Suddenly, from nowhere, a violent downdraft slammed into the Stinson. The bag of candies Bob was holding flew out of his hand, and the suitcases in the luggage compartment at the back were hurled against the roof of the plane. Nate knew they were in trouble. He didn’t have enough altitude to contend with a downdraft this strong. He jerked the control wheel to keep the wings level as he tried to maneuver out of the unusually strong air current. But the airplane was dropping too fast. It was plummeting, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The last thing Nate remembered was a plowed field rushing up to meet the Stinson.
Nate opened his eyes and squinted at the bright light. He was in a large room with tiled walls, and people were moving around him. He heard voices. “Give him ten more milligrams of morphine,” someone said. The words seemed to float by him. He felt a prick in his arm, and then everything went blank.
Later—Nate had no idea how much later—he opened his eyes again. This time he was in a smaller room, and Marj was standing over him. As he moved, she patted him on the hand. “Try not to move,” she said. But he couldn’t have moved even if he had wanted to. His body, from neck to hips, was encased in a giant plaster cast. His left foot was also in a cast. Marj told him he had a compression fracture of his fourth lumbar vertebra and a severely pulled ligament in his left ankle. His back was going to take a long time to heal. Nate asked about his passengers, and Marj told him Mrs. Tidmarsh had broken the small bones in both lower legs, and Bob had escaped with only bumps and bruises. Both of them would make a full recovery.
Marj, who had thought Nate would be visiting her in the hospital any day soon, was now in charge of a badly injured husband. At that moment, Nate was glad she’d become a nurse instead of the mathematics teacher she’d set out to be. After talking at length with the doctors in Quito, Marj told Nate that they weren’t sure how best to treat his injuries and that he ought to go back to the United States to be treated by a North American doctor with more experience in this type of injury.
Nate’s heart sank; they didn’t have the money for him to fly home. But Marj was one step ahead of him. Before he sank into depression over the situation, she reminded him he was an army veteran and, as such, he could get treatment at any army hospital free of charge. There was a large military hospital at the United States base in Panama, and Marj had already made arrangements for Nate to be flown there. The U.S. military had a cargo plane stationed in Quito that would ferry Nate to the hospital in Panama for treatment. Because Marj’s pregnancy was too far advanced for her to travel, she would stay in Quito and have the baby.
With a cast covering half his body, Nate looked like a mummy as he was carried on a stretcher to the military transport plane. As he crossed the tarmac to the plane, he caught a glimpse of the yellow Stinson, which lay in a crumpled heap in front of a hangar where it had been dragged. The fuselage was broken in half, and the engine and landing gear had been ripped right off the plane. As he looked at the wreckage, Nate knew it was a blessing that he was alive.
On the flight to Panama, Nate had to stay lying on his back on the stretcher, since his cast didn’t bend at the waist. He passed the time counting the number of rivets in the bulkhead. It was frustrating for him to be only a few feet from the cockpit and not be able to go up front and visit with the flight crew.
At the hospital in Panama, a battery of tests were run on Nate. After reviewing the results, the doctors decided his cast was immobilizing the wrong part of his back. The old cast would need to be cut off and a new one put on. That was the bad news. The good news arrived on January 10, 1949, the day after he arrived in Panama. It came in the form of a telegram from Quito, and it read, “Kathy Joan Saint born January 9th. All is well. Love Marj.” Nate let out a whoop of joy. Everything was fine; he was now a dad! He wrote straight back to Marj and said, “Honey, don’t be afraid to give that little gal lots of loving. She’ll need the practice for when her daddy gets home….May the Lord guide our steps until we are making footprints side by side again.”
As he lay in his hospital bed, Nate played the accident over and over again in his mind. There were so many questions that needed answers: How had it happened? What could be done to stop it happening again? How had the 9,300-foot elevation affected things? Obviously, the mountains around the airfield caused the wind to move in unusual patterns, and that was almost certainly the cause of the sudden downdraft. Still, if he’d had a bit more airspeed, the whole accident might never have happened. Letters between Nate and MAF headquarters in Los Angeles hashed over every detail of the short flight. Finally, everyone concluded that the sudden downdraft had caused the accident. But they also noted that in mountains at that elevation, downdrafts should be anticipated.
Nate also wondered whether there could have been some way to prevent his back from being broken. The lap belt had kept his hips in place, but the impact had flung the top half of his body forward, fracturing his back. What was needed were shoulder harnesses as well as lap belts. A shoulder harness would have held him in his seat and stopped him from being jerked around and injured more. Nate wrote to Jim Truxton and told him his thoughts on fitting shoulder harnesses to MAF planes. Jim thought it was a good idea and ordered all MAF aircraft to be fitted with them immediately.
Nate spent a month at the hospital in Panama before doctors decided he was well enough to return to Ecuador. His back was healing nicely, but he had strict instructions from his doctors. He was to wear his cast for another five months and then have it cut off. After that time, he would have to wear a back brace, which the doctors made especially for him, until his back muscles were strong again. That would probably take another five months.
The military transport plane flew Nate back to Quito. This time, though, Nate got to stand up for the whole trip because of his new cast. It was tiresome standing for the whole flight. But despite his weary legs by the end of the journey, he couldn’t wait to see Marj and new baby Kathy, who were waiting at the airport to meet him. His face beamed as he took his first look at the little blonde bundle Marj was carrying.
The newly enlarged Saint family spent several days in Quito. While there, HCJB, the ministry whose guest house Marj had been staying in, asked Nate to talk on the radio. The name HCJB was short for “Heralding Christ Jesus’ Blessings,” and the ministry’s goal was to send Christian programming around the world by radio. Quito’s high elevation and proximity to the equator meant there was little atmospheric interference of radio signals from the earth’s magnetic field. Strange as it seemed, Quito, high in the Andes Mountains, was a perfect place from which to share the gospel message with the world.
During his many days in the hospital, Nate had been thinking about the idea of “expendability,” and that was the subject of his radio talk. Expendability comes from the word expend, which means to use up. Nate used the term to mean that Christians need to offer themselves to be used up by God however He wishes to use them. During his talk, Nate said that “missionaries constantly face expendability. And people who do not know the Lord ask why in the world we waste our lives as missionaries. They forget that they too are expending their lives. They forget that when their lives are spent and the bubble has burst they will have nothing of eternal significance to show for the years they have wasted.
“Some might say, ‘Isn’t it too great a price to pay?’ When missionaries consider themselves—their lives before God—they consider themselves expendable. And in our personal lives as Christians isn’t the same thing true? Isn’t the price small in the light of God’s infinite love? Those who know the joy of leading a stranger to Christ and those who have gone to tribes who have never heard the gospel gladly count themselves expendable….”
Nate knew what he was talking about when he talked of expendability. He had nearly been killed in a plane crash. Yet it didn’t deter him. He was ready to get back in an airplane and serve other missionaries.
Nate, Marj, and Kathy took the bus back to Shell Mera. Once again, Nate couldn’t sit down for the trip. He spent the entire thirteen hours standing on the back bumper of the bus, clinging to a handrail! If the doctors could see me now, he thought, they would never have released me. Still, Nate quickly forgot about the discomfort of the journey as the bus rolled down the dusty road and the new house at Shell Mera came into view.
After thirteen hours on the bus, Nate and Marj were both a little wobbly. They staggered into the yard of their brown stained house, whose timber had been cut from trees that once grew where the house now stood. The aluminum roof glistened in the sun.
As they settled into their new home, Nate and Marj grew to love it. Marj enjoyed the sense of being almost outdoors, because the house had large open windows in every room covered only with screens. The house was also almost bug-free, because the foundations were concrete pillars, each with a moat around it filled with oil, barring entrance by termites and other insects. Of course, there were a few things the house didn’t have, like electricity and running water. To take a bath, the Saints had to wait for rain. They never had to wait for long, though, because Shell Mera had more than thirty-two feet of rain a year. When it rained, they would gather up soap and a towel and head over to where the rainwater flowed off the edge of the runway. The water flowing into a ditch there made a good shower.
Nate was not the type to sit around, or stand around, as his cast forced him to do. With his cast still on, he managed to find plenty of jobs to keep himself busy. He dug post holes for a fence around the yard and laid gravel to make a taxiway from the airstrip to the hangar that had been built next to the house. Unfortunately, the hangar was empty, because there was still no replacement plane stationed at Shell Mera. Missionaries had to revert to hiking through the jungle for days to get where they wanted to go. When Nate heard about one such trip that nearly claimed the life of a missionary, he became concerned. Three missionaries had been trekking out from the isolated Macuma station. While crossing a turbulent river on a raft, they lost some of their equipment. Then one of the missionaries became violently ill from fatigue. Because their food rations were dwindling, he struggled on with the others. Their ordeal had lasted for six days. And when they finally reached Shell Mera, the one missionary’s feet and legs were so swollen he could barely walk.
A replacement airplane was needed at Shell Mera, and it was needed fast. But before Nate could write to MAF to stress the urgency of the need, he received word from Jim Truxton in Los Angeles that a replacement plane was on its way to Shell Mera. Several days later, Hobey Lowrance, a MAF pilot sent to replace Nate until he was able to fly again, piloted the yellow, four-seater Piper Pacer across the Andes to Shell Mera, where he pulled it to a halt in front of the new hangar. Nate was waiting outside.
Hobey settled into the house with Nate and Marj. Soon he was busy servicing the missionary bases across the Oriente with the new plane. The missionaries were deeply grateful to again have air service to assist their work in the jungle.
Finally, five months passed, and it was time for Nate to take off the uncomfortable and, by now, very dirty cast. Marj walked with him to the Shell medical clinic. She carried with her the back brace that had been specially made for Nate in Panama. Nate would have to wear the brace right away because his back would be too weak and floppy for him to stand up without it. At least that’s what the doctors thought.
