Cam and Elaine honeymooned nearby for two days before getting back to work. They had bags and barrels to pack, as all their belongings were gathered up to be sent to Peru. On the way to Peru, Cam and Elaine planned to travel through Venezuela, where Cam had arranged meetings with the Venezuelan president and members of his cabinet to discuss SIL’s eventually moving into the tribal areas of the country to do translation work.
After the trip to Venezuela, Cam and Elaine were reunited with the team in an old, unfurnished house in the poor sector of Lima, Peru. Soon afterwards, the person handling the finances for the group confided in Cam that somehow the money had been counted wrong in Mexico City. Instead of there being enough to cover the group’s cost for the first three months in Peru, there was barely enough money to cover a month’s expenses, and it was going fast. Cam gave an understanding nod. By now he knew that things seldom turned out to be as easy as they had first seemed. He talked to Elaine about the situation, and she agreed they should give their wedding gifts, totaling eleven hundred dollars in cash, to help make up the difference. That amount, along with an unexpected gift of five hundred dollars from Cam’s home church in Los Angeles, was enough to pay the rent and buy food for the group.
Before long, the team of translators was scattered in pairs throughout the Peruvian jungle. Cam and Elaine set up home in the jungle at a site that overlooked the Aguaytia River. The site was also situated on the main highway from Lima and was to be SIL’s base camp in Peru. Elaine was pleased to have a hut to call her own, especially since she had just learned she was pregnant; the baby was due sometime in January 1947.
The baby, a six-pound girl whom they named Grace, was born early, two days after Christmas. At the age of fifty, Cam was a dad for the first time, and he couldn’t have been happier about it! Little Gracie, as she soon became known, was a traveler almost from the start. She was only six weeks old when she flew with her parents to the jungle camp near Tuxtla, Mexico, where a second group of recruits was waiting to be trained to go into the jungle. The second jungle camp was even more successful than the first, because Cam and Elaine had a lot more firsthand knowledge to share, since they now lived in the jungle themselves.
Time at the jungle camp passed quickly, and soon the Townsends were ready to head back to Peru. Cam helped Elaine climb into the back seat of the Piper Super Cruiser airplane and then handed in baby Gracie, sound asleep in the woven basket she used as a bed. Neatly folded beneath her was a batch of freshly dried diapers, ready for the trip. Cam waved one last time to the students as he swung himself into the seat beside his wife. He adjusted Gracie’s basket so that it lay evenly over both of their laps.
Since Betty Greene was busy flying some missionaries to another location in the Waco biplane, a commercial pilot and plane had flown in to pick the Townsends up. The pilot checked his gauges before cranking the Piper’s engine to life. He turned the plane around, set the flaps for takeoff, and gunned the engine. Soon the Piper Super Cruiser was barreling down the rough, doglegged airstrip. They were about three-quarters of the way down the airstrip when the wheels lifted off the ground. Cam reached over and squeezed Elaine’s hand. “We’ll be in Tuxtla in no time,” he said.
Both of them turned to take one last look at the students, still waving from the far end of the airstrip. As Cam looked back he knew something was wrong. The plane was so close to the trees he could hear their branches scraping against the undercarriage. And the pilot seemed to be wrestling with the control stick. Suddenly there was a tearing sound, and Cam felt the plane nosedive. He barely had time to shield Gracie with his body before the plane crashed against the side of a ravine, bounced twice, and landed on its side against a tree.
Cam lay in the wreckage, his left leg pinned under him. The smell of airplane fuel filled the air as he cautiously turned his head to check on his family. A surge of relief rushed through him when Gracie let out a loud scream and Elaine moved her head. Cam heard tapping on the window, and he turned to see an Indian man peering in at them.
By now fuel was pouring into the airplane, and Cam’s only thought was fire. Blood was gushing from his left hip, and Elaine’s foot was trapped, but the baby was free. Quickly, Cam grabbed Gracie, bundled her in the spare diapers, opened the window, and handed Gracie to the man. “Run!” he yelled in Spanish, “Run! Fire, fire!”
Terror was reflected in the Indian man’s eyes as he took Gracie and leapt away from the plane.
With Gracie safe, Cam knew the rest of them had to get out of the plane as soon as possible. He reached over and shook the pilot, who groaned but did not move. Cam could see that the pilot’s head was pinned against the control panel. He then turned his attention to his wife.
“It’s my ankle,” Elaine moaned.
Cam looked down. Elaine’s foot hung loosely at the end of her leg like that of a puppet. “Come on,” he urged, as much for his own benefit as for hers. “We have to get ourselves out of here now. I’ll help you.”
Painfully the two of them crawled out the window of the crashed airplane and fell clumsily onto the ground.
About then, several of the jungle camp students arrived on the scene. A few moments later, Dr. Culley, who was working with the students, also arrived. Together they pulled the pilot from the wreckage and tore up clothing for bandages to bind the wounds on Cam’s leg and Elaine’s ankle. Minutes later, more students arrived with blankets, and makeshift stretchers were made from some sturdy tree branches.
Cam was conscious the whole time, and his mind was racing. He wished the folks back home could see how unreliable commercial flights could be in the jungle. Maybe then they would fund more airplanes and experienced pilots for SIL. Suddenly, ignoring the throbbing pain in his crushed leg, Cam had an idea. “Dale,” he yelled to one of the students. “Go and get the movie camera and film us and the wreckage before we’re moved. People back home need to see this!”
Dale Kietzman looked stunned for a moment, and then he sprinted off to do as Cam had asked. Within minutes, the footage was shot, and the three injured people were lifted up the side of the ravine and taken back to one of the huts at the jungle camp. Dr. Culley tended to their wounds as best he could, and he was very relieved when a radio call to President Cárdenas produced another doctor, a nursing assistant, and an array of bandages and drugs to treat the patients.
It was twelve days before either doctor felt that the three injured patients were stable enough to be transferred to a hospital in Mexico City. Little Gracie, who was unharmed by the accident, stayed behind to be looked after by the students and teachers at the jungle camp.
Once they were relocated to a hospital, both Cam and Elaine had surgery to repair their injured legs. Cam’s thigh was so badly injured that a metal plate had to be permanently inserted to add extra support. And Elaine’s ankle required major reconstructive surgery. As a result, Elaine was unable to walk without the aid of crutches for six months, and the injury was to bother her for the rest of her life.
Despite the pain Cam and Elaine endured, two good things did come out of the plane crash. First, Cam stayed still long enough to complete Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexican Democrat, the biography of the president he had been working on for years. Second, Cam realized that SIL needed to have its own airplane service in the jungle. CAMF and Betty Greene had been very helpful, but there was no way Betty’s organization would be able to grow fast enough to cover all SIL’s needs. Even though SIL funds had dropped to an all-time low, Cam began making notes on exactly how a jungle aviation service should operate.
As soon as he was well enough, Cam went to the United States, where a SIL board meeting was being held. Many encouraging things were shared at the meeting. Ken Pike was preparing to start a Camp Wycliffe in Australia to train linguists to translate the Bible into the many aboriginal languages spoken in Australia. And nearby New Guinea had entered the world’s spotlight during World War II. No one knew how many languages were spoken in the mist-shrouded highland areas of the island. Few white people had set foot in the thousands of square miles of mountainous interior.
When Cam introduced his idea for an aviation department, the atmosphere in the room turned glum. No one had much enthusiasm for the project. The other six members of the board argued that it would cost an enormous amount of money to set it up and just as much to keep it running. Besides, it was hard for them to see just what business missionaries had with airplanes.
Cam reasoned with the board members. He told them that in his view, being in the jungle meant they were in aviation whether they liked it or not. In the end, Cam did not manage to bring the group around to his point of view, but he did get them to agree that the project could go ahead on one condition: Forty thousand dollars had to be in the bank for the project by the next board meeting, scheduled for 1949.
Chapter 18
The Pavilion
Cameron Townsend had no doubt that God wanted SIL involved in aviation. Everywhere he went he enthusiastically spoke about his vision of having airplanes ferrying Wycliffe Bible translators in and out of the jungle all over the world. Soon others began to embrace the vision, too. A small committee was set up to oversee the project, and money began to trickle in. A grocer in San Diego, California, donated a small airplane that was sold and the money put away in a designated bank account to buy bigger, more useful aircraft.
Even after he returned to Peru to continue his work there, Cam was constantly writing letters to people and explaining the need for reliable transportation for SIL missionaries. Just to underscore the point he was making, into each letter he would tuck a few photographs of him and Elaine in the hospital after the plane crash.
Besides letter writing, the Townsends had a lot to keep them busy. They built a new hut for the three of them to live in, and then they added an extra room when they found out Elaine was expecting a baby due in May 1948. Cam and Elaine named their second daughter Joy.
The Townsends did not have much money to buy building materials, and Cam did the best he could with what he had. He nailed together a wooden frame for the roof and walls, and Elaine sewed together some sheets of canvas fabric which were then pulled over the frame to form a roof and walls. Although the hut looked like a big tent, it was Cam and Elaine’s first home, and they loved it, at least until the rainy season came. During the rainy season, the hut became unbearably hot inside, and the bugs seemed to fight each other to get inside!
By September 1949, the work of SIL in Peru was progressing well, especially since the organization had added its first shortwave radio transmitter and receiver. The radio helped the Wycliffe translators keep in touch with each other, and with Dr. Altig when emergencies arose. The usefulness of the shortwave radio made Cam even more determined to work towards using airplanes on the mission field.
Towards the end of September, Cam flew to Oklahoma for the scheduled SIL board meeting. When he arrived, he found $41,000 waiting in the account to be used to buy and maintain airplanes. Cam had met the goal set at the previous board meeting, with a thousand dollars to spare. As a result, it was agreed that Jungle Aviation and Radio Service, or JAARS for short, should be established. Cam was elated by the result of the meeting.
Cam arrived back home in Peru just in time for the birth of his third child, another daughter, whom they named Elainadel. The baby was born on December 28, 1949, the day after her sister Grace’s third birthday. Elaine now had her hands full.
