No Surprise

When I wrote the previous post on My Old Man, some thoughts came to my mind:

One was about the moment I met my father at the San Fernando’s Hospital the day after our rescue. I remember he said to me: “Forgive me Pedro, I thought you dead”. But I didn´t understand him, because I had not died, I was alive. In that sense, I think that our story is much more complicated and tough for our friends and relatives that had lost us and thought we were dead, than for us, whom we just spent 72 days surviving. The fact is that we had heard on our small radio that Canessa and Parrado had arrived in Chile and that a rescue team was on its way to rescue us. I remember that in our way, we prepared for the event. We cleaned the place, we combed our hair, brushed our teeth, smoked the last cigarettes and sat and waited for the helicopters to come. And when they came, we felt excited, happy and proud; we felt we were getting to the end of a horrible journey to where we knew that we had to get. We had worked very hard to get there. But it was not an explosion of joy and emotions, there was no surprise, we were waiting for that moment and it had to come.

For the rest of the world it was different, it is an incredible story. With the exception of some of our mothers that always thought that we were still alive, we were given by lost and dead. And now, 72 days after we had crashed in the Andes, we were coming back, skinny and rugged, but coming back from death. But not for us, because we didn´t die, we had just spent those 72 days, surviving.