by Roman Dial
I wasn’t ready to go that way yet. Given the maze of Las Quebraditas and the subtleties of its trails, it seemed unlikely Roman would have made it through this keyhole leading off the summit plateau and down to the Pacific. I studied my topo map. At the top of the Osa, Mount Mueller forms the center of a five-pointed star with each vertex pointing to a different drainage: three to the Pacific and two to Golfo Dulce.
I asked Vargas to take us directly down to a tributary of the Piedras Blancas arm of the Rio Tigre and back to Dos Brazos where we had started, closing a big loop. The steeper terrain and thinner vegetation would naturally draw a hiker in that direction. If Roman had followed the line of least resistance from Zeledón, then east-west-trending canyons would have funneled him toward Las Quebraditas.
Relying on intuition and compass bearing alone, and given his experiences in El Petén, Roman would have balked at pushing through Las Quebraditas’ confusing landscape. It seemed more prudent to search closer to Zeledón Creek, where Roman was last seen, than here on the far side of a maze.
Dropping off Mount Mueller’s slopes there were no human, no tapir, no peccary trails. Just raw jungle travel. Even Vargas hesitated. He was tense off-trail, haunted perhaps by the memory of the bushmaster that bit and killed his brother on the spot. The bushmaster is not only the longest poisonous snake in the Americas, but also its most aggressive. Once agitated, it rarely backs down.
Vargas plunge-stepped down the steep slope of mud. It was hard to keep up, even while he sliced the herbaceous growth with his machete as he bushwhacked off-trail. The blade let out a reassuring tzing, tzing, tzing that left a path clear of snakes and a trail of fresh green leaves to follow should we need to retrace our steps, like Roman had in El Petén.
Midway down, a series of waterfall drops forced us to lower our packs to each other. The exposure here emphasized how readily Roman could have been injured had he slipped into a steep gorge or canyon, like those in the Negritos below Zeledón. I vowed to return to Zeledón and search Negritos’s canyon with ropes and climbing equipment.
The travel was difficult, not physically but emotionally, especially when calling his name. My grief painted the jungle black, but the heart of the Osa’s wilderness still left me awed. Every neon-colored dart frog, every emerald green bird, every fascinating jewel of the jungle that we passed left me with a pang of regret and sadness, remembering how our family had thrilled together at rainforest wonders. Those vivid memories grimly reminded me of why I was here. They left my eyes watery, my heart heavy.
But I couldn’t shut out forever the joy in seeing a kingfisher’s blue flash or a spider monkey’s graceful swing. To ignore those pleasures devalued our lifetimes shared in places like this where we marveled at nature’s creations. Sometime on the third day, I could again see rainforest colors and delight in the flight of a basilisk across a stream or the primeval look of a motmot in bamboo.
After we made our way back to the network of miner trails, Jefe killed a small fer-de-lance at an abandoned miner’s camp. Young poisonous snakes are the most dangerous. In their youthful inexperience, they have not yet learned to regulate their venom’s delivery, often over-envenomating in self-defense. A sixteen-inch juvenile can readily kill a man.
Soon after, Thai stepped over a log where, unknown to him, an olive-green eyelash viper was coiled for a strike only inches from his femoral artery. He could just as easily have put his hand on the snake, or swung his leg over and sat on it.
Thai was five strides ahead of me when I called out to him, “Hey, Thai! You just about got bit by a viper coiled on this log!” I held out the little green serpent, its prehensile tail wrapped tight around my trekking pole.
Thai just flashed that world-wise smile, shook his head a few times in disbelief, then turned and hurried through the heat back to town where the Cruz Roja was closing down the official search for Roman.
Chapter 31
Negritos
Steve Fassbinder rappeling a Negritos waterfall, August 11, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
The official search was over. Weary Cruz Roja volunteers headed home to their jobs. In a meeting, Dondee reminded Thai and me that my son had planned to enter the park illegally, that searches for illegals were difficult to approve in the first place, and that an exception had been made for him. Resources needed for other searches had been consumed here. Cruz Roja and MINAE would not resume their search without hard evidence.
Dondee also discouraged any offer of a reward, bringing to mind the painful story of David Gimelfarb. In 2013, four years after he had disappeared, his parents received several phone calls. The caller claimed a drug cartel held their son hostage. For twice the reward offer, the caller would reveal their son’s location. FBI investigators know that Latin American criminals take advantage of families of missing persons and dismissed the call as a scam. There was little chance anyone would hold a hostage so long before asking for ransom.
The same day Dondee said was Cruz Roja’s last, Thai went home to his wife and infant daughter, leaving me depressed and alone. Sitting at the Iguana Lodge with my hands tied, knowing every day counted more than the last, I sobbed briefly, as I did every day during private moments. I quickly choked back to regain control. Guilt followed.
What kind of father have I really been?
Parents aren’t supposed to pass out pills, smoke dope, or drink booze with their kids, and we never did. Instead, we bought them airplane tickets to exotic lands. Travel itself can be an addiction. Adventure is. Here I was, searching for Roman missing on a trip that traced directly back to me. I had not simply introduced him to international travel and the risks of wilderness adventure. I had included him, again and again, to the point that a large part of our relationship—his very name—was built on experiences like his illegal bushwhack into Corcovado.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything I had done with him in the wild had all been a mistake, that in the end, I had been that irresponsible father the cowboys saw on Umnak. I might not have hurt the six-year-old boy then, but the suffering of a twenty-seven-year-old man lost and broken in the jungle now felt like my fault. Yet every time those thoughts circled round me, Tennyson’s words came too:
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
The love that I had for Roman—and for Peggy and Jazz, for that matter—was stronger and deeper for the time we had spent together in wild places. I would not give that up, even as I felt more helpless than ever. And while moments like this would plague me—still plague me—I would hold it as a truth that the bonds we form in nature with others are the truest bonds between us. While Roman may have been lost and dying because of our time in Australia, Borneo, or wild Alaska, that time we had together compelled me to come and do whatever was necessary to find him now.
SOON, THAI’S FRIEND Ole Carillo from Anchorage; my friend Steve Fassbinder; and his Spanish-speaking coworker, a young woman named Armida Huerta, both from Colorado, would arrive. Ole lacked Thai’s wilderness skills, but he was even more easygoing and had nearly as much travel experience. He also spoke fluent Spanish. I knew Steve well from a two-hundred-mile beach bike and packraft trip along Alaska’s southern coast, but I’d only soon be meeting Armida. Neither had tropical experience.
Meanwhile the Pata Lora story had seeped deeper into the Osa, into every pulperia and hovel. A rumor had spread that we were offering a reward. The situation was spiraling out of my control. But a lifetime of risk had taught me that a calm mind works better than an excited one. On this—the most important journey of my life—I controlled what I could: my emotions.
Dizzy with a pounding headache, I woke sick to my stomach and hurried to the toilet. Chewing Pepto Bismol pills only added nausea to my diarrhea. Morning meetings with officials didn’t make me feel any better; they thwarted my plans to ask the Cruz Roja for
personnel and a long rope to take into the Negritos. Park Superintendent Eliecer Arce, a father himself who was sensitive to my plight, remained adamant that the area was illegal for anyone but park officials.
I decided to keep my canyon rappelling plan to myself. Every official made it clear they were upset with me already, both for my known forays into Corcovado and for the ones they suspected I’d made or soon make.
Back in Alaska, Peggy fielded phone calls and sifted through offers from Facebook friends. Most were of the we have contacts in Costa Rica variety:
I just heard a little about your son. Interestingly enough, my next door neighbor here has a nephew who owns a place called Good Times, a surfer retreat in Costa Rica. He has been there a while and speaks Spanish. If you give me information, I can pass it along and maybe he can do some nosing around for you.
So many people wanted to help. But people asking questions around the edges of Corcovado, Puerto Jiménez, and Carate would simply turn up the Pata Lora story. We needed immediate assistance from people with tropical search and technical rescue skills. Mead Treadwell and his friend Josh Lewis—both active Alaskans in the venerable Explorers Club—were eager to effect this kind of assistance. Mead even took precious time out of his run for U.S. senator to do what he could.
Mead wrote a letter of introduction to Costa Rican officials that described me as “well-known for exploration and search and rescue work under very difficult conditions in many climates including tropical rainforests.” He informed the embassy that I was “more than a distraught parent,” but “an asset [that he] would want on any search in these conditions.” In the end, MINAE permitted me into the park because of Mead’s efforts and Josh Lewis’s connections.
The son of a successful Colorado oil man, Josh had an old family friend in Costa Rica named Juan Edgar Picado, a lawyer in San José. Juan Edgar’s father had been very influential in Costa Rican politics, as was Juan Edgar himself. Juan Edgar was a personal friend of Costa Rican president Luis Guillermo Solís and of Public Security Minister Celso Gamboa Sánchez, the Costa Rican equivalent of the U.S. secretary of defense.
Minister Gamboa signed a letter giving me and my friends special dispensation to enter the park. As part of the deal, we had to fax copies of our passports and signed, notarized statements to San José waiving Costa Rica of any responsibility should we be hurt or killed. We were also required to travel with a MINAE permit and rangers.
Impatient to get back to the jungle as soon as possible, I wrote the GPS coordinates of Zeledón on the documents, faxed them to MINAE, and suggested they send our permit in with the ranger when it was ready. Ole, Steve, and I left for Dos Brazos without the permit or rangers. Heeding Dondee’s threat of arrest if I were caught, I shaved off my beard and ducked low in the back seat when police, MINAE, or Cruz Roja vehicles passed by. It was discouraging to think that officials might now put more effort into stopping me than looking in the park for Roman.
A multisport athlete and adventurer, Steve carried with him a pair of two-hundred-foot ropes and climbing gear to rappel into the Negritos canyon. Without ropes, the canyon is inaccessible, blocked by waterfalls at top and bottom. We hiked into Zeledón, set up camp on one of the few flat spots above the creek, then scrambled down to the Negritos branch of El Tigre where it drops off the first of a half dozen waterfalls. Jenkins said Roman had climbed out at the lowest waterfall. I thought that perhaps he could have somehow fallen into it afterward, in a Hollywood version of a slippery slope in the wilderness.
It was early afternoon and clouds obscured the sun. Rain was coming. We set up the first rappel to slide down the rope into a bowl carved from pebbly walls. “Ole, have you done much climbing?” Steve asked casually.
“Nah, not much,” Ole replied, “but I have rappelled before.”
“How about climb a fixed rope with ascenders?”
Smiling, he shook his head. “No, I haven’t done that, I’m afraid.”
Steve and I stretched out the long rope and dropped off one waterfall and then another. Ole followed. Steve scouted deeper into the slot canyon downstream. By the time he had returned it was raining hard. Steve yelled over the din, “It’ll go with more rope! But I think we should get out, now!”
Steve had seen enough flash floods to know when to go. By the time we all had climbed out of the gorge, the creek had risen to an uncrossable depth. We got out just in time. Clawing our way up the greasy canyon walls and worried about these two friends in a dangerous place, I understood now the park officials’ and Cruz Roja’s concerns about me.
The next morning, Ole stayed at camp. Steve and I rappelled Negritos’s waterfalls, cutting our rope at the bottom of each drop so we could climb back up with ascenders. Between waterfalls, we scrambled and swam the Negritos as it slithered through slot canyons coated in green algae and moss.
Each waterfall was choked with logs and wood. Midway through, we found a broken machete, its rusty blade thrust into a log spanning the creek. It looked too old for Roman to have left it only weeks before. Other than the machete, we found no sign that anyone had ever been there. Below the last waterfall, the walls barely kicked back enough to exit the canyon, just as Roman had described to Jenkins when they had met.
By the time we left on our third day, I was convinced Negritos’s waterfall-filled side gullies and its upper tributary El Doctor needed thorough searching, too. Zeledón itself was perched between the Negritos and another branch of El Tigre that we also had not explored. It was just damned hard to get there, bushwhacking through all the red tape.
Chapter 32
Piedras Blancas
Roy Arias’s house, Piedras Blancas, August 10, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
While we searched Corcovado’s canyons, Armida Huerta interviewed people in town. Most told her the Pata Lora story. But she did hear a new one. Sean Hogan, an American living on the Osa, described a gringo he’d met on a weekday morning in Puerto Jiménez around July 7 or 8. The gringo “looked similar to the photo on the poster, but was more tanned, a bit thinner and older too, in travel-worn clothes, like he’d been out for a while.” The young man Sean met was quiet and didn’t volunteer much. Instead he’d asked questions of Sean. That sounded like Roman to me.
Lauren picked us up in Dos Brazos near noon. Back at the Iguana we sat down with Josh Lewis and his wife, Vic. The families of Josh and Juan Edgar Picado were united by the Fellowship, a Christian political organization based in the United States but international in scope. I’d soon be impressed by the reach and effectiveness of this group and grateful for its efforts to get search-and-rescue personnel from the U.S. military involved. Josh and his wife had flown down from Alaska to help. With his big white beard and aloha shirt, he looked like Santa on vacation.
Josh had employed a Tico driver from San José. Over lunch the driver earnestly recounted the Pata Lora story that he had heard at a bar the night before. I rolled my eyes and tried to explain that was not my son. The driver’s look alone was enough to say: “This father sees his son through rose-colored glasses.”
On the phone Peggy told me, “You should question the people who say this Pata Lora guy was with Roman. We know he lied about the ATM. We should at least find out why.”
I had no doubt at all that Pata Lora had made the Dos Brazos–Carate crossing with a gringo. Multiple people had seen them together. What I needed to know was if Pata Lora’s Cody was our Roman. It was time to visit Piedras Blancas, midpoint along the “Pata Lora trail” from Dos Brazos to Carate.
At the heart of Piedras Blancas is its only permanent structure, a two-story house occupied by Roy Arias—a responsible miner, according to Lauren. Pata Lora and Cody had visited with Roy on their way to Carate, even camping near the house. The Iguana Lodge’s gardener, nicknamed Chico, agreed to lead us there. Chico’s own father had been killed by a terciopelo, the local name for the velvety-skinned fer-de-lance, when Chico was a child.
After four hours of hard walking, we
arrived at Roy Arias’s place. White ponies grazed in a grassy pasture outside the open-plan house. Inside, several hammocks hung between posts; colorful laundry dried from a line on the first floor. We questioned several Piedras Blancas miners whose stories roughly matched those of witnesses from Dos Brazos. My notebook recorded Luis describing Cody: older than thirty; yellowish-brown hair; no glasses; no beard; more hair than me that was combed back; wearing Crocs; and smoking pot that he pulled from a big satchel.
Next, we tracked down Roy Arias. Wearing the miner’s uniform of knee boots, board shorts, and a cutoff T-shirt, Roy looked to be in his forties. He was digging at a placer gold deposit with his partner, Chelo. The two worked the stream by muscle alone, prying pay dirt with an old shovel and sifting gold in a three-foot sluice box. I showed them recent photos of Roman. They laughed and nodded favorably at the photo where Roman posed next to a bikini-clad friend pulled close to his side.
Ole translated. “Roy and Chelo say the guy with Pata Lora was not the guy in the photos. He didn’t look like him at all.” The miners said the gringo with Pata Lora spoke little Spanish; didn’t cook; slept in a tan tent; and wore Crocs. The part about the Crocs didn’t resonate with me.
On the APU trip to Corcovado when we’d walked across the park, eleven-year-old Roman had witnessed a sandal-wearing student impale himself on a six-inch palm spine. Carl and I had sent the student out on horseback to go to the Golfito hospital. To clear his subsequent infection, the student required an antibiotic drip that he carried in a fanny pack for six months. While there may have been a Cody walking in Crocs with Pata Lora through Piedras Blancas and on to Carate, it wasn’t my Cody Roman.
BY THIS TIME, a month had passed since Roman should have returned from his Corcovado crossing. Knowing the odds and desperate to try anything, I resorted to checking the geographic coordinates supplied by a psychic. The position was off-trail near Sirena, Corcovado’s chief tourist center and a full day’s walk from Carate. Accessible only by foot, boat, or air, the flight to Sirena from Puerto Jiménez is expensive but short; we flew because it was quick.
