Nate knew number five on his list was more common that any pilot liked to admit. Sometimes a pilot would change plans in the middle of a flight, or in an emergency a pilot would be tempted to take a risk and hope that there was enough fuel in the gas tank to make it the extra distance.
Nate felt there had to be some way to lessen the chance of an airplane engine’s quitting over the jungle. But what was it? There were so many different ways the fuel supply could be cut off. He tried to come up with the answer, but nothing seemed to suggest itself as a solution. Then one day, as he worked away in the MAF hangar at Shell Mera, a truck went lumbering along the road on its way to Ambato. Lots of trucks passed Shell Mera on their way to Ambato, but something about this one caught Nate’s attention. A boy was sitting on the roof of the truck cab with a five-gallon can of gas and a siphon tube. On the truck’s fender beside the engine was another boy. He held the other end of the siphon tube. He tweaked the end of the tube with his fingers to control the flow of gas as he aimed it into the truck’s air cleaner.
Nate laughed out loud when he realized what the boys were doing. With their tank of gas and siphon tube they were feeding fuel into the truck’s carburetor in a tiny stream, completely bypassing the truck’s own fuel storage system. It was a simple and ingenious trick, and it gave Nate inspiration. Why not use the same idea to bypass the fuel storage system of an airplane in an emergency?
Nate ran to the house and grabbed two of Marj’s cooking oil cans. Back in the hangar, he beat them into the shape of a three-gallon tank and soldered them together. Then he cut a piece of balsa wood and shaped it into a cowling to go over the tank to make it aerodynamic. He strapped the tank and the cowling onto the left wing strut, and then he took a length of copper tubing and used it to connect the tank made from cooking oil cans to the manifold intake of the plane’s engine. He put a valve on the end of the tubing and made a control rod from the valve to the instrument panel inside the plane. With the rod he could control the flow of fuel from the can to the engine.
It was dark by the time Nate finished his project, too dark to take the plane up for a test flight. So he put his tools away and headed to the house for dinner. All evening he thought of reasons why his new invention wouldn’t work. After all, if the solution really was that easy, why hadn’t someone thought of it before? And what if not enough fuel flowed through the copper tube and starved the engine, or too much flowed and flooded it?
By the next morning, Nate had almost reasoned himself out of taking the airplane up for a test flight—almost, but not quite. He tested the extra fuel tank in the hangar first. He started the engine and then gunned it before shutting it off and pulling the control rod he’d made the night before. When he shut it off, the engine didn’t miss a beat as it changed from its own fuel supply to the one in the tin can strapped to its wing. The whole thing worked like a charm.
Still it was one thing for it to work while the plane was sitting still and level on the ground. Now Nate needed to know whether it would work in flight. He took off in the plane and circled Shell Mera about two thousand feet above the airstrip. Then Nate did the one thing that a pilot tries to avoid at all costs; he shut off the regular flow of fuel to the engine. Within a few seconds, the engine began to sputter. Nate reached down and pulled the control rod for his emergency device on the instrument panel, and the engine shuddered back to life. Twenty minutes later, the engine was still humming along on its emergency fuel supply. Nate tested the system every way he could think of. He banked sharply one way and then the other. He climbed rapidly and then put the plane into a dive. In every instance, the cooking oil can fuel tank worked perfectly, and the engine never once faltered.
Nate could hardly wait to land the plane and share his success with Marj. With just four pounds of added weight and less than a dollar’s worth of parts, he had solved a problem that could save many lives in the jungle, maybe even his own.
He wrote to MAF headquarters in California about his invention. Jim Truxton agreed that it was a great safety improvement, and like Nate’s suggestion about fitting shoulder harnesses, he ordered all MAF planes to be fitted with Nate’s “tin can lifesaver.” Nate also applied for a patent for his invention and approval for it from the Civil Aeronautics Authority. He received both.
Nate’s mind was running in other directions, too. In 1949, some of the students in his Sunday school class told him they would be leaving Shell Mera. After eleven years at Shell Mera, Shell Oil Company had decided to stop any further exploration in the Oriente. There was certainly oil beneath the jungle, but the company had decided there wasn’t enough oil for it to be a profitable operation.
Since Shell Merita and the MAF property were leased from Shell Oil Company, Nate and Marj wondered what would happen to them. In fact, they wondered what would happen to all the buildings at Shell Mera. If someone didn’t use them, they would quickly be overrun by the jungle again. Nate and Marj discussed the situation and came up with a big plan. Why not have MAF buy the property that the house and hangar sat on, as well as the airstrip and a little extra land on each side. Then it could get one of the other missionary groups working in the area to buy the property with the other buildings on it. Nate discussed the idea with his friend Frank Drown, who was a missionary with the Gospel Missionary Union. Shell Mera, it turned out, was just the facility his mission needed for a planned Bible college to train local Indian Christians.
And so, the headquarters for Shell Oil Company’s exploration of the Oriente became the permanent home of MAF and the Berean Bible Institute. The facility, which had cost Shell Oil Company more than sixty thousand dollars to establish, was sold to both groups for a tenth of its value. Nate and Marj couldn’t have been happier. Things were going better than they could have possibly hoped.
Chapter 10
Raising the Roof
Nate and his older sister Rachel had a lot to catch up on when she came to visit in mid-1951. Of course, the first thing Rachel wanted to do was see her new nephew, Steve, born to Marj and Nate in January 1951. Steve was a happy, bouncy boy, and he took an instant shine to his Aunt Rachel. As Rachel and Nate sat together in the evenings and sipped coffee or lemonade and watched Mt. Sangay’s crater glowing in the distance, Nate told her all about his emergency fuel tank device and his bucket drop technique. Rachel laughed as she listened. Nate hadn’t changed much from the little blond boy back in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, full of dreams and schemes.
Rachel, in turn, told Nate all about her decision to become a Bible translator and about the two years she had worked among the Shapras Indian tribe in Peru. In 1948, at thirty-five years of age, Rachel had left the rescue mission in New Jersey where she had been working successfully with recovering alcoholics to become a missionary in the Amazon region. Her friends thought she was crazy, but deep inside, Rachel felt a call and a promise from God that centered around one verse: Romans 15:21. The verse said, “Those who have never been told of Him shall see and those who never heard shall understand.” Rachel felt that God was calling her to make contact with a tribe which had never before heard the gospel message, and when she did make contact, she believed they would understand the message and respond to it.
After attending Wycliffe Bible Translator’s jungle training camp in El Real, Mexico, near where Nate had repaired the crashed Waco biplane, Rachel had moved on to Peru. There she worked with two other Wycliffe missionaries translating the New Testament into the language of the Shapras Indians. It was challenging work, and Rachel loved it. But rewarding as the work was, somehow she felt it wasn’t God’s final destination for her. She felt there was another tribe God would lead her to, and there, amid that tribe, she would truly fulfill the promise from the verse in Romans.
Nate listened to all she had to say. Then several days later, when he took Rachel up flying with him, he flew out across the jungle before banking steeply to the left. As the plane turned, he motioned with his head in the direction of a ridge about ten miles away off the right side of the plane. “There’s your tribe, Sis, just beyond that ridge,” he said. He told her the little he knew about the Auca Indians. But Rachel was hardly listening; somehow she knew beyond a doubt that they were the people God was calling her to. She didn’t know how it would happen, because Wycliffe Bible Translators didn’t even work in Ecuador, but she knew God would arrange it. When Rachel returned to Peru and the Shapras Indians, she went back with a new excitement for all God had planned for her in the future.
By the time 1952 rolled around, Nate and Marj had been stationed at Shell Mera for three years, and it was time for them to take an extended break. MAF sent Bob and Keitha Wittig to take their place while they were away. After the Wittigs had settled in and Nate had oriented Robert to jungle flying and the locations of the various mission stations scattered across the Oriente, Nate and Marj gathered up three-year-old Kathy and one-year-old Steve and headed for the United States, where the kids would meet their grandparents for the first time.
Back in the United States, the Saints moved into a cottage on a missionary housing compound in Glendale, California. Grandma and Grandpa Farris, Marj’s parents, moved into a house nearby. They, of course, were excited to be near their grandchildren. Having Marj’s parents close by worked out well for Nate and Marj, who were able to speak in churches or meet with MAF officials and know their children were well taken care of by their grandparents. It was also a great arrangement for the children, who were treated to many ice cream treats by their grandparents.
Their time in the United States rolled by quickly. Nate and Marj had many invitations to speak at churches across the country. Many people had heard stories of the “savage” tribes of the Amazon region, and they wanted to hear more about the region firsthand from frontier missionaries working there. Whenever the Saints spoke at a church, they made it a point to speak in the Sunday school as well. Nate and Marj both knew how important it was for young people to understand that God had a plan for their lives.
When Nate and Marj were not speaking at churches, Nate worked on new safety features for jungle planes. He was able to do this thanks to Granddad Proctor. His grandfather had died before Nate was born, but the money from his will wasn’t distributed until 1952, when all his grandchildren came of age. Nate and Marj decided to do three things with the money they received. First, they put a little of it away as emergency money in case something happened to Nate and Marj had to raise the children alone. Second, they used much of it to buy the land around Shell Merita which they gave to MAF. Lastly, they kept some money aside so Nate could experiment with new safety features.
While Nate was busy with his experiments, Marj was out buying enough clothes to last them all until they came back to the United States on furlough again in another five years. It wasn’t easy deciding what Kathy or Steve would like to wear, or even what size they would be in five years, but Marj guessed as best she could.
Nate kept in regular contact with the Wittigs at Shell Mera. The Wittigs were doing a fine job, but they were amazed at how much work Nate and Marj had to do. They understood why after three years the two of them had needed to take a break. They wrote to Jim Truxton and told him the work of MAF in Shell Mera was too much for one couple to do all by themselves. As a result, by the time Nate and Marj were ready to return to Ecuador in the spring of 1953, MAF had decided to send another couple to Shell Mera to work with the Saints. This also meant that another airplane was needed. Nate helped MAF choose a Piper Family Cruiser for the job. The Piper Cruiser had longer wings than the Pacer, which meant it could land on shorter airstrips. Nate thought it would be perfect for jungle flying.
