I bought the New York Times today. It’s only a dollar more than the local paper which has really gone down the tubes. The Times is no guarantee either, posting mostly political, racial, LGBTQ, George Floyd, COVID crap as usual. But there was one big article in today's paper that caught my attention. It was about the plane that went down in the Amazon back in 1971 and only one person survived, a 17 year old girl.

I was hoping the story would provide more crash and survivor detail, what she ate or drank and how she managed to find her way out of the jungle - but it was more about her life today, some kind of zoologist just like her parents. Her mother died on the flight.

There was one part of the article that was right up my alley. When the plane went down it came apart in midair two miles up with the section the girl was in separated from the rest. She flew out of the plane in her seat which spiraled downward like one of those maple tree seeds that looks like a helicopter blade. She fell 2 miles and survived with a broken collarbone and other relatively minor injuries.

I am going to type it off the page. The start of the part of the article concerning her recollection of — “Her 4th day in the jungle when she came upon a row of seats. Still strapped in were a woman and two men who had landed headfirst with such force they were buried 3 feet into the ground with their legs jutting grotesquely upward.

“It was horrifying”, she said. “I didn’t want to touch them but wanted to make sure the woman was not my mother. I grabbed a stick and turned one of her feet carefully so I could see the toenails. They were polished, and I took a deep breath. My mother never used polish on her nails.”

She followed a narrow creek till it became a stream then a small river ending up at some kind of mining camp 11 days after the crash. I remember when this happened but wanted to read it again - just the juicy parts. Something funny about corpses strapped into seats crashing to the ground. Lethal dead heads. You don’t want to get in their way. It’s like a self driving car only worse. Anyway, it’s articles of this nature that brought me to newspapers to begin with. Of course this article had it’s moments but dwelled mainly on biodiversity and the preservation of the rain forest and animal preserves and so forth. Not exactly what I was hoping for but a pleasant departure from the norm which of course existed on just about every other page of the rag.

The girl stumbled into a mining camp where the workers fed her cassava and poured gasoline into her open wounds to flush out the maggots that “protruded like asparagus tips”, she said. I love these survivor stories. In the end I don’t care if they survive or not, I’m looking for the drama. Sometimes a part of me is rooting them, sometimes not. That’s the beauty of reading this kind of stuff, you can get deep into it without being directly involved, which is my standard motif for life in general.

I have a deep seated need to read about airplane seats planted deep in the ground.

On Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 12:48:59 AM UTC-4, jazee...@gmail.com wrote:
> I bought the New York Times today. It’s only a dollar more than the local paper which has really gone down the tubes. The Times is no guarantee either, posting mostly political, racial, LGBTQ, George Floyd, COVID crap as usual. But there was one big article in today's paper that caught my attention. It was about the plane that went down in the Amazon back in 1971 and only one person survived, a 17 year old girl.
>
> I was hoping the story would provide more crash and survivor detail, what she ate or drank and how she managed to find her way out of the jungle - but it was more about her life today, some kind of zoologist just like her parents. Her mother died on the flight.
>
> There was one part of the article that was right up my alley. When the plane went down it came apart in midair two miles up with the section the girl was in separated from the rest. She flew out of the plane in her seat which spiraled downward like one of those maple tree seeds that looks like a helicopter blade. She fell 2 miles and survived with a broken collarbone and other relatively minor injuries.
>
> I am going to type it off the page. The start of the part of the article concerning her recollection of — “Her 4th day in the jungle when she came upon a row of seats. Still strapped in were a woman and two men who had landed headfirst with such force they were buried 3 feet into the ground with their legs jutting grotesquely upward.
>
> “It was horrifying”, she said. “I didn’t want to touch them but wanted to make sure the woman was not my mother. I grabbed a stick and turned one of her feet carefully so I could see the toenails. They were polished, and I took a deep breath. My mother never used polish on her nails.”
>
> She followed a narrow creek till it became a stream then a small river ending up at some kind of mining camp 11 days after the crash. I remember when this happened but wanted to read it again - just the juicy parts. Something funny about corpses strapped into seats crashing to the ground. Lethal dead heads. You don’t want to get in their way. It’s like a self driving car only worse. Anyway, it’s articles of this nature that brought me to newspapers to begin with. Of course this article had it’s moments but dwelled mainly on biodiversity and the preservation of the rain forest and animal preserves and so forth. Not exactly what I was hoping for but a pleasant departure from the norm which of course existed on just about every other page of the rag.
>
> The girl stumbled into a mining camp where the workers fed her cassava and poured gasoline into her open wounds to flush out the maggots that “protruded like asparagus tips”, she said. I love these survivor stories. In the end I don’t care if they survive or not, I’m looking for the drama. Sometimes a part of me is rooting them, sometimes not. That’s the beauty of reading this kind of stuff, you can get deep into it without being directly involved, which is my standard motif for life in general.
>
> I have a deep seated need to read about airplane seats planted deep in the ground.

This story is probably a real downer for other people who's mother was also on that plane and did paint their toenails. Did she check the dude to see if it was her dad? Maybe the seats got rearranged on the way down.

"This story is probably a real downer for other people who's mother was also on that plane and did paint their toenails. Did she check the dude to see if it was her dad? Maybe the seats got rearranged on the way down."

Sorry, her father was not on the plane. Most of the mourners are probably now as dead as those they mourned. The minute someone dies they are every bit as dead as someone who died 10,000 yeas ago, so powerful is the equality of death. But it wasn't always that way. For a long time the newly dead had to fight for acceptance. It changed when MLK and JFK and Bobby arrived on the scene. Now when a newbie arrives they are ridiculed as 'outsiders' or 'invaders'. All are welcome in the world of death.

It changed one day during the hazing of a group of newcomers when a disgusted Abe Lincoln stepped in and put a stop to it. "We were born equal", he said, with words rivaling those of his famed Gettysburg Address, "and we are equal in death as well. It is true, we have come over the hill, but we must live in peace in the valley of death." This is where the song about Abraham, Martin, and John coming over the hill came from.

In the afterlife there is no seniority, no favoritism, no nepotism of any kind. Yes, every so often there are friendly disputes among the dead over who had the most dramatic or memorable death but they never get out of hand with Honest Abe, Bobby, JFK, and the Right Honorable Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior running the show. They keep the peace in a place where a lot of big-time egos are always on edge. They were famous when they were alive - keepers of the peace - and now in death they are Wyatt Earp, Elliot Ness, Bat Masterson, Matt Dillon, Dan Matthews, andJoe Friday all rolled into one. Working as one they helped tame what once was the roughest, meanest, and deadliest underground megalopolis of all time - Boot Hill South - a little big town that has no industry but never stops growing.

Get out of Dodge!