Eleven Days Downstream

The flight from Lima to Pucallpa was meant to take less than an hour. Juliane Koepcke, seventeen, sat by the window; her mother, an ornithologist, in the seat beside her. They were going to spend Christmas with her father at Panguana, the biological station the family had built deep in the rainforest. Halfway there, the plane flew into a storm. Juliane saw a white glow over the wing and heard her mother say, very calmly: “Now it’s over.” Then the plane was no longer around her.

She fell from about three thousand metres, still strapped to a row of three seats that spun like a maple seed. Below, the forest looked like a field of broccoli. She woke the next day on the ground, alone. She had a broken collarbone, a deep cut on her arm, one eye almost swollen shut and a single sandal. She had lost her glasses, and without them the world was a green blur. She called for her mother for hours. Only the insects answered.