The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 10

  In all, at least five expeditions have climbed Illimani in search of the wreckage over the past thirty years. None of them found any bodies or flight recorders, nor could anybody establish what brought down the plane. Officially, it was designated a “controlled flight into terrain,” which means it couldn’t be blamed on a bird strike or an engine malfunction or hijackers. The NTSB ultimately filed its own report to supplement the Bolivian one, but it came to the same flat conclusion: the plane was destroyed because it ran into a mountain.

  As time passed, however, details emerged that invited speculation among South American journalists, the families of the victims, and anyone else still following the story. The flight crashed because of an equipment malfunction; no, the crew was new to the route and flying in bad weather; no, the Paraguayan mafia blew it up because the country’s richest man was on board; no, Eastern Air Lines was running drugs; no, it was an attempted political assassination—someone took down the flight to get at the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, Arthur Davis, who was supposed to be aboard but changed his plans at the last minute.

  The thing is, even the more outlandish theories had some ring of truth. Five members of Paraguay’s prominent Matalón family, who built an empire selling home appliances, were on the flight. The wife of the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay—Marian Davis, who had continued on without her husband—died in the crash. In 1986, a criminal indictment against twenty-two Eastern baggage handlers revealed that, for three years, the airline had indeed been used to deliver weekly shipments of 300 pounds of cocaine from South America to Miami. (Eastern declared bankruptcy in 1989 and dissolved in 1991.)

  So the mystery deepened. Theories festered and grew. Where were the flight recorders? Where were the bodies?

  One of the more comprehensive explanations came from George Jehn, a former Eastern pilot who published a 2014 book about the crash called Final Destination: Disaster. In it he theorizes that a bomb went off, depressurized the plane, and sucked all the bodies out of the cabin. Then he speculates that either Eastern or the NTSB hired Bernardo Guarachi to get rid of the flight recorders as a way of halting further inquiry into the crash, for fear that a full investigation would have revealed that the airline was running drugs for President Ronald Reagan. It’s a convoluted plot, too far-fetched to take seriously, but seductive as hell to those looking to explain the inexplicable.

  “Not one body, not one body part, no bloodstains. Why not?” Jehn said when we spoke in May. “It’s the single greatest aviation mystery of the twentieth century.”

  But the case of Flight 980 is about as cold as they come. Any remaining clues have been locked in the ice of a Bolivian glacier for decades. Trying to solve it would combine the dangers of high-altitude mountaineering with the long odds of treasure hunting—a losing hand almost every time. So here’s another question worth asking: what sort of foolhardy seeker suddenly takes an interest in a thirty-year-old plane crash?

  Dan Futrell is an affable, loud, heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. Impulsive. Persistent. In college he was the Gonzaga bulldog mascot at basketball games, dancing and making costumed mischief during time-outs. After graduating in 2007, he served two tours in Iraq. He completed Army Ranger School but decided to move on to civilian life. Now thirty-three, he manages people and spreadsheets for an Internet company in Boston, where he lives.

  To say that he misses the physical challenge of soldiering is an understatement, but that’s his preface when you ask him what kicked off his interest in the crash. Since leaving the Army, he’s made a habit of regularly scheduling sufferfests—he once took aim at all seven peaks in New England named after presidents and bagged them in one day. A little more than a year ago, he stumbled across a Wikipedia list of unrecovered flight recorders. Next to Eastern Air Lines Flight 980, the article listed “inaccessible terrain” as the reason the flight recorders had never been found.

  “Challenge accepted,” he wrote on his blog.

  Isaac Stoner, Dan’s roommate, was the first to hear his let’s-go-find-it sales pitch. Though they’ve known each other only two years, they act and argue like brothers. But where Dan has dark hair, weary eyes, and an expressive face with many angles, Isaac has the blond hair and classically handsome features of a small-market news anchor. Dan is spontaneous and emotional; Isaac is calm and analytical. After the Army, Dan attended grad school at Harvard; Isaac worked in biotech and then went to MIT.

  Finding the box sounded pretty good to Isaac. And it took priority over their other screwball ideas, like running a marathon in a suit or attempting to set the world record in the pieathlon, a 3.14-mile race in which you eat a whole pie.

  Most people still tracking this plane crash have deeply personal, often tragic reasons to care about it but very little capacity for travel and risk. Dan and Isaac had no reason but the adventure. They had no sponsorships, benefactors, or Kickstarter funding—just a crazy plan, a bit of money in the bank, and two weeks’ vacation.

  The first step was to divvy up the responsibilities. Dan was in charge of learning about the crash and its history, figuring out where to start searching, and blogging about the trip. Isaac researched the altitude, weather, skills they’d need to learn, and contingencies if things didn’t go smoothly—in short, he was tasked with keeping them alive.

  They embarked on a five-month training plan that consisted of running stairs at the Harvard football stadium and sleeping in a Hypoxico altitude-simulation tent. Four weeks before wheels up, a friend of a friend sent me a link to their blog and relayed that they’d be happy to have me along. Two days later, I was on the phone ordering my own altitude tent.

  Our primary search area was not the crash site itself, but a roughly one-square-mile patch of glacial moraine 3,000 feet below it. Flight 980 hit a saddle on the south side of Illimani, near the top, and for the past thirty-one years plane parts have been sliding down the mountain in icefalls, plunging over a cliff, and then slowly grinding downhill toward a glacier at the bottom.

  The Bolivian summer and fall of 2016 (the Northern Hemisphere’s winter and spring) had been warm and rainy, and we were told that the glacier had melted far up the mountain. The moraine—and the wreckage—was more exposed than ever. We planned to spend four days searching the debris field at about 16,000 feet, then another searching the original crash site at 19,600 feet.

  Which is how we find ourselves standing amid a heap of rental gear in a climbing shop in La Paz, three days after leaving the U.S. Off to one side, I’m nauseous and dizzy from climbing a single flight of stairs. We’re at 13,000 feet, but to me it feels like the summit of Everest. Isaac says it looks like I got hit by a large bus. He says he got hit by a smaller one.

  Meanwhile, our climbing guide, Robert Rauch, has fallen asleep in his camping chair. Fifty-nine years old, born in Germany but living in Bolivia for the past twenty years, Robert has pioneered more than a hundred routes in the country, including three on Illimani’s south side. His house has an entire room devoted to equipment for different kinds of pull-ups. He does not own a couch. Dan calls him “the most interesting guide in the world.”

  Rauch had taken an interest in the crash as well. He’d traveled through the debris field while scouting routes on Illimani and thought that a concerted, methodical search of the area might turn up the recorders and bodies. “The whole area will lie in front of us like a Google map,” he’d written in an email.

  A few minutes later, our expedition’s cook, Jose Lazo, shows up. He’s Aymara—one of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples—and he and Robert are soon telling stories about the time Jose was chased by a bear, the time Robert was chased by a condor, the time an angry mob chased the two of them out of Jose’s village and they fled 300 miles in seven days, crossing jungles and alligator-infested rivers to get back to La Paz. Dan calls him “the most interesting cook in the world.”

  Back in the store, Isaac is trying to convince Dan to rent warmer snow pants; Dan is rolling his eyes. Robert is down to his skivvies, having dropped
trou in the middle of the shop to rub his sore left knee with an herbal balm he bought on the street.

  I’m still feeling queasy, resting on a box of something or other, when a climber with a man bun sits next to me and says that a week of wind sprints before we start will help me adapt to the altitude.

  “When do you leave?” he asks.

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  To get to Mount Illimani, we tie our bags to the roof of a rented Land Cruiser and tell the driver to head south from La Paz, following the Irpavi River all the way down to 3,000 feet, where the air feels soupy and rich and our pulses finally find the low side of seventy. I feel remarkably better. Then we cross the river and drive to 12,000.

  At least it’s a rest day. Our only responsibility is riding in a car and then unloading our overstuffed backpacks and duffel bags at Mesa Khala, an abandoned tungsten mine at 15,400 feet that’s a forty-five-minute hike from the lower debris field. As we drive up the other side of the steep valley, past an active uranium mine, we round a corner and see fifty yards of impassable rock blocking the road.

  “What if we just drive faster?” Dan says.

  We’re still two miles and about 3,000 vertical feet below our base camp at Mesa Khala, and we’re going to have to hike it. So much for the rest day.

  Dan and Robert walk to the uranium mine and return ten minutes later.

  “Cinco porters-o,” Dan tells us, exhausting his knowledge of Spanish. “They’ll carry our shit-o. Up the mountain-o.”

  This is great news, except we packed like we were driving all the way to base camp, so even five porters won’t be enough. “This is how Livingstone traveled,” Isaac says, surveying the explosion of gear as we hastily jettison nonessential items—candy, notebooks, an extra stove, more candy—to send back in the 4x4.

  The ascent doesn’t kill us, but it tries. Jose sets the route, and it turns out that Aymara-style climbing consists of walking straight up the fall line. By the halfway point, I’m resting every few steps.

  Four hours later, we’ve covered the two miles to Mesa Khala. Setting up camp among the ruins, we find plane parts that locals must have brought to the mine from the debris field. Scrutinizing and discussing each one in detail, we’re transfixed, as if this random piece of aluminum tubing or that tiny drive shaft or the mechanism from an inflatable life vest might shed light on what brought down the aircraft.

  The next morning, we hike to the steep glacial moraine that marks the edge of the debris field and find more parts on the ridge. It’s exciting. This is exactly what Dan and Isaac spent five months imagining a Bolivian mystery adventure would be like—scattered clues leading to a search area laid out in front of them like a Google map.

  In fact, it was only recently that this trip went from being a simple treasure hunt to something heavier, a story about tangible grief and unexplainable loss. Only recently did they meet Stacey Greer.

  Greer has a few very specific memories of her dad, flight engineer Mark Bird. Talking on his radio. Eskimo kisses. The two of them snuggling in his recliner. She was three years old when the plane crashed.

  “My mom didn’t really talk about it a lot,” Greer told me when I called her at her home in Fort Benning, Georgia, a few weeks before we left for Bolivia. “She just said that he had been in a plane crash. As a kid, your imagination runs wild. You always ask yourself, Why couldn’t he just jump out of the plane? Crazy stuff like that.”

  She didn’t fully understand what had happened until she watched the video of his memorial service as a teenager.

  “It was just my dad’s flight helmet and a picture of him. It clicked,” she said. “There was no casket. There was no body.”

  In the past few years, Greer, now thirty-four, has started questioning the official narrative that the crash site was too difficult and dangerous to reach. She read George Jehn’s book and contacted him by email; he sent her a link to Dan and Isaac’s blog. A former Army nurse who met her husband in Iraq, she forged a quick connection with Dan, who was also in the Army and raised by a single parent.

  But where Dan carefully avoids any mention of conspiracy, favoring a more straightforward interpretation of the crash, Greer seems to have embraced the idea.

  “It’s the only plane crash that has never been properly investigated by the NTSB,” she said. “And then a few years later, Eastern goes under.”

  In total, Flight 980 carried nineteen passengers and ten crew. Eight were Americans, five of whom worked for Eastern, and seven were Paraguayans, five of whom were part of the Matalón family. There were also nine Korean passengers and five Chilean flight attendants.

  With seating for 189 passengers, the crash could have been far more deadly, and Greer never heard from any of the other families. To her it felt like everything was immediately swept under the rug. The missing bodies aren’t so much a mystery as a sign that the general public stopped caring.

  “People need closure,” she said. “Imagine one of your family members on the mountain for years, and their body has been frozen over and over and over again.”

  Robert finds the first body part. It’s a femur, roughly fourteen inches long and so dry that it’s almost mummified. You can see skin, muscle, and fat still attached.

  “That’s pretty gruesome,” Dan says. “It just sheared right off in the crash.”

  Encased in ice for more than a quarter-century, the bone likely spent several years sliding down the mountain from the crash site, several seconds falling over a 3,000-foot cliff, and—judging by the milky white marrow still visible inside the bone and its location at the base of a rapidly melting glacier—perhaps only months in the sun before being found by us. It’s 1:00 p.m. on our first day of searching.

  “Shall we say some words?” Isaac asks.

  Sure, but no one can really think of anything.

  “Shall we bury it?” Dan says.

  They dig a small grave, stacking rocks as a marker. Not long after, we find another bone—probably a tibia. Then, a few feet away, cervical vertebrae with frayed nerves still visible down the spinal column.

  As we search, the temperature swings wildly between T-shirt weather in the sun and down-jacket weather in the shade. Every hour or so, a massive block of ice—possibly carrying more plane parts—drops off the saddle and roars toward us before disintegrating into a sugary white cloud.

  Our plan was to walk a precise and thorough grid. But the search area is longer and thinner than we anticipated, a lifeless alpine moraine filled with boulder gardens and ice fields, walled off on three sides by vertical rock. Sixty-foot-tall glacier fragments and ten-foot-deep canyons force us off our pattern. So instead we spend the morning scrambling between pieces of wreckage on our own, congregating whenever anyone finds something interesting.

  This happens quite a bit. There are plane parts everywhere. First we discover pieces of fuselage and a jet engine, then wiring and toggle switches and seat belts and children’s shoes. Then Robert finds a black plastic box.

  “That’s a black box,” Isaac says when Robert holds it up. “Not the black box.”

  We see an astonishing number of contraband crocodile and snake skins, which were probably being smuggled to Miami to be made into black-market goods like shoes and handbags.

  Dan gets on the radio to tell us that he found a roll of magnetic tape. “This is either from one of the black boxes,” he says, “or it has a great 1985 movie on it.”

  Isaac and Dan also both find a few chunks of orange metal, which is exciting because—despite the name—flight recorders are painted international orange to help investigators locate them. But the pieces seem too trashed to have come from supposedly indestructible boxes.

  Most planes carry two flight recorders: the cockpit voice recorder, which documents conversation among the pilots and the engineer, and the flight-data recorder, which notes the status of the plane’s mechanical systems several times per second.

  Current specifications require that a flight recorder’s metal cas
e be capable of withstanding temperatures of 2,000 degrees, underwater depths of 20,000 feet, and impacts up to 3,400 times the force of gravity. To hit these marks, the outer shell is made from a blend of titanium and steel. It also must have an underwater locator beacon that emits a ping for thirty days.

  These standards weren’t so rigorous and uniform in 1985, and we couldn’t nail down which type of recorders were on Flight 980, in part because the airline has been shuttered for twenty-seven years. Most of Eastern’s planes used a model of flight recorder manufactured by Fairchild that recorded via magnetic tape. But not all of them. So aside from the color, we aren’t really sure what the black box will look like.

  Dan is adamant that the orange metal pieces are part of the flight recorders—but they’re aluminum, not titanium or steel. The metal must be a piece of something else on the plane; the tape could just be a home video, stashed in luggage. It feels like our discoveries have only prompted more questions: What happened on all those other expeditions? Why didn’t they find any body parts? And could you believe all those snakeskins?

  In La Paz, the theories surrounding Flight 980 have less to do with missing bodies and cover-ups and more with the dubious rumor that Enrique Matalón—then the richest man in Paraguay—supposedly carried $20 million on board in a duffel bag.

  In 2006, a Bolivian climbing guide named Roberto Gomez got wind that plane parts were turning up in the glacier below the crash site. If the wreckage was turning up, he thought there might also be a bag of money. Gomez and his team spent three days searching the glacier.

  “The strangest thing we found was lizard skins,” Gomez says when we meet in his office in La Paz. “But it was a really sad scene, because we found a lot of children’s clothes, and many pictures.”

  As Gomez tells his story, it’s clear that the Bolivian and American versions of this mystery diverge fairly quickly. The only place they overlap is at the beginning, when Bernardo Guarachi made it to the crash site and then clammed up about what he saw there.