Lost in the Amazon

by Tod Olson

  Every traveler who sets foot in the rainforest complains bitterly about insects. And they don’t mean an occasional whining mosquito or tickling ant, but hordes of bugs so dense they make a solid curtain of insect life. Black flies collect in swarms that look like clouds of smoke. “The torments I suffered when skinning a bird or drawing a fish can scarcely be imagined,” reported the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace. “My feet were so thickly covered with the little blood-spots produced by their bites, as to be of a dark purplish-red color and much swelled and inflamed.”

  Mosquitoes came in numbers so great that early Spanish explorers sometimes labored in pairs, one person swatting bugs so the other could work. Humboldt, the German naturalist, was tormented by the swarming beasts. “[They] cover the face and hands,” he reported, “pierce the clothes with their long sucker … and, getting into the mouth and nostrils, set you coughing and sneezing whenever you attempt to speak in the open air.”

  They could also cause a lot more than discomfort. Mosquitoes transmit malaria, a disease that causes intense pain and crippling fevers. Wallace contracted it while he was traveling the Rio Negro in northern Brazil. “During two days and nights I hardly cared if we sank or swam,” he recalled later. “I could not speak intelligibly, and had not the strength to write, or even turn over in my hammock.”

  And then there were the ants, which build their nests everywhere—in the ground, in the bushes, in the trees. When army ants hunt for termites, cockroaches, and other prey, they march from their nest in a column that can fan out 100 feet wide. In some parts of the rainforest, ants outweigh all the vertebrate species combined. And they defend their territory with a vengeance. The naturalist Richard Spruce once wandered into a nest of tocandira ants. The tiny creatures swarmed his legs and arms, stinging with abandon. After the attack, Spruce spent hours sick to his stomach, sweating and trembling. “My sufferings,” he said, “were indescribable.”

  Juliane had avoided vast armies of ants so far, but when she wasn’t submerged in the water, flying insects tormented her. Mostly, she gave in to the assaults. Swatting at mosquitoes and fanning at black fly swarms served no purpose. Kill one attacker and another replaced it. The insect hordes had an inexhaustible supply of reinforcements, and they left Juliane covered in tiny red welts.

  The assorted stings and bites didn’t worry her. But when she sat down on the riverbank to inspect her wounds, she discovered something else that made her recoil in horror. The cut on her calf had swelled and turned a sickening whitish color. But the truly shocking sight came when she turned her head to examine the cut on the back of her right arm. She had to contort herself to see the wound, and what she saw made her stomach churn: The exposed flesh crawled with tiny white heads.

  Flies had been laying their eggs in her wound, just as they had done with the corpses buried in the airplane seats. The brood had hatched, and her body now hosted dozens of hungry maggots, feeding on her flesh.

  It was all part of nature’s cycle. Flies lay their eggs in places where their larvae can find food. The maggots eat their fill and find a place to pupate. They curl into a hard, protective shell and several days later emerge as a fly.

  A natural cycle of life and death, yes—but Juliane did not want to be a part of it. Like most parasites, maggots don’t generally kill their host. Still, she had seen what they could do. Her German shepherd, Lobo, once got infested from a tiny cut. The maggots tunneled through his leg until it swelled and began to smell terribly. It was so painful the poor dog wouldn’t let anyone near him. Finally, Juliane and her parents coaxed the maggots out by pouring kerosene on the wound.

  Juliane had no choice but to try to pick them out, one by one. She used the only tools she could find—the buckle on her watchband and a spiral ring that she unwound into a sharp prod. Neither weapon worked. When she dug in the wound, trying to spear the vile creatures, they wriggled deeper into her flesh and out of reach. She gave up, and a new fear took root: Even if she was saved, would they have to amputate her arm?

  Each afternoon as the light grew dim, Juliane found a place along the river where she could lean against a sandy bank or a tree trunk. If something truly wanted to attack, a hill or a tree would provide no protection at all. But somehow it felt comforting to have a barrier at her back.

  She needed every bit of comfort she could find, because the nights had turned into a 12-hour torment. As she lay down to rest, the jungle came alive around her. Invisible creatures filled the air with rustling and screeching and hammering. Occasionally, something crawled across an ankle or a calf. A tarantula? A snake? The spearhead of an ant attack?

  The heat of the day brought some relief from the bugs. But when the sun went down, they came out in force, feasting on every inch of exposed skin. They crawled into her ears and nose and surrounded her head with a constant whining hum.

  The only relief from the onslaught came when the skies opened and the rain fell in buckets. The water drove the insects away, but it soaked Juliane to the bone. She collected giant palm leaves and pulled them over her. She tucked herself under bushes or into the crevices of massive tree trunks. But nothing kept her from shivering in the mud, alone and helplessly exposed.

  Rainy season in the Peruvian rainforest lasts from December through April. It’s not unusual for it to rain, and rain hard, every day. The downpours feed one of the miraculous cycles that create life in the rainforest. A quarter of the water runs off into rivers and streams. The rest soaks into the ground, where trillions of roots drink it in and deliver it up trunks and stems to feed 400 billion trees. The trees consume another quarter of the water and use it for growth. The rest evaporates from the leaves into the sky, where it fills the clouds until they release it once again in buckets to the earth, and the water cycle begins anew.

  It’s a process that sustains one of the most beautiful, rich, and diverse ecosystems on Earth. But it leaves a path of destruction in its wake. “Cities and towns flood,” says the naturalist and explorer Paul Rosolie, “dirt roads become muddy rivers, and actual rivers can swell more than fifty feet in places, exploding far onto land. Larger tributaries can burst their banks and flood miles of forest, ripping thousands of trees from the earth in the all-encompassing current.”

  Yossi Ghinsberg, the Israeli backpacker who got lost in Bolivia, was caught in a massive flood as he tried to follow a river to safety. One minute he’d been standing on dry land; the next he was wading through chest-deep water. He stumbled from tree to tree to keep the current from sweeping him away.

  The flood followed a vicious storm that had descended on Ghinsberg the night before while he huddled under a shelter of vines and palm fronds. The water turned solid ground into mud in an instant. Giant trees toppled with a deafening roar, taking smaller trees with them as they fell. The jungle seemed like a living being to Ghinsberg, trying to crush him because he had intruded. “It’s the only thing that will pacify this jungle, let it settle peacefully back into its former calm,” he wrote later. “It wants to expel this arrogant interloper, this man who dared to think he could survive here alone.”

  Juliane had not deliberately challenged the jungle. She had not been arrogant—unless it was arrogance to think that humans could fly like birds over the trees. She had been dropped by chance into this waterlogged forest. She had been abandoned by everyone and everything she knew.

  That was the feeling that came over her at night, when the wind shook the trees and the sky opened like a faucet. It was then, cowering on the forest floor through the intolerable nights, that her mind wandered over what had happened. She wondered where her mother was. Had she been rescued by a patrol? Lifted from the forest by a helicopter? Always the image of the three bodies, buried upside down in the mud, hovered at the edge of her mind. And vaguely she held two thoughts together without resolving them. She knew it was nothing short of a miracle she had survived and wondered why she would be the one. At the same time, she assumed that others had made it through and that one of those survi
vors was her mother.

  One day, Juliane swam ashore, found a patch of sun, and lay down to rest. By now, she had lost track of time. Had New Year’s Eve come and gone already? Her mother had wanted so badly to be home in Panguana, celebrating with her father.

  As she dozed on the sandy bank, a familiar squawk woke her with a start. Several baby caimans, less than a foot long, lay on the sand—far too close for comfort. The babies themselves were no danger, but their mother could be vicious if she felt her nest was threatened.

  An instant later, a full-grown female rose on her stubby legs and came straight at Juliane’s resting place. With a burst of adrenaline, Juliane made it to the water and plunged in. The caiman stayed on the riverbank, content to defend her territory. Juliane drifted away, reminded yet again that she was an intruder in a world that was not her own.

  For days now, something about the river had been eating away at her confidence. She had seen more wildlife than she was used to around Panguana. In addition to the caimans, howler monkeys and small brocket deer lingered near the shore. One night a paca—a rodent the size of a small coyote—came nosing around her bed.

  These animals had not yet learned to be afraid of people—and it wasn’t because they were stupid. Most likely they had never seen another human being. If that was true, this river that was her only link to civilization could be uninhabited for miles around. No matter how hard she tried to survive, rescue might be nothing more than a dream.

  There were chickens, she was sure of it—and chickens did not run wild in the rainforest. She heard them clucking and knew she’d been saved. Just through the trees there must be a riverside village where people raised birds for eggs and meat. They would take her in and feed her soup. They would put her in a boat and bring her to a doctor, to her father, maybe even to her mother.

  But when she looked around, she saw nothing but forest.

  Again and again as she made her way down the river she heard the chickens, always just out of sight. Each time, she thought the ordeal had come to an end—the swimming and the walking; the mosquitoes and the black flies; the cold, wet nights; and the deep, unbearable loneliness.

  But each time, when she stopped to look for a person tending a manioc field or bathing in the river, the fantasy vanished. The “chickens” were a wild forest bird, or another animal, or the sound of raindrops landing on the river. They were a creation of her own brain, starving for nourishment and desperate for the sight of another human being.

  By her second week in the forest, Juliane was failing fast. Starvation had drained her strength and made her mind unreliable. She didn’t feel particularly hungry, and that puzzled her. But when the human body is starved for food it protects itself by lowering its need for fuel. Days ago she had burned through the stores of fat in her cells. Now her body harvested protein from its muscles to keep itself alive. Her brain consumed its own neurons.

  When she lay down at night and tried to get comfortable, she dreamed of food—giant, mouthwatering dinners and simple snacks. Each time she rested it took a tremendous effort to stand up again. In the water, she used all her strength to get through the maze of drifting logs without breaking a bone or hitting her head.

  She knew she had to eat in order to keep going. But she had no idea how to get food. On first glance, the rainforest looks like the most fertile place on Earth. Surely an environment that produces towering trees and lush vegetation should offer up nuts and fruits and edible plants around every river bend. But in fact, the giant trees soak up most of the nutrients in the soil. Plants that grow below the canopy have to compete bitterly with one another to survive. The species that make it are the ones that defend themselves with thorns and spines or poisonous chemicals. Few of them produce anything to eat.

  The real bounty of the forest lay in the canopy, 100 feet above Juliane’s head. Aguaje fruit, brazil nuts, acai berries, and figs flourish in the treetops. But they might as well have been dangling from the search planes that taunted Juliane from the sky. When Yossi Ghinsberg began to starve in the Bolivian Amazon, he spent hours throwing rocks at fruit that mocked him from the tops of the trees. “I couldn’t bear the thought that I might die of hunger while mountains of fruit hung over my head, out of my reach,” he wrote. “It wasn’t fair. Who was all the fruit for?”

  Stuck on the forest floor, Juliane had few options. With a machete she could have chopped through palm stalks and eaten the core. With a blowgun and years of training, she could have picked off a bird in the trees. With fishhooks, she could have pulled a bass or a catfish out of the river. But without tools, the forest was barren to her.

  The only animals she could imagine catching were the frogs. In the rainy season, they were everywhere, hopping in the sand and mud, oblivious to the desperate human that shared their riverbank. They were gaudy creatures—vibrant yellow and red and blue. The boldest of them were toxic, Juliane knew that; the indigenous people of the Amazon used a fluid from the frogs to poison the tips of their darts.

  But most species didn’t carry enough poison to kill a person. And the little amphibians were so tempting. They hopped inches from her face as she lay in the sand trying to muster the will to move on. Juliane swiped at them again and again. Each time they darted away before she could get a grasp, and another day went by without an ounce of food to eat.

  At night, when there were no vines to battle or logs to dodge, when the problem of where to place a foot or how to stay afloat did not fill her mind—sometimes then, in the dark, she prayed. Her parents didn’t believe in a god, exactly. They were scientists, and whatever spiritual beliefs they held came from the forest that towered above Juliane. The sun sustains all life on Earth, and the process it sets in motion inspired a kind of awe in Hans and Maria Koepcke that no god could match. And still, Juliane prayed—for her mother, for her own rescue, for some kind of human contact.

  She also started to think about her life in a way she had never done before. What, after all, had she done with her 17 years? She was calm and even-tempered, shy in big groups but happy and comfortable with her good friends. No matter where her parents took her—Germany, Lima, or Panguana—she adapted. She read a lot and did well in school.

  She’d had an unusual childhood, with all the research trips and the years dodging snakes and caimans at Panguana. But she also liked doing normal things—going to movies and hanging out with friends. Before she left Lima, her friend Edith had been teaching her volleyball. She’d been looking forward to coming back and going to the beach in a new blue bikini.

  She hadn’t questioned any of it before. Now, a world apart from beaches and volleyball nets, she found herself asking what it all meant. It was a perfectly acceptable life, but she didn’t stand out in any way. She’d been walking the Earth for 17 years and hadn’t left a mark. Now that she had fallen from a plane and survived, life felt like a gift she couldn’t afford to squander.

  What that meant, exactly, she didn’t know. She had always loved animals and assumed she would study biology like her parents, but it no longer seemed like enough. She wanted to do something that would make the world a better place—for humans and for the plants and animals that surrounded her.

  First, she had to get out of the forest. She wanted it more than ever, but her body was so weak. Her arm, infested with maggots, throbbed with pain. It was all she could do each morning to stagger to her feet and drag herself to the water. And in the days since she had found the river, she had observed nothing to make her think she would ever see another human being again.

  On Sunday, January 2, 1972, as the afternoon light dimmed, Juliane struggled out of the river and collapsed onto the bank. She’d been walking, wading, and swimming for nine days without food. In minutes she was dozing on her back in the gravel. As she drifted in and out of sleep, something at the edge of the water caught her eye. At first it registered only as a thing that did not belong, an object that was not tree, river, or animal. She tried to bring it into focus, and it finally took shape.r />
  It was a boat.

  At least it looked like a boat.

  She blinked and rubbed her eyes. Each time she looked, it was still there. But she couldn’t make herself believe it was real. In a week and a half she’d seen just three things made by human hands—two banks of seats and an engine, each of them ripped from the LANSA flight in midair. They were fossils, reminders that the entire world she once inhabited had deserted her. If her starving brain wasn’t playing tricks on her, this was a functional boat used by living human beings. It meant that the world still existed.

  She dropped into the water and swam. She had to put her hands on it to be sure it was real. When she got there, she knew: It was not a log masquerading as a boat or a relic abandoned by a hunter decades ago. Floating in her river and tied to the bank by a strand of cable was a brand-new boat, in perfect working condition. And now she took in the entire scene. How could she have missed it? A path led from the boat up the riverbank, and in it she could make out the footprints of another human being.

  It was just a thin trail through the riverside vegetation, no more than 20 feet long. But Juliane had so little strength left, it seemed to take hours to drag herself to the top. When she reached the flat ground above the riverbank she saw it—a simple shelter, known as a tambo by Peruvians. It stood about 10 feet by 15 feet with no walls, a floor of palm bark, and a set of poles holding up a roof of palm leaves. The boat’s outboard motor rested on a corner of the floor, along with a can of gasoline, a length of hose, and a plastic tarp.

  Behind the shelter, the path continued into the woods. It led, no doubt, to a village full of people, a dirt track that led to a larger village, a road that led to a city and the rest of the world. The sight was so vivid, such a contrast to the emptiness of the last 10 days, that she expected the owner of the boat to appear any minute.

  When a few minutes passed and Juliane was still alone, her mind settled on the gas can. The condition of her arm frightened her, the maggots burrowing deeper into her flesh by the minute. If kerosene had drawn the revolting creatures out of her dog’s leg, gasoline should work just as well on her arm.