by Tod Olson
As she puts it: “I’m trying to save the rainforest that saved my life.”
caiman: a close relative of the alligator, found in Central and South America
canopy: the top branches of trees that form a sort of ceiling in a forest
fuselage: the main body of an aircraft
manioc: a long, starchy root, also called cassava, that is a basic part of the diet in the Amazon. Manioc grows well in the poor soil of the rainforest.
porter: a person whose job it is to carry baggage or other loads
silt: fine sand or earth carried by moving water
sinuosities: curves or bends
sun bittern: a colorful, long-legged bird found near forest streams in Central and South America
wood rail: a long-legged bird native to Central and South America. Wood rails have a distinctive cackling call.
When I started research for this book, I was excited about the prospect of interviewing Juliane. But when I tried to contact her in Germany, I was told she was engaged in other projects and couldn’t tell her story to me.
That left me wondering whether I should write the book at all. I know from Juliane’s memoir that she had a hard time when her story became public. She had no control over how it was told. Reporters got details wrong. They portrayed her in ways she didn’t think were accurate.
While Juliane was recovering in Yarinacocha, her father allowed reporters from the German magazine Stern to spend a couple of days with her. She was still in shock at the time. Her brain and body were protecting her from the trauma of her mother’s death. It’s a common state for disaster survivors, but the Stern reporters seemed to mistake it for indifference. The article portrayed her as courageous but cold—able to cry over the death of her pet blackbird, but not over her mother.
I had to ask whether I could do better. Could I get the story right without hearing it directly from Juliane? Could I add enough to make it worth telling again?
I had one advantage over the reporters who covered the story 45 years ago: Juliane’s memoir, When I Fell from the Sky. When the book came out, she finally started giving interviews to reporters. My guess is it still wasn’t easy for her. She is a private person who was forced into the public eye by a traumatic experience.
Juliane’s book, her interviews, Werner Herzog’s documentary, and the multipart Stern article published in 1972 became my main sources for her part of the story. But I wanted to tell the story from other points of view as well. How did the massive search for the plane progress? What was happening at the Summer Institute for Linguistics, which had lost five members of its own community in the crash? And who were the other people on the plane? In Pucallpa there’s a plaster monument where the remains of more than 50 of the flight’s victims are interred. In big letters it reads ALAS DE ESPERANZA, “Wings of Hope.” Juliane found the inscription ironic since only one person out of 92 survived: What was hopeful about that? I wanted at least some of the passengers who didn’t survive to play a role in the book.
None of this research proved to be easy. The organization that started the Summer Institute for Linguistics still exists, and their archivist tried to put me in touch with people who were there at the time. But those people had lost loved ones in the crash, and they didn’t feel comfortable putting their memories in the hands of a writer they didn’t know.
Through another missionary organization, I eventually tracked down Bob Weninger, the pilot who first spotted the wreckage of Flight 508. He gave me the name of Doug Deming, who was a pilot at the Summer Institute for Linguistics during the crash. Their accounts, plus some 550 jpegs of articles from Peruvian newspaper archives, helped me piece together the rest of the story.
Most important, I wanted to tell Juliane’s story as part of a larger narrative of the Amazon rainforest. That, I think, is the way she understands it. She is part of a long history of outside interaction with the Amazon. For five centuries, people who were not born in the forest have come to it with varied motives. Some exploited it for their own gain. Others wanted mainly to understand it. Some tried to destroy it, and others were destroyed by it.
Juliane nearly died in the forest. And yet, she refuses to think of it as a “green hell.” She approaches the rainforest with curiosity, not fear, and that attitude matters. The world’s population now numbers about 7.5 billion. It will probably climb to 11 billion by the year 2100. We carve our cities and suburbs and farms out of an ever-shrinking natural world. In Europe, for instance, less than 15 percent of land remains unchanged by humans.
How we think about that land is important. If wilderness—be it dense rainforest, frozen tundra, mid-ocean caverns, or the woods in our backyards—feels foreign and frightening to us, we’re more likely to look the other way when it’s destroyed to make way for a ranch, a mine, or an oil-drilling platform. Those activities provide resources for a growing population. But at some point, they will exhaust the planet that is our home.
As Juliane says, “nature is the host and we are the visitors.” If her story can help inspire that kind of approach to living on Earth, then in my opinion it is worth retelling.
Books
Bennet, Glin. Beyond Endurance. New York: St. Martin’s, 1983.
Chasteen, John Charles. Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence. London: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Cobb, Jerrie. Solo Pilot. Sun City, FL: Jerrie Cobb Foundation, 1997.
Cook, Noble David. Born to Die. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Cronin, Paul. Herzog on Herzog. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Forsyth, Adrian, and Ken Miyata. Tropical Nature. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984.
Ghinsberg, Yossi. Lost in the Jungle. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2009.
Gonzales, Laurence. Deep Survival. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Grann, David. The Lost City of Z. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.
Heaney, Christopher. Cradle of Gold. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Hemming, John. Naturalists in Paradise. London: Thames & Hudson, 2015.
———. The Search for Eldorado. London: Michael Joseph, 1978.
———. Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2008.
Koepcke, Juliane. When I Fell from the Sky. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2012.
Kricher, John. A Neotropical Companion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Leach, John. Survival Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994.
Levy, Buddy. River of Darkness. New York: Bantam Books, 2011.
Medina, José Toribio. The Discovery of the Amazon. New York: Dover, 1988.
Millard, Candice. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. New York: Doubleday, 2005.
Muir, Wesley. The Man Who Jumped off Clouds. Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 2000.
Noyce, Wilfrid. They Survived: A Study of the Will to Live. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963.
Rosolie, Paul. Mother of God. New York: HarperCollins, 2014.
Savoy, Gene. Antisuyo: The Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
Smith, Anthony. Explorers of the Amazon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
———. The Lost Lady of the Amazon. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003.
Suzuki, David. The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2007.
Whitaker, Robert. The Mapmaker’s Wife. New York: Bantam Dell, 2004.
Willis, Jennifer Schwamm. Explore: Stories of Survival from Off the Map. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press and Balliett & Fitzgerald Inc., 2000.
Newspapers and Magazines
I relied heavily on coverage of the crash in three Peruvian newspapers: La Prensa, El Comercio, and La Nueva Crónica. Specific articles are cited in end notes.
Magazine and web sources for details on rainforest ecology, deforestation, and aviation are cited in end note
s.
“Ein kam durch,” Stern, Jan. 16, 1972.
“El Valor de una Vida,” César Hildebrandt, Caretas, Jan. 14, 1972.
“Lansa Accident and Search Report,” Translation, April–June 1972, Wycliffe Bible Translators.
“Mit Juliane zurück in den Urwald,” Rolf Winter, Stern, Feb. 13, 1972.
“She Lived and 91 Others Died,” Robert G. Hummerstone, Life, Jan. 28, 1972.
“So habe ich überlebt,” Juliane Koepcke, Stern, Parts 1–3, Jan. 23, 30, Feb. 6, 1972.
“Sole Survivor: The Woman Who Fell to Earth,” Sally Williams, The Telegraph, March 22, 2012.
Author Interviews
Nicholas Asheshov, journalist living in Peru, Feb. 8, 2016.
Doug Deming, missionary pilot at the Summer Institute for Linguistics, Yarinacocha, Peru. Email correspondance, Sept. 26 and Oct. 16, 2016.
Ed Schertz, missionary pilot, July 2016.
Bob Weninger, missionary pilot for Wings of Hope, July 20, 2016.
Ed Zipser, pilot and professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Utah, July 21, 2016.
Prologue: December 24, 1971
Herzog describes the scene at the airport in his film Wings of Hope and in Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 268.
Accident records for the LANSA crashes can be found at the Aviation Safety Network website, http://aviation-safety.net
Only plane left: “Flight International,” May 18, 1972, http://flightglobal.com
Electra wing trouble is described in Stuart Lee, “Lockheed Electra: Killer Airliner (Part 2),” cs.clemson.edu
Details on the exchange students aboard Flight 502 are from “99 on Airliner Die in Crash in Peru; 54 Are from U.S.,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 1970.
“LANSA se lanza de panza”: Koepcke, When I Fell from the Sky, 57.
Rovalino’s and Sales Rios’s reservations described in “Pasajeros de LANSA; Una Extraña Cita con la Muerte,” La Prensa, Jan. 2, 1972.
“Don’t fly LANSA, brother”: “Estudiante Adelantó Viaje que Planeaba Para el Año Nuevo,” La Nueva Crónica, Dec. 29, 1971.
The trip to Cuzco is described in Koepcke, When I Fell, 63.
Juliane describes her time at Panguana in Koepcke, When I Fell, 47–53 and beyond.
A friend recalls Juliane’s talent for imitating tarantulas in “El Valor de Una Vida,” Caretas, Jan. 14, 1972.
The prom and the decision to fly on Dec. 24 are described in Koepcke, When I Fell, 56–57, 62.
Pumacahua’s rebellion is described in Chasteen, Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, 113–115.
Nathan Lyon’s plan is described by his mother in “6 Due Burial At Peru Post,” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Jan. 12, 1972. Profiles of both boys are in “Lansa Accident and Search Report,” Translation, April–June 1972, Wycliffe Bible Translators.
Juliane’s harrowing description of the flight can be found in Koepcke, When I Fell, 63–64. She also describes it in Herzog’s Wings of Hope while in a window seat flying the same route as Flight 508.
Timeline of Flight 508 is from the accident report, provided by the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Piloting strategies in Amazonian storms are from author interviews with Ed Zipser and Ed Schertz.
Chapter 1: The Green Hell
400 billion trees is from a 2013 study described in “400 billion trees belonging to 16,000 different species grow in the Amazon,” UPI, Oct. 21, 2013.
“The largest river”: quoted in Hemming, Tree of Rivers, 140.
“Of all the marvels”: Savoy, Antisuyo, 104.
Carletti is quoted in Whitaker, Mapmaker’s Wife, 56.
Juan and Ulloa are quoted in Whitaker, Mapmaker’s Wife, 84.
“eyes in their shoulders”: quoted in Hemming, Search for El Dorado, 173.
Orellana’s encounter with the Amazon warriors is described in Levy, River of Darkness, 158–162, 168–174.
Myth of El Dorado is discussed in Hemming, Search for El Dorado, 97–109, and Levy, River of Darkness, 17–22.
“goes about continually covered”: Fernandez de Oviedo, quoted in Hemming, Search for El Dorado, 97.
The tragic effect of smallpox on indigenous Amazonians is discussed in Hemming, Tree of Rivers, 63–65. See Cook, Born to Die, 1–14 for a general take on the decimation of Amerindians by disease.
Gonzalo Pizarro’s expedition is described in Levy, River of Darkness.
“They were so pale”: Augustin de Zarate, quoted in Levy, River of Darkness, 102.
“Some, contrary to nature”: Philip von Hutten, quoted in Hemming, Search for El Dorado, 63.
“The reports are false”: quoted in Grann, Lost City of Z, 11.
European travelers often described the subsistence skills of indigenous Amazonians. The Machiguenga people still use the mildly poisonous barbasco root to fish: “Traditional Fishing With Poison Deployed for Science,” Water Currents blog, Sept. 24, 2014, nationalgeographic.com. Omagua turtle farmers are discussed in Hemming, Tree of Rivers, 57, as are manioc farmers, 25–27. The naturalist Henry Bates got a Yuri native to train him in the use of a blowgun: Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise, 122.
“meats, partridges, turkeys, and fish”: Carvajal in Medina, The Discovery of the Amazon, 175.
See a drawing of a top-hatted European carried on the back of an Indian laborer in Whitaker, The Mapmaker’s Wife, 141. This was just one indignity in a system known as mita, in which indigenous people were taxed so heavily that they were forced to work off their debt in conditions not much different from slavery.
“For a man to eat meat”: quoted in Hemming, Tree of Rivers, 64. Hemming describes how native communities fled deep into the forest to escape Portuguese slaving expeditions. “Rarely in human history,” he says, “has so much damage been done to so many by so few.”
“This man knows nothing”: quoted in Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise, 139.
One-tenth the planet’s species: “Amazon,” worldwildlife.org
One-fifth the world’s river water: “Amazon River,” britannica .com; Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise.
More than 100 uncontacted groups: see survivalinternational .org
The story of Bob Nichols was told to me by the British journalist Nicholas Asheshov, who went to search for Nichols after he was lost. Asheshov was also one of the few reporters who was allowed to interview Juliane after the LANSA crash.
Chapter 2: Alone
The account of Juliane’s first day in the forest is drawn from Koepcke, When I Fell, 65–67 and 74–76; Herzog, Wings of Hope; and “So habe ich überlebt (How I Survived),” Stern, Jan. 23, 1972. These were the three main sources for Juliane’s part of the story, in addition to interviews Juliane gave in 2012 when her book was published. Juliane is critical of the Stern articles, so I approached them skeptically. However, they come from interviews done within two weeks of the time Juliane emerged from the forest. Herzog’s documentary was made 27 years after the crash, and Juliane’s book was written another 14 years after that.
Trees screen out 95 percent of sunlight: Rosolie, Mother of God, 6. Rosolie says of his time soloing in the Amazon: “It is the most profound loneliness imaginable, as though the rest of the world had ceased to exist.”
The work of leafcutter ants is described in Kricher, Neotropical Companion, 133–135.
“There is a weird gloom”: quoted in Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise, 11.
The cutthroat lives of lianas are described in Forsyth and Miyata, Tropical Nature, 47–50.
“Do-nothing sickness” is discussed in Leach, Survival Psychology, 43–45; and Gonzales, Deep Survival, 196.
“Strange how the shallow little footpath”: Savoy, Antisuyo, 104.
Chapter 3: Follow the Water
The account of Juliane’s second, third, and fourth day in the forest is based on Koepcke, When I Fell, 77–80; Herzog, Wings of Hope; and “So habe ich überlebt,” Stern, Jan. 23, 1972.
The scene at the Summer Institute comes from
Translation, April–June 1972, Wycliffe Bible Institute; and my interview with Doug Deming.
“LANSA PLANE LOST”: “Se Pierde Avion Lansa: 92 A Bordo,” La Nueva Crónica, Dec. 25, 1971.
Rumors: “Habría sido localizado el LANSA en una quebrada; FAP dice que no hay nada,” El Comercio, Dec. 26, 1971.
“any rumor that has circulated”: “Dramática es la Búsqueda Del Avión que Desapareció,” La Nueva Crónica, Dec. 26, 1971.
“You can’t even carry a brick”: “Intenso Drama Viven Familiares de los 92,” La Nueva Crónica, Dec. 26, 1971.
Blood drive in Pucallpa is described in “Intensifican en Selva La ‘Operación Rastreo,’” La Nueva Crónica, Dec. 26, 1971.
“A distant railway train approaching”: quoted in Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise, 49.
“I had never been so terrified”: Ghinsberg, Lost in the Jungle, 187.
Where the real dangers lay: Koepcke, When I Fell, 71–72. Stern quotes seventeen-year-old Juliane as saying, “My parents taught me all about the dangers of the jungle—for example, that the big animals—the ocelots, jaguars, or tapirs—aren’t what’s dangerous; but rather it’s the small animals—the insects, the spiders, ants, flies, and mosquitoes.”
The 19th-century naturalist Henry Bates did actually come across a Goliath spider killing two small finches it had caught in its web. Bates tried unsuccessfully to rescue one of the birds. Hemming, Naturalists in Paradise, 93.
“If you want to be a biologist”: Koepcke, When I Fell, 20.
The Stern reporters claim Juliane saw other parts of the wreckage, but she writes only about the engine in her memoir.
Chapter 4: No Shortcuts
The account of Juliane’s ordeal, from finding the three bodies to discovering the river, is from Koepcke, When I Fell, 89–91; Herzog, Wings of Hope; and “So habe ich überlebt,” Stern, Jan. 23 and 30, 1972.
Telephone lines clogged: “Familiares Confían que Alguien se Haya Salvado,” La Nueva Crónica, Dec. 27, 1971.
Bob Weninger described his search for the LANSA plane to me in a phone interview. See also, “The Twelve Days of Christmas 1971,” Aviation News, Dec. 1972.