THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF JAN MULLER

The Spirit of Lost Things

Vintage portrait of a smiling man with curly hair and a beard wearing a light-colored suit jacket and patterned scarf

A blind and deaf woman is left alone and at death’s door in the most remote region of the Amazon rainforest

Born with a progressive form of sight and hearing loss, Jan Muller left her suburban 1950s California home with her young daughter, Rebecca, to live as a naturalist in the Mexican highlands. There, she met and married Harry Little, a man carving out a homestead in the Selva Lacandona.

The fated union would isolate Jan as her senses slowly slipped away from her and Harry’s oppression and cruelty took hold. His madness and insecurity pushed the family further into seclusion, settling in an area of the Amazon rainforest so remote it was accessible by canoe only a few weeks of the year.

When a strange virus claimed the lives of Rebecca and Harry, Jan was left weakened and alone on an unreachable, rocky hillside in the depths of the rainforest. She had only her fortitude and resourcefulness to survive a treacherous environment she could not see or hear.

01 - THE TRUE STORY

She chose the wilderness. Then it asked everything of her.

JAN AND HARRY · PASSPORT PHOTOGRAPH · 1973

People hiking through a dense tropical rainforest with tall trees and lush vegetation

THE AMAZON - 1980

Weakened by months of illness, alone and without any means of calling for help, she had a simple choice: stop, or keep going.

She kept going.

02 - ABOUT JAN

Jan Muller was born in California in 1929. She was diagnosed in adulthood with Usher Syndrome Type 2, a genetic condition causing progressive combined loss of sight and hearing, though she had known since childhood that her ears and eyes did not work the way other people’s did.

She spent her twenties in Sacramento and San Francisco, working government jobs, reading widely, and looking for a life that made sense to her. She found it, eventually, in the idea of homesteading, of belonging to the land rather than to the world of offices and cities and other people’s expectations.

She married Harry Little out of convenience, and in the hope to get the homesteading life she would not be able to enter on her own.

Jan and Harry homesteaded across four countries over twenty years. Her daughter Rebecca from a previous relationship grew up in the jungle. The three of them built shelters, grew food, kept animals, and learned the rhythms of the equatorial forest in a way that most people never come close to. Jan did all of this with narrowing vision and hearing that barely reached beyond arm’s length.

She outlived them both.

Jan wrote about her life with the same clarity and lack of self-pity that she brought to everything else. She did not think of herself as brave. She thought of herself as practical.

She died before seeing her memoir published.