The Nurse in White. April 21, 2025

The Nurse in White. April 21, 2025

The movie was “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” It was a major motion picture filmed in the Amazon jungle outside of Belem, Brazil, in the summer and fall of 1990. The producer was Saul Zaentz, who had already won two Oscars for Best Picture (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.”)

I’d been hired by David Jones, the famous stunt pilot and aerial coordinator ( “Apocalypse Now” ), to maintain the DeHavilland Beaver used in the film. I rebuilt and maintained Beavers at a seaplane base in Seattle.

Barry, the Canadian ferry pilot, flew the Beaver from St. Cloud, Minnesota, to Belem in late May of 1990. The dirt airstrip had just been completed at the Madre de Deus set.

It was a very narrow and short runway built on wood pilings over the swamp next to the river. There was one way in and one way out of that dirt strip coming in to land or take off over the river.

Every time we landed and took off, it was a close thing. The plane landed and took off with only 20 yards of runway to spare at most.

The days were around 120°F with 80% humidity. The plane struggled to get off the runway in the hot and humid air. One time, Jones forgot to put down the wing flaps until we’d almost reached the end of the dirt strip. If he’d forgotten, we would have ended up in the river.

One landing, a gust of tail wind sailed the plane past the landing area on the dirt strip and we ended up on the runout area at the end of the strip which was very narrow.
To turn the plane around, Jones locked up the left wheel with the brake and spun the plane around 180 degrees by applying power to the engine. It was done on some plywood put over the swamp.

One hot afternoon, they were filming the Beaver on the dirt strip with the stand-ins for Tom Waits and Tom Berenger in the plane. I was, as usual, observing from the hammock in our little airstrip shack the movie prop department built. It had props on the deck of it. I guess my hammock fell in with the decor though I couldn’t be in the shot.

There was a ruckus among the grips and assistant directors. One of the grips had dropped dead on the airstrip. It was a Brazilian guy. Turns out he died of a cocaine overdose.

The filming wrapped up and the set nurse was called to the scene. We were an hour from Belem and deep in the jungle. There were no ambulances available.

The film crew left the airstrip. The nurse had brought a chair and an umbrella. She was a pretty Brazilian in a bright white nurses’ uniform, skirt, shoes, blouse, and cap.

She sat in her chair, opened her umbrella, and shaded the dead man on the airstrip from the hot equatorial sun. This was to keep the body from getting too ripe too quickly.

I sat in my hammock watching the scene. For a moment, I thought of taking a photo, but thought better of it.

An hour later, I left with the aerial unit by car to go back to Belem and the Belem Hilton Hotel. The nurse and body were still there when I left.
TJM