When I Fell From the Sky

by Juliane Diller (Koepcke)

  I found it wonderful to have so many relatives, and they all warmly accepted me into the family. There were so many new things for me to experience and discover, and I postponed my plans to see Panguana again.

  Thus time passed. During the day I studied diligently for my Abitur, and now and then did something with my new schoolmates. And at night I dreamed I was hurtling with insane speed, as if equipped with an engine, in a dark space, always along the wall. Or I dreamed of a deep, roaring sound, and I know that it’s the turbines and we’re plummeting into the abyss. For a long time these dreams were a part of me like the scars I retained from the crash. Often I’m plagued by headaches, but I accept this. What do I have to complain about? All the others are dead, so shouldn’t I be able to bear a little bit of head pain? For my birthday my father sent me preserved rain forest butterflies. Another time he sent me a camera, a Minolta, which I was extremely happy about. We wrote to each other, and both of us ended most of our letters with the request: Write back soon!

  The two years up to my Abitur went fast. I passed it with a good grade. My father could be proud of me. And as a reward he came himself. Two years and six days after my departure from Peru, I saw my father again….

  It’s time to try our luck again with the authorities. After a long-winded good-bye, we smile one last time at the various cameras and are allowed to move on.

  And lo and behold, we get lucky. We’re able to take care of all our affairs. We even find in his general store the neighbor who lets his cattle graze on one of the new properties. He and Moro settle the matter, and then we can head home.

  That evening we don’t make it back to the village of Yuyapichis before dark. Under a sky that looks as if all you have to do is reach out your hand to grasp the stars, we cross the Río Pachitea. On the other side, below the Módena farm, the faithful Chano waits for us. Is it the exhaustion or the successful day? Is it the many memories or the warmth of the kind people? On this evening I feel almost weightless as I walk behind Moro across the pasture. The many times I walked along this path in the past merge with the present, with the future. For I know I will continue to return to Panguana countless times. Every step I take seems to me like one of those long steps that are required to fulfill my parents’ legacy. But I also know that, just as I always come back, no matter what happens, just as at the end of the journey the lupuna tree is waiting for us and under it the huts of Panguana, so I will succeed in protecting this place, once and for all, and preserving it for succeeding generations.

  I wonder how my father might have felt when he walked along this path for the last time back then. Was he relieved to finally leave this place, where he had been indescribably happy and later unspeakably lonely and isolated in his grief? Or did he think he would come back soon, perceiving the parting as only temporary, far too preoccupied with the preparations for the long journey? I don’t know. And I think, how strange it is, and also sad, that after my stay here in Panguana directly after my accident, I was never again here with my father.

  17 A Reunion and a Return

  Rainforest jewel: a large Morpho butterfly, 2008. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)

  On April 12, 1974, I picked up my father at the airport in Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel. We weren’t alone, and maybe that’s why the reunion went rather uneventfully. My aunt was there, of course, and my father’s friends who had received me two years ago in Frankfurt.

  Unfortunately, I have no particularly detailed memories of this reunion. I recall only that I had wanted him to bring me a fresh avocado and a mango. My father came with us to my grandmother’s home in Kiel and spent one or two nights with us. Then he went to Hamburg, where he, in accordance with the agreement he had made when he received his professorship, assumed an academic post. There he initially lived in the guest room of the institute, until before long he bought a small row house on the outskirts of Hamburg.

  At first he said that his presence in Germany was only temporary, and he would definitely return to Panguana. Later I learned from colleagues at the natural history museum in Lima that he had not said good-bye to anyone there. One day he was simply gone. Before anyone really knew what was going on, his post at the university was occupied by a younger colleague. Today I know that my father was at that time already working on the transformation of Panguana into a nature reserve, and even had a promising statement from the ministry of agriculture. In the early 1970s, Panguana was already supposed to be expanded about four square miles. But then, the whole matter stagnated. Reports were written and disappeared into a file, which gradually grew thicker. From Germany, my father could not really press ahead with the matter, and so it all came to nothing.

  Why my father never returned to Peru—I don’t know. I suspect that once in Germany, he no longer had the strength for it. Peru was the country where he had been happy with my mother. Without her it wasn’t the same anymore. And everything there reminded him of her. In a letter from Panguana during my first year in Germany, he had written: … and in 1975 I would take a trip to Peru, mainly to visit Panguana. I cannot make any promises yet at this point, of course, but I could imagine that it would be nice if we came here together and also left again together.

  But that never came up again later, and I didn’t press him about it either.

  However, a different journey was coming up, a real trip across the globe. From August 12 to 19, 1974, the Sixteenth International Ornithological Congress was being held in Canberra, Australia. Anticipation for the event had already been building years before. For this long-standing conference, so important for ornithologists, has existed since 1884 and takes place once every four years (however, it was irregular in the beginning and there were missed meetings during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, which is why this was only the sixteenth). Today I suspect that probably it was originally my mother who was planning to attend it. (After all, she was the ornithologist in the family.) But after her death it somehow went without saying that my father would travel to Australia—and I would accompany him. My Abitur over and done with, full of excitement and with a considerable amount of wanderlust in my heart, I set off on August 5, 1974, with my father. We flew via Frankfurt, Bombay and Singapore to Sydney. From there we went on to Canberra—of course, not without first taking a few excursions to the marine sandy beach and the environs of Sydney. Above all, we visited, as in all places we traveled to, the zoological and botanical gardens.

  For me, Canberra was an impressive experience—and not only because of the congress, where I enthusiastically attended events and met many foreign colleagues of my mother’s, but also because of the exciting, architecturally interesting city and the glorious surroundings. My father gave a talk at the conference about the birdcalls of the Peruvian rain forest. In other ways, too, this whole trip was not a vacation for him, but rather served a precise plan for his research work. For that purpose we later continued northward along the East Coast, spending five days, for example, on the forested and uninhabited Hinchinbrook Island, located east of the town of Cardwell, where we camped and recorded birdcalls. My father had in his luggage what was then a state-of-the-art tape recorder—though today it is, of course, extremely outdated and cumbersome—the Nagra III, along with a reflector. The Thyssen Foundation provided it for him, and he and my mother had used it to compile their birdcall archive in Peru. In my father’s view, only in this way, recorded with the same device, could the recordings really be compared. For that is precisely what he intended to do: We were systematically seeking out rain forests in northeastern Australia, New Guinea and on various islands of Hawaii that had certain similarities with that of Panguana, in order to find or rule out parallels in the world of birdcalls. My father, who had always kept his eye on the big picture, did not want to run the risk of becoming limited as a scientist exclusively to Panguana and the form of rain forest found there.

  Hinchinbrook Island has remained memorable to me, for the kind gentleman from Cardwell who arranged our supplies an
d provisions for the stay on the island forgot the silverware. So we carved primitive spoons with our pocketknives out of the husks of the numerous coconuts lying around. My father had always been a master at improvising. Besides that, on the very first day I sat down on my glasses and broke a lens. To top it all off, it was pouring rain, our tent wasn’t leakproof, and the mosquitoes loved us.

  We spent a month altogether in Australia, traveled on to New Guinea, tirelessly collected birdcalls and other data there for four weeks, until we continued via the Fiji Islands to Hawaii. Because we crossed the international date line, we experienced the day of this journey twice.

  Here, on the gorgeous island of Kauai, I spent my twentieth birthday. My father surprised me with a lovingly arranged gift table, decorated with flowers and candles. He must have crept out of our shared room at night when I was already asleep to get all this. It was a really special birthday, which I will never forget. We took a taxi around the island to gain an overview, and then hiked through a subtropical forest area. It was wonderful to be traveling together. We had the same interests, and maybe my father felt during those weeks a little bit the way he used to, when he had been traveling with my mother.

  This time spent so intensively together brought us close to each other again. On a trip it becomes clear whether people do well together or not, and we got along splendidly.

  When we landed in Frankfurt in mid-October, I was once again on the brink of a new stage in my life: my university studies. Even though I had still been vacillating the previous year as to whether I shouldn’t perhaps study literature and art instead of biology, I had decided to remain with what had been my desire from an early age: to become a zoologist like my parents. My father was really happy about that. He hoped that I would continue his work and that of my mother. And indeed, there was nothing I longed for more than to finally return to Panguana. My love for all living things, my curiosity and my astonishment in the face of the endless diversity of nature—I had felt this again distinctly during our trip—were still just as strong as they were when I was a child and had explored the mysteries of the forest with my parents. I had adjusted well to life in Germany; however, when I began my studies, it was a foregone conclusion for me that I would one day return to Peru and live there.

  My first opportunity to do so was in 1977, when I had to get started on my thesis work. I needed a topic, something that had not yet been studied. What could have served this purpose better than one I could work on in Panguana?

  Of course, I spoke about it with my father. My interest pleased him. The exploration of life in Panguana remained very close to his heart. My mother and he had set off in those days with the plan of developing a systematic ecological survey and as complete an inventory of species as possible. So many years later that had been accomplished only partially, so diverse is the life in this area of rain forest. Among other things, he mentioned that there had not yet been a scientific study of the camouflage coloring of the carrion- and dung-feeding butterflies, though there were most likely publications on the warning-colored moth. And I thought: Yes, this could be something for me. My father and other scientists had already collected a lot of butterflies in Panguana, so I wouldn’t have to start from scratch. And these insects are also relatively easy to observe and attract, so that I could manage the topic within the scope of my thesis work. And so in this way, another part of the fauna at our station was explored and illuminated.

  For me it was the first and very welcome opportunity to finally return to Panguana. I didn’t travel alone, but set off in early August 1977 with four other students. We were a motley crew: Accompanying me were a thesis student of my father’s with her husband, who were both interested in reptiles and amphibians. One of my father’s doctoral students also came with us, Andreas, who today works at the Stuttgart natural history museum as a herpetologist, a specialist in amphibians and reptiles. He wrote his dissertation on the biological community of frogs in a forest pond and remained there for about a year. And finally we were accompanied by another student, who wanted to get to know the life in the Amazon Rain Forest and also to keep Andreas company.

  When we arrived in Lima, there was once again a crowd of journalists waiting for me. I could hardly believe it. After all, I’d be gone for over five years and had been hoping I was long forgotten in Peru. I constantly received requests for interviews, and that really got on my nerves. For that reason I was glad when my companions and I set off toward the jungle, where I could pursue my work in peace.

  How happy I was to see Panguana again. At that time we could still stay in the old main house that I had lived in with my parents, which, unfortunately, no longer exists today. It was surrounded by a work hut and a kitchen hut, and somewhat farther away there was another guesthouse. Though this house didn’t have any walls, it directly abutted the jungle on one side, and here, where you were really well sheltered from wind and weather, we spent the night—on the floor, of course. There was enough space for all of us. At that time Moro and his family were still living downriver on the other side of the Yuyapichis on his farm, La Ponderosa, named after the ranch in the television series Bonanza. Only later did he build the house on the grounds of Panguana directly opposite the present-day guesthouses.

  I spent three months altogether in Peru, one of those in Panguana. There I caught and photographed numerous butterflies, which I attracted with various types of bait. There were at that time many wild rats and mice near the houses and at the edge of the forest, above all spiny rats. Moro helped me catch them, and when animals were slaughtered, I got other meat too. These often fist-sized pieces I put out to attract the butterflies. The bait was most attractive to them when it began to rot, above all for the magnificent morphos and the mysterious, palm-sized owl butterflies, with their beautiful eyespots on the underside of their wings. Many species also liked fermenting fruits and fruit juices or dung. The most beautiful species I saw and caught in our toilet, a real outhouse. There I was unfortunately stung in the thigh one night by one of the giant ants, a one-and-a-half-inch isula, or bullet ant. A sting like that is extremely painful, and you feel the puncture site for several days. That’s why the species is also known as “24 horas” (“24 hours”) for that’s how long you will definitely suffer.

  At first my meat bait would mysteriously disappear, and I found out that it was being eaten by turtles, armadillos and other animals. Rotting meat is a genuine delicacy for turtles. What could I do about that? I wrapped the pieces of meat in wire mesh and bound them to a tree or post. Though this put a stop to the feast of the turtles, I could better observe “my” butterflies. On the riverbank I found whole clouds of glorious, richly colored yellow, white and orange butterflies, sitting on tapir dung and urine or on the excretions of spectacled caimans—always a gorgeous sight.

  I still remember well how my father’s thesis student and I were assailed by masses of tiny ticks one day in the forest. We had grazed a bush on which these beasts were sitting, and they completely inundated us. Nothing helped. We rushed home, tore off our clothes and removed the tiny little pests from each other with tweezers, which we plunged afterward into a candle flame to burn up the ticks.

  Once the thesis student and her husband caught a forest crocodile, which she was eager to photograph. But she was bothered by her husband’s hands, which were holding on to the crocodile and shouldn’t be in the picture. So her husband let go of the snout and tail of the two-and-a-half-foot-long animal, and was holding on to it only by the legs. Of course, it bit deep into his arm. Luckily, the wound didn’t become inflamed.

  At that time there were many snakes around the houses of Panguana, and one of the neighbors was once bitten by a lance-headed viper. The thesis student gave him a large amount of snake serum so that there was a huge bump. That probably would not even have been necessary, but better safe than sorry. It was important, however, to be careful with the serum, for it could lead to anaphylactic shock if someone is allergic to it—and that can be deadly too
.

  In those years Yuyapichis was not yet a real village, but rather a cluster of huts on the high bank of the Río Pachitea, and during the week nothing was going on there after sundown. But on Saturdays, there was a fiesta with dancing and eating, and we liked to go there. It was a fun time, which passed too quickly, unfortunately. We girls naturally attracted attention as gringas and were simply idolized by the men in the village.

  When I was in Lima, I stayed with my friend Edith’s parents. They had a small, one-story annex in the garden, in which a room with a bathroom was always available to me. That was, of course, really pleasant. In Lima, I had also been invited to a special event during that visit to Peru, a ceremony at Ricardo Palma University. They had named the biology students’ final semester “Promoción 76B Maria Koepcke” after my mother, and I was invited there as a guest of honor, which was, of course, once again all over the press. I was still constantly being asked for interviews, and my stay in Peru was intently followed and commented on in the newspaper. Above all, when I passed through Pucallpa on my journey between Lima and Panguana, my past caught up to me. The head of the local radio station had been friendly with my parents, and so I couldn’t refuse to give greetings and such repeatedly on one of his programs.

  On those occasions I liked to visit the kind missionaries in Yarinacocha who let me recover in their houses after my rescue. I once had a memorable experience there.

  I was invited privately by one of the families of linguists to their house. It was a really nice evening, and I once again felt really secure with these people. I was struck by the way a woman I knew by sight, as I did so many others there, asked me again and again: “Are you doing well, Juliane? I mean: really well?”

  “Yes,” I said, now starting to get a bit irritated, “yes, I’m doing well!” Why, I wondered, was this woman insisting on this question?