Lost in the Amazon

by Tod Olson

She did not feel like a hero. Nor did she feel especially brave. That was a word meant for people who deliberately risked their lives. She had only been trying to save herself. And nothing about the experience felt like a miracle. If God had anything to do with her survival, then why was her mother dead? What kind of divine being would let 91 people perish and save only one seventeen-year-old girl?

  On January 8, an amphibious Twin Otter plane settled onto the runway at the Pucallpa airport, less than 5 miles from Juliane’s hideaway at Yarinacocha. Its doors opened, and workmen hauled seven black plastic bags out of the plane. The first of the LANSA flight’s 91 victims had come home to Pucallpa.

  For the grieving families, this was the beginning of the end. For two weeks they had watched search planes return from their rounds with no news at all. Now they had evidence that could not be denied.

  After Bob Weninger first spotted the wreckage, the search turned into a recovery operation. Patrols got as close as they could by river and then cut through the forest to the crash site. A helicopter lowered a team through the trees to clear a landing area.

  The rainforest did not give up its quarry easily. As Juliane thought, the plane had been torn apart nearly 4,000 feet above the canopy. Its wreckage had rained down across 5 square miles of forest.

  As the patrol members picked their way through the disaster area, it was the personal belongings they noticed. Purses, shirts, and sweaters hung from the trees. Watches, photos, gifts, and shoes—dozens of shoes—lay strewn around the forest floor. A doctor who was called to the scene later recalled that “suitcases had opened in midair and the presents hung in the branches as if these were Christmas trees decorated for a sad, holy night.”

  The first bodies were found inside a large piece of the fuselage. Workers had to use an axe to hack their way into the cockpit. They emerged with the body of the pilot, Carlos Forno Valera.

  Fernando Ribeiro, who had joined a civilian patrol, identified his fourteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, by the gold earrings he had given her. Ribeiro insisted on carrying her remains himself from the wreckage to a waiting helicopter.

  The helicopter lifted the bodies to the nearby town of Puerto Inca, where officials had set up a staging area. Relatives waited there or in Pucallpa to identify the remains. A brother recognized his sister’s shoes—white with cork soles. An uncle knew his nephew from a bandage on his right leg.

  By noon on Saturday, four days after Juliane arrived in Tournavista, half the bodies had been recovered. Eventually, the remains of all 91 passengers and crew would be lifted from the jungle.

  Among the items recovered from the forest was Flight 508’s black box, which recorded all conversations in the cockpit and any instructions sent from the pilots to the plane’s electronic systems. Investigators studied its contents to find out what had happened during the final minutes of the flight. “Catastrophic disintegration in the air” were the words they used to describe the disaster. The lightning strike and severe turbulence had ripped the wings off the fuselage. Under pressure, the rest of the plane broke into pieces.

  There were also signs that the pilot had played a role. Carlos Forno Valera may have panicked, fighting to keep the plane level when he should have let it ride the storm.

  The report made no judgment about the fitness of the plane. But the investigators who had looked into the earlier LANSA crash in Cuzco had not been happy with the airline’s maintenance crew. Many of the mechanics were new to aviation. They had never fixed anything more complicated than motorcycles.

  Juliane’s father wanted to hold LANSA responsible for the crash. But when he tried to sue the airline, he got nowhere. The Electra that carried 91 people to their deaths had been the company’s last plane. With no money and no assets, LANSA had been shut down for good.

  The accident report also said nothing about how Juliane could have survived a lengthy fall from a disintegrating plane. Juliane would eventually come up with her own explanation. She remembered her seat spinning through the sky, which could have created a helicopter effect that slowed her descent. Intense storms can also create updrafts of air that might have cushioned the seat on its way down. The thick forest canopy and its tangle of vines probably did the rest of the work.

  Late in January, while the recovery efforts were winding down, doctors declared Juliane healthy enough to travel. She and her father left Yarinacocha for the peace and quiet of Panguana. But even there, they couldn’t hide from a curious world. One day, a nurse arrived at the door, claiming that she’d been sent to examine Juliane. When Juliane recognized the “nurse” as a reporter from Yarinacocha, Hans Koepcke ushered the woman out the door.

  All Juliane wanted now was to go back to Lima and be a normal teenager. She still had two years of school left before she could take her Abitur, the final exams that would qualify her for college. Then she would go to a university in Germany. In the meantime, she’d hang out with her friends, get ice cream, go to the beach, and study. She would leave the plane crash behind and move on.

  But when she left Panguana to board a plane in Pucallpa, “normal” seemed like a dream. Journalists mobbed her at the airport, shouting their questions: Juliane, have you recovered? Juliane, what are you going to do now? Photographers snapped pictures of her arriving in Lima. Ordinary Peruvians came up to her in the street. They asked for autographs or simply wanted to touch her.

  Juliane still wanted to stay and reclaim her life. But her father had seen enough. He bought her a plane ticket for Germany and arranged for her to live with her aunt. At the airport, Juliane waved at the photographers. She swallowed her fear of flying again and boarded a plane for the long flight across the Atlantic.

  In 20 harrowing minutes over the Peruvian rainforest, her life had been torn apart. It was time to put the pieces back together.

  In 1977, Juliane stepped off a plane in Lima for the first time since the LANSA crash. A crowd of journalists heard she was coming and tracked her down, asking for interviews. But she wasn’t there to relive the crash.

  She had come back to study butterflies.

  After returning to Germany in 1972, Juliane decided to take on the work her parents had loved. She went to university to become a zoologist and study the plants and animals of the rainforest.

  Her ordeal in the forest still haunted her. The flying nightmare that seized her the night of the crash returned again and again. Sometimes she dreamed that her mother was still alive, standing on the other side of a street. In the dream, Juliane ran across the street, ecstatic and relieved. But just after she fell into her mother’s arms, she woke up.

  It took several years before she let herself truly feel the loss. One Christmas Day, it finally hit her. “I cried for hours and hours, all day long, almost without end,” she recalled years later, “and thought of my mother and all the important subjects I didn’t discuss with her.”

  Had Maria Koepcke lived, she and her daughter would have found plenty to talk about. On that visit in 1977, Juliane spent a month in Panguana, catching and observing butterflies, and rediscovering the rainforest she had loved as a kid.

  Four years later, she returned to study bats. She slept in a hut without walls, draped by a mosquito net. She learned to butcher wild pigs, cook caiman tails, and use herbal medicine to cure toothaches. She went out under the moonlight with the Milky Way shining overhead. She probed inside hollow trees to observe bat colonies. She surprised an ocelot one night and a jaguar another.

  Juliane got to know the forest the way her parents knew it, as a student of the sights and sounds, the complicated relationships between animals, trees, and plants. “I took in the forest with all my senses,” she later wrote, “the endless diversity of the vegetation and wildlife and their adaptations, nature’s incredible play of colors … the sounds that sometimes enveloped me like a cloak and that always give me pleasure to this day, the smells, the green and yellow twilight, the warm dampness of the forest.”

  On her midnight explorations, Juliane discover
ed the “secret soul” of the Amazon. “I felt as if I were plunging into the energy of a powerful, all-embracing living thing, so intimate by now, and yet always unfamiliar in new ways,” she wrote.

  She had nearly died in the rainforest, hungry and alone. But it did not feel like a “green hell” to Juliane. It was not a lair for man-eating caimans and deadly snakes. It was a place of wonder, of awe—a place where she felt safe. The forest, she said, had helped her “return to human life.”

  During the long, desperate nights she spent huddled in the rain after the plane crash, she had vowed to do something important with her life. Now she knew what that task was. She would devote herself to preserving the little patch of rainforest that gave her and her parents so much joy. My task has a name, she thought. And it is Panguana.

  Seventeen years later, in the dry season of 1998, Juliane peered out the window of a helicopter at a vast stretch of forest in Peru. The helicopter settled into a small clearing, not far from the Shebonya River. A balding man in khakis helped her down while a film camera recorded the scene.

  The man was Werner Herzog, the movie director who had been desperate to get on the LANSA plane that Christmas Eve in 1971. For nearly three decades he’d been haunted by the crash and the lone girl who had survived. Finally, he had tracked Juliane down in Munich and asked if he could make a documentary about her.

  Juliane, now in her forties, had done her best to put the crash behind her. She had married a fellow zoologist and found a job she loved, running the library at one of the largest natural history museums in the world. Reporters still pestered her for interviews from time to time. She turned them all away. But she had seen a couple of Herzog’s films and liked them. He would not be like the other journalists, she thought. Maybe it was the right time to revisit the past.

  Herzog’s crew had made four expeditions into the jungle before they found the plane wreckage. Pieces of fuselage the size of a car had been completely hidden by vines.

  Juliane spent a couple of days wandering among the wreckage, telling the story of the crash. She sifted through pieces of debris from the forest floor—a hair curler, the heel of a woman’s shoe, a piece of a tray on which the flight attendants served sandwiches just before the plane plunged into the storm. At one point she peered at a window-sized opening in a piece of fuselage. Above the window, the words SALIDA DE EMERGENCIA were still readable—“Emergency Exit.”

  At first, the experience left Juliane feeling distant, like she herself was watching a movie. That numbness had helped her survive a terrible tragedy when she was seventeen. Three decades later it was still with her. “It’s a mechanism that allows us to live with a monstrous experience,” she reflected, “to deal with it as if it were a birthmark that belongs to us, a scar, an affliction. Or sometimes even a blessing. Who can decide?”

  Before the film crew left the crash site, they stumbled across a massive piece of the plane that lay camouflaged on the forest floor. As they hacked away with machetes, a 40-foot piece of fuselage with its landing gear still intact emerged from the vines and the undergrowth.

  The sight finally made the memories feel real to Juliane. “Lying there like that,” she recalled, “it reminded me terribly of the remains of a dead bird, a real living thing stranded helplessly with its feet pointing upwards.” It symbolized something final—as though 30 years after she survived a nearly 4,000-foot fall into the trees, the ordeal was finally over.

  In 2011, 40 years after the crash, Juliane landed again in Peru. This time, she was ready to finish the mission she had vowed to undertake years earlier. She had come to save a small corner of the rainforest she loved.

  Since Flight 508 crashed in the jungle, the Amazon has been under attack by farmers, loggers, miners, and ranchers. It has lost nearly 15 percent of its trees. An area larger than the country of France has been hacked and burned out of the “uninterrupted” wilderness that Richard Spruce marveled at when he first arrived in 1849.

  Juliane had noticed the destruction when she came back with Herzog in 1998. A major highway sliced through the edge of the forest from Venezuela through Peru to Bolivia. On either side of the road, acres of trees had been cut down or burned away. Unbroken forest was giving way to a patchwork of cattle ranches, small farms, and smoldering stumps. It looked as though the Amazon was slowly being burned to death.

  The rate of deforestation has declined in recent years. But at its worst, the Amazon lost an area the size of 600 football fields every hour—1 square mile gone in the time it takes to brush your teeth.

  Highways now cross the rainforest from the east coast of Brazil to the west coast of Peru. Off of those roads, loggers and miners have built 100,000 miles of illegal tracks into remote areas of the forest. Loggers offer woodcutters $30 for a mahogany tree that will eventually sell for $3,000 overseas. Miners come in digging for gold and leave behind house-sized mounds of dirt and rocks.

  The most intrusive new residents of the rainforest, though, aren’t farmers, loggers, or miners. They’re cows—more than 200 million of them. Cattle ranchers are responsible for at least 70 percent of deforestation in the Amazon. They ship nearly 2 million tons of beef overseas every year. Hides from their cows are made into leather for soccer cleats. Fat from the carcasses gets processed into toothpaste and cosmetics.

  The desire to make a profit on the forest goes back to Pizarro and the other Europeans who blundered their way into the Amazon in the 16th century. Eventually, the early explorers gave up on El Dorado. But their dream survived—that with energy, willpower, and technological skill, the rainforest could be turned into a source of great wealth. In 1852, an American expedition emerged from the Amazon and reported that the forest was the world’s biggest untapped resource. With the right tools, the soil beneath its 400 billion trees could feed the world. Bring “the railroad and the steamboat, the plough, the axe, and the hoe,” the expedition’s leaders claimed, and the rainforest would produce “power, wealth and grandeur” to rival any empire.

  The Amazon hasn’t been a lot more hospitable to the plough and the axe than it was to the early explorers. The soil in the rainforest doesn’t lend itself well to farming or ranching. Without tree roots to suck up water, storms simply wash the top layer of soil away. With it go most of the nutrients in the soil. Grass and food crops grow well for a couple of years after the forest is cleared. Then the yield drops off. Farmers need to clear even more land. Ranchers have to buy expensive feed to keep their cattle nourished.

  Still, the destruction continues, and the consequences are serious. Indigenous people have been forced off their land by loggers and ranchers. The Awa-Guaja, one of the few nomadic tribes left in the Amazon, nearly went extinct when a third of their land was destroyed. Thousands more indigenous people have had to move to cities in search of jobs.

  Deforestation also plays a role in the biggest long-term threat to the Earth: climate change. The trees of the rainforest do an important service to the planet. To grow, they need carbon dioxide—one of the gases produced when we burn fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Carbon dioxide is one of the so-called greenhouse gases that trap the sun’s heat near Earth, causing the planet to warm. Trees help to limit the effects of carbon dioxide by sucking it out of the air. When those trees are cut down and burned, they return the planet-warming gas to the atmosphere.

  Panguana, with its huts and its majestic 150-foot lupuna tree, was just a tiny fraction of this threatened landscape—460 acres out of 1.3 billion. But to Juliane, it was a vital piece. In that small patch of forest, over 400 species of ants eat the bark and leaves of 500 species of trees. Countless more varieties of insects fill the air. They provide dinner for 350 species of birds, 52 species of bats, 50 species of frogs, and 50 species of various reptiles. Another 280 species of butterflies help spread pollen for at least 500 varieties of plants.

  Sometimes, when Juliane talked about her work at Panguana, people would ask what the point was. Why did we need to know how many species of dung beetle inh
abit the forest, eating monkey poop and burying the fruit seeds they find in it so new fruit trees can grow?

  Because, Juliane would answer, we can’t appreciate what we have until we understand what it is. “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.”

  In 2011, Juliane and her husband, Erich Diller, had come back to make sure that no one set fire to Panguana. She had found investors to help buy more land around the research station. With the help of a neighbor named Moro, they expanded Panguana from 460 to 1,730 acres. Then they convinced the Peruvian government to declare it off-limits to development of any kind.

  Juliane and Erich flew from Lima to Pucallpa and traveled overland to Panguana, meeting with government officials and signing papers. Juliane had finally decided to tell the story of the crash in her own words. She was writing a book that would be published the following year, called When I Fell from the Sky.

  As they made their way to Panguana, they found echoes of the crash along the way. In Pucallpa, a tomb holds the remains of more than 50 of the LANSA passengers. On it is a map inscribed in plaster marking Juliane’s route out of the forest from the crash site. On the way from Pucallpa to Panguana stands a small roadside market that locals know as “The Door.” It’s named after a rusted hatchway from the LANSA flight that the owner keeps on display. On the piece of wreckage is written Juliane’s door.

  For Juliane, the rainforest has always felt like a world apart. “In the city,” she wrote, “nature is a guest you tolerate: 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.”

  It’s a relationship Juliane must feel more keenly than most. At seventeen, she should have plummeted to her death in the rainforest. Instead, it welcomed her and guided her back home. She can’t understand why she alone, out of 92, became a guest. But she can work to make her survival mean something in the end.