Couple recall terror of free-wheeling ’70s trip

Special to the Green Valley News

Will Rogers said, “Sometimes you have to go out on a limb because that’s where the fruit is.”

John and Carol Crothers have done that and can take comfort in knowing they won’t have regrets in life about what they didn’t do. But a near-death memory is nevertheless still real after 45 years.

Fear was only a word to these two young explorers who walked away from good jobs to see the world, as many others of their generation did in the early ’70s.

“We figured south was easier to start ... no ocean to cross,” Carol said, remembering the plan they hatched soon after marrying in 1971 to save ten grand for a year of adventure.

The bug bit her after studying in Japan and India as a Fulbright scholar, and John had seen a few places as an implausible 6-foot-6 Navy submarine vet.

They found each other when she was the only woman in a corporate computer training class. The class of young upstarts decided to fly on a whim from Cleveland to the Big Apple to mark Chinese New Year.

Perhaps it was a sign of things to come that the diminutive Western Michigan University graduate who was trying to follow her dream to be a bush pilot and the lanky ex-submariner were the only ones who showed up on the plane.

That unorthodox and impromptu first date led to a plan to drive a 66 Corvair van from Carol’s hometown of Troy, Ohio, as far as possible and sell it. But they only reached Albuquerque when it broke down, so they took busses and hopped ferries all over Mexico in that summer of ’72, fascinated by the ruins and perhaps a little naively struck by the communication problems they encountered.

“After a while we discovered everybody was speaking Spanish and we didn’t,” John joked, so they began to learn as they went.

Across South America

After finally crossing into South America with just backpacks and one suitcase, the couple averaged about $20 a day for everything, picking up cash through American Express ... no ATMs in those days.

“We never carried much ... nothing we couldn’t lose,” Carol said.

“We stayed in Colombia for a buck a night, and that included a meal,” John remembered.

“I asked, ‘Where’s the dessert?’ I was just joking, but they went back and made it,” he added.

They managed to escape the catastrophic Managua earthquake by a week, rode busses with rooster owners headed for cockfights, hitched rides, shared cabs and finally were able to share some American food with a U.S. science expedition they ran into at the tip of the continent.

In Buenos Aires, they caught a Hong Kong steamer loaded with retirees heading for Africa.

Some of the ladies said, “These hippies aren’t coming on our boat, are they?” Carol recalled.

Once in Capetown, they found it harder and more expensive to travel because apartheid kept them from traveling with black Africans, generally the cheapest modes.

They shared a rental car with a couple from the ship and saw much of South Africa, but wanted to push northward into the continent.

That’s when they found Andre, who would guide them and two young Canadian college students, along with six others, on a Land Rover expedition into the northern countries that would eventually get them into Europe.

Stalled at the border

But the trip had been stalled for weeks in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at the border above the magnificent Victoria Falls while Andre tried to obtain a pass to continue into Zambia, which was not particularly friendly with Rhodesia at the time.

It was May 15, 1973, when the Crothers accompanied 19-year-olds Christine Sinclair and Marjan Drijber from Guelph, Ontario, on a short afternoon hike into the deep gorges cut by the raging Zambezi River below the falls. It was their last chance to see the spectacular area that bordered the two feuding countries up close because the news had come that the pass to leave had finally arrived.

Laughing and joking, Carol remembers, Christine went ahead on the narrow path along the rocky ledge to see if there was a trail she remembered from an earlier hike that would lead them up the steep gorge and back out. Carol was glancing at the Zambian power plant across the narrow gorge, noticing eight men she assumed were workers.

It was 1:45, and suddenly something was wrong.

Gunfire in the air

“We could see sand spraying around us,” Carol recalled.

Gleeful conversation was replaced with screaming and scrambling and covering of heads as an explosion of gunfire shattered the crystal blue sky, leaving them exposed and utterly helpless, the group scattering to find an escape that wasn’t there.

John remembers seeing Christine lying in the crack of a large rock up ahead and was shouting at her when he felt what he thought were rock chips hitting him, his left eye watering, making it difficult to see.

He tried to go back to where he saw Marjan bleeding from the stomach and clinging to the ledge, but he slipped waist-deep into the river when he found Carol and screamed at her above the noise of the raging water to duck under a boulder he had spotted.

The machine gun fire continued for five minutes as his wife got him under the boulder and put a handkerchief over a wound on his neck.

He wanted to go back out to help Marjan, but he was bleeding from a hip wound as well and knew he couldn’t walk.

Pinned down as the firing resumed off and on over the next three hours, they could only hope the girls were OK, since it would be certain death to expose themselves.

“We were convinced now that these people meant business,” Carol recalled, “and they hadn’t made a mistake. They were trying to kill us.”

“We thought the best thing was to stay there and wait to be rescued,” she said, knowing the camp was expecting them for dinner.

It was a decision that would spare their lives.

2 dead on the river

The ordeal would end late in the dead of night, hours after Andre began looking for them. Carol repeatedly described the surrounding scenery to keep her husband alert in the cramped space where he was bleeding and in need of medical help, unaware of the tragedy just a few feet away.

A search party of park rangers, police and bush trackers found them about 10:30 p.m., but had to wait into the night for the moon to set to get Carol to safety and pull John up the steep cliff on a stretcher in the cover of darkness.

With air support they returned to find Christine, killed instantly from a shot to the head, but were never able to locate Marjan, speculating she was hit and swept away by the roaring waters.

A chopper took John out and he spent three weeks in traction in a Rhodesian hospital, answering questions for African newspapers and investigators.

The couple met with Prime Minister Ian Smith for his personal apology and the government paid all the medical bills.

They became local celebrities, approached for autographs with invitations as personal guests and further regrets. The Zambian government, however, never issued an apology, even after pressure from the Canadian Ministry.

Their position that the four were planning to sabotage the power plant was reflected in a 1977 Africa Institute news bulletin that grouped the incident under what they called “an emerging terrorist campaign.” A May 19, 1973, article by the New York Times reported that the Zambians believed “the women had appeared to attack a Zambian power station.”

Marching on

The Crothers finished their dream, pushing into Europe, most of America, and even China when it was almost impossible to get in, as well as the Middle East.

“We wanted to go some place safe after that,” John quipped, “so we went to Israel.”

Young, fearless, and adventuresome, the couple eventually settled into raising a family, and Carol retired as a project manager with IBM after 32 years. But John still has the scars and they both still carry vivid memories of the nightmare at Victoria Falls.

Mike Touzeau is a freelance writer for the Green Valley News.