Nate found a phone and called the CAMF headquarters office in Los Angeles to see what he should do about the problem. He was told to ship the propeller to Mexico City and, since time had been lost, catch a plane there himself. Nate was quite glad to be zipping through the air to Mexico City rather than rumbling along overland by train and bus.
In Mexico City, Nate was met by Betty Greene, who had flown up from Peru. She told him about the damage to the plane. Nate was stunned as he listened. What did she mean when she said he would find the two wings and the struts in baskets in the hangar at the Tuxtla airport? Surely they didn’t make baskets big enough for airplane wings to fit in. As Nate was to find out soon enough when he peered into the hangar at Tuxtla, it all depends on how small the pieces of the wings are!
Propped up behind the baskets of wing pieces was what looked like a pile of junk. As he looked more closely, though, Nate discovered that the pile of junk was actually the wing struts and pieces of the landing gear that had been removed from the plane and brought eighty miles out of the jungle to Tuxtla. Standing in the hangar, surveying all the pieces, Nate knew he was going to be in Tuxtla Gutierrez for a very long time.
Nate walked around and tried to imagine how he would tackle the job. He thought about the model planes he’d made as a boy. Perhaps he could approach the job the same way as building a model. In fact, the Waco biplane wasn’t a lot different from the models he had made. It was constructed mostly of wood and fabric; it was just a lot bigger than his model planes, and it had a real engine. He plotted out a plan to rebuild the plane. First he would make new wing parts from wood. Then he would concentrate on the struts and the wing root that held the wings to the fuselage of the airplane. Finally, he would fix the landing gear. By then, the propeller should have arrived, and he would take it and all the other parts to El Real in the jungle and assemble the wings there. The wings would be much too big to carry in one piece if he assembled them in Tuxtla.
The trouble was, Nate was a mechanic, not a woodworker. To get the job done, he would need to find a cabinetmaker who could also build airplane wing parts. But how could he find such a person when he couldn’t even speak the language? He had been working hard on learning Spanish and could count to thirteen with confidence, but he was a long way from being able to tell someone what he wanted them to do. While his Spanish had a way to go, he could draw simple pictures, which he figured anyone could understand. So with notebook in hand, he drew pictures of a man who worked with chisels and saws and went off to find such a man who wanted a job making parts for an airplane. It was an overwhelming task, but amazingly, Nate came back to his one-room house with Santiago, who had immediately understood what Nate wanted done. Santiago was also a good cabinetmaker who learned well from pictures, and he didn’t mind giving up building cabinets for a while to repair airplane wings.
The slow process of rebuilding the wings began. Nate and Santiago began working in the hangar, but the owner wouldn’t let them use their tools inside the hangar. It was too hot and rainy to do the work outside, so there was only one thing to do. The two men moved their wing-building operation to Nate’s one-room house. There wasn’t much space to spare once the two men and the two wings were inside. The house itself was made of adobe brick with a tile roof. It had a front and a back door, but no windows. The doors themselves were constructed in two halves, much like barn doors. It didn’t take Nate long to find out why they were like that. Without the doors open, the room had no sunlight. When the doors were wide open, there was plenty of sunlight, but pigs, chickens, and burros would then wander through the house to see what the two men were up to. An answer to the problem was soon discovered. With the top half of the door open and the bottom half closed, there was still plenty of sunlight to work by, but the visiting animal problem was solved.
There were other animal problems, though. Bats, rats, scorpions, and cockroaches all vied for living space in the rafters of the house. They were impossible to get rid of. At first Nate hunted them down, but as quickly as he did, more came flooding in to fill up the empty accommodation space in the rafters. He learned to be very thankful for his mosquito net, which he tucked tightly around his bed each night. The net formed a kind of boundary between his world and the world of rodents, bats, and bugs that took over the little house each night after dark.
Not only were the insects and animals a trial, but Nate also found the local food very strange. He thought of the many other uses there must be for tortillas, which tasted to him like cardboard. When he ate frijoles and the hot sauce that seemed to smother everything, his stomach revolted. In the end, his stomach would allow him to eat only tomatoes, boiled eggs, and bananas. Despite the food and the creatures in the rafters, Nate kept on working.
Each day, Nate took out the blueprints and worked on the wings, using the wood parts Santiago had crafted. He often worked late into the night. Finally, though, the heat, poor food, lack of sleep, and stress of the whole project combined to keep him in bed. He was very sick, but he didn’t know what he was sick with, and there were no doctors around to tell him. His only information came from a basic medical handbook that Betty Greene had given him. Nate lay on his stomach and propped the book on his pillow. Somehow he had to figure out what was wrong with him. He started at ‘A’ and read all the symptoms for every illness until he got to ‘J,’ where he found the word jaundice and a list of symptoms. Weakness? Yes. He could hardly drag himself from his bed to the cactus bush outside that he used as a bathroom. Yellow coloring of the eyeballs? He reached for the mirror he kept on the shelf above his bed and pulled down his lower left eyelid. There was a definite yellow tinge in his eyes. As he read through the list, he discovered just how sick he was. He needed help, and he needed it fast. He pushed the medical handbook from his pillow, rolled onto his back, and began to pray.
Chapter 6
The Remarkable Repair Job
The answer to Nate’s prayer for help came in the form of Phil Baer, a missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Phil was passing through Tuxtla on his way back to his mission station deep in the jungle, far beyond El Real where the Waco biplane had crashed. He was curious when someone in town told him about the American who was building wings in his house for a missionary airplane. Phil had to check it out, so he followed the directions to Nate’s tiny adobe house. There he found a skinny man lying half conscious in bed, with airplane wing parts and a variety of tools spread around the room.
Immediately, he could see that Nate was in trouble. He radioed his mission station and told them he would be delayed in Tuxtla for a while. Then he set to work. First, he had to help Nate get well again. He concentrated on finding good food Nate could keep down. He went to the market each morning and bought meat and vegetables to make soup. Then he tackled the huge mound of dirty clothing and bedding that had piled up in Nate’s house. There was no washing machine, so Phil had to wash everything by hand. To dry the laundry, he spread it on the cactus plant outside the house.
With good food and care, Nate’s health quickly began to improve. Before long, Nate was up and about again. Phil insisted on staying to help Nate until he had finished making the parts for the wings. Phil lived in the jungle and knew how important it was for CAMF to be successful. The plane would save missionaries hundreds of hours of traveling time and would open up whole new areas to the gospel message.
The days rushed by. Phil took over all the household chores, from washing the laundry by hand to cooking on a camp stove. There wasn’t much cleaning to do because the cactus bush outside the house was not only the clothesline but also the bathroom, and the shower consisted of three crates stacked outside the front door with a hose draped over the top of them. The crates were only shoulder high, and when he’d first arrived, Nate had been too embarrassed to shower during the day, waiting instead until nightfall. But as he quickly found out, even in southern Mexico it could get cold at night. After a few weeks of shivering in the shower, he decided to start showering in the middle of the day with the sun beating steadily on his back and the occasional neighbor chatting with him as he soaped up.
Nate was grateful for Phil Baer’s help. He realized that Phil had more important things to do than help a mechanic build airplane wing parts. But Phil never complained about the boring jobs or long hours he put in helping Nate, not to mention the time he was spending away from his wife and new baby. It was Nate’s first experience with a real missionary in the field, and he was impressed with what he saw.
Time, though, was running out for Nate. He had only a couple of weeks left on his tourist visa and had to get the job finished. He had ordered the central beam that ran the length of the wing—the spar—and the wing root that connected the upper wing to the fuselage of the plane, but so far only the spar had arrived in Tuxtla. While he waited, Nate had a big problem to solve. As he studied the instructions that came with the spar, explaining in diagram form how it attached to the wing root, he noticed that the drawing of the wing root was different from the drawing on his blueprints. One of the drawings had to be wrong, but which one? Nate knew if he got to the jungle with the wrong wing root he would have to come all the way back to Tuxtla to make another one. That would waste days, and he didn’t have days to spare.
Nate sat in front of his adobe house in the morning sun and thought about the problem. The only sensible thing to do, he decided, was to reconstruct the old wing root from the basket of pieces from the crash. He would then be able to compare it to the two different drawings to see which one was right. It took more than a day to sort out the splintered pieces that belonged to the upper wing and fit them back together into a spar and a wing root. Nate wondered as he worked which picture of the wing root would be the right one. The answer, he soon discovered, was neither. The reconstructed wing root was unlike either of the drawings; it was a completely different design!
Unfortunately, the broken pieces couldn’t be fit back together accurately enough for Nate to use the old wing root as a pattern from which to make a new one. All he could do was take the materials to construct a new wing root into the jungle with him. There he could use the wing root from the right side of the plane as his pattern for the new one.
Finally, Nate had done all he could in Tuxtla. He needed to find the Waco biplane in the jungle and finish the repairs where it had crash-landed. But to get the eighty miles to the airstrip at El Real, he needed a plane that could transport him and all his parts and equipment. Since Phil could speak Spanish, he set off to see what he could find. Some locals told him about a charter plane that flew into town from time to time. Fortunately, the plane had just arrived a few days earlier.
Nate and Phil hunted all over Tuxtla for its owner. They found him in a tavern. He was a six-foot-two-inch, blond Dutchman named Hank. Unfortunately, Hank was too drunk to talk to, so Nate and Phil decided to come back the next day. But when they found Hank the next day, he was in a bad mood from being drunk the night before and didn’t want to talk to anyone. It took several days of visiting Hank, and agreeing to pay him far too much money, to get him to fly Nate to El Real.
Dealing with a drunk, grumpy, greedy pilot opened Nate’s eyes. Is this what missionaries have to go through every time they need to get somewhere quickly? Nate wondered. How would I feel if it took two days to round up a pilot to fly my sick child to a hospital from some remote jungle location? An airplane could mean the difference between life and death. Like never before, Nate understood the importance of airplanes in missionary work. He just hoped everything went well at El Real and he could get the Waco biplane flying again soon.
