Life or Death

by Larry Verstraete

  As a safeguard, Sayed waited one more day. When he heard that US troops had pulled down a statue of Saddam in Baghdad, he felt it was finally safe. Almost twenty-two years after going into hiding, and now forty-six years old, Sayed emerged.

  His neighbours were shocked. The man they had thought was dead or missing was alive, but barely recognizable. After being in his cramped, dark quarters for so long, Sayed’s back was stooped, his legs were wobbly and his eyes were no longer used to bright sunlight. He had difficulty walking and had to wear sunglasses. Due to a lack of calcium in his diet, many of his teeth had fallen out, too.

  Adjustment to life above ground was not easy for Sayed. Sometimes when he needed comfort afterwards, he would return to his familiar tomb to curl up on the dirt floor that had been his mattress for so long. “It is my second home,” Sayed explained. “Maybe it is my first. I will leave it like it is.”

  SURVIVING THE IMPOSSIBLE

  January 12, 2010 / Port au Prince, Haiti

  When Hotel Montana collapsed during an earthquake that devastated much of Haiti, American journalist Dan Woolley lay trapped in a hollow pocket under six storeys of fallen concrete. The back of his head throbbed, a sign of a possible concussion, and when Woolley reached to check it, he got a handful of blood. Searing pain shot up his leg, too, indicating a possible fracture. Weak from his injuries, Woolley worried that at any moment aftershocks might pancake the building, completely burying him under rubble before help arrived.

  Woolley tried to find a safer spot, but in the dark he couldn’t see anything. Then he felt a bump against his chest from something dangling around his neck. It was the digital camera that he had forgotten he was carrying. Woolley aimed the camera into the dark, pressed the shutter and took multiple shots around him. He viewed the results on the screen. Each shot told him something about his position, the obstacles around him, the routes leading away.

  One picture showed an elevator shaft with a small elevator car wedged inside, its door frozen open. Surrounded by thick walls, the elevator car offered protection and safety in case of further collapse. Woolley dragged himself to it, carefully steering around rubble and electrical cables. He crammed his tall frame into the tight space.

  Using the flash on the camera, Woolley examined his injuries. His leg was worse than he imagined. A ragged gash ran from his knee to his ankle. Blood trickled from the wound. Given the rate of blood loss and the possibility of infection, he worried he’d never make it until rescuers arrived.

  Huddled in the dark, Woolley waited and prayed. He thought about his family, his wife and young children. Then he remembered his cell phone.

  Digging it out of his pocket, Woolley switched it on. Although he wasn’t able to secure a connection, he located a first-aid app he had downloaded earlier. By following directions on the app, he treated his wounds using materials around him — peeling off his sock to make a compress for the back of his head, tearing off his shirt to fashion a bandage for his leg. To tie the shirt, he found a wire in the elevator and ripped it from the wall.

  The app warned about the dangers of shock, a life-threatening condition that often accompanies severe injury. Stay awake, the app suggested. If you feel yourself slipping into shock, do not succumb to sleep. As a safeguard, Woolley set the cell phone’s alarm clock to rouse him every twenty minutes.

  “It really was an incredible tool in my pocket,” he said of the cell phone, “and I was really glad to have it.”

  After sixty-five hours, rescuers found Dan Woolley and pulled him from the wreckage, dehydrated and badly injured, but grateful for the technology that had given him a second chance at life.

  3.

  COMPLETELY ALONE

  Hurled from the plane, Juliane Koepcke saw the jungle whirling toward her.

  To this day, Juliane Koepcke remembers the exact moment the plane exploded. It was around 1:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1971. She was seventeen years old, one of 92 passengers aboard a turboprop L-188 Electra. Juliane was sitting beside her mother in a row of three seats near the back. They were flying to Pucallpa, Peru, to join her father, who ran a wildlife research station there.

  Thirty minutes into the one-hour flight, the plane entered a pitch-black cloud. Lightning flashed. The plane shook. Luggage fell out of overhead compartments. For ten terrifying minutes, the plane bucked the storm. And then Juliane saw a blinding white light along the right wing … heard her mother saying, “Now it’s all over” … people screaming … engines roaring … Seconds later she heard nothing but the sound of wind whistling in her ears.

  Suddenly Juliane was outside the plane, still strapped to her seat, flying upside down in a free fall. She wasn’t scared, just numb. She felt the seat belt pressing into her stomach. She saw the Amazon jungle — like “green cauliflower” — rushing toward her. Then she blacked out.

  When Juliane woke up, it was morning. She was lying under her seat in the jungle. She wasn’t strapped in any longer, and it was raining. She had no memory of the impact or what followed — just hazy recollections of the whirling plunge. Somehow she must have woken up earlier though, she realized, and released her seat belt to crawl under the seat, probably to get out of the rain.

  Gone was her mother who had been sitting beside her. Gone, too, was the heavy-set man who had occupied the third seat near the aisle. There was no sign of anyone else. No bodies, no wreckage from the plane, just dense foliage all around.

  Juliane’s head ached. So did her shoulder. Her right eye was swollen and gashes ran along her arms and legs. Later Juliane would find out that she had broken her collarbone and suffered a concussion, but in the jungle that day she felt little pain, just confusion. As her thoughts cleared, truth hit home. Through some miracle, she had survived a 3000-metre free fall. Now she was alone.

  Juliane tried to walk but, overcome by dizziness, she blacked out. For much of that day and night she drifted in and out of consciousness. Finally she felt strong enough to crawl.

  She had no idea where she was. Other than a small bag of candy found among bits of debris on the ground, she had no food or supplies. She had lost her glasses and one of her sandals, and she was wearing only a short, sleeveless mini-dress. In a daze, she searched for wreckage, for some sign of life. “Hello. Is anyone there?” she called over and over.

  The dense canopy of the Amazon rainforest was going to make searching for survivors nearly impossible.

  On the afternoon of the second day, Juliane heard a promising sound — water bubbling somewhere. She followed the sound to a small stream. Immediately she recognized its potential. Both of her parents were zoologists. Having lived with them at research stations, Juliane had learned a few survival skills. Water, her father had taught her, always flowed downhill toward larger bodies of water. Follow the flow of a stream and it will eventually join a river. Somewhere along the river you will find a village, a town or some other human settlement.

  Juliane heeded her father’s words. She had a destination now, and there was no point in staying where she was, alone and surrounded by jungle. She followed the stream, picking her way through thick stands of trees, heading on a course she hoped would take her to the research station.

  Several times a day it rained. When the sun finally broke through the canopy, the jungle turned into a steamy cauldron. Heat and humidity sapped Juliane’s strength. At night she rested on the bank. When temperatures dropped, she shivered in her thin dress and curled up to conserve warmth. Drawn to the scent of her perspiration and blood, squadrons of mosquitoes attacked. Gnats crawled into her ears. Her sleep was broken by nightmares.

  On the fourth day Juliane heard the distinctive splash of a king vulture landing on the water. She knew that vultures fed off corpses. The sound filled her with dread. There were bodies from the plane crash nearby. She was sure of it. Would one of them be her mother?

  As she rounded a bend in the stream, Juliane spotted a row of airplane seats jammed upside down in the mud. Three bodies were strapped in the seat
s. The impact had buried the upper parts a half-metre into the ground, exposing only the legs and feet. One of the bodies looked like a woman’s.

  Juliane had never seen a dead body before. Paralyzed by fear, but driven by a need to know, she pried off one of the shoes with a stick. The toenails were painted with nail polish, something her mother never did. Juliane felt relief and then a moment later, shame. How could she be so stupid? The body couldn’t possibly be her mother’s. Her mother had been strapped in the seat beside her.

  With every new step, Juliane thought about her parents. Was her mother injured, lying in pain somewhere and needing help? And her father? He must have heard the news. How was he coping, alone now, with both his wife and daughter missing?

  Occasionally Juliane heard the buzz of search planes. She yelled and waved, trying to get their attention, but the thick canopy obscured the view. Unable to see her, the planes drifted farther away. In time, the buzzing stopped completely. More than ever she felt alone. They’ve given up on me! she thought.

  Juliane slogged on, fighting exhaustion and despair. Her clothes were caked in mud; her skin was burnt from the sun; the bag of candy was long gone. She didn’t have a knife or cooking equipment, and she knew that much of what grew in the jungle was poisonous. She didn’t dare eat.

  One day she heard an encouraging sound — the call of a hoatzin, a native bird. She knew from her experience at the research station that hoatzins lived only near large, open rivers. Juliane followed the bird call, winding through thickets until she came to a wide river. Driven by the promise of a settlement downstream, she followed it.

  Juliane knew not to walk along the banks, places where deadly snakes crawled and poisonous spiders hid. Instead she waded in the middle of the river, away from the shallows that piranhas preferred. Now and then she saw wildlife along the banks — howler monkeys, martens, brocket deer. The animals displayed no fear, none of the usual caution that animals familiar with people show. Perhaps there was no settlement nearby after all.

  Juliane pushed doubt aside. “I wasn’t in pain or panic, but I knew that I had to rely on my own strength to get out of there.”

  A new problem arose. She had a small open sore on her upper right arm. Flies had laid eggs inside. The eggs had hatched, and now tiny white maggots squirmed underneath her skin, feeding off her flesh and carving a tunnel for themselves. Juliane squeezed her skin to push out the maggots, but the hole was too deep. She bent her ring into a hook and tried fishing them out. That didn’t work either. Neither did flicking them out with a stick.

  By the afternoon of the tenth day, Juliane was too weak to continue. Wrapped in loneliness and misery, she rested on the riverbank. She slept in the sun, her back against a tree for protection in case a creature approached from behind. Her mind reeled with dreams of rescue.

  When Juliane woke up, she spotted something she hadn’t noticed earlier — a wooden boat. She inched over and touched it to prove to herself that it was real. Near the boat, Juliane found a little path that led up a hill into the jungle. It was hard to crawl up the hill — it seemed to take ages — but at the top, Juliane discovered a small hut. It had no walls, just poles that supported a palm-leaf roof.

  “I had to rely on my own strength to get out of there.”

  In the hut, Juliane found a boat motor and a barrel of diesel fuel covered with a plastic tarp. Her open wound was worse than before. The maggots wriggled, digging deeper, and Juliane worried that her arm might have to be amputated. She remembered that her family once had a dog with a similar problem. Her father had doused the dog’s wound with kerosene to flush out the maggots. Would it work for her?

  She found a plastic tube in the hut. She sucked up diesel fuel from the barrel, sprinkled some on the open sore and rode through the pain. The maggots squirmed, trying to escape. Quickly Juliane plucked about thirty maggots from the wound before the rest tunnelled deeper and disappeared.

  That night and the next morning, Juliane slept in the hut. She huddled beneath the tarp, listening to the patter of rain, too weak and discouraged to care if she lived or died. When the rain stopped in the afternoon, her dark mood lifted. There had to be people nearby, she realized. The hut and boat were proof of that. Hope renewed, she decided to spend another night in the hut and make a fresh start in the morning.

  At the same moment she made her decision, Juliane heard voices — men talking in Spanish. “It was like hearing the sound of angels,” she said.

  Three men emerged from the jungle. They stared in disbelief at her, unsure if she was real or some forest phantom. Juliane told her story. There was a plane crash … somehow she survived … she was trying to find her father …

  The men treated her wounds and gave her food. The next morning they took her by boat to a town along the river. Medics at the local hospital treated her injuries and pulled more than 50 maggots from the small hole in her arm. After a brief stay, she was reunited with her father. It was a joyous moment, but one tinged with sadness. Juliane was alive, but her mother? Despite the odds, her father held out hope that perhaps his wife, too, had survived.

  With directions provided by Juliane, a search party zeroed in on the crash area. They found the plane, the mangled parts and scattered luggage and the bodies spread over a wide area. On January 12 they identified Juliane’s mother — dead like all the others.

  “Then it was real,” Juliane said.

  Survivor Juliane Koepcke, right, writes a note to friends after recovering from injuries received in a Christmas Eve plane crash.

  News of Juliane’s miraculous survival spread around the globe. She was hounded for interviews and received letters from complete strangers. Suddenly famous, she craved a normal life. For almost three decades she declined interviews and kept her memories suppressed. Then in 1999 at the request of filmmaker Werner Herzog, who wanted to make a documentary about her, Juliane returned to the crash site. It was time, she decided.

  Although the jungle had grown thicker, little else had changed. The plane wreck was still there, hidden in the tangled undergrowth. Prodded by Herzog’s questions, Juliane relived the past. It was a healing experience. Dealing with haunting memories and long-buried emotions was, in her words, “the best therapy.”

  FACING THE IMPOSSIBLE

  January 17, 2011 / Rakkestad, Norway

  Thirteen-year-old Walter Eikrem was walking home from the bus stop like every other day when he spotted something grey on the snowy hillside. “At first, I thought it might have been the neighbour’s dogs,” he said.

  The grey shapes turned out to be four wolves. Not uncommon in the area of Norway where Walter lived, wolves had been spotted just the day before. Walter recalled his mother’s advice: Don’t run away. That just invites the wolves to hunt you down.

  “But I was so afraid that I couldn’t even run away if I wanted to,” Walter said.

  Fearing that the wolves might attack, he stood his ground. Calmly he pulled out the earbuds he was wearing, unhooked them from his cell phone and cranked up the volume. Aiming the phone at the wolves, he waved his arms, screamed at the top of his lungs and blasted a hard-rock song at them.

  “They didn’t really get scared,” Walter said. “They just turned around and simply walked away.”

  CONFRONTING THE IMPOSSIBLE

  September 8, 2013 / Churchill, Manitoba

  Late at night, as Garett Kolsun walked along a deserted street of this northern Canadian town, he spotted a polar bear approaching from behind. “It was running full tilt towards me,” he said.

  Alone and with no place to hide, Kolsun screamed for help. He ran in circles, dodging blows and bites, all the while yelling frantically. To defend himself, he flailed his arms and shoved back. Finally he fled to a bakery and tried kicking down the door.

  “At that point, the bear was basically on top of me,” he said.

  Kolsun pulled his cell phone out and thrust the lighted screen into the bear’s face. Startled, the bear stepped back, knocked over a plan
ter, swung its head to look behind and gave Kolsun the break he badly needed. He ran to a house and took refuge inside. Apart from a few scratches to his chest and two puncture wounds on his hip, Kolsun was safe and unharmed.

  4.

  A RIBBON OF GREY

  With 155 people aboard his disabled plane, the pilot needed a place to land.

  One minute after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport on January 15, 2009, co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles spotted a flock of geese. A moment later so did the pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, a veteran with forty years of flying experience. The birds were dead ahead, dark dots against the blue sky, and about the length of a football field away.

  The twin-engine US Airways Airbus A320 was steadily climbing, the streets of Manhattan were fading away and the geese were too close to avoid. The plane ripped through the formation, sucking several birds into both engines. Caught in a giant blender of whirling blades, flesh, bone and feathers mashed into “bird slurry.”

  Several loud bangs sounded. Inside the engines, impellers broke. Vanes blew apart, guides fractured and both engines quit. Blood splattered the windshield. The smell of burnt flesh drifted into the cockpit as lights on the console flashed and alarms signalled danger.

  In the cabin behind, 3 flight attendants and 150 passengers felt a jolt. Through the windows they saw flames shooting from the engines. Smoke rolled through the cabin, carrying the stench of jet fuel. Instead of the normal engine drone, there was sudden silence. One flight attendant said it was like being in a library.

  In the cockpit, pilot and co-pilot ran through a carefully practised routine. “My aircraft,” Sullenberger said to Skiles. In those two words, the men established protocols. Each knew what the other would do. Sullenberger would operate the controls. Skiles would run through the emergency checklist and try to restart the engines.