7/1/2023 0 Comments Annette haven![]() She knew she needed water, for instance, so she made a plan. Reading them, she realised that in the jungle, her behaviour had been textbook. Some – mostly the dads – pressed books about survival into her hands. At dinner parties, she was a prized guest. Years later – after Herfkens married her colleague Jaime Lupa, moved to New York and had two children – friends of her daughter, Joosje, and their parents quizzed her on her experience in Vietnam. Both of them tried Ritalin, but found it inhibited their sense of humour.) (She has experience in this department, because her son, Max, 23, is autistic. She learned to be “inventive and charming” and thinks that if she had “had Ritalin as a kid, I would never have developed the qualities I had for surviving the jungle”. Growing up, she was reckless and forgetful, routinely mislaying her hockey stick. Herfkens thinks that she probably has attention deficit disorder and that if she were a child now “they definitely would have diagnosed me”. I definitely chose flight’ … Annette Herfkens in hospital after the crash. I didn’t have parents telling me what I should do and feel. “I was the youngest child – I grew up with a lot of love – but I was left alone. Herfkens, who now works as an inspirational speaker, has often thought about what enabled her to survive – why was she the only one to make it? Did her innate qualities somehow equip her? Over the years, she has come up with lots of explanations. ![]() “And by breathing, I got back into the moment, back into the now.” I panicked.” Her collapsed lung made it hard to get the air in. When, after a couple of days, the man who had been beside her died, Herfkens realised she was alone in the jungle. In some ways, this mindfulness was foisted upon her by her body. “I trusted that they were going to find me … I did not think: ‘What if a tiger comes?’ I thought: ‘I’ll deal with it when the tiger comes.’ I did not think: ‘What if I die?’ I thought: ‘I will see about it when I die.’” She describes this experience of “moment after moment after moment” as mindfulness before its time, before we all knew the word for it. I trusted that they were going to find me It seems incredible, given that she had no food or water, but while she waited for the rescue party, who eventually carried her down the mountain on a hammock, what Herfkens did not think was that she was going to die. She also thought of her mother back in The Hague. She had been working for Santander in Madrid, and had been the only woman on the trading floor. While she lay injured and thirsty, waiting to be rescued, she thought of the bond markets. But how could the very place her life had crumbled around her – her partner dead, along with the future they envisaged together – shift from being a place of peril to a haven?įor Herfkens, the transformation began in the hours immediately after the crash. For three decades, it has been her “safe place”, somewhere to will herself back to at times of stress and emotional need or even in transcendent moments of meditation. (A famous actor wanted to make the film before Covid, but the project stalled in the pandemic.) “I accepted that I was not with my fiance on the beach … Once I accepted that, I saw what was there – and it was this beautiful jungle,” she says.īeautiful? Did she really see it that way? Far from fearing the jungle, Herfkens says that since her escape she has sought it out in her mind. ![]() She calls this idea the “elevator pitch” for her book, Turbulence: A True Story of Survival, as well as the film or TV series she is writing. ![]() “If you accept what’s not there, then you see what is there,” she says. Time and again, Herfkens turned her focus on them, their light, their colours, movements, away from the man beside her, now dead, away from the white worm crawling out of his eyeball and the leeches on her own skin. Green and golden, sequinned with dew, sunlit through her eyelashes. The most vivid image from the hours that followed the crash, and from the subsequent eight days Herfkens spent in the jungle with the moans and cries of her fellow survivors slowly silencing, was of being “surrounded by leaves”. And then I must have crawled another 30 yards” – away from the wreckage. “So I must have crawled out of the plane and lifted myself down. “It must have been excruciating pain to get out of there.” First there was “the emotional pain of seeing Pasje dead”, and then the physical pain: 12 broken bones in her hip and knee alone her jaw was hanging one lung had collapsed. She is speaking on a video call from her holiday home in the Netherlands (she is Dutch, but usually lives in New York). “That’s probably self-protection,” she says now. She sounds matter-of-fact, but she has had time to become analytical about her behaviour: the crash happened 30 years ago, in November 1992. Annette Herfkens with Willem van der Pas in Peru, 1983.
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