When I Fell From the Sky

by Juliane Diller (Koepcke)

  The next day the time has come once again: We set off for Panguana….

  14 Nothing is the Same as It Was

  Recovery after the crash: embracing a giant tree at Panguana and regaining strength, March 1972. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)

  A Toyota pickup with four-wheel drive picks us up early in the morning. For a few years we have always booked the same drivers. They know the difficult route like the back of their hands, and so far their vehicles have always been reliable.

  “The road is open,” he says, after greeting us, and I heave a sigh of relief. For a few days the route was impassable due to the heavy rainfall. “The conditions aren’t great, but we’ll get through. Yesterday it took one of our drivers seven hours.”

  Seven hours—that sounds good. The most important thing is that we arrive in Yuyapichis at daytime, for at night the crossing of the Río Pachitea and the hike to the research station are still more arduous than usual.

  “It will be fine,” Nery reassures me. “If need be, you could always spend the night in my house in Yuyapichis.”

  As always it takes a while before all the baggage, including all the provisions that we brought, is stowed in the open truck bed. Then a board is put over the gasoline canister for refueling as a seat bench for Moro and the second driver. They will spend the drive up there—as I know from my own experience, not always a pleasure under the scorching sun and on dusty or muddy bumpy roads. But Moro laughs: he’s used to it and will sleep—he’s sure of that.

  When we turn onto the carretera that leads into the jungle toward the Andes, and will ultimately end in Lima, I’m happy. This evening I will be in Panguana! Even after all these years in Germany, it’s still a homecoming for me.

  It’s just like back then, when after a four-week stay in the Instituto Linguístico de Verano, my attentive doctors finally allow me to leave my bed. For a few days I live with my father with the Maulhardt family, who hospitably put me up in their bungalow hotel La Cabaña. Here I also have my last interviews with a new reporter from Stern, Rolf Winter. I have to confess, all the questions are starting to get on my nerves. The meetings with Gerd Heidemann and Hero Buss had gone pleasantly. Even though errors crept into their accounts, which would be copied a thousand times.

  In the preliminary report, which appeared before the two of them had even spoken to me, so much of the groundwork was laid for rumors, which would never again be eradicated. This piece was clearly based on the article that had first appeared in Life magazine, for which the reporter had interviewed various people, such as the nurse in Tournavista, the pilot Jerrie Cobb and probably also the woodcutters who had rescued me. So Stern wrote that I took a cake with me from the crash site. This cake, which unfortunately did not exist, for I couldn’t eat the completely mud-soaked panettone, will spread worldwide through all the coverage and take many strange forms. For the one cake soon turned into several! Finally—in Paris Match–it had transformed into so many that I can’t even carry all of them with me, for want of a bag, and I have to leave them behind. Later the cake will turn into a Christmas stollen I baked for my father; in another newspaper I hold on to it in my lap the whole time during the Electra flight, so that after I wake up on the forest floor, I conveniently have it right at my fingertips.

  The Stern reporters are also surprised that I left the crash site and even write of a “mistake” that saved my life. But I knew very well what I was doing. I had realized that no one would ever find me in the place where I woke up. I certainly did not run panic-stricken through the jungle, but followed with good reason the course of the water.

  In the preliminary report the absurd myth of the self-built raft is also taken from the Life article:

  The fact that Juliane knew which branches and lianas are suited for the building of a raft was the second stroke of luck that saved her life: If she had chosen the wrong material for her raft, she would have been in the middle of the river without a chance, for in the rainy season even the small rivers, which are all tributaries of the Amazon, have a raging current.

  The detail that I had “many worms” (viele Würmer) in my arm, which provoked the expert from Munich to write a reader’s letter, is also in this very first article.

  In the second part of the report, there’s a sentence that many later held against me: After the crash Juliane resolved: “Now Father has lost his wife, but he’s not going to lose his daughter too.” This suggests that I had seen my dead mother and possibly other corpses or injured people as well, which was, of course, not the case. This then led to the false reports that injured people were wandering through the forest, crying and screaming, but I ran off on my own. But these are basically all the typical inaccuracies from which journalists all over the world are clearly not immune. What affected me much more was the tone and content of the last part of the report, written by Rolf Winter. Here, in issue no. 9, February 17–23, 1972, I am portrayed on page 54 as an unfeeling, arrogant, precocious child. (In the article the phrase “little Juliane” appears a total of seven times!) I am depicted as someone who remains completely unmoved by her experiences and also incomprehensibly would like to go back to the jungle. He apparently doesn’t notice that I’m still suffering from the aftereffects of an intense shock. To my knowledge, people had heard of this phenomenon even in 1972. Fundamentally, I’m anything but a vindictive person, but to this day I have not forgiven Rolf Winter his last paragraphs:

  It need not be feared that she will have to suffer on her continued life’s journey from an excess of feminine emotions. Nor will she lose sleep over the tragic circumstance that her now dead mother and she actually didn’t even want to take the crashed plane, but rather already had tickets for another airline. Someone told them mistakenly that the flight was canceled, so they flew with LANSA—the mother to her death, the daughter to tragedy-enveloped luck.

  Little Juliane, who looks so fragile and in need of help, much more child than woman, will cope with these sorts of things. Still, she is only human. Someone tells her that at the station in Panguana her bird “Pinxi” has died. She found him once after he had fallen out of the nest, she loves him, and now he’s dead.

  Now little Juliane cries.

  I will get used to reading my story in variations that are constantly surprising to me and to the fact that complete strangers know how it was at that time much better than I myself do. But there are certain things I will never get used to. I find it uncanny how my trek through the jungle stirs people’s imaginations, right up to the lurid novel A Jungle Goddess Must Not Cry. It’s quite possible that my fate “inspired” Konsalik to write this shoddy work, an unspeakable story about a blond, likewise seventeen-year-old, girl who survives a plane crash in Amazonia—conveniently, along with a brave young man—and is found by dangerous headhunters and abducted as a sun goddess … and so on and so forth. Of course, many reports also mention that my dress was completely in tatters and I was half naked. I saved the minidress, and aside from the defective zipper and a small hole in the side seam, it’s in astonishingly flawless condition. But apparently the truth is eventually no longer so important. It has to take a backseat to what people imagine in their wildest fantasies.

  So it’s no wonder that I’m relieved at the end of January 1972 when I’ve finally recovered enough so that I can travel. With my father I go to Panguana. Our relationship has changed radically due to what has happened. Overnight, it seems to me, I’ve turned from a carefree child into an adult, and nothing has prepared me for it—neither the school in Lima nor the school of the jungle. I might be able to keep myself alive for days in the rain forest, but I’m unarmed against what pelts down on me after my rescue.

  Up to that point I had a much closer relationship with my mother. She was my confidante, as much as my father’s. Perhaps, I realize only now, she was always a sort of intermediary between my father and the world. The void she left behind brings us closer to each other. And yet my father, who will never get over losing her, will a
lways remain to some extent a stranger to me.

  I don’t have many concrete memories of the five or six weeks in Panguana between the crash and my departure to Lima. My mother isn’t there, but she might just as well have been on one of her trips abroad. I get a young coati as a gift, and I name him Ursi. He really keeps me on my toes. He gets up to a lot of nonsense and, of course, cannot be housebroken. At one point he devours our entire supply of aspirin pills. Another time he snatches our valuable thermometer and disappears with it onto the roof of the hut. I have a lot of fun with him, even though he ravages our kitchen repeatedly in search of something delicious.

  Unfortunately, as Rolf Winter reported, Pinxi, one of my blackbirds, died during my stay in Yarinacocha. My father had put the birds in the care of friends, and there they had probably eaten something that Pinxi couldn’t tolerate. Now I begin to gradually return the other blackbird, Punki, to the wild. I release him, and he immediately joins a group of blackbirds building their hanging nests in a nearby tree. Still, he keeps coming back to me when he sees me. He really loves to come swooping into the kitchen hut and plunge without warning into one of the bowls of bread dough or whatever else happens to be standing around at the moment. Eventually he gets on my nerves so much with this that I offer him a spoonful of mustard, and greedy as Punki is, he immediately sinks his beak into it. From that point on, he’s more careful and no longer comes smashing immediately into any bowl.

  The familiar surroundings, spending time with my beloved tame animals and those in the forest outside our door—all this does me good. When my father and I speak about the future, then I know exactly what I want: to return to Lima, to go to school for two more years and then to take my Abitur. This was just what I was planning before the crash.

  I want to pick up my life again where the thread broke on December 24. I want to go on living my completely normal life, just like before. At one point my father speaks of sending me to Germany. I argue with him, which I rarely do. I don’t want to go there now. Germany is a foreign country to me. Anything but still more change. I want everything to go on the way it was. Or at least almost.

  No one can bring back my mother. And even here in the jungle, where everything is actually the same as it used to be, nothing is the same as it was. This paradox will stay with me for many years. For my desire for normality is so strong that it sometimes almost hurts. Here, in February 1972 in Panguana, I really think I’ve moved on from “it.” I will soon find out how much I’m deceiving myself.

  The grief for my mother—it still has not reached me. Not until about three years later, on a Christmas Day, will I grasp with full force the irretrievability of this loss. Only then will I cry, all day long, almost without cease. But until that point her death remains for me like a distant theory. As if my mother might step out of the forest at any moment, shout to me with a laugh about whatever exciting thing she has discovered this time. For many years I dream again and again that I suddenly spot her by chance on the other side of the street. I run to her, call to her, we fall into each other’s arms, and all is well. I’m boundlessly relieved and sooo happy—until I wake up.

  I know that this will never happen. But thinking and feeling are separate from each other. In those days and weeks between the crash and what will follow, I learn that understanding something and grasping it are two different things. At least here I have a little peace and quiet, even though some especially tenacious journalists even follow me all the way to our very difficult-to-reach refuge.

  At one point, for example, to our great surprise a nurse arrives, claiming to have to examine my wounds. Her face looks familiar to me.

  “Don’t I know you?” I say. “Didn’t I see you in Yarinacocha?” It’s a journalist, who that time already tried in a different role to force her way to me. Now she has disguised herself as a nurse. My father drives her away. The rest of the day, his expression is gloomy. I’d like to know what’s going on inside his head. Or rather: I don’t want to know.

  The weeks pass, and life goes on. I’m looking forward to seeing my classmates who, like me, will be preparing for the Abitur. And I’m looking forward to life in Lima with movies and milk shakes and excursions to the beach. After the Abitur, I’ll study biology. For that, I will go to Germany, as I already had discussed a long time ago with my mother. The universities are better in Germany, she had said. I would like to study in Kiel and become a zoologist, just like her and my father. But that will still take two years. Two years are a long time in the life of a seventeen-year-old. And then the time has come, and the new school year is just around the corner.

  If only I were already there! But before I can go to school again in Lima, I have to cross the Andes.

  “I’ll fly with you,” says my father. I have a lump in my throat. Of course, we don’t book with LANSA. Even if we wanted to, that wouldn’t be possible, for with the Electra the airline lost not only its last plane, but also its license. My father, who tries to sue the company in Lima, will learn that it was long since liquidated. But the fact that we’re flying with a different airline doesn’t dispel my fear of this flight.

  “Do we have to fly?” I ask my father.

  He casts a brief glance at me. Then he says: “It will be better than winding across the Andres for three days, don’t you think?”

  I’m not sure whether it will be better. But I don’t say anything else. I learned a long time ago to be brave.

  If I thought that the world had forgotten me in the meantime, I’m already disabused of that notion in Pucallpa. I have no idea how the journalists know that I will fly at this particular time to Lima. In any case they hold microphones in front of my face from all sides. Cameras hum; flashes blind me; flowers are handed to me; questions bombard me. Am I doing well? How are my wounds healing? What am I going to do with my life? Would I like to greet the girls of Pucallpa? Am I afraid to get on an airplane again?

  I don’t know what to say. Of course, I’m afraid. But being mobbed so suddenly by this pack scares me even more. I’m almost relieved once I’m sitting in the airplane. But that is only until it takes off. Then I notice how every muscle in my body tenses.

  I close my eyes and try to take a deep breath. Strain to listen to every sound, however slight. Today no storm can be seen far and wide. Fortunately, the flight takes under an hour. But fifty minutes can be so terribly long.

  I’ve almost made it through the flight when I hear a noise that makes me panic. It’s a rattling and banging—my heart skips a beat; sweat breaks out from all my pores. I cling to the seat in front of me.

  “Relax,” says my father. “It’s only the landing gear. It’s being lowered now. In a few moments we’ll already be landing.”

  I heave a sigh of relief. Shortly thereafter, I climb, my knees still wobbling, out of the plane.

  But what are all these people doing at the bottom of the steps? A whole crowd besieges the airfield, surrounds the airplane. Are they allowed to do that? Are they waiting for me? Once again I’m photographed. Here, too, people hold microphones toward me. I’d like best to turn back around and hide myself away in the airplane. But the other passengers are pushing from behind.

  It’s like running the gauntlet: “Juliana,” I hear, “smile for us!” “Juliana, have you recovered well from the green hell?” “Juliana, what will you do now?” I don’t want to say anything. I want to disappear into thin air. I’m generally a shy person, and this attention is getting to be too much for me. “Juliana, do you already have a boyfriend?” “Juliana, is it true that you pray to San Martín de Porres, the black saint?”

  Finally we’ve gotten through. I can hardly believe it. Why are all these people still interested in me? During the weeks in Panguana, I saw barely a handful of people. And here I’m being overrun.

  As he often does, my father lives during this stay in Lima in the guest room of the natural history museum. He withdraws from everything. He doesn’t want to see or hear anything, but prefers to be alone with his grief
. And I move back into my room in my schoolmate Edith’s grandmother’s apartment. But if I thought everything would be the same as it was before the crash, now I realize that nothing is the same as it used to be. Complete strangers approach me on the street, want my autograph or just want to touch me. I find this incredibly trying. I haven’t yet learned to deal with this sudden “fame.” And the journalists don’t give me any peace either. When I step out of the house, they’re already there. When I take a walk with my friends in the city, they follow us. When we go to the beach, they’re already waiting for me. They even try to photograph me in my room with a telephoto lens. Ultimately I feel as if I’m under siege. It’s no fun at all to do anything anymore. This isn’t how I imagined my return to Lima.

  In this mood my friend Edith persuades me to go swimming with her in the German Club. I’ve been there only rarely, for my parents didn’t visit that place, but Edith doesn’t relent.

  “Oh,” I say, “I don’t know. I’m sure to be ambushed by journalists there. I’d rather not.”

  “But you can’t sit in your room with the curtains drawn forever,” she replies. “It would be best if you just got used to the press. And you’ll see, it’s not as bad as you think.”

  Edith knows what she’s talking about. She has already won numerous medals as a track athlete for Peru, and she is famous herself. She has experience with press people, and she promises to stand by me.

  “Besides, you’re imagining things,” she says. “They don’t let journalists into the German Club. Come on, the weather is so beautiful.”

  Finally I give in. Edith is right, I think, soon school will be starting again, and we don’t have much time left for things like that.