Lost in the Amazon

by Tod Olson

  She sat by the gas can and labored to unscrew the cap—the simplest of tasks took all her strength. When it finally came off, she used the piece of hose to suck up some gas and trickle it into her wound. A red-hot current of pain ran through her arm. In a minute, the wriggling white heads surfaced in her flesh. She took off her spiral ring, unwound it, and picked out the maggots, one by one. She counted 30 of them before she stopped, exhausted from the effort.

  By now, the daylight filtering through the trees had faded. No one had appeared on the path behind the shelter.

  Resigned to another night alone, Juliane lay down and tried to sleep. But consoling as it was to rest in a real human habitation, she couldn’t get comfortable. She had lost weight, and the bark floor bit into her hips and her back. After 10 days yearning for a roof over her head, she stepped out from under the palm leaves and found a place again on the soft riverbank.

  This time, she carried a plastic tarp with her. She climbed under it and pulled it over her head. She shut out the mosquitoes, the black flies, and the rain, and slept through the night.

  When Juliane woke, the questions and the doubts returned. Someone would come eventually to use the boat—but when? The shelter could be an outpost on the far edge of someone’s hunting or logging territory. It could be weeks before the owner came back to it. Maybe she should get back in the river and move on.

  All morning, the options drifted in and out of her mind. It occurred to her that she could launch the boat and try to ride the river to civilization. But could she really navigate the logs and the current when she could barely stand on her own? And suppose she saved herself by stealing a boat and left someone else stranded in the forest to die. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, no matter how desperate she was.

  She let the hours slip past like river water. Around noon, the sky darkened and the clouds opened. The drenching rains were a daily ritual by now. She pulled the tarp close around her and sat in the shelter, numb and unable to decide what to do.

  When the rain let up, she made a feeble attempt to catch frogs. Hunger wasn’t so much an urge as a problem to solve. If she decided to move on, she needed strength, and starvation had left her exhausted to the core. If she stayed, she might have to stay alive for days or weeks before anyone came, and she knew she wouldn’t last long without food.

  In the afternoon, she finally decided to get back in the river and swim. But now that she had made up her mind, she couldn’t bring herself to move. The empty shelter made of rainforest trees was an oasis in the desert. It was the only sign of human civilization she had seen in so long. How could she trade it for the cold desolation of the river? She had the strength to get up again and try to catch frogs. But she couldn’t get in the water and leave the shelter behind.

  Once again, she felt as though the entire world had abandoned her. The other survivors, she thought, had all been rescued. Only she had been left in the wilderness to starve to death. At some point they would find her body, and no one would know that she had survived a fall strapped to her seat, that she had found a trickle of water and followed it until it became a stream and then a river, that she had stayed alive alone in the forest for this long.

  Tomorrow, she told herself—tomorrow, she would get up and she would keep following the river.

  By Monday, Peruvians were close to abandoning the search for survivors of the LANSA crash. Newspapers were starting to lose interest in the story because every day the news sounded the same. A rumor would send a new ripple of hope through the exhausted crowds holding vigil at the airports. If the weather allowed, planes took off and ground patrols headed into the jungle. At the end of the day, they came back with the same disheartening message: No sign of Flight 508.

  Every flicker of optimism, it seemed, had been snuffed out. Farmers had supposedly seen the plane spinning wildly in the sky 35 miles north of Pucallpa. A priest had seen it 150 miles south of Pucallpa. A forest worker had found a “strange thing” half buried in mud 30 miles southwest of Pucallpa. On Monday, in its lone article about the crash, La Prensa reported: “All rumors … have been dismissed by the search command.”

  A spokesman for the command insisted they weren’t giving up the search. A U.S. Air Force Hercules C-130 plane was on its way with state-of-the-art cameras and other equipment. But that day, while Juliane waited at the shelter, only two planes went up to search for survivors. The search commander, Teddy del Carpio, sounded like he was ready to admit defeat. “It’ll take a miracle for us to find the plane,” he said.

  A relative of Narda Sales Rios, the singer who’d been on Flight 508 with her five-year-old son, told a reporter, “The jungle has swallowed the plane, and when that happens the jungle does not give anything back.”

  In Juliane’s corner of the jungle, dusk fell. She readied herself for a second night at the shelter. Then, with the light fading and the swollen river rushing below, she heard what sounded like human voices.

  They couldn’t be voices, she thought. How many times had she heard the chickens and believed she’d been saved, only to have her hopes crushed by the sound of the birds and the monkeys and the frogs? It had to be the forest, conspiring with her brain to fool her again.

  But the voices grew louder and they mingled with footsteps, and as the thought formed in her mind that these were real people from the real world, three men stepped out of the forest and stood, staring through the open walls of the shelter with shock and even fear in their faces.

  She spoke in Spanish. “I’m a girl who was in the LANSA crash,” she said. “My name is Juliane.”

  Beltrán Paredes, Carlos Vásquez, and Nestor Amasifuén could barely believe their eyes. The three forest workers never encountered strangers near the tambo—especially not white people. Paredes froze with fear for a moment. He thought Juliane might be the incarnation of a water spirit that was said to have blond hair and fierce powers. According to tradition, if a pregnant woman looked the spirit in the eye, she would lose her child.

  “It’s a good thing you spoke to us right away,” Paredes said.

  It was also extremely lucky the men were there in the first place. They often spent nights in the forest on trips to hunt or cut wood, but rarely did they come check on the boat. They hadn’t been planning to visit the tambo, but Amasifuén had talked the others into it. The weather looked bad, and he wanted to have a roof over his head.

  If they hadn’t changed their plans, Juliane might never have been found. The river that flows past the tambo, they told her, is called the Shebonya. As she had feared, no one lived along its banks for miles in either direction.

  Juliane could tell the men were worried about her. She looked a mess, skinny and weak with the zipper of her filthy dress broken in the back. The forest floor had been battering her feet for ten days. Her collarbone poked unnaturally at the skin near her neck. Her shin and her arm hosted open wounds, swollen and white and infested with parasites.

  The men laid a blanket on the bark floor and sat Juliane down. They gave her some farinha, which she could barely choke down. The pasty gruel of manioc flour and water tasted sour, and she picked at it just to be considerate. While she tried to eat, they turned their attention to her wounds. Juliane had just removed more than two dozen maggots, but when they went to work with the gasoline, dozens more surfaced.

  While the men picked parasites from her flesh, Juliane carried on her first conversation since she had sat next to her mother on the plane.

  “What about the other passengers?” she asked. “Were they rescued?”

  The men were silent for a minute, reluctant to answer.

  Finally, Nestor Amasifuén spoke. “No, señorita,” he said, “not even the airplane has been found. It has simply disappeared in the jungle, as if it closed its fist around it. As far as I know you are the only survivor.”

  Juliane spoke near-perfect Spanish, and yet she had trouble making sense of the words. How could she have been the only one? All this time she had assumed there were other
s, because how could only one person out of 92 survive? And slowly the full meaning of Nestor Amasifuén’s words became clear. If it was true that no one else had survived, then her mother too must be dead.

  She tossed and turned on the floor of the tambo that night. Two other forest workers had arrived seeking shelter from the rain. How strange to have been alone for so long and now to sleep crowded into a space with five other people. The bark floor was hard, and her wounds throbbed from the probing and the gasoline. But the men had given her new clothes and their only mosquito net. She didn’t want to insult them by moving to the riverbank.

  The next morning, they carried her to the water and laid her in the boat. Marcio Rivera and Amado Pereira, the two new arrivals, nosed the boat into the river she had started following a week ago. They wove in and out of floating logs, and for once she did not have to strain to stay afloat. For hours, she drifted in and out of sleep. The Shebonya emptied into a larger river, the Pachitea. The Pachitea led to a riverbank cleared by human hands and a town of simple houses with grass roofs.

  It was 4 p.m. when they docked at the village of Tournavista. Their arrival drew a crowd. People stared as though Juliane were a strange new species, emerging from the jungle for the first time. She and the two men had stopped at a riverside farm along the way for food, and the children there had run screaming when they saw her. The tiny blood vessels around her pupils had burst, the men told her, probably from the change in air pressure as she fell from the plane. Her eyes were no longer white but a shocking, bloody red.

  After a week and a half of total solitude, she found herself surrounded. They wanted her on a stretcher, which annoyed her because she could still walk. Someone handed her a bathrobe, and someone else took a picture. A nurse examined her and injected her with antibiotics, and before she knew it a missionary pilot stood in front of her asking if she was ready to get back on a plane. Forty miles away, at the missionary community in Yarinacocha, she would have privacy and expert medical attention.

  She didn’t have the strength to argue.

  The flight to Yarinacocha proved to be the second-most frightening plane ride of Juliane’s life. The pilot insisted she lie down, which made it worse. The tiny twin-engine plane banked hard into turns, and Juliane had no way to confirm that they weren’t headed for another fiery crash into the rainforest.

  After twenty minutes of terror, she was delivered safely to the Summer Institute for Linguistics. The community there was deep in mourning for the five members they had lost to the LANSA crash. The pilot Floyd Lyon had given up hope for his son, who had waited in line for Flight 508 with Juliane. Pat Davis had decided she would continue her work in Peru without her husband, Harold, who was also on the plane. Rebecca and Timothy Hedges, who were just seven and five years old, were still recovering from chicken pox. Their illness had kept them in Yarinacocha while their parents, Roger and Margery, traveled to Lima for a visa and then boarded Flight 508 to come home to their kids.

  For now, no one overwhelmed Juliane with questions. A doctor named Frank Lindholm took her in. He treated her wounds, pulled more maggots out of her flesh, and extracted a huge wooden splinter from her foot. When he finished, Juliane ate a chicken sandwich—the first food she had actually enjoyed in nearly two weeks. Then she lay down in a large, soft, dry bed and slept.

  Bob Weninger, the missionary pilot from Wisconsin, flew into Pucallpa at around 5 p.m. that night. He had spent four or five days searching for the LANSA wreckage before he had to return to his regular duties. When he landed at Pucallpa and climbed down from the cockpit, he saw the aircraft manager running across the tarmac. “Roberto! Roberto!” he was yelling. “They found a girl!”

  Weninger flew to Tournavista that night and told Commander del Carpio that this time he was going to find the plane. It had to be within two minutes’ flying time of the forest shelter, he figured. He tracked down Amado Pereira and Marcio Rivera and made them promise to guide him to the shelter.

  The next morning, a thick fog shrouded the forest. In Pucallpa, the search pilots waited, convinced there was no point in taking off. In Tournavista, Weninger had no patience for waiting. He ushered the two forest workers into his red-and-white twin-engine Cessna and rose above the fog.

  By the time they neared the shelter, the sky below was clearing. Weninger followed the Shebonya River upstream and told Pereira and Rivera to watch for vultures lurking in the treetops.

  In a minute or two, Weninger figured he had flown too far south. He turned around, and within seconds, they spotted a crumpled hunk of fuselage cradled in the tree limbs below. As he circled low, the men scanned the canopy, and other foreign objects appeared in the branches. Suitcases, clothes, and packages clung to the trees, the first sign that nearly two weeks ago, 92 people had disappeared into the forest.

  Juliane woke on Wednesday, January 5, in the embrace of a real bed. It took a few moments to remember why she was there. When the details came back to her, she felt strangely numb. She had come as close to death as possible and survived—but she did not feel overjoyed to be alive. She had lost the person she loved most—but she did not feel devastated. The crash and the days in the jungle and the rescue and the passengers who had vanished—when she thought about it all she felt nothing.

  It still seemed impossible that 91 people had been with her one minute and were gone the next. In the forest, she hadn’t let herself think they could be dead. Maybe all along she had been protecting herself from the thought that her mother was gone.

  Had she thought about it rationally, it should have seemed obvious. The airplane seat was Juliane’s only source of protection during her fall from the plane. And she knew her mother had been ejected from the seat before it hit the ground.

  Still, Juliane had believed that Maria was safe—and maybe that belief saved her in the end. Maybe it was the only thing that made her get up each morning, get back in the cold water, and swim a mile closer to the riverside shelter.

  Now she had finally accepted it: Her mother was not coming out of the jungle alive. But she still felt numb—an emotional deadness that often plagues survivors after a traumatic experience. The part of the brain responsible for generating emotion turns off in order to shut out the full impact of the ordeal. For a time, it’s as though you can only touch the world with gloves on your hands.

  Juliane was resting at the Lindholms’ house, lost in that emotional fog, when the door to her room opened and her father walked in.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Good,” she said.

  Then he hugged her and sat down on the bed. It would take a long time before he could bring himself to ask when Juliane had last seen her mother. He had never been one to talk a lot, and that was fine with Juliane.

  In a few hours, her body would give in to the trauma of the last two weeks. For several days, she would run a high fever before finally starting on a full recovery.

  In the meantime, she rested in a house with walls that shut out the rain and the sun, the spiders and the black flies, the eerie sounds at night and the rushing water by day—a place where she could sit in silence with her own father close enough to touch.

  The letters came in bunches from around the world—the United States and Germany; Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Burundi. Some had no more than two lines for an address:

  Juliane Koepcke

  Peru

  Somehow they found their way to Yarinacocha, and Juliane read them while she recovered.

  Schoolkids were especially fascinated by her story. They drew pictures of her in the forest, standing next to fragments of a plane. Young wildlife enthusiasts wanted to know what stingrays were like or if jaguars had gone extinct.

  Some people offered their help. A doctor wrote with advice on treating a broken collarbone. A woman who had lost her seventeen-year-old daughter invited Juliane to live with her in Texas. Teenaged boys and young men pledged to be there for her until their dying days. An artist wanted to sculpt her in bronze.


  Then there were the wacky—sometimes disturbing—letters. One woman insisted that her soul had kept Juliane company in the forest and led her to safety. Another claimed to have discovered an astronomical reason for Juliane’s survival: a triangular pattern formed by Venus, Saturn, and Pluto at the end of December.

  Most of the letter writers seemed honestly moved by Juliane’s ordeal. They wrote to offer sympathy and to let her know she wasn’t alone.

  Juliane felt touched by the attention. She also felt unsettled. Her story had been private for 10 days while she wandered alone in the forest. Now the entire world wanted details.

  Journalists from around the globe poured into Pucallpa. Teddy del Carpio, commander of the search operations, did what he could to keep them away. He told the press that Juliane was at a hospital when she was still recovering in a private home. He posted guards in Yarinacocha.

  Denied access to Juliane, reporters pried the story out of anyone they could find. They talked to the nurse from Tournavista. They tracked down the men who’d found Juliane at the shelter.

  When facts weren’t available, some reporters settled for rumors. In one account, Juliane had built a raft from forest wood and vines and used it to float down the river. Another reporter gave a melodramatic version of her first encounter with the forest workers. Supposedly, Juliane had gathered the strength to say, “There are dead people!” and then passed out.

  Juliane had lost control of her story, and she found it frustrating when it was told wrong. But the mistakes were almost easier to accept than the praise. Every story hailed her survival as a great achievement. “Miracle in the jungle!” proclaimed La Nueva Crónica. A columnist called her “a modern heroine.” Letter writers told her she’d been “coolheaded” and “fearless.”