When I Fell From the Sky

by Juliane Diller (Koepcke)

  After the Ticlio, we would soon reach the Altiplano, and then hours would pass at an altitude between thirteen and sixteen thousand feet. Here, too, you come upon at most a mining town, where copper, wolfram, bismuth and silver are mined. Finally we would be going downhill again and would soon stop off in Huánuco, an old Spanish colonial city in one of the most fertile river valleys. It lies at an elevation of about six thousand feet—so by Andean standards on the lower end of the spectrum.

  On my first trips we would always spend the night near here, for the road toward Tingo María became so narrow that it could be used only in one-way traffic. Spending the night meant you stayed in the bus, or else it could drive on without you.

  Next comes a stretch of land known as the Cordillera Azul. It’s densely wooded and hence gives off a bluish shimmer from a distance. By the time you finally reach Tingo María—well, then another eight-hour bus ride to Pucallpa lies ahead of you.

  On the way my mother would always tell me which birds could be found where: In the cloud forest of the Cordillera Azul, right at the water divide La Divisoria, there were the glorious orange-red cocks of the rock. On a hill outside of Tingo María, in a cave called the Cueva de las Lechuzas, dwelled oilbirds, known in Peru as guácharos. They were nightjars, my mother taught me, which orient themselves in the dark with a primitive echolocation and whose body fat finds a use as lamp oil—hence their name. For the next couple hundred miles, I then had something to think about.

  Two days and a night after setting off in Lima, we would finally reach Pucallpa, at the time a real small pioneer town. It was surrounded by farmland, and the farmland, in turn, by jungle. Here we could stock up on everything we would need in the jungle: basic foodstuffs like sugar, lard, oil and flour. After that, to get to Tournavista, the next leg of our journey, there were only two possibilities: either a boat or an off-road vehicle over wild paths through the forest. That was also only possible during the dry season. Otherwise, the roads turned into mud holes. Most of the time we would take the boat. On the Ucayali it would bring us to the mouth of the Río Pachitea. From there we would head upriver to Tournavista. The Texan family Le Tourneau gave this jungle village its name. Here we would spend the night with acquaintances, sleeping on the floor, and then look for a new boat for the continuation of our journey. To this day everything in the jungle is transported via the rivers—people, animals, baggage, all sorts of cargo. For two more days we would chug upriver.

  At night we would sleep wrapped in wool blankets on a sandbank, and the next morning the journey would continue. Not until evening on the second day did we come to the mouth of the Yuyapichis, where Panguana is. The river’s name comes from the old Inca language Quechua and means “lying river,” because it can sometimes be so deceptive. At a given moment it may seem to be a tranquil, leisurely little river, but within a few hours, it can turn into a raging torrent—depending on the precipitation in the nearby Sira Mountain Range, where the Yuyapichis originates.

  On our journey there we would go through notorious rapids, in which you could capsize if the boatman wasn’t experienced. During the whole trip, my mother never closed even one eye. She didn’t want to miss anything, and there really was plenty to see: Once a brocket deer swam through the river, then caimans, a type of South American alligator, and snakes again. My mother kept pointing into the water and saying things like: “Look, Juliane. There’s a bushmaster—one of the most poisonous snakes in the world. They’re very aggressive. You have to be on your guard against them.”

  Then the mouth of the Yuyapichis would finally come into view. Here we went ashore and had to make our way through three more miles of untouched primary rain forest. It was a nasty path, full of climbing plants that were almost as high as I was tall. The ground consisted of deep mud or slippery laterite, which in heavy rain took on the traction of a sheet of ice. Once we’d gotten through this area—a week after the departure from Lima—we would finally reach the Yuyapichis again, on the other side of which was Panguana. My mother would blow a police whistle, and my father would come across with the dugout canoe to pick us up. Welcome home!

  But I’m getting away from myself. My thoughts are jumping off course from my story again. For they revolve incessantly around Panguana, the research station my parents would found in 1968, which became my home for many years. As I look over the park in Miraflores, tired, full and happy to finally be here, as I go over our schedule for the next two days with Alwin and my husband, which couldn’t be tighter—numerous visits to the authorities are on the agenda, a meeting with our lawyer to finally bring our cause a decisive step forward—as we savor a dessert on the house, my thoughts revolve around Panguana. And I admit: As much as I enjoy being in Lima, I can’t wait to be in my beloved jungle again.

  No. For me it was and is no green hell. It is part of me like my love of my husband, like the rhythms of cumbia, which are in my blood, like the scars that I still have from the plane crash. The jungle is the reason I get on airplanes again and again, and for it I’m even willing to grapple with the authorities.

  The Peruvian word for bureaucracy is “burocracia,” and many say with a smile: “burrocracia”—which contains the Spanish word “burro,” the “ass.” And that’s no accident. Here in the Andean country, an apathy sometimes prevails that can drive many a European crazy. I’m almost afraid I’ll be confronted with it on this trip too. With my goal of having Panguana declared a nature reserve, I ultimately have a great deal to sort out with officials and authorities. I speak about that with our friend Alwin Rahmel. As always he helps me fight my way through the only “jungle” I truly sometimes fear: that of the burrocracia.

  Finally we get going. We’re tired from the long journey. We still have to get used to the time difference.

  When we arrive at the hotel, Alwin suddenly pauses.

  “Did you notice that?” he asks me.

  My husband and I look at each other questioningly. What does Alwin mean?

  “That was a small earth tremor.”

  Right. An almost imperceptible jolt. Then everything’s the same as before. It was as if there was a tear in time for a tiny moment.

  “But that was nothing at all,” Alwin immediately reassures me.

  But I’ve been used to it from an early age. For on the Peruvian coast two tectonic plates grind against each other, and as a result there are constantly recurring earthquakes. Such a quake is a frightening experience. First you hear a sound that cannot be integrated into our realm of experience. “The earth grumbles,” we say, and it can scarcely be put better than that. When it then begins to tremble, you become disoriented. That’s because our senses cannot cope with this suspension of the established physical rules. Repeated earthquakes and seaquakes beset other South American countries too. Just recently Peru’s neighboring country Chile was hit hard by one.

  I remember well two particularly violent quakes. One took place in 1967, when I was thirteen years old. I was home alone and cleaning my box of watercolors when it began. First there was an intense vertical movement, the ground rose and sank, juddering under my feet. That was already alarming enough. But then the earth went into lurching movements, the ground virtually swung sideways, and that was especially terrible. People panicked; I heard them running and screaming in the street, and I was tempted to do the same. I realized that I was alone. To be confronted with this force of nature all on my own was really a special experience. Instead of running in the street, I reminded myself of what my parents had impressed on me for such situations: It was better to stay in the house and get under a door frame. There, where the ceiling is supported, you’re much safer than in the open street, where a roof tile or a collapsing wall might strike you dead. That quake had a magnitude of 6.8 and lasted for quite a while. Luckily, not much happened in our area, and I escaped with no more than a scare.

  When I was between the ages of eight and twelve, my parents went on several expeditions to Yungay, a small town in one of the most beautiful a
reas of the Cordillera Blanca, and they often took me with them. We camped in a famous valley named Callejón de Huaylas. I can still remember well the ice-cold water of the glacial lake in which I had to wash myself and the glorious colors of the sunset on the snow-covered slopes of the nearby twenty-thousand-foot mountains. There were massive rocks in bizarre formations, and among them was one that I especially liked. It looked like a gigantic matchbox set upright, so I named it the “matchbox rock.” There were plants growing on top of it, and that made a strong impression on me.

  In 1970, this area was beset by a powerful natural disaster. A 7-magnitude earthquake caused a large piece of the glacier to break off. It fell toward the valley into the lake, which burst its banks. Gigantic mudslides completely submerged several towns. In the small town of Yungay, only the tops of the palms on the Plaza de Armas jutted out of the desert of mud. All the residents were buried under the avalanches, except one school class and its teacher, who had been on an excursion to the higher-up cemetery at the time of the disaster. When the earthquake occurred, my parents and I were already living in Panguana, far away in the jungle, and even there it could still be felt perceptibly enough that the birds flew up in fright from the trees. Ten years later I would go to that area with fellow students, and one of the towns was still completely buried.

  We say good-bye to Alwin, who clearly regrets having reminded me of the dangers of an earthquake. A short time later I see the familiar signs in the hotel that indicate the places where you should stay in case of a tremor. For anyone who lives in Peru, this phenomenon, too, becomes part of everyday life.

  I, too, grew up with the fact that nothing is really safe, not even the solid ground under your own feet. And I find that this knowledge helps me again and again to keep a cool head even in difficult situations. Maybe that’s another reason I survived the nightmare after the plane crash, because from an early age I was used to the fact that unusual things could happen—whether it was a poisonous snake creeping through the garden in the city of Lima, or waking up in the middle of the night to find the bed wobbling as if evil spirits were shaking it.

  Fortunately, that is not the case tonight. Tired, we sink into our pillows. How happy I am to be back here. And yet I wouldn’t like to live here all the time. I enjoy being at home in both worlds, even if it’s difficult at times and I occasionally almost burst with longing for the country I’m not in at the moment.

  But all this is balanced by the chance to expand my own horizon constantly. I don’t mean only the wealth of experience. No, I’m speaking of the inner, emotional horizon. I was always someone who preferred to gather information firsthand. And that’s only possible on-site, in close contact with people who live there. I think that benefits my work in Germany too. I feel privileged to be able to work in the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology. I value my colleagues. We are more than a community of scientists; we are like a family. I can justifiably say: I’m very content with my life. Isn’t that strange? After everything that’s happened? When I actually shouldn’t even be here? My mother’s last words still ring in my ears. The memory comes over me everywhere, without warning, on an airplane, in an elevator, in a dream. Then I hear my mother say: “Now …

  5 How I Became a Jungle Girl

  The vegetation is impenetrable near the riverside, 2010. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)

  … it’s all over!” With a jolt the tip of the airplane falls steeply downward. Even though I’m in a window seat all the way in the back, I can see the whole aisle to the cockpit, which is below me. The physical laws have been suspended; it’s like an earthquake. No, it is worse. Because now we’re racing downward. We’re falling. People are screaming in panic, shrill cries for help; the roar of the plummeting turbines, which I will hear again and again in my dreams, engulfs me. And there, over everything, clear as glass, my mother’s voice: “Now it’s all over!”

  Everything would have turned out differently if my parents hadn’t decided to relocate their workplace from the city of Lima to the middle of the jungle. They wanted to study on-site the diversity of the flora and fauna in the Amazon Rain Forest, which at the time was practically unknown. They wanted to live for five years in immediate proximity to their research field. And at some point thereafter they wanted to return to Germany.

  I was fourteen when my parents put this plan into action. At the time I was less than thrilled by the idea of living in the jungle from that point on. I imagined sitting all day in the gloom under tall trees, whose dense canopy of leaves didn’t let through a single ray of sunlight. I thought wistfully of leaving behind all my schoolmates in Lima. They all looked at me pityingly, for none of them could imagine living in the middle of the jungle. Most of them had never even set foot in it. Not that I was afraid—I knew the jungle already from excursions with my parents. But to take trips there and to move there with the whole kit and caboodle are not the same thing. At the age of fourteen you have other things in mind besides living in the wild.

  Our departure was delayed. My father had been working for several years on a major and ambitious project, a multivolume work on the life-forms of animals and plants, which he was determined to finish before the move to the jungle. My mother, who was fantastic at drawing, a master at sketching animals perfectly in any movement, would contribute the six hundred illustrations for it. They both worked feverishly. That was all right with me; I was in no hurry to leave. But we had already given up the Humboldt House and had to move for a few months into a small, expensive temporary apartment directly over a loud thoroughfare until we could finally get going.

  So it turned into a long good-bye from the city, which wore on my parents’ nerves. Above all my father was completely beat, and his mood often tense.

  The closing down of the Humboldt House, in which my parents had lived for about twenty years all told, was a prolonged task. How much stuff had amassed in the course of time! In my parents’ large study, all kinds of things were sorted out for weeks—no, months. Some things were thrown out, and what they wanted to keep was packed. No less than two hundred boxes were filled in this way. But, of course, my parents were far from able or willing to take everything with them into the jungle. So they developed an elaborate system to determine what they would store or loan, and where it would go.

  I still remember well those weeks full of feverish activity. Alongside their usual work, my parents packed cartons. My father built one box after another; my mother made detailed lists of their contents. “Without these lists,” she said to me often, “we’re lost, Juliane. It’s the only way we’ll ever find anything again.”

  In December 1967, the first moving van drove to the museum, which my parents were lending furniture for a guest room and where they were permitted to store a lot of boxes. At my request we celebrated our last Christmas in the Humboldt House in an almost-empty dwelling. Only the living room remained for us, where we exchanged gifts under an especially beautiful Christmas tree. We filled my godfather’s cellar with some of our boxes, and another family with whom we were friendly also offered to store about fifty cartons for us. And still, the small temporary apartment was completely full.

  And, as is often the case with such a big step, our actual departure would be delayed for another half a year. There were so many things my parents still had to straighten out, so many projects to complete. Finally, all our remaining baggage, along with Lobo and my parakeet, Florian, was packed on the bed of a rented truck, and on July 9, 1968, the journey began.

  I sat with my German shepherd on the truck bed under a blanket and watched as we gained altitude, and Lima, my friends, my schoolmates, Alida and my godparents—along with all my childhood memories—were left behind for good. I sensed that this would be a decisive break in my life, but I was too young to fathom what it really meant. In my veins flowed the same adventurous blood as in my parents’. Now that all the hustle and bustle of moving out and packing up was finally over, I was looking forward to what lay ahead of me: fir
st of all the trip, about which I already knew that it would take many days.

  Upward we went on curvy roads, which were occasionally so narrow that we had to worry more than once that the truck, along with its heavy load, would slide off the edge over the abyss. When evening came, we were already in the High Andes, not far from the Ticlio Pass, and here we all spent the night on the truck at an altitude of about thirteen thousand feet. In a letter to my grandmother and my aunt, I later wrote: It was pretty cold. Lobo sat on the truck and was really frightened. Florian (my parakeet) wasn’t doing especially well. He got seasick from the rocking of the truck, and there were times I thought he would die. He was probably suffering not only from seasickness, but also from altitude sickness.

  On the second day we crossed the Ticlio Pass, and the journey went on over several passes to Tingo María. Here the road conditions got worse and worse, and they didn’t get any better when the rain started pelting down. Eventually we couldn’t go on anymore, for a road construction machine stuck in the mud blocked our way. We weren’t the only ones. Behind us more trucks were jammed up, and we had no choice but to park and spend the night right there. I still remember well how worried my parents were, for the constant rain could easily cause landslides. We had to be afraid of either sliding down the mountain ourselves, along with the road, or having an avalanche come down on our heads. Luckily, neither of those things occurred, and the next morning the road construction machine was successfully pulled out of the mud. The road was unobstructed again. That day we made it to just outside of Pucallpa, and so we were already in the middle of the rain forest. From here to Tournavista was another day’s journey, and there our trip came to a temporary end.