by Roman Dial
In 2002, we had both competed in an adventure race in Fiji. He had been on a Costa Rican team that struggled, like most teams, on the first day. I hoped our shared experiences then might create common ground. Instead, it seemed to cast me as a competitor. But this wasn’t a race between Dondee and me. We were on the same team in a race to find my son as quickly as possible.
Knowing Roman well, better than anyone, I could help. We had walked on and off jungle trails together since he was three in Puerto Rico. We’d been to tropical Asia, Australia—even to Corcovado twice. It was difficult to articulate the depth of these experiences without sounding both pretentious and arrogant, but my intuition would offer more insight than two dozen Cruz Roja volunteers.
Dondee returned to his computer. A Cruz Roja volunteer sat next to me. “Are you offering a reward?” he asked in clear English.
“No, not yet.”
“Good. There was another American, David Gimelfarb, who disappeared five years ago in another national park. He was missing for months and nobody saw anything. Then his parents offered a reward. Suddenly there were sightings everywhere, even in Nicaragua and Panama. But it never led to anything. You see, gringos with blue eyes and blond hair—they all look the same.”
The Gimelfarbs’ son had gone missing from a simple two-mile trail hike in Rincón de Vieja National Park near the border of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The Gimelfarbs’ $100,000 reward offer caused problems for everybody. Its only outcome was false information about the missing boy and false hope for his parents.
The day dragged on. People came and went. They talked quietly, ignoring me. The success of a search-and-rescue effort comes down to the first few days, the first few hours, often to the initiative and luck of just one person. This I knew from experience.
By the time the sun dropped like a rock at six-thirty, the only things we’d learned were that we shouldn’t offer a reward, that Cody was seen with a drug dealer, and that no one had looked on the Conte, the river where Roman said he would start.
“Thai, ask Dondee if they found where Roman stayed in town.” Dondee shook his head.
The answer shocked me. After two days of searching, it seemed they should know, yet they didn’t. “Thai, let’s go,” I said. “There’s nothing for us here.”
Chapter 22
The Corners
The yellow bag, Corners Hostel, July 25, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Thai and I left into the night to find where Roman had stayed. We made our way to each of Puerto Jiménez’s half-dozen hostels. In fluent Spanish, Thai asked the proprietors if they had seen the young man in the photo we showed. An hour after leaving MINAE headquarters we crossed the only paved street in town, walked past the long-distance bus stop, and arrived at the Corners Hostel. Heavy metal bars enclosed the two-story building up to its tin roof. In front, a picnic table sat beside a small, empty parking lot.
We walked in. An old lady about four and a half feet tall shuffled out in slippers and a simple blue smock patterned in plaid. She was Doña Berta, the owner. She had short-cropped hair, milky blue eyes, and a warm smile, but no English. Thai handed her the photo and asked if she’d seen the young man. “Si. He stayed here, in the dormitory,” Doña Berta said in Spanish.
My heart raced. We found where he stayed! Maybe he’s coming back. Doña Berta showed where Roman had signed in. There, on July 8, he signed his given name Cody Dial next to his passport number. This evidence of him comforted me, even if it was just his neat, small-lettered handwriting. I looked at the computers in the office for guest use, wondering if he had typed his emails there. “Ask if the police came by.”
“No,” Doña Berta responded. Thai and I were the first to ask about him.
“Had he come back?”
“No,” she said, “but he left money for his return.” She opened a different notebook. Her diminutive hands pointed to an entry in the ledger. He had paid for a dorm bed and was coming back.
“Did he leave anything?” I asked, thinking of all the trips when we’d left things in hotel or airport storage as we headed for the mountains, rivers, and jungles from Australia to Alaska. Doña Berta led us out to a caged-in corner of the building. Immediately I saw the small yellow duffel bag marked “Forrest McCarthy, Jackson, WY.” Another wave of warmth and excitement passed over me. The familiarity of his things made him feel close.
Where is he? What is he doing? When will he be back?
Inside the cage was a big backpack, too, but I didn’t recognize it. It belonged to another traveler, I surmised, and ignored it. Instead, I pawed through the contents of the yellow bag, looking for answers. Inside was a red spiral notebook. I tore out a page and I wrote him:
Friday 7/25 8:30 PM
Rome, We were worried when we didn’t hear back after 5 days, so Thai and I came down looking for you. Email or go to Corcovado Park Headquarters. There’s a big search on for you. Hope you are OK!
Dad
Back at MINAE headquarters, we got in our rental jeep and drove to the Iguana. Toby and Lauren were waiting, eager for an update. We told them how we’d found Roman’s hostel, that the little old lady there had said he’d planned to return but never did, then mentioned to them the story of the drug dealer and hike to Carate.
As locals, they knew of the guy and his name. “We’d heard that, too,” Toby said, “that Cody was seen with Pata Lora. Our breakfast cook has a relative in Piedras Blancas who saw Pata Lora with your son.”
“Pata Lora?” I repeated.
“Yeah, Pata Lora,” he said. “Short for Pata de Lora or “Parrot Foot,” a reference to his limp. He’s a really bad guy. A thief. Into drugs. He comes from a big family on the Osa that’s done well. But he’s the black sheep. Nobody likes him. You can’t trust him. Even his own parents disowned him.”
Lauren interjected. “It’s so like the Fuerza not to even find the hostel where your son stayed. The authorities never really do an investigation quickly or effectively. When our friend Kimberly was murdered a few years ago at her house, they never even found a suspect. We had to hire a private investigator to find out who did it.”
After dinner Thai and I went to our room. It had been a long day. In the darkness and heat, I tossed and turned below a wobbling ceiling fan, trying to reconcile Roman’s last six months of emails with the story of Cody hiring a drug dealer as a guide outside the park.
THE NEXT DAY I told Dondee that we had found Roman’s things at the Corners Hostel. He didn’t care. The prevailing narrative on the Osa that Dondee now pursued involved Pata Lora, the same well-known twenty-seven-year-old thief, sometime miner, bootleg guide, and general Osa ne’er-do-well that Toby had told us about.
In this story, Cody and Pata Lora walked a horse trail from Dos Brazos, through the off-road mining community of Piedras Blancas, then onward to Carate by footpath, a journey entirely outside of Corcovado National Park. From there, they returned by colectivo to Puerto Jiménez, where Cody paid for Pata Lora’s guide services from an ATM there. Then, Pata Lora said, Cody went surfing at Matapalo, the rocky cape with the best break on the Osa. These were details offered by Pata Lora himself to Costa Rica’s version of the FBI—Organismo de Investigación Judicial, or OIJ, pronounced “oh-ee-hota”—who had questioned him about his travels with the gringo. According to Dondee, a nature guide named Roger Muñoz saw Cody with Pata Lora coming out of the jungle in Carate.
This news was good, if a bit perplexing. Cody Roman was around, just acting strangely. Since Mexico, he’d been quick to answer our emails. But after Peggy had responded to Roman’s email on July 9, calling him the next Thai Verzone, he hadn’t written back. Roman wrote us the day he exited El Petén and La Moskitia. Why hasn’t he emailed us now?
Thai and I headed to Carate at ten, following Dondee in his Cruz Roja Land Cruiser to meet Roger Muñoz. Driving through Puerto Jiménez, I did a double take every time I saw a young man in short hair and glasses who wore flip-flops and a tank top. They all looked�
��even to me—like Roman. “The Cruz Roja volunteer was right,” I told Thai. “Every gringo looks the same.”
The potholed road to Carate punched abruptly from Puerto Jiménez’s residences into cattle land. To the east, a gentle surf sparkled in the sun. Ahead, the road passed through a tunnel of fig trees for miles, their fat trunks strung with barbed wire as living fence posts. We bumped along as fast as the corrugated dirt road allowed.
“Thai, thanks for coming down. I wouldn’t have found that hostel without you.”
“Sure, Roman. I’m happy to help. I just hope we find Roman soon.”
“You know, I’m glad everybody seems to think he’s around, but it seems weird that he hasn’t contacted us, or even gone back to get his things at the hostel.”
Thai nodded.
“And if he was headed out surfing, why would he leave all his beach stuff in Forrest’s duffel at the hostel?” It seemed unlikely he’d leave sunscreen and his dive card behind.
“Yeah, and it’s weird he’d hook up with this guy Pata Lora. That doesn’t sound like Roman to me.”
I wanted to believe the Pata Lora story, but it just didn’t fit. Science confronts hypotheses with evidence through the process of disproval and I was more than willing to be proved wrong, especially if it meant Roman was okay.
“Thai, I don’t know what’s going on, but I sure hope these people are right about Roman.”
Chapter 23
Carate
Tamandua, along the road to Carate, July 26, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Carate is little more than a string of beach camps, locals’ houses, and expensive second homes hidden from view. Parallel to the palm-lined beach, there’s a long paved airstrip where clients arrive for upscale vacations at rustic eco-lodges. Mountains rise steeply above the pounding surf on the beach. Scarlet macaws cruise over the trees. A popular jumping-off point for day hikes into Corcovado National Park, Carate’s colectivo stop is at the end of the road, next to a pulperia that sells drinks and snacks for those waiting to catch a ride back to Puerto Jiménez.
We parked and headed down the beachside path leading to the La Leona Ranger Station at the Corcovado boundary. Slender Roger Muñoz met us on the trail. In his twenties, his broad smile was open and his short hair and wide ears gave him the clean-cut looks of a guide who likely earned good tips.
“No, I don’t think it was him,” Muñoz offered in clear English, looking me—the father—up and down while inspecting a recent photo of Roman. “He wasn’t so tall. I wouldn’t have noticed him if he wasn’t with that guy, Pata Lora. Pata Lora is a bad guy, not a real guide.”
Still, Carate was where Roman intended to end his hike. And Roger had seen a gringo with Pata Lora on July 15, when Roman would’ve reached the road, and the day Roger signed La Leona’s logbook. The time and place fit. Just not the gringo.
After saying good-bye to Roger, we encountered a group of high school kids from the U.K. They had walked over from Piedras Blancas, the off-road/off-grid mining community halfway between Dos Brazos and Carate. They were waiting for the big Mac truck that operated as the colectivo. We asked if they’d seen any other gringo hikers. No, they said.
A local guy in shorts and a T-shirt, wearing rubber boots and smelling of alcohol, hoisted himself into the front seat of the colectivo after it arrived. In a conspiratorial voice, he leaned out the window and told Thai that the kid we were looking for had been seen with a very bad guy on the trail from Piedras Blancas. Then the truck pulled out and drove back to town, carrying the British kids, the drunk miner, and the story to Puerto Jiménez.
FROM 2009 TO 2011 four ex-pats were murdered on the Osa. The two Austrians in their mid-sixties had been living and buying gold in Dos Brazos when they went missing during Christmas 2009 from their blood-spattered house. Their vehicle was gone, too. Two years later, a flooding stream washed bones out of the beach where the murderer had buried their dismembered corpses. The same year, the fifty-three-year-old Canadian friend of Lauren and Toby named Kimberly Blackwell was found beaten and shot at the gate to her home and cocoa farm between the Barrigones and Conte Rivers, near where Roman had said he’d start his hike. Later that year, fifty-two-year-old Lisa Artz, an American and another friend of the Cleavers, was suffocated when thieves stole her laptop and iPod.
While these murders ultimately resulted in convictions, such justice was rare. In fact, it took a private investigator hired by Lauren, Toby, and other friends of Kimberly Blackwell to identify the killer. Overall, statistics show that less than 5 percent of murder charges in Costa Rica end in conviction: nine times out of ten, perhaps, people get away with murder. The Osa works hard to mask this darker side, offering surfing lessons, yoga retreats, and guided walks. Still, some locals often rely on illegal activity for their livelihoods and the people who know the jungle best include poachers and gold miners who somehow avoid the poisonous snakes, tree fall, mudslides, wild animals, and flash floods while dodging park rangers who burn their illegal camps.
Roman might well have overlapped with characters connected to the Osa murders. An early suspect in Kimberly’s murder lived in the foothills above the Rio Conte. Pata Lora’s cousin was sentenced to fifty years in prison for killing the two Austrians. Cody was reportedly seen near Matapalo where Lisa Artz was murdered in her own bed.
While we were in Carate, Doña Berta, the little old lady at the Corners Hostel, had changed her story. She now remembered Cody had returned, then left again. We accompanied Dondee and Tony, a Cruz Roja employee stationed in Puerto Jiménez, back to the Corners to investigate. The pair studied Doña Berta’s cryptic entries, asking questions that to me sounded like interrogation.
I’d hoped to see something concrete in the ledger: “Dial” or “Cody.” Instead I saw “XXXX” and “₡5,000 pago” marked in green highlighter. Fingers pointed at text, flipped pages, and settled on “Martes 22 Julio.” The three concluded that Cody had returned on Monday, July 21, then left again for Dos Brazos on Tuesday, July 22, leaving money for a bed on his return on Wednesday, July 23. Today was Saturday, July 26. According to this account, Cody had been here only four days ago and was expected back any day.
The relief of this news settled over me like a warm blanket on a shock victim. I smiled broadly at Thai. I looked forward to seeing my son. It had been six months since our rafting trip, the second longest gap in his life without physical contact between us, without a hug, a shared meal, a pun, or a grinning story. I was sure he had some new tales to tell from his weeks on the Osa.
Prior to our arrival, Cody sightings had come from all over the Osa Peninsula. Cody had been seen wearing a safari outfit between Carate and Matapalo. A bus driver had dropped him off at Dos Brazos; miners had seen him in Piedras Blancas. Pata Lora had claimed he was with Cody in Puerto Jiménez and that Cody went surfing afterward, where he was seen near a Matapalo bar.
Listening to all these sightings, it seemed easier for all to disregard Cody as an irresponsible twenty-something who was too cheap to hire a real guide than to accept Roman as lost or injured in Corcovado’s wilderness. The sentiment was “Let’s just wait for Cody to show up. If he doesn’t, then he doesn’t want to.”
Besides, the kid sounded foolish: illegally in the park, alone and off-trail in its wilderness. To look for Roman in a trackless jungle of poisonous snakes, lawless miners, and few trails was like looking for a needle in a burning haystack. The more I claimed that the Roman I knew differed from the Cody that everyone cast as a stereotypical gringo kid, the more they pitied me as a father in denial, the first stage of grief.
This reaction reminded me of an incident a decade ago. One of my former students at APU, a popular, easygoing kid named Joe, had taken up climbing. Joe and a more experienced mountaineer were climbing a local Anchorage peak unroped when a cornice collapsed and sent Joe thousands of feet to his death. When his father heard of the accident, he rushed to Alaska, arriving at the airport ready to head onto the glacier where
Joe had fallen, thinking he might still be alive.
The father had no experience with glacier travel. He brought downhill skis and boots unsuited for skiing uphill. Although he could, of course, conceive of the danger and knew he lacked the skills of professionals who had been unable to find his son, he was still a father who loved his son deeply. His instincts had implored him to act. The father never set foot in the mountains, perhaps talked down by the leader of the search, or simply aware of his own limitations. After Joe’s father returned home, I telephoned him, partly to give my condolences, but mostly to empathize father to father. “I have a son,” I said. “I can’t think of anything worse than losing him.”
Eventually, I gave up kicking off Cruz Roja’s warm blanket. Giving in kept my shock at bay. It felt good. Cody was everywhere and doing fine. He just wasn’t contacting his friends or parents.
Relieved, I emailed Roman that night:
Looking for you. Everyone is. Wished you’d emailed us when you had the chance. They say you were with this guy Pato de Lorra or something like that. And he has been arrested and is being questioned. They say you’ve crossed the mountains twice now. With Pato de Lorra. Practice for Darien? Hope to see you safe and sound and soon.
I had Thai ask Tony, who lived in Puerto Jiménez, where was the best place in town to eat. Feeling gracious, I wanted to treat Dondee, Tony, and Thai to a meal. As we waited on our dinners of seafood, rice, and plantains, a gentle sea breeze carried the night air into the restaurant. I stepped out to the busy waterfront and called Peggy on my cell.
Waiting for the call to go through, I gazed out into the tropical night, looking hopefully at every young man in a tank top and short hair, expecting him to say, “Dad! What are you doing here?”
