When, in 1976, Lauren Elder found herself whimsically accepting a ride in a friend's Cessna, she expected it to be a fun, three-person day trip to Death Valley that would have her safely home by nightfall. She could not have known that, in boarding the plane, she would be committing herself to her life's most harrowing challenge. For, only hours later, she will have crashed in the Sierra Nevada mountains, isolating her and her dying companions at 12,860 feet and miles from the nearest human soul. By the next morning, her companions will have died and Ms. Elder, though herself wounded, will have to face the reality that, if she is to survive, she will have to manage it without any formal training, any help from the outside, and without the proper supplies or clothes necessary to weather her inhospitable conditions.
How do people survive situations they aren't prepared for? What fine line exists between life and death? What are the true limits of human endurance? And I Alone Survived explores all such questions as Ms. Elder narrates her survival against all odds. Dressed in a blouse, a wrap-around skirt and boots with two inch heels, and debilitated by a broken arm and facial injuries, she has to descend 12,800 feet of treacherous mountainside, negotiating snow-packs, ice-sheets and ravines in an endless and numbing odyssey. Her iron-willed determination to press on despite her injuries and the hopelessness of her plight is awe-inspiring. And the sheer courage it must have taken to set out on her mission instead of waiting at the crash-site for help is matchless by anything I've heard of. People survive the unexpected by believing in themselves, by planning out what they must do and by executing that plan. And while luck plays a role in why they lived while others died, their calmness and rationality in the face of the overwhelming keeps them focused on their goals, not on their pains. They survive because there are no limits to human endurance, not while one is alive. We can do what we must do, so long as we want it enough, need it enough. That is what Ms. Elder teaches us. That is why she alone survived.
This is a gripping book and it's no surprise that, after 35 years, it remains in print. Ms. Elder, who went onto become an artist, captures herself wonderfully here, a young woman caught in that awkward time after college but before she's settled on her life's direction. She has just as keen an eye for her friends as she does for herself, nailing Jim, the pilot, as the cocky and overconfident showoff for his girlfriend. The night Elder spents with Jim, huddled in the crumpled plane, desperate for warmth, is is a beautiful illustration of their differing attitudes towards their predicament. This is first-class non-fiction. (4/5 Stars)
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