The woman who survived

Press, 21 April 1979, Page 17

The woman who survived

And I Alone Survived. By Lauren Elder with Shirley Streshinsky. Collins. 188 pp. $13.95. . (Reviewed by Nancy Cawley)

Miss Elder’s story of a joyride that went wrong is simply and effectively told, and because of these qualities, quite unforgettable. In the Californian spring of 1976, Lauren Elder was 29, a commercial artist who had come back to the Sunshine State to reappraise her life, to sort things out, after “six weeks of tramping around Mexico with Jim, after six years of trying to make a living as an artist.” When their tnends Jay and Jean offered Lauren a one-day flight over the Sierra Nevadas to Death Valley, it sounded like a good beginning to a new life-style. She threw on a quilted coat, high-heeled boots, and grabbed her camera. It was very nearly the last day of her life. Lauren Elder says she had a passing premonition, a feeling she should not go, but don’t we all feel a bit that way before we fly? Jay took the red-and-white Cessna 182 up from Oakland Airport, and the two women settled down to their sight-seeing. Soon, he told them, they would be crossing the Sierra north of Mount Whitney, at 14,000 feet. But they never made it. After just over an hour of flying, the Cessna slammed into the mountain range, 15 feet below Kearsarge Pass and 12,360 feet above sea-level. After the crash and a great waiting silence, the three crawled and hauled each other out of the plane. Jay’s girlfriend Jean died soon afterwards from head injuries, and although Jay lived through the long, cold alpine night huddled in the remains of the fuselage with Lauren, he died next day from hypothermia and internal injuries. There is no ghoulish dwelling on these sad happenings, no attempt to

play them for sensational effect. It seems evident that Lauren Elder is giving us just a record of her thoughts and reactions at the time. “It seemed like such a waste, such a careless way to die. The point, I told myself as I lay next to Jay’s dead and freezing body, is that I am talking about suicide. To give up would be the easy way out . . .”

Lauren Elder did not give up. She scrabbled over the crest of Kearsarge Pass, with a deep cut on her thigh, broken teeth, a broken arm and frostbitten feet, and during a day and night of danger, suffering and hallucination fought her way down 8000 feet of steep, frozen snow and rock to the Owens Valley town of Independence. The inspiration in the book comes from Lauren Elder's determination to fight her way back to life. For once, one can agree with the jacket blurb: “It is impossible to read this book without a feeling of pride that one is of the same species as its author.” An interesting footnote to her arrival at night in the small valley town, is the fact that the first few people whose doors she knocked on. turned her aw'ay. The multiple murderer Charles Manson had been held in the local jail for two weeks some time before and his women had looked much like the grubby, barefoot Lauren Elder. Towards the end of the book Lauren Elder writes of Antoine de Saint Exupery, the French aviator and write, who said: “Horror does not manifest itself in the world of reality.” She says she discovered this to be true. “In all the time it had taken me to descend the mountain I had not experienced horror. One feels horror in anticipation or retrospect ... 1 had also discovered, that spring day, that there is little than cannot be endured.”