At first, everything seems to be quiet in the German Club. But no sooner have we stepped out of the changing room than they are already there: I have no idea how they got in, but suddenly the press has surrounded me once again. This time there’s even a television camera pointed at me.
“Come on,” Edith says softly to me, “it would be best if you very agreeably answered a few questions now. Then they’ll quickly leave you alone again.”
And at her advice I sit down obediently on a swing, smile pleasantly and answer the journalists’ harmless questions. And indeed, after a brief time, the television crew departs. Still, the incident leaves me with a bad feeling. The way that the press follows me in a pack, almost like wild carnivores, is awful; though no jaguars or other animals attacked me in the jungle, these supposedly civilized people never stopped hunting me.
My life would have taken a different course if my godfather hadn’t invited my father to his home that particular evening. They turn on the television for the main news. And there he sees, to his boundless dismay, his daughter. She’s sitting in a bikini on a swing, smiling into the camera and telling the world that she’s doing well. It’s quite a coincidence, because my father doesn’t usually watch television. But during those two minutes, of all times, he is watching. First he is thunderstruck. Then he sees red.
“So that’s how you mourn your mother!” He hurls the words angrily at me when he finds me that same evening. And then he announces to me his irrevocable decision. I will leave this country immediately. I won’t take my Abitur in Lima, but in Germany. As soon as possible he will put me in an airplane and send me to my aunt Cordula.
I’m horrified. Cry. Beg to be allowed to stay. I don’t want to go to Germany. Don’t take away my home too, I want to scream, not that too. I’ve already lost so much. But the severe reprimand of his “So that’s how you mourn your mother” seems to deprive me of all my rights. I’m doing well, after all, you could hear that on television. Only he is consumed with grief for his beloved wife. Over the next few days, I hope and pray that he will come to his senses. Once he’s calmed down, I think, he’ll reconsider. But my begging is in vain. His decision has been made.
“Here in Peru,” he says a few days later, “you’ll never get any peace. These journalist vultures will keep you from being able to lead a normal life. Believe me, this is for your own good. In Germany, you’ll be able to start a new life.”
A new life. But I don’t want a new life. I just want to be able to go on leading my old life like every other girl in my class, to go to school and take my Abitur. After that, I’ll go to Germany. But not now, not after everything that has happened….
It’s no use. My passport photos have to be taken. In them I have tears in my eyes. Everything happens so quickly, as in a bad dream from which I just can’t wake up.
When my schoolmates hear of my imminent departure, they organize a farewell party for me. On this occasion they give me a beautiful ring, red gold with a pink tourmaline, so that I should never forget them. They chipped in to be able to buy it for me. I’m touched and have to cry once again.
I remember an afternoon walking through the streets of Miraflores with my father. He’s trying to explain something to me, talking about the philosophy to which he and my mother adhered, the ancient Egyptians’ belief in the significance of the sun as a life-giving power. I notice that he’s searching for words. He makes a strange movement with his hand, as if he had to wave something away, but there’s nothing there.
“What are you doing?” I ask with alarm. “What’s that about?”
“Oh, nothing,” he says, and stops walking.
“Juliane,” he then says in a completely different tone, “your mother and I, we had a few rules we always adhered to. One of them is never to say good-bye to each other in a fight or even to go to sleep at night without making up first.”
I look at him and wait for him to go on. He runs his hand over his face.
“That’s important,” he says.
Nothing more. I look into his face, observing his deep wrinkles, the hint of despair around his mouth, his alert, almost burning eyes, which seem to have sunk even farther back into their sockets. And suddenly I realize: My father is completely at the end of his nerves.
Was he trying with those words to make up with me, awkward as he was in emotional matters? At the time I was too young, too distraught and confused to recognize that. To my friends’ grandparents, with whom I was living, I said in farewell: “I’ll be back soon!”
But they only looked at each other and then said: “We don’t really think so, Juliane. It won’t be that soon.”
But I didn’t want to hear that. I replied: “Yes, it will. I’m sure of it.”
There are photos from the airport in Lima. Of course, the Peruvian journalists followed me up to the very last moment, and in Germany their colleagues were already waiting for me. In these photos I’m waving sadly at the camera, while my father keeps an eye on me with a rather pinched face. He looks nervous in these pictures. Perhaps he’s having doubts about his decision? Or he’s afraid I’ll thwart his plans at the last instant, after all? The fact that I was sent to Germany against my will—for many years I successfully suppressed that, at least on the surface, like so many things. For a long time I said: “… and then we decided I’d be better off going to Germany.” But, in actuality, my father decided that, and I was really unhappy about it. Today I have, of course, come to realize that his decision was right in the end.
But at the time there was so much that filled me with anxiety. First and foremost I had to face, alone, my first overseas flight ever.
15 Homecoming to a Foreign Country
My new life in a foreign land, residing at the home of my aunt and my grandmother in Germany, 1974. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)
I had to conquer the stress of sitting in an airplane again, and this time it would not be only fifty minutes, but a whole eighteen hours. Fortunately, I got to spend some of these hours in the cockpit, which made the time pass much more quickly for me and to some extent allayed my fear. I found especially fascinating the evening stopover in New York, which I got to witness from the cockpit. I was immediately seized again by my enthusiasm for all things technical, and the friendly pilots patiently answered my questions.
And yet on this flight over the Atlantic, I was in a sort of psychological no-man’s-land. My previous life had come to an abrupt end. I had not yet begun a new one. And I was gradually grasping that the crash was more than an unpleasant incident to be experienced, worked through and then forgotten. Even though I had miraculously landed relatively softly on the rain forest floor—I still felt as if I had no ground under my feet, no basis, no foundation.
I had lost my mother. My home had just been taken from me. And I had no idea what would await me in my new life. I had set off with the firm conviction that I would return as soon as possible to Panguana. In reality many years would go by before I would see my beloved jungle again.
Perhaps that’s why it is always really special for me to return to this spot in the middle of the Peruvian rain forest. Today it turns once again into a test of patience. No sooner have we left the carretera and turned onto the dirt road toward Yuyapichis than there’s one mud hole after another. After rainfall the red laterite ground causes cars to slide all over the place, and after the past few weeks of heavy showers, it requires a lot of experience to steer the fully laden truck safely through these perils. Several times even I, who have by now already traveled here in the jungle so often and with all sorts of road conditions, think: We’re not going to make it over this obstacle here! Especially when the road heads steeply downward for a few yards as on a slide into a water hole of indeterminable depth, and then, after ten or twenty yards, back up an equally steep slide. But our driver is not so easily impressed, and he unswervingly maneuvers us through this mess. On the way we meet small and larger trucks and pickups, fully laden with goods and people. Like bunch
es of grapes they cling to the load on top and hold on as tight as possible. You can’t be timid when the vehicle really pitches; but for a lift for a few soles, people here in these remote areas will put up with a lot.
“Once we’ve reached The Door,” says the driver, “things won’t be so bad.”
And he’s right. We only have to change a tire once, and the two drivers take care of that as routinely as if they did it every day. And that’s actually the case. “A tire?” laughs the second driver, who is clearly happy to have something to do instead of just being tossed about on the truck bed. “That’s nothing!” The “new” tire has almost no tread left at all, but that doesn’t bother anyone.
And then the journey continues.
At The Door we make only a brief stop today. The señora is not at home, and I give her daughter a few photos I took of her mother on the last trip through. We have a beer and move on. It’s not long before we cross the Río Shebonya. Here I have the truck stop briefly, for this river remains special to me. I walk to the bridge, cross it halfway and look between the iron trusses into the water. How often have I asked myself whether I passed by here too, swimming or drifting in the water, wading along the riverbank, always on the alert for stingrays? Everyone I asked about where the plane wreckage was from here gave me a different answer. It’s back in the clutches of the jungle, disturbed only once by the tenacity of Werner Herzog.
And on we go across the wide, earthy white-water Súngaro River and through the settlement of the same name, continuously heading south. It’s not far, and yet the journey drags on. My impatience grows with my anticipation. After crossing the beautiful black-water Yanayacu River, we reach the dead-end road to Yuyapichis. When we finally arrive in the village, it’s still three hours before twilight. I urge Moro to hurry, for now it’s time to arrange boats for us and for our cargo. But things don’t go that quickly here. I should actually know that.
And eventually the hectic pace of the city simply falls away from me. The jungle has its own tempo, and people adapt to it. And so I don’t get worked up when Moro is standing in front of me an hour later, sweating and gasping for breath, with the news that he was able to find a boat for us and our suitcases, but not for our food. So we store it for the time being in Nery’s house and head to the river. Mañana, mañana—tomorrow is another day.
The journey across the river has always been like the crossing of a mysterious border for me. On one side lies real life; on the other is Panguana. Of course, Panguana is just as real as life in Lima or Munich. But it belongs to another world. In the city nature is a tolerated guest: you plant a few trees, put plants in front of the window and keep a pet. Here in Panguana, nature is the host, and we are the visitors. Even if this spot belongs to me on paper, I view it more as borrowed, or better still: entrusted. We biologists come, marvel, learn, describe and try to make our newly attained knowledge accessible to humanity.
“What’s the point of knowing how many beetles, ants, bugs, mites and other creatures are crawling and flying around there?” I’m often asked. “What good does that do us?”
“You can only protect what you’ve first studied and gotten to know,” I usually answer, “and at some point people will realize here, too, that it’s more beneficial and valuable to preserve the forests and their biodiversity in the long run instead of destroying them for a short-term profit.” But as long as we regard the rain forest as nothing but a wilderness, a “green hell,” we’re behaving like children setting fire to a heap of money just because they don’t know what the paper is worth.
I prefer not to talk about my love for this green universe, whose secrets we have still barely penetrated. Many people view feelings as an unsound argument. And there are, of course, really enough good arguments: If the tropical forests are destroyed, then the CO2 previously stored in the biomass will escape into the atmosphere, and that’s several billion tons. And other harmful gases will be released as well. If the forest cover is decimated, it will get increasingly dry, the groundwater level will sink and the temperatures will rise. The consequences are vast, and they have alarming effects on the entire global climate.
When my parents came here over forty years ago, the Amazonian forests were still as good as unexplored. It was their idea to investigate in a particular, well-defined area what cohabits here in a small space. They chose Panguana, in order to direct their focus on this exemplary area, less than a square mile, in the immensity of the rain forest. To begin with, they simply wanted to observe and compile what lives and grows here. The bulk of their work, therefore, consisted in making lists of species. At the same time they wanted to study the ecosystem of the lowland rain forest, in which these many species interact with one another, especially the “ecological niches” of animals and plants, for every species finds itself a niche in which it can exist alongside the others. This is usually a very complex and exciting web of relationships. While my mother as an ornithologist focused mainly on bird life, my father always set his sights on the “big picture,” and he was actually working ecologically from the beginning, even though in his day that wasn’t the term for it.
Originally my parents wanted to stay here for five years and then go back to Lima to analyze their results. At that time they probably couldn’t imagine living longer than five years in this isolation. But soon they realized that the diversity in the lowland rain forest near the Andes is so tremendous that you would need more than a whole lifetime to come even close to completing the lists of species. At that time the lists existed only for the large or common animals and plants. There were some superficial compilations for wider regions or the whole country, which disregarded biological contexts and did not particularly take into account the rain forest. What my parents achieved here by striving for exhaustiveness in a small area and illuminating the depths of this ecosystem was thus truly pioneering work.
The news of the enormous diversity of life-forms in Panguana lured scientists here from all over the world. My parents, especially my mother, had an excellent worldwide network of colleagues—and this at a time when e-mail and the Internet did not yet exist and a letter usually required several months to reach us. In her letters my mother often mentions the difficulties with the mail. Nor did she shy away from tracking down those responsible and asking them why a piece of mail sometimes even took a whole five months to make it from Pucallpa to Panguana.
My mother repeatedly traveled to the United States or Europe to participate in conferences. I remember particularly well one of her longer absences in early 1970, shortly before my return to Lima. At that time we had numerous scientists visiting, and I had to cook daily for everyone, which I found rather grueling.
My parents were the first to investigate how any life-form they found integrates itself here in its environment, how it escapes enemy pressure, what strategies it develops to challenge food competitors, and much more. Since they intended to take everything into account, to exclude nothing and set no priorities, it swiftly became clear to them that this work was as good as endless and would take a very long time, unless they had help. For that reason they were happy to be able to interest many of their colleagues in Panguana as a new field of study. Even today, far from all the life has been catalogued, and yet Panguana is the best-explored jungle station in the Peruvian rain forest, east of the Andes. It is also the oldest, though not the largest, and most of the others are equipped with significantly more resources. When my father left Panguana in 1974 and taught as a professor in Hamburg, he assigned thesis projects and dissertations to his students on ecological problems that were not yet so well investigated in Panguana. In this way a lot of knowledge was gathered in the course of time. But still no one has done more extensive systematic work on Panguana’s fish. Once, my parents spread a gill net in the river and soon found thirty-five different species in it. Here, too, there would still be so much to do.
If my mother could see what has become of Panguana since then, I think, as I climb down the bank to the Río
Pachitea, where the boat is waiting for us, she would definitely be happy. And perhaps she would say with a wink: “What? In all these years you still haven’t managed to complete the species list of fish?”
With two or three steps, I climb spiritedly aboard our boat, Panguana I, a canoa, a traditional dugout canoe, reinforced and enlarged on the sides with boards. It’s best to step exactly in the middle, or else you might fall in the water faster than you can say “oops.” During my two years in Panguana, I even used to be able to pole a simple canoa without side reinforcements by myself. I haven’t tried it in a long time. Nowadays they use the typical seven-horsepower outboard motors, known as “peque-peques” because of their loud chugging noises. They have a long steering rod, with the help of which you can lift the screw out of the water in no time, which is really handy if you inadvertently run into a shoal. And to my ears even the peque-peques sound like home.
In the evening it’s especially beautiful on the rivers of Amazonia. The water, usually the brown color of coffee with milk, receives a golden shimmer, the sky takes on an unreal tinge, and the background noise of the riverbank birds, frogs and insects changes its pitch. No one speaks. The river is like a magical ribbon on which we’re gliding along, downstream and across the stately breadth of the Pachitea, past the huts of gold seekers, past houses in front of which children are playing, and above all past the green wall of the forest. I keep an eye out for hoatzins, which once saved my life and which my mother studied so intensively. To do so, she would climb down to the river on countless evenings and observe with her unique saintly patience the behavior of these strange birds. But today the hoatzins don’t show up anywhere.
We reach the mouth of the Yuyapichis River. Our boatman changes his course and heads for a sandy pier. On top of the hill I spot the old Módena farm, which Moro’s grandparents once cultivated.
When I Fell From the Sky Page 17
