On those nights I pray. The prayers are mainly about my mother. I’ve always had a very close relationship with her. She is my mother and a sort of friend. We’re more intimately bound to each other than I am to my father, who scarcely lets anyone get close to him besides my mother. I’m aware that it’s a miracle that I’m still alive, and I wonder why me of all people. I have survived the crash and believe that I now have to get through this too. I pray that I will find people. I pray for my rescue. I want to live. With every fiber of my gradually weakening body, I want to live. And then I wonder what I will do with that life when this is finally over.
I think about that for a long time.
Of course, like all my friends, I’ve thought about what I will do after school. From an early age I wanted to study biology, like my parents. But I never asked myself why and for what purpose. I was fond of animals, interested in plants, and I liked what my parents did. Up to now, that was reason enough for me. On those rainy nights I now think that it would be great to devote my life to something big, something important, something that would benefit humanity and nature. What that might be, I have no idea. I just feel that my life from now on should have a meaning in the fabric of the world. For it has to mean something that I fell out of the airplane and walked away from that with only a few scrapes.
Those “few scrapes,” though, do begin to worry me somewhat in the days that follow. The cut on my calf swells with rampant whitish flesh. Still, I feel no pain. The hidden wound on the back of my right upper arm is a different story. I have to twist my head far to see what’s going on there. To my horror I discover white maggots, whose bodies peek out of the wound like tiny asparagus heads! Apparently, flies have laid their egg packets in my wound, and the brood is now already half an inch long. That is something else I know all about, and this time my knowledge worries me.
For Lobo, my German shepherd mix, was once infested with fly larvae. Unbeknownst to us, he had a small cut in his shoulder, and the flies laid their eggs in it. Hidden under the skin, the maggots hatched and burrowed ever deeper into the flesh. They do that very skillfully, avoiding blood vessels so that the wound doesn’t bleed. Back then, they ate a deep canal for themselves under Lobo’s fur, down his leg to his paw. At night Lobo whimpered, and we wondered what was wrong with him. The maggots were still completely invisible. Then the leg eventually swelled and began to smell. By then, it was already so bad that the dog would no longer let anyone touch him. Finally we discovered what had happened. Normally, you can get maggots out of the body with alcohol, but my father said we couldn’t do that, because the dog would go crazy with pain. So we poured kerosene into the wound, which doesn’t burn, until the maggots came crawling out, one after another, and we could patch up poor Lobo. Fortunately, his wound healed without any problems after that.
So I know what I have to do: The maggots have to come out. But I have neither alcohol nor kerosene. Only a silver spiral-shaped ring, and I now bend it open and try to fish out the maggots with it. But as soon as my self-made tweezers approach, the maggots disappear into my flesh. I try it with the buckle on my watchband, but that, too, gets me nowhere. Then a rather queasy feeling creeps up on me. It’s not a pleasant thought, to be devoured alive from within. Though I know that the maggots themselves would not do anything dangerous to me, for like all good parasites they initially avoid harming the host, the wound can, of course, get infected. After all, I swim all day long in brown, dirty river water. And if that should occur, then it’s not out of the question that my arm would ultimately have to be amputated. I’ve heard of cases like that. I wouldn’t be the first person to whom this happened.
Since there’s nothing I can do about it at the moment, I go on swimming. I noticed a long time ago that the wild animals on the riverbank are extremely trusting. I see martens and brocket deer, which aren’t frightened of me at all. I hear howler monkeys, very close, and that makes me think, because usually those animals are extremely shy. I know what that means, but I try to keep the thought at bay: This river and the surrounding forest have not yet come into contact with people, and that it will be many miles before that might change.
Meanwhile, I’m getting weaker all the time. Though I don’t feel hungry at all, I notice how everything is getting harder. I drink a lot of the river water, which fills my stomach, and I know that I should eat something. How many days have I already been on the move? Seven? Or eight? I count on my fingers, and I realize that the new year of 1972 has possibly already begun. My mother really wanted to celebrate the turn of the year with my father. That was the reason she didn’t want to wait any longer for a flight. And now I wonder where my father might be.
Only recently did I find among my aunt’s posthumous papers letters that my father wrote during those days. On December 31, 1971, he wrote:
Now a week has already passed, and still the plane has not been found. The weather is mostly good, so that search operations could be launched in all directions. I’m on Herr Wyrwich’s hacienda, which has an airfield and is therefore equipped with transmitters and receivers. We can inquire in Pucallpa and are then informed on the status of the search operation.
This paragraph is followed by an enumeration of the various theories and statements of witnesses, all of whom claim to have heard the airplane itself or a detonation. But it turns out that in the nearby Sira Mountain Range, due to the constant rainfall, a landslide had occurred, which might have caused this sound. As I read this letter for the first time in my father’s typical neat handwriting, I tried to imagine what might have been going on inside him. Only the second part of the letter, written after an interruption, bears witness to his emotions. For in the meantime an American missionary named Clyde Peters had landed his plane on Herr Wyrwich’s airfield and had given him encouraging news. There was some support for the theory that the LANSA plane must have made an emergency landing somewhere. I could tell even by my father’s handwriting how hope was rekindled in him. Of course, I don’t have the slightest inkling of all this during my odyssey. I have only one thing in mind: I have to find people. During the day I swim or let myself drift, and at night I now have a few encounters with larger animals. At one point, while I’m trying to sleep in the middle of some bushes, I hear a hissing and pawing right next to me. I know it’s most likely not a jaguar or an ocelot. Probably what’s making noise next to me is a majás, known as a paca in English, a rodent as large as a medium-sized dog, with brown fur and white spots arranged in rows. I clear my throat, which gives the animal a terrible scare. It runs away in wild bounds, loudly grunting.
The next morning I feel a sharp pain in my upper back. When I touch it with my hand, it’s bloody. While I’ve been swimming in the water, the sun has burned my skin, which is already peeling off. They are second-degree burns, I will later learn. I can’t do anything about that either and continue to let myself drift in the water. Luckily, the current is getting stronger. As weak as I am, I only have to be careful not to collide with a log floating in the river or injure myself on another obstacle.
My bad eyes repeatedly fool me. Often I’m convinced that I see the roof of a house on the riverbank. My ears deceive me too, and I’m completely sure that I hear chickens clucking. But, of course, it’s not chickens; it’s the call of a very particular bird. Even though I know this call well, I’m taken in by these sounds, again and again. Then I’m annoyed and scold myself: How can you be so stupid, you know that those aren’t chickens. And yet it happens to me, again and again. The hope of finally, finally finding people is stronger. And ultimately I fall into an apathy unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.
I’m tired. So horribly tired. During the nights I fantasize about food. About elaborate feasts and completely simple meals. Each morning it gets harder for me to stand up from my uncomfortable spot and get into the cold water. Is there any sense in going on? Yes, I tell myself, mustering all my strength, I have to keep going. Keep going. Here I will perish.
At one point I sink i
n the middle of the day onto a sandbank in the river under the glaring sun. It seems to me an ideal place to rest a bit. I’ve almost dozed off, hardly noticing anymore the ubiquitous blackflies on the riverbank that are constantly pestering me. Suddenly I hear a squawk near me that I know; young crocodiles make those noises. When I open my eyes, I see baby caimans, only eight inches large, very close to me. I jump up. I know that I’m in danger. As soon as the mother of these babies notices my presence, she will attack me. And there she is already, very close. She rises on her legs and comes toward me threateningly.
And me? I slide myself back into the water and drift on. I’ve already had encounters with spectacled caimans, which were dozing on the riverbank. When they had noticed me, they were frightened and jumped into the water toward me. If I didn’t know this jungle so well, I undoubtedly would have gone ashore full of panic and run into the forest, where I would probably have died. But instead I trust that what I’ve learned in Panguana is true: that caimans always flee into the water, no matter what direction they suspect danger is coming from, and that they will swim past me or under me but definitely won’t attack me. But the very presence of so many caimans is a sign for me that there are no people living on this river. Later I will learn that at that time the entire river was uninhabited. If I had simply lain down somewhere and stayed there, I would never have been found.
So I keep going.
I’m getting weaker, can scarcely struggle to my feet anymore. I know that I have to eat something if I don’t want to die. But what?
It’s the rainy season, and frogs are jumping around everywhere. And I’m seized by the idea that I have to catch one of these animals and eat it, even though I know they are poison arrow frogs and will not agree with me. The Indians use certain species to poison their arrows, but the effect of these frogs here is too weak to kill an adult. Still, I’m not sure how well I will stomach them in my weakened state. Nonetheless, I try again and again to catch one of the frogs. But I don’t manage to do it. At one point one of them is sitting less than six inches from my mouth. The moment I grab it, it’s gone again. And that depresses me more than anything else.
And again I hear the false chickens clucking, and again I am fooled by them. At one point I’m close to tears when I realize I’ve been deceived again.
I spend the tenth day drifting in the water. I’m constantly bumping into logs, and it costs me a great deal of strength to climb over them and to be careful not to break any bones in these collisions. In the evening I find a gravel bank that looks like a good place to sleep. I settle down on it, doze a little, blink; then I see something that doesn’t belong here. I think that I’m dreaming, but I open my eyes wide, and it’s really true. There on the riverbank is a boat. A quite large one, actually, of the sort the natives use. I tell myself that it’s not possible, that I’m hallucinating. I rub my eyes, look three times, and still it’s there. A boat.
I swim over to it and touch it. Only then can I really believe it. It’s new and in full working order. Now I notice a beaten trail leading from the river fifteen to twenty feet up the slope of the bank. There are even visibly trodden steps. Why didn’t I see that before? I have to get up there. Here I will definitely find people! But I’m so weak. It takes me hours to cover those few yards.
And then I’m finally there. I see a tambo, a simple shelter, poles with a palm leaf roof, a floor made out of the bark of the pona palm, about ten by fifteen feet. The boat’s outboard motor is stored here—forty horsepower, I observe, as if that were important right now—and a barrel of gasoline. No people can be seen far and wide, but a path leads into the forest, and I’m certain that the owner of the boat will step out of it at any moment. As I look at the gasoline, I remember my maggots, which sometimes hurt horribly and have already gotten a bit bigger. I will trickle some of the gasoline into my wound, and then they will come out as they did with Lobo. It takes an endlessly long time for me to get the barrel’s screw cap open. With a little piece of hose I find next to it, I suck up the gasoline and let it drip into my wound. At first that hurts excruciatingly, for the maggots inside my arm try to escape downward and bite their way still deeper into my flesh. But finally they come to the surface. I take thirty of them out of the wound with the bent-open ring, and then I’m exhausted. Later it will turn out that that was far from all of them, but for the time being I’m pretty proud of my achievement.
Still, no one has come. It gets dark, and I decide to spend the night here. At first I try the floor of the hut, but the pona bark is so hard that I’d rather find a spot on the sandy riverbank. I borrow a tarp that is also lying in the hut, cover myself up with it and, thus protected from the gnats, sleep divinely that night, better than in any five-star hotel.
The next morning I wake up, and still no one has shown up. I wonder what I should do. Perhaps no one will come here for the next few weeks. I know that there are shelters like this in the jungle that trappers or woodcutters use only sporadically. Perhaps I really should keep going? Only briefly do I consider taking the boat and heading downriver, but it doesn’t seem right to me. Who knows? Perhaps the owner is somewhere in the forest here, I think, and when he comes back, he’ll need his boat. I cannot possibly save my own life and jeopardize another’s. Besides, I’m not sure whether in my weakened state I’m even capable of maneuvering the boat down this river. While I’m thinking about this and unable to decide whether to get back in the river, midday comes. And then it begins pouring rain. I crawl into the tambo, wrap the tarp around my shoulders and feel nothing. Now and then I try to catch a frog, in vain.
In the afternoon the rain stops, and my mind tells me that I have to keep going. Against all common sense I simply remain sitting. I don’t have the strength anymore to struggle to my feet. I will rest for one more day, I think, and tomorrow I’ll go on. Despair alternates with hope; powerlessness with new resolve.
I think that all the others must have been found a long time ago, and I’m the only one still out here. The thought occurs to me how strange it is that a person can disappear just like that, and no one knows about it. It’s a peculiar feeling, which fills my chest and goes to my depths. I worry that I might die here, and no one will ever know what became of me. No one will ever find out what an arduous journey I undertook, how far I have come. I’m aware that I am slowly but surely starving. I have gone too long without eating anything. I always thought that when you starve, it hurts terribly. But I have no pain. I don’t even feel hungry. I am only so horribly exhausted and weak. Again I try to catch one of the frogs. Again and again. Thus the day passes.
It’s already twilight when I suddenly hear voices. I can’t believe it! After all this time in solitude, it’s inconceivable to me. I’m imagining it, I think, as I have so many other things already. But they really are human voices. They’re approaching. And then three men come out of the forest and stop in shock. They even recoil involuntarily. I begin to speak to them in Spanish.
“I’m a girl who was in the LANSA crash,” I say. “My name is Juliane.”
Then they come closer and stare at me in astonishment.
10 The Return
A witness to the devastation: a temperature gauge from the cockpit of the LANSA plane, 1998. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)
It’s January 3, 1972. Some of the LANSA passengers’ family members have lost hope. Ten days after the disaster, the prospect of finding survivors fades. The search for the missing airplane is officially abandoned. Only the patrol made up of civilians and family members does not yet give up. The numerous journalists who came to Pucallpa on Christmas, and have continuously besieged the city since then, depart—the story seems to be over. My father is staying on the farm belonging to his acquaintance Peter Wyrwich. Has he, too, accepted the fact that he has lost his wife and daughter?
Meanwhile, Beltrán Paredes, Carlos Vásquez and Nestor Amasifuén, for those are the names of the three forest workers who find me in their camp, kindly take care of me. They gi
ve me fariña to eat, a mixture of roasted and grated manioc, water and sugar, the typical fare of the forest workers, hunters and gold panners. But I can get almost nothing down. As well as they can, they attend to my wounds and take still more maggots out of my arm.
“By all that’s sacred,” Don Beltrán confesses to me as he picks one after another out of my wound, “at the first moment I thought you were the water goddess, Yacumama.”
“Why?” I ask with surprise. I know whom he means. Yacumama is the name the Indians give to a nature goddess who lives in the water. Pregnant women have to avoid looking at her at all costs, or else she will come later and take the child. But why did they think I was she?
“Well, because you’re so blond. And because of your eyes. And because there’s no one living here far and wide. Especially not any whites. Good thing you spoke to us right away.”
That’s how I learn that this river really is completely uninhabited.
“What about the other passengers?” I ask the men. “Were they rescued?”
Speechless, the men look at me with wide eyes. Finally one of them pulls himself together. It’s Don Nestor, and his voice sounds hoarse.
“No, señorita,” he says, “not even the airplane has been found. It has simply disappeared in the jungle, as if it closed its fist around it. As far as I know, you are the only survivor.”
The only survivor? Me? That seems inconceivable to me. If I’m the only one … that means … I try not to finish this thought, but can’t help it: My mother wasn’t found either?
“No one,” confirms Don Carlos, who has been silent until now. Only now do I realize that I spoke my thought aloud. “It’s a miracle that you’ve turned up here, that you’re alive, able to talk to us. And that we came here. For we actually weren’t going to. When the rain came today, we considered whether to go to the shelter or not. To be honest, we check on the boat pretty rarely. We might well not have come at all. But Nestor said, ‘Oh, come on, the weather is deceptive. Let’s go to the tambo. There we’ll at least have a roof over our heads.’ I can still hardly believe it. How long were you on the move?”
When I Fell From the Sky Page 11
