How many memories came back up! The river was still the same, and fortunately the forest too had scarcely changed. The calls of the birds that my mother had studied so extensively, the wonderful lupuna tree towering at its 150-foot height far over all the others, the butterflies and other insects—everything reminded me of those years when my world was still intact. I wandered as in a dream through the places of my childhood, grateful and amazed that I could still move in the rain forest in the exact same way I had learned to do as a child. “It’s like riding a bike,” my husband observed, laughing. “You never forget how to do it.”
We went to Puerto Inca, and there we met Don Marcio, who had brought me to Tournavista back then. It was a really moving encounter for me, after all those years. Along with many others, Don Marcio had helped search for the wreckage for the documentary. Once, he had even set off on his own. Unfortunately, he was injured by a stingray. It stuck its poisonous stinger through Don Marcio’s rubber boot and into his heel, causing his foot to swell intensely and become inflamed. Due to this incident he might almost have died in the jungle, if a boat hadn’t passed by. But since Don Marcio had almost no money with him, these people didn’t want to take him along. So out of necessity he offered them his rifle, a valuable item in the jungle, and so they let themselves be persuaded to take the injured man onto their boat.
I’d heard of his bad luck, and bought back the rifle with Werner Herzog’s help. Now we brought it back to him, a small favor in return for what he had once done for me. At that meeting I said: “Don Marcio, you saved me back then.” But he shook his head and said earnestly: “Not I, but God saved you, Juliana. I only got to be his vessel.”
When we were about to depart in the helicopter that was already waiting for us in Puerto Inca, there was a delay. For the pilot had discovered on an earlier flight that the trees in the clearing where we were supposed to land had not been cut down low enough. The stumps were still a few feet high, and that was life threatening. So they had to be cleared again, and only then could we set off.
I’d never flown in a helicopter before, and I found that really interesting. How you can simply rise vertically and hover in one spot in the air—that was extremely exciting for me, as someone who as a little girl had already been more interested in technical things than dolls.
And then we landed there, in the middle of the jungle, on top of a hill. We were a large crew with a cook and macheteros, who helped us cut the path. Some had flown ahead and had already set up a temporary camp with mosquito nets under large plastic tarps. My husband and I got a two-person tent somewhat away from the others, which was a luxury in this jungle camp. All provisions, including drinking water, had to be brought with us, for it was the dry season. And with German thoroughness a toilet was immediately dug as well, a simple pit with an outhouse over it.
To my surprise there was a tremendous number of sweat bees there on the hill. Even though they don’t sting, hundreds of them stick to you, which is very bothersome. All of us suffered from it. The crew was impressed with how stoically I endured this, but that was simply due to the fact that I was intently focused on speaking my lines as well as possible and not having to repeat them all the time. In the film there is a shot of my arm, where these creatures are just romping about. At the time of my journey through the jungle, I did not have to endure this, for down by the stream there were no sweat bees.
It was a peculiar place, our camp in the jungle. All around us in the forest, the parts of the airplane were scattered. At first they couldn’t be seen at all. Over all those years the jungle had absorbed them. But then, all of a sudden, they revealed themselves, and that was always an extremely astonishing sight—above all, because they were still in such good condition.
We found wreckage that looked as if it had just fallen into the jungle. Since most of the pieces were made of stainless steel or aluminum, all the years in the humidity of the jungle had apparently passed them by without a trace. The rain forest had appropriated them, grown over and around them, pulled them into its ground as if they belonged to it. Often you couldn’t recognize anything until one of the macheteros, who had helped find the crash site, set upright a pretty large piece of the airplane’s sidewall and brushed off leaves, moss and lichens: The paint and writing on it were like new. It was as if I were in a dream.
I saw all the pieces of the airplane in which I had once sat, in which I had crossed the Andes, surface from the green of the rain forest. And yet it scarcely affected me. I found it extremely interesting, even the smaller finds like a piece of one of the trays from which I, too, had eaten my last breakfast before the crash, or the remains of a plastic spoon, a wallet containing coins that had since become invalid, fragments of the carpet on which even the color could still be made out, the heel of a woman’s shoe, the metal frame of a suitcase whose clasps were incongruously still locked while the material that had originally covered it had disappeared. All that fascinated me profoundly, but it didn’t strike any chord inside me. It was as if I were an outsider viewing a distant spectacle.
What astounded me was: The airplane parts seemed so untouched. We also found a propeller and the turbine I had already encountered on my trek back then. And a three-person seat that was better preserved than all the others we found. We assumed that it could be the one with which I fell from the sky. It also fascinated me that airplanes were flying over us. We were exactly below the flight path between Lima and Pucallpa. So the pilot back then had not even tried to avoid the storm.
To see the stream again that had led me out of the forest and thus saved my life was also strangely unreal to me. The courses of streams can certainly be altered over the years in the rain forest, just as the vegetation is constantly changing, and yet I had the distinct feeling that I had been in that spot before. When we arrived at the Río Shebonya, we came upon a lot of butterflies at one point on the bank, and Werner Herzog had the idea of shooting a scene in which I walk through their colorful cloud. But how to explain to them that they should gather at Werner Herzog’s direction? Our knowledge as zoologists helped there, for my husband said: “That’s very simple! All of us have to pee there now, and then the butterflies will come in droves.”
No sooner said than done. The whole film crew peed on that spot, and that’s how the beautiful scene was made in which I walk through a fluttering swarm of butterflies—a fitting metaphor for my flight, the crash and my journey back to life.
And finally we found among all the wreckage something that did affect me deeply. Again it was initially hard to recognize, even though it was gigantic in size. It was part of the landing gear still lying in the forest with the wheels pointing upward. Lying there like that, it reminded me terribly of the remains of a dead bird, a real living thing stranded helplessly with its feet pointing upward.
I don’t know what people were expecting—whether they thought that I would burst into tears or undergo a powerful emotional eruption. I’ve never been the type for that. On top of that, some survival instinct must have formed a protective shield around me over the years, allowing me to lead a so-called normal life. Today I also think: The shock I undoubtedly suffered during my plunge from a height of ten thousand feet lasted until during the filming. To this day it has not yet completely dissipated. And probably that’s all right. It’s a mechanism that allows us to live with a monstrous experience, to deal with it as if it were a birthmark that belongs to us, a scar, an affliction. Or sometimes even a blessing. Who can decide?
But today, as I look out over the Yarinacocha Lagoon, I sense that the time when I have to keep those memories at a distance is now over. Now the time has come to speak about it. All those years it wasn’t possible. The work with Werner Herzog, which I really enjoyed and for which I am still extraordinarily grateful to him, helped me a great stretch of the way to working through my past. For me, someone who has never gone to a therapist, Herzog’s film work, his empathetic questions and his ability to truly listen, as well as the chance to return
with him to the site of terror, were the best therapy. Since then, I have found peace and inner stability. And yet another thirteen years had to pass before it would become possible for me to tell my story more fully than I had done ever before. Werner Herzog’s careful documentation had set the course for that, making it possible for me to write this book today. I’ve put it off for a long time. Today I am ready for it.
Surveying the LANSA wreckage site with the famous film director/producer Werner Herzog, 1998. (Copyright ©1998, Werner Herzog Film)
An examination of the wreckage: the frame of a suitcase and a part of the side panel. (Copyright ©1998, Werner Herzog Film)
11 One Survived!
After the crash, I recovered in the doctor’s home at the mission station in Peru’s Yarinacocha district, 1972. (Copyright ©1972 Stern magazine)
While I’m lying in a deep sleep in Dr. Lindholm’s house the night after my rescue, all hell breaks loose in Pucallpa. And not just Pucallpa—the unbelievable news of my miraculous rescue spreads all over the world! No sooner had we arrived in Tournavista than an amateur radio operator already broadcast the news over the ether at four o’clock in the afternoon. The other passengers’ families, having just reconciled themselves to the inescapable and trying to come to terms with the death of their loved ones, now revert to a mad euphoria. The hope that others might also have survived is rekindled. In the evening everything that has legs goes out into the streets and streams to the Plaza de Armas. At first people cannot even believe the good news.
That same night the comandante of the Fuerza Aérea del Perú, Manuel del Carpio, who is in charge of the search operation, calls a press conference. He confirms my rescue, but prohibits any contact with me with the argument that I’m in shock and have to recover. He mentions that I’m only mildly injured, which only increases the hope among the passengers’ families. If Juliane isn’t seriously injured, then shouldn’t others be able to be saved too? And another valuable piece of information spreads like wildfire. For during our trip on the Río Shebonya, I described to Don Marcio and Don Amado how the spot looked where the stream I was following flowed into the Río Shebonya. I mentioned the caña brava, and since they were familiar with the area, they knew that those gigantic reeds grow in great abundance by only one outlet: that of the Quebrada Raya, the “Stingray Stream.”
So it happens that early the next morning, the pilot Robert Wenninger, from the missionary aid organization Alas de Esperanza, boards his airplane and is directed by the two forest workers Marcio Rivera and Amado Pereira. They fly over the mouth of the river and follow the Quebrada Raya. At around ten o’clock in the morning, they already sight the first large piece of wreckage from the LANSA plane’s fuselage.
When I wake up that morning, I have no idea about all this, of course. Everything appears so unreal to me. I’m lying in a pretty large, divinely comfortable bed. Then I remember: I am at home; I have returned to the world of the living. Still, I’m hovering in a state that I can’t describe. To this day, after so many years, I find it hard. It’s the way you might feel after handling a very urgent matter for which you have to be in top form, and afterward you fall into a void. You’re neither upset nor happy about what you’ve achieved. You simply feel nothing.
I’m in this sort of limbo when my father walks through the door. He simply comes in and asks, “How are you doing?”
I say: “Good.”
And then we take each other in our arms. Neither of us cries. I’m so happy to see him. But it’s more something I know than something I feel. There’s no space in me for big emotions. I am simply relieved. At that moment there are no words for what I experienced. Nor are there any for what is still to come. And there are definitely no words for what I’m feeling. For at the moment it’s as if I’m cut off from my own feelings.
My father sits down next to me on the bed, and we just look at each other silently. He was never a man of many words. And I prefer it that way.
Later I will worry about this emotional void, will wonder whether something might be wrong with me, whether I might be coldhearted. This inner apathy will occasionally cause me anxiety. But today, forty years later, I know that this was a protective mechanism I developed at that time. During my trek through the jungle, it was necessary for survival; and when I was rescued, I could not just shut it off. My psyche was on autopilot. Inwardly I was still making my way through the rain forest. My mind had not yet made it back to civilization. Perhaps it’s still not completely back today.
But my body grasps very well that it’s safe, and all of a sudden it lets go. From one hour to the next, I get a very high fever that lasts a few days and then just as suddenly disappears. The doctors are at a loss.
On top of that, my left knee swells up a great deal. No one knows why. A few months later I will find out that I tore my cruciate ligament during the crash. “And you’re telling me you walked on that for eleven days through the jungle?” the orthopedist will ask me with consternation. “Medically, that’s actually completely impossible.”
Isn’t it incredible how my body was able to suppress the natural reaction to this injury until I was rescued? During my eleven-day journey, I had neither pain nor swelling. If I had not been able to move away from the crash site, I certainly would not have survived.
There are constantly people around me, and there’s always something going on. The linguists’ small airplanes, which are participating in the search operation, come and go over the settlement. When my father finally breaks the silence, he asks about my mother. How disappointed he is when I’m able to tell him so little! In a telegram to his sister, he writes: Unfortunately, we cannot say anything about Maria. Juliane did not see her again after the accident. And for me, too, it’s incomprehensible how she, who had just been sitting next to me, could disappear from one moment to the next so completely from my life.
On that first day after my arrival in Yarinacocha, the comandante of the FAP, Manuel del Carpio, visits me too. He asks me politely for information. I tell him what I know. Afterward, he asks me to report nothing in detail about the events of the crash to press people until everything has been cleared up. I comply with his request. But an official statement on the cause of the crash would never be made.
On that day, to quote the local newspaper Impetu, a “deluge” of journalists inundates Pucallpa. They plunge the small city into chaos, and they’re all searching for me. Luckily, the comandante issues a report that I am in the famous Hospital Amazónico Albert Schweitzer, with Dr. Theodor Binder, who is as well known in Peru as elsewhere. Not only the journalists, but also many locals besiege the hospital. Everyone wants to see me.
Despite the red herring, Comandante del Carpio orders police to guard the house where I’m staying. The crash area is closed off too and is only accessible to police and military personnel. Nonetheless, once again a group of ten civilians and family members sets off, extremely motivated by my fortunate rescue and the locating of the crash site. Among them is Marcio Rivera, who serves as a guide with his good knowledge of the area.
On that same day, the pilot Clyde Peters, the missionary who gave my father so much hope on New Year’s Eve, 1971, parachutes to the crash site. His plan is to cut a clearing in the jungle so that helicopters can land there safely. That would facilitate the rescue work immensely. At the same time an official delegation of three members of the Guardia Civil and six military personnel, among them a radio operator and two medics, set off on foot from Río Súngaro, near Puerto Inca, more than twelve miles away from the wreckage. Meanwhile, Clyde Peters’s heroic attempt fails. Not only does he lose his equipment—most important, the power saw bound to his leg—but he also injures himself landing. Cut off from the helicopter crew without radio contact, he follows the flight noise, because he thinks it will lead him to the crash site. But this is not the case, and instead of a rescuer, he becomes a missing person himself. It will be three days before Clyde Peters resurfaces.
The military delegation doesn�
��t have much luck either. It takes them two days to cover the twelve miles. It turns out to be intensely arduous to cut one’s way through this part of the rain forest, for the terrain is extremely hilly and the constant rain has made it completely muddy. When the leader falls and injures himself as well, progress becomes still more difficult.
The next afternoon, January 6, some civilians follow Clyde Peters’s example. But instead of parachuting, they are lowered down from helicopters on ropes, equipped with power saws, over the crash site. The military delegation and the civil patrol arrive there on the same evening and decide to work together. Thus it is now a total of twenty men, among them two newspaper editors, who approach the crash site.
Meanwhile, my usually composed father loses his temper: He starts a huge quarrel with the comandante and accuses him of not doing enough for the rescue of possible survivors. In my father’s opinion, the rescue teams’ progress is too slow. A lot of energy and precious time are being lost by infighting over jurisdiction. In a letter to his sister and his mother, which I found only recently in my aunt’s posthumous papers, he writes two days later:
Unfortunately, not everything that can be done is being done by the Peruvian side here. If Juliane had not come and said where to look for the airplane, they probably would have abandoned everything already. The day before yesterday I had a very intense confrontation with the highest authority in the search operation, Comandante del Carpio. The special North American airplane has been requested much too late: the linguists and Adventists (none of them Peruvians), who are experienced in the jungle, have not been sufficiently brought into the effort or permitted to help. They could have long since requested about 30–50 jungle Indians from among the linguists, etc. The “señor comandante” declared that he was canceling the police protection for my daughter. The police guarding us are no longer standing outside the house.
When I Fell From the Sky Page 13
