Truth and Miracles: Werner Herzog, Sansa Stark, and the Girl Who Fell From the Sky

Abstract

Truth and Miracles:Werner Herzog, Sansa Stark, and the Girl Who Fell From the Sky Micah Perks (bio) This girl grew up deep in the forest. Her parents sent her to school in the city. When she graduated, her mother traveled from their forest home to fetch her, but the daughter begged the mother to delay their return so she could attend her first ball. The mother relented, the girl wore a brightly patterned long dress with puff sleeves, and on Christmas Eve they boarded a plane with a poor reputation. Twenty minutes before landing the plane flew into a thunderstorm. The day turned to night, the plane rattled. There was screaming. Christmas cakes and presents burst out of the luggage compartments. Light flashed over the wing. Her mother said, Now it's all over. As if the mother had conjured it, the plane and everyone in it disappeared. Only the girl was left, seat-belted at the end of her row, abandoned two miles above the earth. She heard the wind and saw the bright green of the trees far below. Instead of falling like a stone or like an ordinary person, the girl spun, round and round, down and down, like Dorothy in her tornado or Alice in her rabbit hole, or like a winged seed. This is a true story. [End Page 129] In his Minnesota Declaration, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog writes, "[F]acts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable . . . there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth." The girl awoke cocooned in mud underneath her seat. She emerged, deep gashes on her leg and arm, a broken collar bone, a concussion, wearing a minidress and one white sandal, with one eye swollen shut and without her glasses. Through her single nearsighted eye she could see no sign of person or plane. She called for her mother. The rain forest ignored her, intent on its own raucous business, croaking, ticking, chattering, dripping. The forest smelled like the smell that rises when a woman's water breaks, which also smells like semen, which smells like the rotting fruit of the female ginkgo, the oldest living tree on the planet. To the girl it smelled like home. Amidst all this rowdy fermentation, the girl was not afraid because her mother had taught her how to manage in the woods. She assumed her mother and everyone else had already been rescued. She ate some candy she found, a piece of a drenched Christmas cake, then followed a rivulet until she heard the call of the hoatzin birds which her mother had told her meant open water. She swam and walked, day after day, drinking river water. After several days she began to pull maggots out of her wound. Sharp-toothed caimans dove past her legs, but did not bite her. Once, she scared up a great cluster of white butterflies. The girl grew weaker and weaker, but she kept wading. On the twelfth day, she discovered a moored boat. She pulled herself up the path beside it and collapsed inside a small shack. In her delirious hunger she tried to catch and eat a small frog she knew to be poison. When the woodcutters returned home, they believed they had discovered Yacumama, the water mother, beached on their dirt floor, perhaps because all the vessels in her eyes had burst when she spun to earth, and both her eyes, including the irises, had turned blood red. As the woodcutters boated her out, a woman on the shore cried, Those eyes, I can't look at them! Oh, god, those terrible eyes. [End Page 130] The girl with the terrible eyes was Juliane Koepcke: seventeen-yearold Peruvian German, sole survivor of LANSA Flight 508 that originated in Lima, Peru, and never arrived in Pucallpa, Peru, on Christmas Eve, 1971. After Juliane rescued herself she became an instant international celebrity, mobbed by journalists, some of whom mangled her story and harassed her in ways she would never forgive. In 1974 the Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Maria Scotese made Perdida en el Infierno Verde/Lost in a Green Hell, what Scotese called the "official...