In those days, too, the arm of the authorities reached all the way to our jungle station. After one and a half years, the educational authorities indicated their reservations about my being permitted to take the graduation exams without having sat at a regular school desk for the three decisive years. Even if I could pass all the tests without a hitch, it was no help: In March 1970, I had to go back to Lima and attend my old school there again.
Yes, by that time I thought of going back as something I “had” to do. That shows how much things can change. But when it was clear that the authorities would not relent, I looked forward to the chance to be with my friends again. After all, I wouldn’t lose Panguana—I would return to it on all my breaks. In the meantime there were more and more airlines that flew to Pucallpa, so the strenuous journey over the Andes had become unnecessary.
Everything seemed very simple. No one suspected then what would happen one day….
Despite the big time difference, my husband and I wake up the next morning and feel refreshed and well rested. A glance out the window and I’m in an even better mood than before, for today the sun can be detected in Lima’s sky, an unusually friendly reception for this city. We enjoy breakfast, and then things get under way. In front of the hotel, we hail a taxi to our first meeting with the lawyer, whom I asked on my last visit to press ahead with the formalities for the acquisition of new land for Panguana.
Last year it became clear that as a Peruvian I could certainly purchase property in this country. But since by Peruvian law, one’s spouse must also sign the contract of sale and is recorded in the land title register, we ran—once again—into a completely unforeseen problem. Because my husband is a German citizen, that’s not possible. And if it’s not possible, then I can’t buy property.
“What?” I asked with consternation, but also combativeness. “That can’t be. There must be some solution.”
Yes, there is one. But the path to it leads through numerous offices. And today, fresh and well rested, we forge ahead slowly but tenaciously on this path. From the lawyer we continue on to all sorts of agencies, where we are sent from one office to the next. Each time we can calculate by those waiting in front of us how long it’s going to take this time. But I’m tough, and this is ultimately what I’ve come here for. Desk by desk I work my way toward the goal, getting together the necessary papers and stamps on them to turn Panguana into a nature reserve. No one can stop me; not even the new official, wearing fashionable glasses, who was not yet sitting at this desk half a year ago, and who threatens to have the whole matter reviewed all over again, which would set me back years. With patience, the necessary assertiveness and expertise, combined with friendliness and persistence, I manage to convince this young woman too. And in this way the day and the next morning go by; at which point, sighing and satisfied, we can finally turn our back on the authorities for the first time.
One of our more pleasurable destinations today is the natural history museum, where my parents worked for so many years and where I still have old friends from that time, colleagues of my parents, who receive me warmly and help me however they can. Today the halls no longer seem as gigantic to me as they did when I was a child. Isn’t it strange how rooms have the habit of shrinking when we get older?
In the meantime the biology department of a university in Lima has been named after my mother. My parents are still renowned figures here, and will most likely remain so.
“But you’re famous,” Alwin tries to tease me on the way to our last dinner before our departure into the selva. “If you’d allow it, the airport tomorrow morning would be full of journalists.”
“No way,” I snap at him. I’m fed up with those appearances. It’s enough that the taxi driver this morning didn’t take his eye off me in the rearview mirror and finally said, “I know you from somewhere, señora. First I thought you were Evita Perón. But now I know it: Aren’t you Juliana? The one who survived the plane crash?” In Peru, I am always called Juliana—which the Peruvians spell with an a at the end, though my name is actually spelled the German way, with an e at the end. Even complete strangers know me by my first name, for I have become a sort of symbol among them because of my survival story.
Yes, today people still remember this story well, which I tried to forget for so many years. Once I might have cut short the conversation, but today I answer amiably and patiently. I’ve had to learn to deal with this sort of fame. Today I’m willing to confront my story. Here in Lima, it’s always catching up to me, anyhow. Not least of all when I meet my friends from those days, and this evening we have dinner plans with Edith.
Whenever we see each other, I feel as if we separated only yesterday. So much binds us, and yet we lead two such fundamentally different lives. Yes, that was already the case back then, for Edith never visited me in Panguana, neither during our school days nor in the decades since. But that doesn’t matter at all, just as I also have friends in Munich who have never been to Peru, or just as Moro so rarely comes out of his jungle. When I see Edith, my husband knows he can safely spend the next two hours talking to her husband, for we have “women’s conversations,” just as we used to do as teenagers. In Lima, we also always like to visit my close friend Gaby, who during my early days in Panguana regularly informed me how far they had come in school in Lima, so that I wouldn’t miss the connection to my class.
Back then, after almost two years in the jungle, I was able to return to my old class without a problem, thanks to Gaby’s help. To my teacher’s surprise, my grades had actually improved, most of all in math. At first I lived in a room at the home of our longtime family doctor, with whom my parents were friendly. But when his daughter returned from abroad, and the room was being used, I moved into Edith’s grandparents’ apartment on the second floor of her parents’ house. I’d have liked best, of course, to move back into the Humboldt House, which I thought of as my home, but that was unfortunately not possible. The Humboldt House no longer existed as an institution for traveling scientists, and the house now had other residents.
At first my friends said: “Juliane, why are you walking so strangely?” That’s when I realized that in the jungle I had grown accustomed to always lifting my feet up sharply from the ground, to avoid tripping over a root or anything else. We laughed, and I broke the habit. At that point I was already learning to live in different worlds, and I enjoyed it. Those worlds could not have been more distinct from each other. In Panguana, we went to the river to wash; we slept in open Indian huts; food was cooked on simple kerosene flames. In Lima, on the other hand, I experienced all the comforts and conveniences of city life.
My remaining one and a half years in Lima were a wonderful, lighthearted time, which I spent with my peers. Despite my jungle experience I was a schoolgirl, like all the rest. I was one of them, and I liked that. In Panguana, I was almost exclusively with my parents; here I was with kids my age. I was a completely normal teenager, didn’t worry all that much, spent my vacations in Panguana and the school days with my classmates in Lima.
On the first Christmas break after my return to Lima, I flew for the very first time by myself on an airplane from Lima to Pucallpa. That had also been the plan for Christmas in 1971. I was seventeen and had just graduated from Peruvian school. That was after eleventh grade, comparable to a German secondary-school diploma, which did not qualify you to attend university. Of course, I wanted to continue going to school and take the German Abitur, the university entrance exam.
As chance would have it, my mother already came to Lima in November, because she had some matters to attend to in the capital. She would have liked best to fly back to Pucallpa on the day before Christmas Eve to be with my father as soon as possible. Despite the flight from Lima to Pucallpa, which saved us a lot of time, the trip still took several days, depending on the water level of the rivers, on the roads and on how fast you found a boat.
“Shouldn’t we fly earlier?” she asked me. “After all, you don’t have classes anymore.�
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I made an alarmed face. For on December 23, the graduation ceremony took place, and on the evening before that, there was the first really big and important celebration of my life: the “Fiesta de Promoción,” the graduation ball. For weeks I had been saving earnings from German private tutoring sessions for my first long dress. It had an elegant blue pattern, puffy sleeves and was a little bit low-cut. I already had an escort too, the relative of a schoolmate. In those days you didn’t go to such an occasion without a dinner partner. Not all my schoolmates wanted to take the Abitur, and so the graduation festivities were incredibly important for me; it was a goodbye to many of my friends. I was a girl who hadn’t had too many social highlights in her youth, and so I implored my mother to let me take part in this celebration and attend the graduation on December 23. Of course, she understood.
“All right,” she said, “then we’ll fly on the twenty-fourth.”
My mother tried to get a flight on the reliable Faucett airline, but they were all booked. The only other airline that flew to Pucallpa that day was LANSA, the Líneas Aéreas Nacionales S.A., which had already lost two planes in crashes. There was a saying that went: “LANSA se lanza de panza,” which roughly means: “LANSA lands on its belly.” My father had specifically urged my mother not to fly with that airline. But the alternative would have been waiting another day, or even two. And my mother didn’t have the patience for that.
“Ah,” she said, “not every plane’s going to crash.”
And so she booked two seats for us on that plane. What we didn’t know: It was the last airplane that LANSA even had. All the others had crashed already. One had even had an entire school class on board. Only a copilot had survived that crash with serious injuries….
On the evening of our second day in Lima, my husband and I pack our suitcases once again. Yes, I admit, I’m excited. Full of anticipation for Panguana, I can hardly wait to finally be there again. I’m looking forward to the forest, the animals in it, the familiar sounds, the smell, the climate. Even though your blouse clings to your body from the first moment to the last, and all you do is sweat from morning to night. Even though the way there is still taxing, it’s no comparison to what we used to have to do to get there. But mingled with my anticipation is also another feeling, and I know that it will never leave me, above all not before a flight from Lima to Pucallpa, the very route that would change my life so decisively. If it’s never easy for me to board a plane, repeating this particular flight is the hardest. But I’ll pull myself together. Colleagues accompanying us to Panguana to pursue their research work there joke sometimes that there’s probably almost no safer way to fly than with me. For it’s considered extremely improbable for one and the same person to crash twice. I can give examples, however, where that was indeed the case. But I don’t want to think about that today.
The next morning the alarm goes off early. Just like that day, our flight is scheduled for seven o’clock. While we rush to get ready and are driven to the airport, it all comes back. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and just like that day I don’t feel well rested at all. As if I were seventeen again, I doze, thinking of the school festivities, the graduation ball. I didn’t have the slightest idea how much that day would change my life….
With my mother, in a canoe, on the Río Yuyapichis, 1969. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)
6 The Crash
No escape: emergency exit from the wreckage of the LANSA plane at the crash site, 1998. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)
When we arrive at the airport early in the morning on December 24, 1971, it’s packed. Several flights were canceled the day before, so now hundreds of people crowd around the counters, everyone anxious to get home in time for Christmas. There’s chaos in the terminal. We got up so early, and now suddenly we have to wait. For a while it’s not even certain whether our plane will fly to Pucallpa at all or instead head south to Cuzco. I’m really annoyed about this.
Also in the crowd, jostling for boarding passes, is the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who has already been trying indignantly for twenty-four hours to get seats for him and his film crew on a plane to Pucallpa, for his flight the previous day was canceled too. He has to get to the jungle to shoot scenes for his movie Aguirre, the Wrath of God. He puts up a fight to be able to fly in our plane, and he is really angry when he cannot. In all the commotion I take no notice of him. Only many years later will he tell me that we might even have directly encountered each other that day. Standing in line, I do notice two good-looking, cheerful boys about my age, speaking American English, with whom we exchange a few words. They explain that they live near Pucallpa in Yarinacocha, where a group of American linguists has been studying the language of the jungle Indians for years. Like my mother and me, they manage to get seats on the packed plane.
Finally, when it’s already after eleven o’clock in the morning, our flight is called. And when we ultimately see the plane, we find it magnificent. It’s a turboprop built by the company Lockheed, model L-188A Electra; in my eyes it looks as good as new. However, it’s far from it, as we’ll later find out. This type of airplane was actually designed for use in desert regions and had already been taken out of service in the United States for years. Because it has trouble withstanding turbulence—for its wings were, unlike those of other airliners, fastened firmly to the fuselage—a turboprop could not be less suited for a flight over the Andes. No, it was not new, but assembled entirely from spare parts of other airplanes. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time.
Its name is Mateo Pumacahua, and that strikes me as memorable, for it’s the name of a national hero, who fought for Peru’s independence and was ultimately quartered by the Spaniards. The two young Americans and I make jokes about the name, one of them saying: “Well, we’d better hope the plane isn’t quartered too.”
In the airplane we take our seats. Everything is completely normal. My mother and I sit in the second-to-last row, number 19. I sit by the window as always, seat F. From here I can see the right wing of the plane. It’s a three-seat bench, my mother sits in the middle, and a thickset man takes the aisle seat and falls asleep on the spot.
My mother doesn’t like to fly. She often says: “It’s totally unnatural that such a bird made of metal takes off into the air.” As an ornithologist, she sees this from a different standpoint than other people do. On one of her flights to the United States, she already had an experience that gave her a huge scare, when an engine malfunctioned. Even though nothing happened and the plane was still able to land safely with one engine, she was sweating blood.
And there was another incident that made her suspicious of flying. We had an acquaintance in Cuzco who refused to fly no matter what. “No,” he said, “I don’t fly, and that’s that.” For years he had always gone by land, wherever he traveled. He stuck to that; until one day, for some reason, he had to fly, after all. And that very plane crashed. For my mother that was a sort of omen.
Still, she flew often, especially from Lima to the jungle, as soon as that was possible, for in the end you were saving yourself so many hours of travel. Earlier, before there were regular airlines, we occasionally even took propeller planes over the Andes. Since those planes fly at a low altitude, it’s always really turbulent, and even I sometimes felt queasy. A few weeks before that flight on Christmas Eve, 1971, I had gone on an eight-day trip with my whole class, the traditional Viaje de Promoción. We flew to Arequipa in the southern part of the country, and in a letter to my grandmother I wrote: The flight was glorious! Among other places, we visited Puno, Lake Titicaca and Machu Picchu, and from Cuzco we flew back to Lima. That flight was extremely turbulent, and many of my classmates didn’t feel good. But I wasn’t nervous at all. I even enjoyed the rocking. I was so naive that it didn’t even occur to me that something could happen.
Today everything is quiet at the airport. My husband and I check in without a problem at the airline Star Peru. After that, we have breakfast calmly and
unhurriedly at one of the new coffee shops. I try to act as if this flight were one of many. And in a way it is too. Then it’s time to board. As always I sit on the right by the window. Who knows, we might have beautiful weather over the Andes today. The sun hasn’t risen yet, and there’s no telling from the chronically overcast Lima sky how things will look over the cordilleras.
It turns out that we got dream weather for this trip: The mountains are completely cloudless; the summits and glaciers gleam in the rising sun; the massive ridges and vast plateaus of the Andes appear first in pastel and then in shining colors. This spectacle lasts about twenty minutes, and then the mountain slopes in the east descend to the endless rain forest, which is already part of the Amazon region. Soon we’ll reach the spot where it happened….
The flight from Lima to Pucallpa takes only about an hour. On December 24, 1971, the first thirty minutes are—just like today—perfectly normal. Our fellow passengers are in high spirits. Everyone is excited to celebrate Christmas at home. After about twenty minutes, we’re served a small breakfast of a sandwich and a drink, just as we are today. Ten minutes later the stewardesses already begin to clean up. And then, all of a sudden, we hit a storm front.
And this time it’s completely different from anything I’ve experienced before. The pilot does not avoid the thunderstorm, but flies straight into the cauldron of hell. It turns to night around us, in broad daylight. Lightning is flashing incessantly from all directions. At the same time an invisible power begins to shake our airplane as if it were a plaything. The people cry out as objects fall on their heads from the open overhead compartments. Bags, flowers, packages, toys, wrapped gifts, jackets and clothing rain down hard on us; sandwich trays and bags soar through the air; half-finished drinks pour on heads and shoulders. The people are frightened; they scream and start to cry.
When I Fell From the Sky Page 7
