dimanche 3 juillet 2011

Juliane Koepcke


On Christmas Eve 1971, in the skies above the desolate, remote jungles of Peru, LANSA Flight 508 got its ass rocked like a hurricane by a ginormous bolt of lightning that blew the entire fuselage apart like a humongoid human-filled flying pipe bomb with wings.  Juliane Koepcke, a quiet seventeen year-old high school senior on her way to visit her father, fell two miles out of the sky, without a parachute, crunching into the dirt floor of the Amazon Rain Forest with enough velocity to fracture the skull of Bahamut the World Fish.  When she somehow miraculously awoke and came to her senses (a feat which few of her fellow passengers managed to accomplish), she was still strapped in to her seat.  She had a broken collarbone, a severe concussion, deep cuts in her arms and legs, and one of her eyes had been swollen shut like Stallone the end of Rocky II.  You know, the sort of injuries you'd expect from someone who just plummeted through a few thousand feet of freefall and splashed down in a goddamned rainforest.

Juliane unbuckled her apparently-indestructible airline seat belt (she was obviously paying attention when the flight attendant was going through that whole "here's how you properly fasten your safety belt" portion of the spiel) and briefly surveyed the wreckage.  All she saw were corpses and empty seats. She was alone in the Amazon, with the thick canopy jungle above her preventing her from signaling for help, and effectively crotch-stomping any hope for a successful or timely rescue.  Juliane Koepcke had no food, no tools, no gear, no powerbars, no means to make fire, no maps, and no compass.  Shit, she only had one shoe, having lost the other one during that whole "careening through the atmosphere" thing, which I guess is understandable.  It was just her and the wilderness, mano-e-womano.

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