Lost in the Amazon

by Tod Olson

  Juliane had no trail. But she had something almost as good—a childhood spent in the rainforest.

  When she had been living at Panguana, a young student had stumbled into the research station, weak, exhausted, and hungry. He had left weeks earlier for the nearby Sira Mountains with a group of scientists from California. When one of the men accidentally shot himself, the student set out to get help. He lost the trail and wandered helplessly in the forest—until he found water and followed it downstream. A stream led him to a river, which eventually led him to Panguana.

  It was advice she had heard again and again from her father. When she set out on her own for walks around Panguana, he had told her in his gruff, protective way that if she got lost she had to follow the water. Even the smallest of creeks would lead eventually to a river. And all rivers led eventually to people.

  As Juliane made her way around the row of seats, still dazed, the planes above her moved on, leaving only the sounds of the forest behind. Under the rustling and the chirping and the buzzing, another sound emerged—a quiet trickling that must have been there all along. Now she recognized it as her lifeline: moving water.

  At 1 p.m. on Christmas Eve day, around the time Juliane Koepcke plunged from the sky, Floyd Lyon watched a roiling mass of cumulus clouds close in from the south. He sat at the flight coordinator’s office of the Summer Institute for Linguistics in Yarinacocha, a missionary community just outside of Pucallpa. The “linguistics,” as people called them, translated the Christian Bible into indigenous languages. They also offered education, medical care, and other services to indigenous villages in the area.

  Lyon and his fellow missionary pilots often flew small double-engine planes into the rainforest to deliver supplies or hold classes. He knew it wasn’t a good idea to be aloft in a storm like the one he saw approaching. And that’s exactly where his son Nathan was—the same Nathan Lyon who had shared a joke with Juliane just a couple of hours before at the Lima airport.

  By 1:15, the storm hit Yarinacocha with startling fury. Flight 508 had missed its landing time by a half hour, and Lyon was on the two-way radio listening to the air traffic controllers. He had heard the plane call in over Oyon, in the mountains. After that, he heard other ground stations trying to reach the pilot on the radio. “No contact,” they reported, again and again.

  At 1:45, Lyon called the institute’s main office. Besides Nathan and his friend David Ericson, the plane had been carrying three other members of the community. Their friends and relatives on the ground were getting anxious. Over the roar of thunder, Lyon told them the plane appeared to be lost. “It doesn’t look good,” he said.

  The next morning, the news hadn’t improved. All the newspapers in Peru announced the plane’s disappearance. LANSA PLANE LOST; 92 ABOARD: TRAGEDY ON CHRISTMAS EVE? read the headline in La Nueva Crónica.

  By 6 a.m., search parties were headed into the jungle with medical supplies and food. Six planes had taken off to comb the area between Huanuco and Pucallpa. Three of those planes belonged to the linguistics. Floyd Lyon stayed at the base, monitoring the radio and hoping for news of his son.

  That morning, an air force colonel arrived in Pucallpa to direct what would soon become the largest search and rescue operation in Peruvian history. He found the city nearly empty and the airport packed with people. Fifty-five of the plane’s passengers had been bound for Pucallpa. Their family members and friends now crowded the LANSA counter at the tiny airport, demanding to know what had happened.

  Rumors had already started to fly: The Electra had landed in Iquitos, in Huanuco; a villager had seen it crash into a hillside 20 miles south of Pucallpa; a radio station reported that the plane had been found in the jungle.

  A spokesman from the Ministry of Aviation showed up long enough to declare, “any rumor that has circulated is false.”

  Tempers rose when the airline couldn’t offer anything more satisfying than that. A reporter overheard one of the family members yelling at a LANSA spokesman: “You can’t even carry a brick, and yet you dare to transport people!”

  By 6 p.m., darkness was beginning to fall, and the search planes were called in. None of the pilots had seen a thing. The crowd at the airport thinned. Some people settled in for an overnight vigil. Others went home to their Christmas decorations. Still others answered a call to go to the hospital and donate blood, hoping it would soon be needed.

  For hours in the afternoon, the hum of the planes taunted Juliane. They came and went overhead, invisible and ineffective. If she could not see them, they certainly couldn’t see her. She still had trouble thinking clearly, but one thought was sharp enough to pierce the fog: She had to find a clearing. The trees had always been a haven to her. Now, if she didn’t move, they would become her coffin.

  It hadn’t taken her long to find the source of the trickling sound. A spring burbled from the ground not far from the airplane seats. From it a small rivulet of water ran away downhill. The flow wasn’t big enough to call a stream, and yet the sight filled her with hope.

  Juliane knelt and drank her fill. She cupped her hands, filled them with spring water, and washed away as much of the dirt as she could. Then she set off to follow the water, with only the bag of hard candies for supplies.

  In all her years in the rainforest, Juliane had never been more ill equipped. She had one sandal between her and the forest floor. Only a thin minidress with a broken zipper in the back protected her from the swarms of mosquitoes and black flies. Without her glasses, everything more than a few yards away faded to a blur.

  Following the rivulet was no easy task. She had to climb over dead logs and find her way around knots of tangled underbrush. After a time, the trickle widened into a real streambed, about a foot and a half across. The water rarely filled the bed all the way, but the stream seemed to be getting bigger.

  At around 6 p.m., the half-light on the forest floor faded to true darkness. The hum of the planes had vanished, and Juliane found a place by the side of the streambed to rest for the night. She dug a candy out of the bag and savored the sweet, fruity taste. Then she lay back to sleep.

  If the Amazon makes humans feel like intruders during the day, it can scare them out of their wits at night. When the sun goes down, the rainforest wakes up. Out of the dark comes a bewildering variety of sounds. Over the shrill whistle of the cicadas and the locusts, wood rails cackle and toucans screech. Mosquitoes whine in one ear, then the other. Frogs make noises that no outsider would ever attribute to a small, slimy amphibian. “A distant railway-train approaching, and a black-smith hammering on his anvil, are what they exactly resemble,” said Alfred Russell Wallace. In the middle of it all comes the deep roar of the howler monkey, which sounds like a prehistoric, man-eating dinosaur hidden in the trees.

  A twenty-two-year-old Israeli backpacker named Yossi Ghinsberg spent three weeks lost in the rainforest in 1981, and he barely survived the nights. He and two others followed a guide deep into the forest in Bolivia to pan for gold. Low on food and hopelessly lost, the expedition split up. Ghinsberg and a friend climbed aboard a makeshift raft and tried to ride a dangerous river back to civilization. When the friend went overboard and the raft shattered in churning rapids, Ghinsberg was left alone in the jungle.

  As he wandered by himself, searching for his friend, he dreaded the end of the day. In the dark, the noises drove him wild with panic. Every screech made him imagine a jaguar ripping a monkey limb from limb. He slept with a lighter and an aerosol can of bug spray next to him, ready to torch a salivating predator. “I had never been so terrified,” he wrote. “I kept hearing sounds all around me, and my heart was pounding frantically. God, just don’t let a wild animal devour me.”

  Four hundred miles west of Yossi Ghinsberg’s “green hell,” Juliane slept like a baby. Her concussion was partly responsible, but she also knew where the real dangers of the rainforest lay. For two years she had gone to sleep at Panguana with the sounds of the jungle in her ears. The frogs sounded like frogs to h
er, the birds like birds, the howler monkeys like howler monkeys. She knew that jaguars did not generally hunt people. If death came in the forest, it would probably not be at the jaws of a hungry predator.

  Juliane woke the day after Christmas, her sleep undisturbed by beasts. Somewhere overhead, the sun had risen, but she couldn’t see it. Like yesterday, the treetops hid the sky. And once again, they would hide her from the pilots combing the forest for signs of the plane. She still felt lazy and slow from the concussion, but she knew that if she wanted to live she had to move.

  As she worked her way down the streambed, she made painfully slow progress. She shoved aside underbrush and clambered over logs. When she wasn’t sure what lay in front of her—ants or spiders or snakes—she led with her sandaled foot.

  She hadn’t gone far when she came eye to eye with the kind of creature that had given the rainforest its reputation as a place of unspeakable horrors. Perched on a branch just across the stream was a spider the size of her hand. She knew it immediately as a Goliath birdeater, a species of tarantula that can weigh more than a small parrot.

  Like many rainforest creatures, the Goliath doesn’t quite live up to its fearsome reputation: It rarely attacks birds. But with fangs that can grow up to an inch and a half long, it’s been known to devour toads, frogs, small rodents, and snakes. The Goliath doesn’t pack enough venom to be deadly to humans, but it can cause tremendous pain.

  The spider eyed Juliane for a few seconds, and she stared back at it. Then they both moved on, the Goliath making audible, clicking footsteps as it scuttled away.

  As the hours wore on, Juliane clung to the stream, step after step. Her father’s words rang in her ear: Follow the water. Aside from that, the concussion clouded her thoughts. Only a vague set of assumptions kept her moving. She assumed that if she had survived, there must be others alive too. She assumed she would make it back to safety somehow. The waterway kept getting wider; it had to lead to a river, to a clearing, maybe to a village or a logging outpost. She heard the planes from time to time and yelled into the treetops.

  Another night passed, and the third day began like the day before—the dim light of daytime in the forest, the obstacle course by the side of the stream. In the morning, mosquitoes and black flies descended on her. They attacked every inch of exposed skin, hungry for blood. The swarms were so thick it did no good to fight them off.

  Then again, swarming insects had been constant companions during the long hours she had spent doing research with her mother. To Maria, endurance in the forest had been a point of pride. Once, they’d been watching a nest of sun bitterns together. When Juliane started to squirm under an onslaught of mosquitoes, her mother told her not to move. “If you want to be a biologist,” she said, “you must learn to sacrifice.”

  By midday, the temperature had climbed into the 90s, and the heat drove the insects away. As Juliane picked her way carefully through the streambed, a large shape appeared in the distance, blocking her path. Gradually, it came into focus—something foreign to the jungle but familiar to her.

  It was a bullet-shaped hunk of metal with a propeller attached, maybe 20 feet long and at least as tall as a person. When she’d last seen it, she had been staring out the window of the LANSA plane into the storm. One side of the engine had been blackened by fire. The rest of the wing was nowhere to be seen.

  Three days ago, the engine had helped lift 92 people into the sky. Now it lay earthbound, covered in mud in a remote rainforest stream. Juliane stared at the dead hunk of metal for a while. The charring must have come from the lightning strike she had seen outside her window in the heart of the storm.

  She regarded the engine with a vague amazement, feeling strangely removed from what it meant. The sight did not bring back her mother’s voice, declaring that the end had come. It did not make her visualize an entire airplane breaking into pieces in midair. She made her way around the engine as though it were another fallen tree and followed the stream.

  The next day, December 28, Juliane’s watch stopped. She had been walking for three days, and the engine was still the only sign she’d seen that the plane or its passengers had ever existed. Now, as she pushed her way through vines and clambered over logs, she heard a noise that sent a chill through her veins. It was the sound of wings beating the air—not the flutter of small parakeets or hummingbirds, but the distinct whomping of very large wings.

  She knew what kind of bird it was before she saw it: the cóndor de la selva, or king vulture. She also knew that the king vulture, with its 6-foot wingspan, rarely bothers with dead tree squirrels or small snakes. It only comes out to feast when large amounts of food are available.

  Juliane pressed ahead through a gathering cloud of dread. Around the next bend in the stream, several vultures sat high in the trees, waiting. Below them lay a row of airplane seats, just like the one that carried Juliane from the plane to the forest floor—only this row of seats had landed upside down with the seatbacks buried three feet deep in mud. Sticking up from the seats were three sets of human legs.

  Juliane stared in terror at the three corpses, strapped to their seats and half buried in the mud. Only once before had she seen a dead body, at an open-casket reception for a child who had died. She was six at the time, and she had been fascinated.

  Now, 11 years later, the sight left her horrified. Ever since she’d woken up under the airplane seats, she had been wandering in a daze. The full impact of the disaster hadn’t reached her. Maybe it was the concussion. Maybe it was simply the brain’s way of protecting her from trauma while she battled for her life. But here was evidence she could not ignore: Three people who could have been sitting just in front of her or across the aisle on the plane now lay dead on the forest floor.

  Then another thought filled her with terror: What if one of the bodies belonged to her mother?

  She made herself step toward the seats. Thankfully, the king vultures hadn’t started their work yet, but the sharp buzzing of flies filled the air. The voracious little creatures wasted no time laying their eggs in body cavities and open wounds. In the rainforest, the dead are recycled instantly into nutrients by insects, birds, and bacteria. Animal corpses are usually reduced to bones in a matter of days.

  Juliane crept closer, revolted by the sight of the legs, still belted to the seats. Judging from the pants and the shoes, two of the bodies had been men. She poked tentatively at the feet of the third body with a stick and revealed a set of painted toenails. Her mother, she thought with relief, never painted her nails.

  Then she realized that her mother had been belted into the seat right next to her. How could she have been so dense? Painted toenails or no, this woman could not have been her mother from the start.

  By Monday, the day before Juliane found the bodies, the air search had expanded to a dozen planes. Pucallpa was a hive of activity. Planes landed, refueled, and took off again. Vans carried search patrols out of the city southward toward the town of Puerto Inca. Local telephone lines were clogged with calls from Iquitos and Lima. People camped out at the airport, pressing anyone who looked official for news.

  Bob Weninger, a missionary pilot from Wisconsin who had been flying in South America for five years, landed in Pucallpa on Monday to join the search. He had to fight off parents, sisters, and uncles of lost passengers who were desperate to fly with him. Everyone, it seemed, was certain that if they could just get close to the crash site they would discover their loved ones miraculously alive and well.

  Weninger wasn’t ready to call it false hope. In 1967, he remembered, a Brazilian military plane had run out of fuel over the rainforest and ditched in a swamp. Ten days went by before a search plane spotted vultures circling above the trees. Rescuers found 5 of the plane’s 25 passengers injured and unable to walk but still alive.

  That morning, a picture of two adorable kids appeared in La Nueva Crónica—a girl of about five or six with her arm around her little brother’s shoulders. Their father was identified as José Guer
erro Rovalino, the accountant who had been to Lima on business and told his mother that he didn’t want to fly LANSA home. The caption below the kids read, Will they be orphans now?

  After four days of dry weather, the rain returned on Wednesday, the day after Juliane found the bodies. By midday it was pouring in the forest. The hum of the search plane engines had been a near constant presence during the daylight hours. Now the sound faded and disappeared altogether.

  For Juliane, the effects of the concussion were fading, and she could think more clearly. But aside from a few handfuls of hard candy, she hadn’t eaten since breakfast on the plane Friday morning. She didn’t feel hungry exactly, but she knew she was getting weaker.

  She trudged on, leading with her sandaled foot to put something between her skin and the forest floor. When the jungle closed off her path on the stream bank, she waded in the middle of the water. In places, the underbrush grew so thick she had to wander off track to find her way around and back to the stream. She had nothing but her hands to fight off a tangle of growth so dense that it has defeated even the most experienced explorers.

  The Scottish scientist James Murray had been almost to the South Pole and back before he ventured into the Amazon in 1911. He fell behind the rest of his expedition, and by the end of the trip, his feet were swollen and raw. Open sores ravaged his body, leaking pus and infested with maggots. He insisted he was only alive because he’d been able to hack his way through the runaway growth that threatened to swallow him at every turn. “Without a machete,” he said, “it means death to be lost in such forest.”

  Juliane had no machete, no sleeping bag, no tent, and nothing but a dwindling supply of hard candies for food. Most of all, she was beginning to feel as though she had no time. At some point, the authorities in Lima or Pucallpa would decide that no one had survived the crash. They would call off the search or scale it way back. If she didn’t find a clearing quickly, there would be no planes to spot her. She had no idea how much ground she was covering, but she couldn’t have been moving fast.