When I Fell From the Sky

by Juliane Diller (Koepcke)

  I still remember well how my dissertation adviser, Professor Fittkau, visited me in Panguana, accompanied by two German colleagues. That was very exciting for me, of course, but also enormously important. I had realized, meanwhile, that with the manifold material I had gathered, I could not only fill a dissertation, but also spend my whole life. He not only helped me sensibly narrow down my topic, but he also made himself tremendously useful getting fires started, for the wood was sometimes damp and hard to get burning. Here Professor Fittkau turned out to be a person with extraordinary endurance. Standing in the middle of the acrid smoke, he fanned the smoldering embers with the lid of a pot without complaint until finally a decent fire emerged. He also impressed me by going into the forest without hesitation in the pouring rain to search in the streams for the midge larvae he was working on. To get hold of a tree cactus—he collected and grew cacti at home—he didn’t shy away from climbing around on dangerously rotten branches over streams and ponds. That was something he had in common with my parents: When he wanted to achieve something, there was no going back. On such trips he was game for anything.

  Alongside his teaching, Ernst Josef Fittkau was also director of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich. And so it happened that a small team of researchers from there visited us in our seclusion a few months later. Apart from that, and from the surprise ambush by a group of English journalists who simply showed up, stayed with us for a week and annoyed me with their questions, it was very quiet all year. And I enjoyed the contact with the locals—Moro’s family most of all, of course. Over time I even took on the singsong of the jungle Spanish, without realizing it. On the coast I was teased for it and sometimes called “charapita,” an affectionate colloquial term for little indigenous Amazonian girls.

  I wouldn’t have wanted to miss any of these experiences. Sometimes I even think with a certain wistfulness of those months, which count among the most wonderful of my life to this day.

  And my awe of the rain forest habitat truly developed only then, during my studies for my dissertation. Previously I had found all that interesting, new and beautiful, but now I realized that I had still lacked a deeper access to this world. As an adolescent I had marveled at everything with great pleasure, and yet in those days I was a mere observer and “appendage” of my parents. I accompanied them all the time, but remained passive myself. Only during my dissertation work did I put all my soul and energy into the exploration of nature around Panguana. Here I found time to reflect on the rain forest and its structure. And gradually I had the peculiar feeling that the green cosmos was only now truly allowing me to penetrate its secrets. And it really is a phenomenon: For at first glance you think you cannot see anything at all in this forest—many people experience that when they first set foot in the jungle. All around you are countless thriving green plants, nothing more, for the numerous animals have adapted perfectly to their surroundings. There are fingernail-sized frogs sitting on a leaf from which their coloring scarcely differs, and you can stare at this leaf for a long time without noticing them at all. Many grasshoppers, bugs or spiders seem to virtually merge with the bark of a tree or with the branches. Snakes lying motionlessly in tree branches can easily be mistaken for a twig or “disappear” perfectly in the leaves on the ground. Anyone who is unfamiliar with the jungle simply doesn’t see such subtleties. But once you get into this world, it is like gradually learning a whole new way of seeing. It is as if a veil has been lifted from your eyes, and you realize that you are surrounded by multitudinous life. This abundance can definitely be overpowering, in the truest sense of the word.

  Today I know that my parents, too, especially my mother, felt this intensely. For now I, too, took in the forest with all my senses, the endless diversity of the vegetation and wildlife and their adaptations, nature’s incredible play of colors, which often lies in tiny details and nuances, 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. And then I feel 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. And it is precisely this constant rediscovery that we scientists find so extremely fascinating about the tropical rain forest habitat—and this is especially true in Panguana, which we have been exploring for forty years and still do not fully grasp.

  It is this secret soul of the jungle, the same forest that helped me return to human life after my accident, which only now, during my one-and-a-half-year research project, reveals itself to me. Only then did I truly understand the life task I decided to take on in the distraught and so boundlessly lonely rainy jungle nights after my crash. Back then, I had resolved that if I could keep my life, I would devote it to a meaningful cause, a task serving nature and humanity. Now, having returned to the station as an adult and fulfilling a research assignment of my own, which I assigned to myself without my parents, everything was suddenly completely clear: My task has a name. And it is Panguana.

  19 Keeping an Eye Fixed on the Future

  Symbol of a dream: the majestic, sacred lupuna tree of Panguana watches over the field station in the Amazon, 2008. (Photo courtesy of Juliane (Koepcke) Diller)

  In February 1983, one and a half years after I had set off, I returned to Germany. I had spent most of that time in the jungle. Those months were enormously important for me. I had returned as an adult to the place where my life had taken such a decisive turn. I had worked as a researcher myself and discovered in my own, personal way the Amazon Rain Forest habitat. More than a decade after my miraculous struggle for survival in the jungle, I had gained a still deeper connection to it. If my eleven-day trek after the crash had been some sort of initiation, during which I already had an intimation that my life was bound to that of the jungle in a mysterious way, those eighteen months during my studies of the bats offered me conscious, adult insight into some of its secrets.

  In Germany, a move and a new beginning were waiting for me. My time in Kiel was over, my belongings packed in boxes, and now I took them and my newly gathered experiences and moved to Munich, where my dissertation adviser taught. At first I lived with my grandmother in Sibichhausen, where I had already spent so many wonderful vacation weeks. But the distance from the Munich city center was too far, and so I soon looked for a small apartment of my own in Neuhausen.

  I took the necessary subjects at the Ludwig Maximilian University for my doctorate. Parallel to that, I was able to work part-time at the State Collection of Zoology, as well as analyze the wealth of material I had gathered in Panguana.

  Here I met many colleagues, and among them was one who courted me especially charmingly. He was working on parasitic ichneumon wasps, always had advice when I needed him, and best of all: He always made me laugh. He liked to treat me to meals, we discovered that we had a lot in common, and before we knew it, we had fallen in love.

  The year after my return, I realized that I had to go to Panguana again to complete my observations, and during those three months in the summer of 1984, Erich sent me wonderful letters in Peru. When I was in Munich in September, right on time for the beginning of the lectures, we saw each other even more frequently—due to my work at the State Collection of Zoology, often even daily.

  It would take another three years before my dissertation, entitled “Ecological Separation of Bat Species in the Tropical Lowland Rain Forest of Peru,” and its oral defense were finished. As chance would have it, there was an opening for a library director at the State Collection of Zoology. Since this position corresponded to my interests and qualifications, I applied for it. As a great lover of books, I work to this day in that unique zoological library, which ranks among the largest of its type in Europe, and here find the perfect balance to my commitment to Panguana.

  In 1989, Erich and I got married in Aufkirchen, where my mother officially lies buried. My husband was interested from the beginning in Peru, and above all, of c
ourse, in Panguana, but he had not yet had an opportunity to travel there himself. And now, of all times, it became difficult, if not impossible. For in recent years the terror of the Sendero Luminoso, whose first excesses I had already encountered during my 1980 trip, had turned Peru into a country full of chaos and violence. Though it was relatively safe in Lima, traveling into the heart of the country was emphatically discouraged. Too many locals, but also foreigners, tourists as well as scientists, had been brutally massacred.

  In those years we would without question have lost Panguana, if Moro had not worked in an extraordinary way for the preservation of the research station. Just as I did, he saw in it a sort of legacy that had been entrusted to him and felt the desire and the duty to maintain what my parents had begun there so many years ago. Meanwhile, with my father’s consent, he had moved onto the grounds of Panguana. In this way he could better lend his support when necessary to the scientific guests my father permitted to visit and use the research station. After my father had returned to Germany, he stayed in regular contact with Moro, gave him orders by letter and remunerated him for his work. But now, difficult times were beginning for people in Peru and for Panguana as well.

  The Sendero Luminoso itself did not come as far as the Yuyapichis, but a different movement did, which took its name from an Inca successor executed by the Spanish occupiers: “Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru.” Though this movement distanced itself emphatically from the Sendero Luminoso and officially supported the rights of the indigenous population, it nonetheless did not shy away from bloody revenge campaigns against the tribe of the Asháninka Indians, who were supposedly traitors to the cause. And since Panguana was in the traditional area of the Asháninka, it was, of course, also affected by those confrontations. The members of Túpac Amaru collected dues from the inhabitants of the rain forest, east of the Andes, and threatened many people, also in Puerto Inca and the other small surrounding jungle towns. There were many deaths, and for one and a half years their representatives were also based in the village of Yuyapichis, where they made life hard for the locals. That Moro managed in those difficult times to protect the forest area of Panguana and to prevent anyone else from taking possession of it—for that, I will always be grateful to him and his family.

  During my stay in Peru for my dissertation work, I had tried to resume my father’s efforts to declare Panguana a nature reserve, but without success. Still, I managed at that time to obtain from the local authorities a first option on the site. My parents had actually purchased the land lawfully from the previous owner, even though it was without official papers. But no one else in the region could produce official documents about this area either. And now suddenly it was said that all properties belonged to the state, and one could only acquire them if one used them for agriculture.

  So Moro and I considered whether it would make sense to plant cocoa in a small section of the secondary forest. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Toward the end of the 1980s, it reached the point where the whole area was parceled, and state surveying engineers newly divided the land. I couldn’t come to Peru at the time, for the journey was too dangerous due to the Sendero Luminoso. On top of that, I was in the middle of my dissertation. What could we do now to ensure Panguana’s survival?

  In this critical situation Moro’s wife, Nery, declared herself willing to have grounds of Panguana temporarily signed over to her name so that they would be secure. For some neighbors had already been casting covetous glances at the forest, knowing as they did what a rich stock of precious timber Panguana boasts. But our friends defended the valuable trees, above all our glorious lupuna tree, if necessary even “with tooth and nail.” At the time Moro got a lot of trouble from the neighbors, who didn’t understand why this guy was guarding a forest in this way for faraway Germans, instead of chopping it down, selling the valuable wood and turning the land into pastures. But Moro had meanwhile grasped what Panguana is about. Today it is certain: Without him and his whole family, Panguana would no longer exist.

  The years passed, a trip to Peru was out of the question, and so Munich became the center of my and my husband’s life. We took vacations such as I had scarcely known before then: to Italy, Greece and Spain. I discovered Europe, so to speak, only now, and enjoyed that very much. At that time, during which I increasingly shied away from press inquiries and gave no interviews, when there was nothing I wanted less than to tell the story of my plane crash, over and over again, I was often overcome with a great longing for the country of my birth, but I put that off until later. I was doing well. I finally had a home, which was fundamentally different from the one I had once had in the jungle. Only the exuberant abundance of plants on our roof terrace hinted at where my heart still secretly belonged. A Polish handyman, who once had something to repair on the roof, was amazed by the lush greenery and spoke to the landlord about it. Afterward, he said extremely sympathetically to my husband: “I know, I know: wife crashed—needs jungle.”

  It was ultimately the phone call from Werner Herzog that prompted me, after a fourteen-year interval, to return to the rain forest and Panguana. I have already described the significant role this trip played in working through my accident. A second, no less important aspect was that I finally saw Panguana, Moro and his family again. It became clear to me that the time had come for me to assume responsibility for the research station, the forest and its inhabitants. That had remained first and foremost the cause of my father, who had meanwhile reached the ripe old age of eighty-four. He still attended to all matters, wrote detailed letters to Moro in which he addressed him, as he had over all the previous years, as “señor”—in the end, at some point, as “estimado amigo,” meaning “esteemed friend.” My father continued to advise students and doctoral candidates when they were interested in a topic that had to do with Panguana. And he still had research results to review and analyze from his time in Peru. During his retirement he still visited once a week the institute of zoology in Hamburg, where he offered his services to the reptile section.

  He still had so many plans. Alongside a book about the forms of human life, about which he had already been speaking when I was still a teenager, he had also begun to write his life story. Unfortunately, he only got to the first chapters, and the unfinished manuscript breaks off, of all places, shortly before his departure for Peru. In the middle of these various projects, he was surprised by a severe illness, which would lead to his death in the year 2000.

  After that, I decided to take up my parents’ legacy and enable the studies that had been begun such a long time ago to be carried on. It was a great help that my husband supported me in this from the beginning. Ever since he had come for the first time during the filming of Werner Herzog’s documentary to the place that had so decisively shaped my life, and was also responsible for my survival after the crash, he, too, had been seized by enthusiasm for this spot.

  As a first step we officially appointed Moro as administrator and my local representative and put that in writing. In this way he has an entirely different status with neighbors and authorities and can represent Panguana’s cause still better than he already did, anyhow, all those years without an official mandate. For my parents’ motivation for exploring the forest without exploiting it was still completely foreign to many locals. Meanwhile, Moro’s work has borne fruit. And of course a rethinking has taken place in Peru as well over the past thirty years. Nowadays the schools offer the subject educación ambiental (environmental education) and in this connection teachers often visit us with their classes. Slowly, but surely, the thought is beginning to catch on that it is perhaps not such a good idea to chop down the rain forest so as to raise cattle on pastures, which don’t even thrive there. Meanwhile, there are already even reforestation programs and environmental specialists to ensure that not everything is destroyed.

  The village council of Yuyapichis visited us too and wanted to become informed on-site about what we do there. They were really taken with what they saw a
nd also learned what Moro is accomplishing there. Meanwhile, Moro has turned out to be an outstanding guide in the jungle. He has not only been acquainted since his early childhood with all the animals and plants, but in the meantime he has also embraced the idea of nature conservation. How delighted I am when I witness for the first time how enthusiastically and thrillingly he is able to explain the forest to the children. Meanwhile, it has also become a tradition that every time a group of scientists comes to Panguana, the schools send a class to learn about what the people from Europe and other parts of the world are actually doing here.

  This understanding among the local population and the acceptance of our neighbors are enormously important for our work. For what good does it do if we create a tiny idyllic spot in Panguana, but all around it the rain forest is destroyed?

  To truly stop this development, I realized quite early on, we require allies—and in Peru as much as in Europe. We need resources that far exceed my private possibilities. That became clear to me at the latest when I got to see the long-since mothballed files at the ministry of agriculture. They had been created in the 1970s when my father had already begun pursuing this goal.

  A main argument of the assessment against a nature reserve was that Panguana was too small, so we had to enlarge it, acquire land, expand the research station. For that, we needed money that I could not muster privately. There seemed to be no solution in sight.