In Tournavista, a village that was part of a large cattle farm, the friendly community provided us with a large room in a former school. We stacked our boxes against the wall up to the ceiling. Here we stayed for about a month. My parents finished their final work on their books and then planned how to proceed.
For where exactly in the jungle we were going to live was still not at all clear. My parents had heard of a spot on the bank of the Yuyapichis where there were said to be a few dilapidated huts, and my father wanted to take a look at them. My mother and I stayed behind in Tournavista, while he set off on his important mission to find the right place for our home.
On the bank of the Río Pachitea, at the mouth of the smaller Yuyapichis River, he asked for a boat and two able men who could paddle him up and down the river. And that’s how he found “Moro.”
Moro’s actual name is Carlos Aquiles Vásquez Módena, but no one calls him that. Everyone knows him as Moro. It would prove to be a fortunate coincidence that he crossed paths with my father so early on. Over the years Moro has become the beating heart of Panguana, without whom the research station would not exist today. Back then, Moro, just twenty years old, and his friend Nelson took my father around by boat on several rivers in the Amazon Basin. They are small and large channels that run in wide curves through the jungle. If you don’t know your way around, then in a short time you’re hopelessly lost. At that time there were still no boats with outboard motors on the narrower rivers, and people relied on poles and paddles to make it upriver and over the rapids. Moro and his friend brought my father to the mouth of the Río Negro at the upper reaches of the Yuyapichis. They were on the lookout for an untouched area that could be reached by boat.
At Purma Alta, they went ashore and hiked downriver, until they came to a few Indian huts. These were the dwellings that my parents had heard about. Apart from four Panguana tinamous bathing in the dust in the shade of the huts, the place seemed to be deserted. My father said: “This is the right place!” A name was at his fingertips: Panguana—after the tinamous. My father and Moro explored the forest, and they liked what they found. The habitat abounded with animals, above all birds, butterflies and other insects. You might say it was a dream come true for any serious researcher. Due to the exertions of the long march to Peru, my father at that time suffered constant back pains. When Moro noticed that, he offered to help bring the baggage here from Tournavista. Naturally, my father agreed. That’s how Moro and his family would come to occupy an important place in our lives.
In Tournavista, my mother and I were waiting expectantly to find out what news my father would bring us from his scouting expedition through the jungle. Where would I spend the next several years? To what remote place were my parents taking me? And then my father returned and reported: “I’ve found the right place. I’ve even already given it a name.”
“And what’s it called?” my mother asked.
“Panguana. What do you think of that?”
Of course, my mother was excited. She bombarded my father with questions. Where exactly was the place? What was the state of the huts? What animal species had he seen? Soon the two of them were absorbed in a lively conversation. I sighed. Once again they were in agreement, as always. Only I was worried. The place was secluded, that much I had already understood. And it would again take several days before we finally arrived there. I tried to figure out how many days’ journey would then separate me from Lima. At the time I could not have imagined that I would take that journey so many times over all these years.
Soon we set off. The trip on the Río Pachitea took three days. One night we slept on a sandbank, and the second on the boat. There were several rapids, and one almost capsized us shortly before our destination. Finally we reached the mouth of the Yuyapichis, where we could spend the night with Moro’s grandparents on their “fundo”—what cattle ranches are called in Amazonian Peru. The next day, when we finally arrived at the dilapidated huts after a grueling march through dense primary forest, my despondency turned immediately into excitement! Panguana wasn’t gloomy at all! It was gorgeous, an idyll on the river with trees that bloomed blazing red. There were mango, guava and citrus fruits, and over everything a glorious 150-foot-tall lupuna tree, also known as a kapok, which is still the emblem of the research station today.
From the beginning I really liked being in Panguana. On the very first day, I met Moro. I think he was rather surprised at the massive amount of boxes and suitcases we had with us. It took months before we were able to bring everything, little by little, from Tournavista. Now the meticulous lists proved to be a blessing. As we unpacked, it turned out that we had only the bare necessities in clothing, but all the more equipment for research. Moro told me later that the people in the area were actually a bit put off that a few gringos showed up there just to explore the forest. He, too, was skeptical at first. But after my mother showed him her books and drawings and explained the scientific significance of the forest to him, he was fired with enthusiasm. Moro later told me, again and again, how my father’s knowledge especially impressed him.
“If a bird whistled anywhere,” he said, “he knew better than we natives what species it belonged to.” My father’s discipline also really impressed him.
“When he said he would be down by the river at eight o’clock in the morning, he was there at eight o’clock,” Moro emphasized. “Not a minute earlier and not a minute later. In each hand he carried a suitcase, so that he could keep his balance walking on swampy paths. But once he actually came five minutes late. That had never happened before, and he apologized immediately for it. ‘Señor,’ I asked, ‘what happened?’ for he arrived with only one rubber boot. It had rained hard, the river was high, and one of his boots had gotten stuck in the muddy riverbed. That had cost him time he hadn’t factored in. The boot was important to him. Luckily, it could be saved later during the dry season.”
To this day we still enjoy laughing about this anecdote.
Besides Moro, there were also other locals, and Germans too, who helped us. Christian Stapelfeld, from Tournavista, and Lionel Díaz repeatedly arranged a boat for us and helped bring our belongings, little by little, to Panguana. Nicolás Lukasevich Lozano, known as “Cuto,” whose mother came from Iquitos and whose father was Russian, also had large motorboats that ran on the river. Today he still lives in Puerto Inca. Back then, among other things, he transported the mail. My mother often traveled with him to Pucallpa and back. Then there was Ricardo Dávilla, who was rumored to have many women and to have killed people. He was a gold seeker on the Río Negro. And, of course, we met and came to love Grandma Módena, Moro’s grandmother, and Doña Josefa Schuler, who came from Pozuzo, a town that had been founded by Rhinelanders and South Tiroleans. Her husband, Don Vittorio Módena, was born in Trient. The two of them ran a beautiful farm with their family directly above the mouth of the Yuyapichis, where it flows into the Río Pachitea. This was where we always went ashore to start on our arduous march to Panguana.
How I loved to stop off at Doña Josefa Schuler’s! She made the best bread in the whole jungle, which was called “pan alemán,” due to its origins, even though some ingredients—plantains and corn—were not exactly typically German. She woke up at four in the morning to bake this slightly sweet bread, and I loved its aroma and its extraordinary taste. Whenever we stopped by, we were warmly welcomed. Once, Doña Josefa offered my parents a whole loaf. To my horror they declined, and said they couldn’t possibly accept it. I anxiously followed the back-and-forth; and when the bread, wrapped in a cloth, finally ended up in our bags, after all, I heaved a sigh of relief. At Doña Josefa’s, there was also another delicacy: sweet cream, which she skimmed from the milk of her cows, a rarity in those hot temperatures. I can still see myself sitting in front of a plate of fried bananas covered in cream! Later my mother caught the bread-baking virus. In the jungle metropolis of Pucallpa, she got hold of sourdough, which on the homeward journey burst the plastic bag in which it was packed
due to the intense warmth. In our jungle camp we attended to it daily, and so we got sourdough bread, which was baked first under a baking lid, then on a Primus burner and later, when we were set up better, on a two-flame kerosene stove.
When I talk to Moro these days, the changes in the rain forest repeatedly become clear to me. Back then, tilled fields were always far away from the farms and from Panguana. Today they’ve gotten dangerously close. Which is another reason to have Panguana declared a nature reserve. But the climate has changed too: These days it’s much hotter than it used to be. Then Moro laughs and says I can’t take part in all the work anymore the way I did back then as a young woman. He reminds me how I helped with the corn harvest, breaking the ears, grating the kernels. I was always there for the slaughter too. I quickly became a “jungle child,” and I was just as content there as my parents.
Friends who came to visit us always reminded me of that later: “We never saw a married couple,” they say, “as completely happy as your parents there in the jungle.” For many it was simply unbelievable that two people could harmonize so perfectly with each other and find their life so fulfilling—and under such restricted conditions. But we didn’t see it that way; what was missing in comfort was easily made up for by the wealth of nature around us. For my parents it was probably really the Shangri-la, which others seek all their lives and never find: heaven on earth, a place of peace and harmony, remote and sublimely beautiful. My parents had discovered it for themselves and found their happiness there: Panguana, the paradise on the Río Yuyapichis.
And me? I loved the selva (as the rain forest is called in South America). But I looked forward to each visit to the city, where it was always too loud and too busy for my parents. I could go to the movies with my friends again or drink a milk shake with them in my favorite bar—and when we then returned, I was happy to be the “jungle girl” once more. That included: living under one roof with vampire bats, avoiding the caimans in the Yuyapichis, poling across the river with the dugout canoe, carefully shaking out the rubber boots in the morning in case a poisonous spider should have made itself comfortable in them and watching out for the many snakes, because the forest back then reached right up to the houses. What my parents taught me at that time about living in the wild later saved my life.
In our early days in the jungle, our hut had no walls. The house stood on stilts, not only because of insects and snakes but also so that it would not be flooded during the rainy season. Soon we had walls put in, which were made of palm wood planks, as is common in native huts. Everything was bound together with lianas, and the roof was covered with palm branches. There were two rooms, a larger one for my parents and a small one for me, along with a sort of porch, on which we ate and worked. At first, we slept in sleeping bags and on air mattresses on the floor, which was made of the hard, thick bark of a palm. Later we slept on normal bed frames with mattresses—but with mosquito nets, for there were many spiders and at night insects could drop from the roof.
The food was quite simple. In addition to the basic provisions and canned goods that we purchased in Pucallpa and the bread my mother baked, we bought rice, beans and corn from the neighbors. We also got fish and meat from them—the latter when they slaughtered pigs or killed game, such as agoutis and pacas, which are South American rodents, and brocket deer and peccaries. Sometimes we fished for ourselves in the Río Yuyapichis. In a small area of Panguana, there was a grove with bananas, pineapples, guavas, avocadoes, mangoes, lemons, grapefruits and papayas—though, of course, it did not bear fruit year round. We also had manioc and pepper plants.
We prepared the food on a log fire or kerosene stove. There was no refrigerator, so we had to preserve meat by smoking or salting it. We had no electricity because a generator would have been too loud and scared away the animals. When it got dark, we lived by candles and flashlights. Though we also had a bright Petromax oil lamp, we rarely lit it, because its glow attracted too many insects, which would buzz around us in clouds so that we could scarcely breathe.
For us, this life was not as uncomfortable as it might seem. And we did not view it as permanent, but rather as a long but ultimately temporary research stay. For entertainment we listened to the news or music on our battery-powered radio. You could connect a record player to the radio, and sometimes we would put on classical concerts and symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven, which my parents really loved. In the evening we would often play cards and various board games together or read by candlelight. My parents were fond of telling me about earlier days and about their travels, and my mother made up wonderful animal stories for me.
With the neighbors we had casual but pleasant relations. They were mostly white settlers or mestizos. The natives living upriver, who belonged to the Asháninka people, also paid us occasional visits. I did not spend much time with the other children in the vicinity, because they were all much younger than I was. On top of that, the families lived far apart, and the path to the small village of Yuyapichis was endlessly long at the time and nearly impassable. We almost never went there. So I had no playmates, and yet I didn’t really miss that because my days were so full.
We had a regular daily routine. At six o’clock in the morning, we went into the forest, often even before breakfast, for that was when the most was going on for an ornithologist. That is the hour of the antbirds, which follow the army ants on their marches through the country, because they eat the insects flushed by the ants. My parents had made observation paths everywhere, which they kept clear of leaves in an arduous Sisyphean task so that we could walk on them soundlessly. That’s also how I learned to lay out a system of paths with a folding ruler and compass, to orient myself in the dense jungle, determine water divides and use old Indian paths as shortcuts. As Theseus once found his way in the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne’s thread, I got used to scratching markings into trees with the bushwhacker so as to find my way back out of the jungle.
I also learned to recognize each bird from nothing but its call. With a tape recorder, antique by today’s standards but state-of-the-art for the time, we made recordings that were later transferred to audiocassettes. Sometimes I got to hold the large parabolic mirror that reflected and enhanced the sounds for the microphone. With it we also recorded insects or frog calls. In general, the chorus of frogs in the jungle is an experience for the senses: Sometimes it’s so loud that you can no longer understand your own words. That’s the case in November and December, when all the frogs lay their spawn and tadpoles hatch in great multitudes. The ponds rise, seeming themselves to be a living creature. And when the South American bullfrog, the hualo, begins to croak, then everyone knows: The rainy season is coming. It doesn’t matter what the meteorologists forecast; the hualo knows better. You can rely 100 percent on its call. Of course, there are also dry-season frogs, which can only be heard at that time of year. These animals have a sense for what’s coming and don’t need a weather chart.
Though I already had my own pets from an early age in Lima, it was clear that in the jungle we would get more. In the very first year of my stay in Panguana, neighbors gave me two very young blackbirds that had fallen out of their nest. I named them Pinxi and Punki and fed them with the dropper. The two funny birds grew on me, and I was really sad when Pinxi died one day. I rejoiced all the more when I got a “new Pinxi” for Christmas in 1970, as I wrote joyfully to my grandmother in Germany.
Around that time Moro gave me a little agouti, a New World rodent related to the guinea pig. I usually kept it in a cage, but, of course, I also let it run free outside now and then. It had become tame and always came back to me. On one of these occasions, a marten caught it in the evening and injured it badly. I was able to scare the marten away and take the poor agouti into my care. Soon, though, we realized that the internal wounds were too severe for it to survive. Before it could suffer too much, my mother put it out of its misery. She did this when it was necessary, in her distinctive way, at once sympathetic and professional. Sometimes t
his affected her really deeply, and I saw tears in her eyes.
Yes, the jungle was my teacher, as much as my parents were. They instructed me with discipline every morning. I was still legally required to attend school, and got the material from a friend in Lima by mail—even though it sometimes didn’t arrive for weeks or months. My parents followed it. They were always after me to do things for school and not run off into the forest all the time. My father was really good at math, and I was really bad. So he decided one day: “Something must have gone wrong at the beginning. Let’s start again from scratch.” How thrilled I was! But he was right, and because he was really good at explaining it, it soon sank in. Suddenly my grades shot up. But I much preferred reading to algebra. I devoured any halfway-interesting reading material, so that my parents had to ration my reading. After all, every single book had to cover a great distance before I could hold it in my hands. I still remember well a thin-paper edition of Quo Vadis, of which I was only permitted to read fifty pages a day. That was hard!
The school of the jungle, the books, but above all my parents’ teaching prepared me for what I want to achieve today: to save Panguana permanently from the encroachments of civilization. But that is only possible in Lima. Luckily, I also know my way around the city, and have been learning how to navigate the burrocracia.
When I Fell From the Sky Page 6
