The passage of time during the survival — the days becoming weeks becoming two months — was experienced very differently by the families waiting in Uruguay than by the survivors on the mountain. The families were living through what increasingly appeared to be an extended grief. The survivors were living through an experience whose connection to ordinary time had been severed by the intensity of what each day required.
When the survivors came home in late December 1972, the reunion with their families was not simply a happy ending. It was the encounter between two completely different experiences of the same period of time — an encounter that required, on both sides, the kind of translation that people do when they have been in very different worlds and need to find their way back to common ground.
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## The Expedition From Inside
The perspective of the survivors who stayed at the crash site while Parrado, Canessa, and Vizintín made the trek is a part of the story that receives less attention than the trek itself, but it is an essential part of the full picture.
Thirteen people — after Vizintín returned on approximately December 15 — waited at the fuselage knowing that two men were walking through the Andes with the group’s remaining food and their best chance of rescue. The wait was different in character from the waits that had preceded it. This was not the passive waiting of the first weeks, when rescue from outside was expected. This was not the organized waiting of November, when the escape plan was being prepared. This was the specific wait of people who had done everything they could do and had given their best resources to two men who were either going to reach help or not.