“Cold burns like acid,” Nando Parrado said, and you could sense the collective shiver of close to 1,000 riveted onlookers who, never having considered the notion, nonetheless knew it was true.

Parrado, the most celebrated survivor of the Andes flight disaster of 1972, delivered a thorough and unpretentious account of his life-altering experience to a capacity crowd on Oct. 20 in the Amarillo Civic Center’s Heritage Room.

His speech served as a capstone of sorts for Amarillo College’s 2009 common-reader initiative, the book being Parrado’s 2006 recollection “Miracle in the Andes.”

“I didn’t want to spend 72 days in that place,” Parrado said. “I didn’t want to be a hero. I just wanted to get out of there.”

And so he did, inexplicably. Parrado, whose in-person account filled the voids in his written work, shared the grim details of what exactly enabled 16 members of his scantily clad Uruguayan rugby team to survive the excruciating, sub-zero, lifeless environment for more than two months.

He gave a step-by-step account of how he and another young man, Roberto Canessa—without benefit of anything resembling winter garb—climbed and clawed their way more than 60 perilous miles for help.

What he will never be able to explain is just why or how any of it was possible, especially without training, equipment, food or even water enough for all.

“How did we do any of it, I don’t know. How did two of us go more than 60 miles in the Andes Mountains without gloves, over cliffs, crevices, all those horrible nights? Again, I don’t know,” he said. “What I do know is some questions can never be answered, and all of us should spend at least some time everyday telling someone that we love them because you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Courtney Milleson, coordinator of the common-reader program, said AC students comprised a large portion of the audience.

“It was fantastic,” she said. “We’ve heard nothing but positive comments about the event.”