## Waking on the Forest Floor
She regained consciousness the following morning — Christmas morning, 1971.
The forest was around her. She was on the ground, in the debris field of what had been a passenger aircraft, in the Amazon rainforest of Peru, with no one near her that she could see or hear.
Her injuries, as she later catalogued them: a broken collarbone. A torn cruciate ligament in her left knee. A deep laceration on her right arm. An eye injury. A concussion. She had lost her glasses. She had one sandal and a sleeveless mini-dress. She had a bag of boiled sweets, salvaged from the crash site.
In terms of what she had to navigate eleven days of jungle terrain with, this inventory is not reassuring. The knee injury made walking painful. The collarbone made certain movements difficult. The eye injury and the loss of her glasses made vision unreliable. The dress provided no protection against insects. The sandal provided partial protection for one foot.
What she had, beyond the inventory of injuries and the bag of sweets, was knowledge. She knew where she was in the most important sense: she was in the Amazon basin, and in the Amazon basin, following water downstream was how you found people. She knew that the sounds and behaviors of the animals around her could tell her things. She knew that insects, not large predators, were the primary practical threat. She knew, from living at Panguana, what the rainforest actually was as opposed to what it appeared to be in the imagination.