Since we live in a rural area, no power means not only no lights, television, air condition, and Internet but also no water (the pump on the well goes dead). Three days of “living primitive” were uncomfortable but manageable.

How long could you survive in your house without power or running water? A few days? Maybe a week or more? Being prepared for such a possibility would certainly make a difference. My family and I had the benefit of past experience—Hurricane Andrew in  and the infamous Katrina of . That experience taught us how to prepare the house for a storm and its aftermath. We knew we had to store water—fill the bathtubs, the washing machine, and the ten-gallon containers in the storage closet. We filled the freezer with ice and put it on the coldest setting; bought plenty of dry goods (pop tarts, peanuts, breakfast bars); and checked the flashlights, batteries, candles, charcoal, and lighter fluid. For a while, we were going to be living a bit more like our great-grandparents, so we’d better get ready for it.

Our preparation had to be not just physical but also mental. During the storm, life would be more arduous. Merely using the toilet, for

C6220.indb vii

6/26/13 10:33 AM

Preface

example, would require refilling it after each use. After the necessary thirteen scoops and dumps from the water stored in the tub, our backs would ache, and the day had just started. Life would also be more monotonous. We would be stuck in a dark, hot house with the same unshowered people day after day, with few if any distractions. Get your mind right, I told myself—be patient, don’t whine, and be open to the unexpected lessons of your circumstances.

Our great-grandparents did just fine without air-conditioning, running water, and television. In some ways, they were probably happier than we are today. When one’s goals are whittled down to just what needs to be done to get through the day, the importance of those activities is suddenly magnified. For example, each evening during our family’s post-Isaac existence, the darkening house chased us onto the patio, where to the flickering illumination of citronella torches, we talked, laughed, and listened to the battery-powered radio. It was some of the most enjoyable family time we ever had. My suspicion is that such gatherings were more common in our great-grandparents’ time than today. These gatherings may count as what I call in this book an “ancient way,” that is, a behavioral pattern more common to our ancestral past, which reemerges when current cultural conditions change.

This book tells the story of a group of young men whose lives were violently reduced to the basics of daily survival. The Andes survivors’ story is remarkable and leaves us wondering: How did they do it? This book explores one answer: They did it by accessing the resources of their own human legacy. Their ability to do this, I argue, was enhanced because of a specific type of preparation they brought with them. They were a team, and not just any kind of team. They were a rugby team, and rugby got their minds right when confronting the challenge of survival. Rugby forced them to think in an “ancient way” that they were individually insignificant and that the greater good of the group

viii

C6220.indb viii

6/26/13 10:33 AM

Preface

was paramount, an attitude rather alien to the modern West but essential to our ancestors’ success.

In this event we also see something else quite noteworthy: the hazy reflection of human evolution itself. Not that the Andes survivors became a group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. That would have been impossible. Instead, the actions they took and strategies they employed in their struggle to survive had deep evolutionary histories. In other words, their story has an evolutionary backstory, which is what I attempt to bring to the fore. This backstory makes it a truly human story, one that we all share simply because of our common humanity.

For example, the survivors organized themselves into a complex, hierarchical (as opposed to egalitarian) social system. Where do complex social systems come from? They have an evolutionary history that extends back to our primate heritage, through our hunter-gatherer forebears and on into settled agriculture and the first civilizations.

Pushing the questions even deeper, we could ask, “How were they able to form themselves into a complex social system?” The answer here draws on our uniquely human cooperative abilities (abilities that, in this case, were sharpened by their rugby training). If the plane that crashed in the Andes had been filled with cats or camels, they never would have survived. Those species simply do not have the cooperative abilities necessary for forming the kind of complex social system that the Andes survivors created. And why don’t cats and camels have those same cooperative abilities? Again, the answer is evolution: those species’ evolutionary histories are different from ours’. To understand how the Andes survivors came to possess the cooperative abilities allowing them to form a life-sustaining complex social system, we have to examine our species’ unique evolutionary journey.

Undoubtedly, I could have used other, similar events as the evolutionary exemplar. Indeed, the fact that women and children are largely absent from this story excludes the possibility of exploring the evolutionary background of the sexual division of labor. Of course, no single

ix

C6220.indb ix

6/26/13 10:33 AM

Preface

event can encompass all the important evolutionary issues relevant to humans. The advantage of this event is that the relevant evolutionary issues are fairly clear and are embedded in a highly gripping human drama. To put it more bluntly, it’s a really good story.

Each chapter of this book opens with a scene based on accounts of the event as they were told in Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors,

by Piers Paul Read in , two years after the crash; Miracle in the Andes:  Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home, by Nando Parrado, one of the survivors, in ; and interviews with the survivors. These passages introduce a particular issue, such as the decision to eat the dead, the creation of their social order, and the rituals and routines of daily life. I then examine and discuss the scene and the issue it raises before presenting the evolutionary backstory of that issue.

With that evolutionary understanding in hand, most of the chapters conclude by returning to the Andes survivors and looking again at the original issue, now from a more informed perspective.

Many people deserve thanks for making this book a reality. First, of course, is my family, whose love and support make possible projects like this. My colleagues in the Thursday science and religion lunch group were an unceasing source of ideas, critical analyses, and challenging viewpoints. They and the students in my graduate seminar in the spring of  added much to this book. I’m also deeply grateful to Piers Paul Read and Nando Parrado for their informative, vivid, and inspiring accounts of the Andes event. Readers of this book are strongly encouraged to read their books as well. Numerous reviewers gave generously of their time, providing helpful and thoughtful critiques of the manuscript as it was being prepared. The final product was immeasurably strengthened through their efforts, and I am in their debt. My thanks go also to Karen Phung and Timothy Lynch for their proofreading. Finally, the editors at Columbia University Press

x

C6220.indb x

6/26/13 10:33 AM

Preface

were a delight to work with. Patrick Fitzgerald and Bridget FlanneryMcCoy were enthusiastic about the project from the start, and their encouragement, diligence, and expertise were essential to transforming a rough idea into a polished work.

Even though my name is on the front cover, what is best about the book owes its origin to many others.

xi

C6220.indb xi

6/26/13 10:33 AM

C6220.indb xiv

6/26/13 10:33 AM

INTRODUCTION

The Crash of Flight UAF 

We know what the pilot did wrong: he badly miscalculated the plane’s position. What we don’t know (and probably will never know) is why it happened. When Colonel Julio Cesar Ferradas radioed air traffic control in Santiago, saying that he had just passed Curico on the western (Chilean) side of the Andes, he was actually some fifty miles east of Curico, deep in the mountainous Planchon Pass. When the controller gave permission for Ferradas’s American-built Fairchild F- to begin its descent toward Padahuel airport, the plane proceeded to plummet into territory so remote that the peaks were unnamed. Thick clouds obscured the rugged slopes below, and by the time the plane was low enough to visualize the terrain, it was too late.

Possibly the plane was at fault. As a class, the Fairchild F- had a poor safety record. In the two years of the planes’ production, they tallied twenty-five incidents with nearly four hundred fatalities. This particular plane, however, was nearly brand new, having logged fewer than eight hundred hours in the air, and it was well-equipped with both a VHR Omni directional range and an ADF (automatic directional finder) radio compass.

Possibly the pilot was to blame. Ferradas may not have accounted for the strong headwind buffeting his craft when he made his initial turn into Plachon Pass. But this was his thirtieth Andes crossing; surely, accounting for the wind was by now routine. The experienced

1

C6220.indb 1

6/26/13 10:33 AM

Introduction

air force colonel could hardly be accused of being incautious. The day before, when the weather turned questionable, he scotched his original plan of a direct flight over the mountains from Montevideo to Santiago and instead landed in the Argentinean foothill city of Mendoza to await better conditions. Earlier this very day, he had chosen the more indirect but safer Planchon Pass through the Andes rather than a straight but riskier flight through Juncal. He did this even though another pilot, having just crossed Juncal, told him that while conditions were not good, they were probably no problem for the Fairchild.

The cold facts of Uruguayan Air Force Flight  are by now well known: A chartered flight carrying forty-five passengers and crew, most of whom were affiliated with the Old Christians rugby team, crashed in the Andes on October , . Seventy-two days later, two ragged, emaciated survivors, Fernando “Nando” Parrado and Roberto Canessa, emerged from the mountains and spotted a Chilean peasant, Sergio Catalan. Catalan alerted authorities, and a subsequent rescue pulled another fourteen young men from the Fairchild’s wreckage, eleven thousand feet high in the Andes.

The “Miracle in the Andes” was a crucible punctuated by a series of dramatic, gut-wrenching events: the crash itself, the gruesome decision to eat the dead in order to survive, the avalanche that magnified their suffering and further culled their depleted numbers, the numerous failed expeditions to the outside world, and the final, successful expedition. But this book is not about those events, already so well documented and explored in other venues. Instead, it is about what those events tend to obscure, the equally trying but mundane business of surviving, of hanging on one more day, day after day. What sustained those sixteen survivors for seventy-two days was a combination of many things, among which were teamwork, faith, and a wellorganized social system. Behind all these life-sustaining factors was ritual, that is, regimented, purposeful, highly meaningful intentional actions that kept reminding them, day after day, who they were and what their lives were all about.

2

C6220.indb 2

6/26/13 10:33 AM

Introduction

Mortal Rituals “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve: to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.” This is a verse from the prayer “Hail Holy Queen,” which is recited during the rosary, a Catholic ritualized prayer. The nightly rosary was one of the regular rituals the Andes’ survivors used to keep up their spirits, to give them hope and strength. For them, the prayer’s spiritual banishment had become a physical reality. The “vale of tears” was no longer a metaphorical place east of Eden; it was a glacier (later aptly named the “glacier of tears”) perched eleven thousand feet high at the base of an unnamed Andean peak. In this frozen place, ritual took on its greatest urgency.

Ritual is essential to social life. We use it to create increasingly complex social systems so that we can rely on one another for survival. In doing so, we become increasingly insulated from nature’s hazards and its beauty. Ritual is also a way of wresting control away from nature.

Nature moves the seasons, but ritual marks them, makes them “official” to the human world. We are born, mature, struggle, prosper, and die at nature’s command; but it is ritual that welcomes us into, makes us full members of, and dismisses us from the human community— celebrating our successes and lamenting our sorrows along the way.

For our ancestors, ritual had mortal consequences. It was ritual that sustained humanity over its long evolutionary journey, just as it was ritual that sustained the Andes survivors.

Ritual’s Promise When Parrado and Canessa found Catalan, the hour was late, and the rushing water of the Rio Azufre made communication nearly impossible. Initially, Catalan thought they were lost tourists, possibly hunters stranded in the mountains. In the shadowy dusk, their dazed,

3

C6220.indb 3

6/26/13 10:33 AM

Introduction

disheveled appearance could easily have led him to entertain more menacing thoughts about these strangers frantically waving at him across the river. Could they be thieves, murderers, revolutionaries on the run from the army? Desperately, Parrado and Canessa sought for a way to make him understand. “For the love of God don’t fear us; help us!” In that moment, to save them, they called on the same thing that had sustained them in the mountains: ritual. In an unmistakable act of supplication, Parrado fell to his knees, clasped his hands, and begged for his life. The message was clear but also rich with social irony: A son of the privileged Uruguayan bourgeois demonstrates his dependence on a simple Chilean peasant. Parrado’s expression was more than just a claim of helplessness; it was a promise. “I am no threat.

I mean no harm—just help me.” Against the backdrop of the quickly darkening sky, Catalan returned Parrado’s gesture with a promise of his own, shouted above the roaring waters of the Rio Azufre. “Tomorrow,” he said.

Long before word could issue promise, gesture was doing so. Or when word was inadequate to ensure promise, gesture could fulfill.

Ritual is enacted promise. Ritual promises tomorrow, and the hope of tomorrow sustains.

4

C6220.indb 4

6/26/13 10:33 AM