As Nate trudged on, footprint after footprint, his mind began to tell him there was something strange about what he was doing. But what was it? He was so cold he was having trouble thinking straight. And then it dawned on him. It was the shape of the prints. Douglas Whiteside would be wearing boots in weather like this, but the footprints Nate was following were bootless. Not only that, but the feet making the footprints were each about seven inches wide. Nate fell to his knees and looked closer. The footprints he was following had been made by a huge bear. He had been following a bear up the mountain!
There wasn’t much he could do about it now. If there was a bear on the trail ahead of him, he’d just have to deal with the situation when he got to it. Right now it was taking all his effort just to keep moving. He struggled on for about another hundred yards before the bear prints finally left the trail and headed toward a rocky ridge.
Totally exhausted, Nate fell into the snow. His legs would no longer do what his brain told them to do. He felt sure he was going to die right there in the middle of the trail. He didn’t fear dying. Instead he felt angry, angry at himself for getting into the trouble he was in. How could he have been so stupid, so careless? He thought back to the New Year’s Eve service in Detroit where he had dedicated himself to be a missionary. Now, because of his foolishness, he would never realize that dream. Instead, he had thrown his life away in a foolhardy hike up a mountain in bad weather.
Sitting there thinking about the trouble he was in got Nate so angry with himself that somehow he found the energy to get back on his feet and keep trudging. As he walked, he began doing something he should have done a lot earlier: He began to pray. He didn’t plead with God or make any bargains like, “If you just get me out of this mess, God, I’ll do so and so.” No, Nate had already committed his life to serve God as a missionary after he got out of the army. Instead, Nate thanked God for all the wonderful things He had done for him. As he prayed prayers of gratitude, a great feeling of peace came over him. In fact, he felt happy, and a broad smile spread across his face.
After a while though, despite the peace he felt inside, he became so exhausted that his mind went blank. Somehow his body kept moving. He became aware of dark shadows ahead of him. As he stumbled forward, the shadows became trees. He searched the sky above him for the phone wire. Finally, he spotted it running into the trees. With his eyes now fixed on the wire, he kept on going. Finally, the wire disappeared into a cabin. He’d made it! Or had he? There was still another hundred yards to go to reach the cabin, and his body was too exhausted to go on. His legs buckled beneath him, and he slumped face down into the snow. His face was so numb he couldn’t even feel the icy cold of the snow pressed against it. What a shame to walk so far and die within sight of help. The thought slowly crept across Nate’s mind. After several minutes lying in the snow, he again found the energy to will his body to stand up and lurch forward. Stumbling footstep after footstep, he got closer and closer to the lodge. But before he reached the building, he had to stop twice more to gather his energy. At last, he fell against the door of the lodge. He called out. It was a pitiful, breathless call, but somehow it got Douglas Whiteside’s attention. As the photographer swung the door open, warm air rushed against Nate’s face. Nate pushed past Whiteside and collapsed onto the nearest chair.
Douglas Whiteside was surprised at his unexpected guest, but he quickly sized up the situation. He poured some soup into a pan on the stove and dragged Nate to his bed and took off his wet clothes. Within an hour, Nate was fast asleep with hot soup warming his insides and a well-stoked fire heating his outsides.
The next day Nate told Douglas Whiteside all about his foolish trip. He wanted to head right back down the mountain, but Whiteside suggested he stay put for a while and get his strength back. This time, Nate took the advice.
The following day, Douglas Whiteside walked down the trail with Nate. He made sure they were safely below the snow line before letting Nate walk the last few miles to the start of the trail alone. Nate had left his army buddies two days earlier, excited to be alone for a while. When he got back, he was very glad to see them again. He didn’t even think about his lack of privacy as the three of them piled into their tent for the night. In fact, it was quite comforting to hear his buddies snoring away on either side of him.
Nate pulled his sleeping bag around his shoulders and thought about the perilous trip up the mountain. How close he’d come to dying from cold and exposure! And it had happened because he’d been foolhardy. He had taken an unacceptable risk.
He thought about flying. It was risky, too. But it was an acceptable risk, like hiking the trail up to Glacier Point on a warm summer’s day would be. In summer, the chances were good that you’d get all the way up there and back safely. If you took some precautions, packed some extra clothes and food, you could minimize the risk even more. Flying was like that. When you took off, there was a good chance you’d land safely. And if you were careful, thoroughly carried out your preflight safety checks, and were sure of where you were headed, you minimized your risk of crashing. But if you were foolhardy and took unacceptable risks, like flying in bad weather or neglecting safety and maintenance checks or making reckless maneuvers, you increased your chances of crashing.
Seeing how close he’d come to throwing his life away because he had taken an unacceptable risk, Nate decided there and then that for the rest of his life he would strive to minimize the risk in the things he did, especially when he was flying. He would never again be foolhardy and ignore the advice of people who clearly knew better than he did about things. With that thought fixed firmly in his mind, Nate fell sound asleep.
Chapter 5
Baskets of Wings
Finally, in February 1946, Nate was formally discharged from the army. It was time for him to head home to Huntingdon. He boarded a long train carrying discharged soldiers back east. At the same time as Nate was winding his way across the country by train, Betty Greene was flying CAMF’s first plane to Mexico. It was a four-seater, 220-horsepower, enclosed-cabin Waco biplane.
Once back in Huntingdon, Nate had time on his hands again. He wasn’t due to start at Wheaton College until the fall. To fill in the time, he bought himself a secondhand airplane and began using it to build up his flying hours. Before long, he had qualified for his commercial pilot’s and instructor’s ratings.
Three months after Nate got back home to Huntingdon, an air crash occurred that would change his life, not because he was in it but because he would have to repair the damaged plane. Betty Greene was about to finish her time in Mexico and head for Peru, and George Wiggins, an ex-navy pilot, had come to replace her. They had taken a flight together to familiarize Wiggins with the area and were attempting to land on a tiny airstrip at El Real, about a mile from the Wycliffe Bible Translator’s jungle camp in southern Mexico, when their landing went wrong. Fortunately, both pilots had climbed out of the cockpit unhurt, which was more than could be said for the plane, which lay on its side, its two left wings torn off, its propeller bent out of shape, and its landing gear broken.
Betty Greene was aware that the accident could shut down CAMF altogether. Many people were watching the organization to see whether it really was worthwhile and safe to run an airline just for missionaries. As she looked at the wreckage of the Waco biplane, she knew something had to be done fast. She and George Wiggins were both pilots, but neither of them had any idea how to fix a badly damaged airplane in the middle of a tropical jungle. But Betty Greene knew someone who did.
By the time the request for help reached Nate Saint, via Jim Truxton, the details were a little vague. Somewhere in Mexico was a CAMF plane that needed “a bit” of help. After praying about it, Nate decided to put off going to college and give his time to where it was needed most. He called Jim Truxton and told him that, if he was needed, he could be ready to go in as little as two weeks.
Two days later, a letter arrived containing a rail ticket to the Mexican border. The ticket was dated for three days away! Nate raced into action. There was so much to do: photographs to be taken for a passport, visas to be obtained, certified duplicates of his aviation certificates and ratings to be made, his plane to be sold, and a million other little things to be taken care of before he left. Amazingly, on the third day, he was sitting on a train headed south with forty pounds of tools neatly arranged in a toolbox inside his duffel bag. He never let the bag out of his sight. Without his tools, nothing would be getting repaired in Mexico.
The train had crossed the Missouri River into Kansas before it began to dawn on Nate that he’d been too busy getting ready to actually think much about where he was going. He was on a train headed for Laredo on the Texas/Mexico border. But he had not had enough time to study where he should go once he crossed the border. He pulled out the letter Jim Truxton had sent him and read it carefully. The letter contained an apartment address, Apartado 8673, Tuxtla Gtz. Mexico. He had no clue where that was, only that somewhere in Mexico, in an apartment in a place called Gtz., someone was waiting for him!
Then, of course, there was the language barrier. Nate knew that Spanish was spoken in Mexico, but he didn’t speak Spanish. As the golden wheat fields of Kansas flashed past his window, marking the journey south, he began to wonder what he’d actually let himself in for. Perhaps once he found the plane, things would be easier. After all, it couldn’t be too badly damaged, because they’d asked for only one mechanic to come fix it. Perhaps he could have it flying again and be back home in time for the fall semester of college after all.
The train continued south, and Nate was glad when, on the last day of his trip to the border, four young Mexican men climbed into his carriage. He listened to their Spanish and wondered if he could ever learn to speak the language like they did. In the end, he thought it would take him quite a while to learn to speak it that well, so he had the four young men teach him one phrase in Spanish: “Is there someone here who speaks English?” It seemed the only sensible thing to learn to say. Nate shared with the men the apartment address he was headed for. They looked at it and burst out laughing. It was a long time before they finally settled down enough to tell him that an apartado was not an apartment but a post office box. Great, thought Nate, now I’m meeting someone in a post office box in Mexico!
Together they tackled the job of finding Tuxtla Gtz. on the map Nate had tucked away in his duffel bag. Nate assured the men it must be somewhere between the Texas border and Mexico City, because that was where the map seemed to indicate most people in Mexico lived. But they could find no Gtz. between Texas and Mexico City. Slowly they scanned farther and farther down the map until they were at the bottom of Mexico where it borders Guatemala. There they found the province of Chiapas. And in the middle of Chiapas, they found the town of Tuxtla Gutierrez. On many maps, it turned out, the Gutierrez had been shortened to Gtz. Nate peered at the map, somehow hoping to get a clue as to what Tuxtla Gutierrez would be like. All he could see was a sea of unpronounceable place names, like Pijijiapan, Venustiano, and Huimanguillo.
In Laredo, Nate was going to collect a new propeller for the plane, but he hadn’t thought much about carrying it across the border to Mexico. The propeller was seven feet long, hard to disguise, and not the kind of thing someone entering Mexico on a tourist visa normally carries. The Mexican border guards thought an airplane propeller was a strange tourist item, too, and they would not let him into Mexico with it.
