When I Fell From the Sky

by Juliane Diller (Koepcke)

  Again he heard that this was impossible: This time the Pyrenees were said to be the end of the line. In comparison to this mountain range, people said, the Alps were a walk in the park. Again my father was undaunted. He followed the rocky course of a stream higher and higher, until he felt from the wind that a Mediterranean mountain climate surrounded him. He’d done it! He was in Spain.

  There, however, he had to be especially circumspect. Supporters of the dictator Francisco Franco didn’t think twice before putting illegal foreigners into their notorious camps. Once again, my father hid during the day and only walked at night.

  But in Barcelona, too, there were no ships departing for South America, and so my father headed for central Spain, always keeping his distance from the cities, staying as close as possible to the mountains. At one point, as he was resting under a carob tree in a completely remote area, a storm began to gather. Dogs howled in the distance, and more and more of them joined in. It took a little while before my father realized that these were wolves, but people posed more danger to him than wild animals did.

  In Córdoba, the small amount of baggage he still had was stolen. He immediately continued on his way to Seville. There he received for the first time a sign that his dream of reaching Peru might become a reality, after all. Shortly before my father’s departure from Germany, my mother’s family gave him some advice: In Lima, there was a connection to the daughter of an admiral friend. He should get in touch with her if he ever arrived in the city. Now he received a letter of recommendation from a German family in Seville, also addressed to the admiral’s daughter. Two recommendations to one and the same person—something simply had to come of that!

  Given the enormous distances my father had covered up to that point, the journey from Seville to Cádiz was a stone’s throw. From there, ships were supposed to leave for Peru. But once again, he arrived just a few days too late. A ship had just started for Lima with Germans on board. In his despair my father told everyone about his situation. A supporter of General Franco’s then connected him to an organization that helped Germans leaving Europe for political reasons. That was not at all the case with my father. Perhaps he would have grasped at this straw, if it had not quickly turned out to be a waste of time and effort. There were many empty promises, but no actions. And there were constantly new rumors. In a town named San Fernando, he now heard, a ship would be casting off for Uruguay in a short time. That would at least be South America, so my father hurried to the small port town. There he met a mason who also wanted to cross the Atlantic. Together they found the ship. It was a salt ship, and it really was about to depart. The two of them didn’t think twice before stowing away on board. They made their way to the cargo hold, tied handkerchiefs over their faces, jumped into the salt and burrowed into it as well as they could. After an endless odyssey my father was finally aboard a ship heading for South America—as an illegal passenger, buried in several tons of salt.

  For four days they stuck it out. Rough seas caused the ship to roll and pitch; the sun burned down; the salt penetrated all their pores; unbearable thirst tormented them—and finally the mason panicked. He wanted only one thing: out! My father figured out that the ship must have been only just level with the Canary Islands and implored his fellow traveler to pull himself together a little bit longer. Just one more day! But his companion no longer had the strength for that. So they revealed themselves and were promptly arrested. When the ship reached Tenerife, they were put in prison in its capital, Santa Cruz. Now my father faced the threat of transport back to Spain and a long internment in a camp there. However, he would get lucky. After fourteen days of detention, he was suddenly released and swiftly found passage on a ship bound for Recife in Brazil. There he went ashore a few weeks later.

  Finally he was in South America—even though he was on the wrong side of the broadest part of the continent. But still: “Columbus cannot have rejoiced more than I did upon setting foot in America,” my father said. By now, he already had been on the move for a year. How could he have suspected that it would take almost just as long to reach the capital of Peru?

  And yet his plan was quite simple: As an experienced walker, he should be able to conquer the three thousand miles to Peru, he thought. Part of the journey he could even cover by train. Of course, everyone told him once again that it was utterly impossible to traverse Brazil in this way. And, of course, my father didn’t let that deter him one bit. He set off, at first through endless plantation landscapes full of sugarcane and bananas. Then came the Caatinga, a four-hundred-mile-wide thornbush savanna, which he had to cross on foot.

  Whenever he came to villages, he was an attraction. And my father was quickly infected by the Brazilians’ enjoyment of life. “It was always fun,” he recounted later. After another five-hundred-mile trek, he finally reached central Brazil. When he later looked back on this enormous feat of walking, he remarked: “On good days I walked twenty-five miles. On worse days it was around twenty.”

  Looking down on this vast expanse today from my window seat, I can scarcely imagine how it was possible for my father to cover that distance on foot. Now we are flying over the Amazon, near Manaus. The river, with its many branching veins, shimmers majestically in the sun. We can see clearly its chocolate brown water; shortly thereafter we are flying over black-water rivers—one of which, the largest, must be the Río Negro.

  My father walked, unwaveringly focused on his goal, and that was Lima. And he wasn’t just hiking—he trekked and observed at the same time! He already knew the wildlife of South America from his studies. But here, on remote paths through savanna and jungle, he could observe the way of life of many species unknown to him. He studied their predator-prey behavior, discovered competing species and even found time to keep a diary on all this. He had no trouble handling the heat.

  In the meantime he had gotten very brown; and with the large straw hat on his head, he barely stuck out anymore in many villages. Only when he came to solitary farms did he often cause panic. If their husbands weren’t at home, the women dropped everything and fled into the jungle. Still, he was taken in hospitably most of the time. And my father enjoyed his newly won freedom: As opposed to traveling in the war-ravaged European countries, here he didn’t have to hide all the time.

  “I hung my hammock wherever I wanted,” he later enthused about his long march. He often penetrated forests that no one had ever entered before. Occasionally he was then overcome by something like doubt about whether it was really a good idea to expose himself to these dangers. However, my father never lost his confidence in himself. When people asked him where he was headed, he answered: “To Peru.” Most of them had never heard of such a land.

  And finally the day came: On May 15, 1950, the birthday of his fiancée, Maria von Mikulicz-Radecki, he reached the border of Peru. And as if that coincidence was not enough: Exactly one and a half years had passed since he had taken leave of my mother on November 15, 1948. From the border he was able to fly on a military plane to Lima. But I’m certain that my father would not have been deterred from crossing on foot the rest of the jungle, as well as the endless ice of the Andes.

  Three years after he had inquired about a job, two years after he had received the reply from the natural history museum in Lima, my father entered the office of the stunned director there. His answer was succinct: The job was unfortunately no longer available. And so a new odyssey began for my father, that of finding work in the Promised Land. The Guano Company, which earned a lot of money with fertilizer made of bird excrement from boobies, cormorants, pelicans and penguins, was a potential employer. But when my father introduced himself there, they had no use for him. Then he met the dean of the University of San Marcos, who proposed to him after some back-and-forth to manage the fish section of the natural history museum, and asked what my father wanted to be paid. Probably my father had never thought about that over all the years of his long journey, for he mentioned a ridiculously small sum. And while my mother was cros
sing to Lima on the South Pacific steamer Amerigo Vespucci, my father started his first job in Peru for a meager salary. No sooner had my mother arrived than she, too, was hired to work in the museum and later took over the ornithology department. Shortly thereafter they were married: In Miraflores, a particularly beautiful district of Lima, they said “yes” to each other on June 24, 1950, the solstice, the day after my father’s thirty-sixth birthday.

  I often think of my father’s long, arduous odyssey when I find myself in danger of becoming a little dispirited. Or when the old fears from the time of my crash are about to overcome me. Then his story is an illustration for me that it pays not to let things get you down. Not military posts, not missed boats, not mountain ranges that must be crossed, not thousands of miles to be covered on foot. “When we have really resolved to achieve something,” my father once said, “we succeed. We only have to want it, Juliane.”

  He was right. After the crash, I wanted to survive, and I did the nearly impossible. After that, can you face anything worse?

  Oh yes, you can. Every challenge presents itself as completely new. Just like anyone else, it always costs me enormous strength to translate what I want into action. Today I want with all my might for Panguana not only to remain in existence but also to be given a new form. I want my father’s wish to come true for this area, in expanded form, to be declared a nature reserve. That’s why I’m sitting on this airplane; that’s why I’m overcoming my fears. And now, after many hours, the moment has almost come. The land of my childhood is already below me. We have just flown over the border between Brazil and Peru. My heart pounds harder. Only about another hour. Already the jungle is giving way to the first ridges of the Andes. Once they’re behind us, the plane will begin its final descent toward Lima. Then this long flight, too, will come to a good end, thank God.

  My father shooting photos in the forest of Panguana, 1970. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)

  4 My Life in Two Worlds

  An adventurous trip to Panguana: we crossed a damaged bridge in a four-wheel-drive Toyota vehicle, 2006. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)

  I heave a sigh of relief. Did it again. Just through passport control, to the baggage claim, and then I’m looking into familiar faces and being fervently embraced. Alwin Rahmel, a longtime friend of our family, insisted this time on personally picking my husband and me up at the airport.

  On the drive to our hotel, I take in the city: Lima is lively, colorful and a little bit louder each year. That was already the case in the past; yet, in comparison to those days, Lima today is scarcely recognizable. Granted, years before my birth, my father already wrote to my mother, before she came to Lima, This city can certainly not be called beautiful, and yet in my childhood it had a charm all its own. In those days there was scarcely a building in the whole city that was higher than four stories. In Spanish Colonial style they were lined up, side by side, surrounded by trees. Now each time I arrive, I find new oversized luxury buildings with the insignia of banks, car dealerships, casinos and hotels along the street in the city center. They differ starkly from the cozy neighborhoods that made up the city of my childhood. There are places and areas I scarcely recognize. Here the road system was changed; there a new highway was built. I don’t think everything new is bad. For example, the separate bus lane in the middle between two roads I find very practical. Trees have even been planted along it, even if they’re currently still small and their later magnificence is only vaguely discernible.

  Yes, Lima’s streets are busy. One “hora punta,” as rush hour is called here, merges seamlessly into the next. Even though so much has changed, I feel as if I’m coming home. I look around and bombard our friend with my questions. What have I missed during all the time I was in Germany?

  Peru remains a country full of contrasts. That’s how it was in the past, and little has changed in that respect to this day. Back then, I was among the privileged children, without being aware of it. If someone had asked me whether there are poor neighborhoods in Lima, I would have indignantly denied it. Today I am aware that my parents and I, even though they attached a great deal of importance to living modestly, were among the rich. My world was Miraflores. That was where my godparents lived, and it remains today one of the better areas of Lima. Meanwhile, I also know that in those districts farthest from the ocean, the ones that ascend the slopes to the Cordillera Negra, many people live in slums. It is for that reason that it always strikes me as a little anachronistic when some of my old schoolmates in Lima say: “How can you stand it in Germany? You don’t even have staff there.” I wince at such statements, because they ignore the other half of Peru, the extreme poverty that exists alongside this wealth.

  Alwin Rahmel tells me about that too, and about the progress of his charitable work in the slums of Lima. Children often don’t get even one meal a day there if they aren’t lucky enough to be at one of the free meals of the Lima childcare organization. Yes, Peru is a country full of contrasts. And I love it the way it is. I’m proud of my ability as a German and Peruvian to unite both worlds. Germany is the country in which I live—and where I’m also really happy to be. But I’m bound to Peru with my heart. In Germany, I love that things generally work better. In Peru, I like the music, the warmth and the humor of the people. And I love Peruvian cuisine.

  On this first evening we visit my favorite restaurant. We’re warmly welcomed, as if we were here just last week, and for a moment I even imagine that’s the case. Everything is the same as always. My life in Germany merges seamlessly into my Peruvian existence, like one half of a zipper into the other. I order papa a la huancaína, which I’m mad about. It is potatoes in a spicy cheese sauce. How often I’ve tried to cook this in Munich; but because the right cheese and the yellow Ají peppers for the sauce are simply not available in Germany, it doesn’t work out so well. It just tastes better here, I admit to myself with a sigh, and let the sauce melt on my tongue. In Peru, there are around four thousand different known kinds of potatoes. They come in white, yellow, red, brown, purple and all the shades in between. My husband chooses a chupe, one of the delicious stews that efficiently warm you up, because this evening it’s also perceptibly chilly in Lima. Once, many years ago, I read an article in a German magazine headlined FIRST-RATE CLIMATE IN LIMA, but I was afraid that the editor fell under the spell of the triple rhyme in German, PRIMA KLIMA IN LIMA, for the Lima climate is anything but first-rate. Most days of the year, the sky is overcast, it’s often foggy, and at times the damp coolness creeps into your bones. That’s due to the Humboldt Current flowing past, nearby, coming cold from the Antarctic to meet the otherwise warm sea, thus ensuring a fair amount of “steam.”

  The different landscape forms are also extreme in this country: The desert runs from north to south along the coast; it is followed by the Andes, with their mighty mountain ranges and high plateaus; and finally, on their east side, the Amazon Rain Forest. As a result of the great difference between the coast and rain forest, our suitcases always contain two sorts of clothing: warmer clothes for Lima and midsummer clothes for the rain forest.

  The different habitats of the coast, mountains and rain forest each hold very particular flora and fauna, which I often had the opportunity to marvel at on my trips into the jungle with my parents. Yes, and these journeys lasting several days from Lima over the Andes into the rain forest are among my most wonderful and richest childhood memories:

  In Lima, we would usually take a bus run by the company “La Perla de los Andes.” The baggage would be tied to the roof, and then a few boys would climb up, whose job was to make sure during the entire drive over the mountains that nothing fell down or got stolen. The baggage guards working for the competing company, León de Huánuco, might have been better, because that bus line was famous for its reliability. But I was not yet at an age where that concerned me. I would look out the window, for shortly after leaving Lima, you already began rapidly gaining altitude. Still, the trip took over eight h
ours before you reached the Ticlio mountain pass. Its elevation is 15,800 feet, and yet it’s still the lowest pass of the central and southern Andes! For most passengers, that was high enough—if you couldn’t hold it together, you suffered terribly from altitude sickness. Once, sitting next to me, there was a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy who continually had to vomit.

  The higher you get, the sparser the already scanty vegetation becomes. Still, there are frequent villages to which the road snakes upward in endless switchbacks. On the Ticlio, there’s snow on the ground all year; and very close to the pass, though it’s hard to believe, there’s actually a town. It’s called La Oroya, and it is occupied by miners. It is a bleak place, a collection of miserable huts with colored corrugated metal roofs. During the day it’s cold, and at night it’s still colder, in a way that goes straight into your bones. No wonder the Indians of the High Andes always wear heavy clothing. When it’s possible, they sleep with kith and kin and all the livestock in a single room. And ornithologists even find hummingbirds up there that go into a torpor at night, a sort of nocturnal hibernation, by lowering their metabolism in order to protect themselves from the icy cold. Somewhat lower down you come across Peruvian pepper trees growing wild, on which what we know as pink peppercorn thrives, as well as other sparse trees. Only once you’ve crossed the Ticlio does the vegetation gradually return. Your gaze is drawn downward into the river valleys, which are green and fertile.

  It’s a long journey: First you go over the Cordillera Negra, which is covered with lichens and algae, giving the mountains a dark color. Then comes the next mountain range, the Cordillera Blanca. Farther in the north of Peru, glorious snow-covered twenty-thousand-foot peaks rise from it, and it connects to the Altiplano, an extensive high plain with the Puna grassland, covered with a prickly yellow plant. Here there are some gorgeous lakes, which at certain times are populated by flamingoes. The colors of this bird went into the Peruvian national flag. According to the legend that my mother told me, José San Martín, when he proclaimed the republic of Peru, was at one point lying on the beach and resting. Then he saw a flamingo above him, and the red and white of the bird inspired the colors of the flag. The coat of arms also depicts the vicuña, a wild variety of camel. Its wool is even finer and softer than baby alpaca and was once reserved for the Inca kings. Next to the vicuña is a picture of a quina tree, which symbolizes Peru’s rich flora. There’s also a cornucopia with coins pouring from it. Ultimately, from all its mineral resources, Peru is among the richest countries in the world.