by Roman Dial
Ole, Steve, Armida, and I needed a licensed guide to join us in the park. The pilot recommended young Nathan. When Nathan learned of our plan his eyes went wide. “We can’t leave the trail,” he declared. “I’ll lose my job and probably my guiding license.” Finally, at risk to his livelihood, Nathan agreed to lead us along the trail. Family is important in Costa Rica, and everyone we’d met was willing to do what they could. Everyone wanted me to find my son.
The flight to Sirena traced an achingly beautiful coast where the jungle tumbled down to the sea. I looked over a geography I knew well but for all the wrong reasons. Fifteen minutes after leaving Puerto Jiménez, the Cessna bumped in landing on the grassy strip. Lunchtime tourists packed the boardwalks and platforms in clusters, each with a young man like Nathan who toted a scope on a tripod and pointed out monkeys, toucans, and sloths in the trees.
Fifteen years before, when eco-tourists were few and no guides were required, Roman and I had walked with the APU class from Los Patos to Sirena, where we stayed for several days. In the forest, Roman staged battles between ants and termites, mortal enemies in the war for the jungle.
“Who wins?” I asked him.
“The termites put up a good fight with their nozzle-headed soldiers shooting goo,” he said, “but the ants always win. They have more soldiers.”
Roman even nosed around a storage building and caught a nectar-eating bat. There are few animals as exhilarating to hold as those that can fly. While Roman held it, the bat’s tongue darted out investigating and probing his gloved hand. He marveled at its long, skinny pink tongue, used to slurp nectar from tubular white flowers that open only at night.
There was a tame toucan there, too. Roman had touched its yellow-and-chestnut-colored bill. “What’s it feel like?” I asked.
“It looks heavy and solid, but it’s not. It’s hollow and light.”
So vivid were the memories at Sirena that I walked behind my friends, wiping my eyes in private.
Near the psychic-supplied GPS coordinates, Nathan looked up and down the trail. When the coast was clear, he whispered to us to leave the ten-foot-wide tourist trail and head into the lowland forest. Less than fifty yards off-trail, we encountered a dozen peccaries. The size of pit bulls, the wild pigs were curious and nearly touched us, their twitching snouts sniffing our knees.
I looked hard for Roman’s Kelty tent with the navy blue fly he’d brought from Alaska. What will I say to him? What are best- and worst-case scenarios? Why has he ended up here, of all places?
The peccaries followed us for twenty minutes through ankle-deep water beneath head-high palms and an overstory of tall buttressed trees. Peccaries, like all pigs, are omnivorous scavengers. I couldn’t help but imagine the worst. We wandered deeper into the muddy forest, but other than palm foliage pinned to the mud by fallen branches, nothing was disturbed. No sign, no footprints, no tent, no stink, nothing but another dead end.
Chapter 33
Homefront
Kitchen, Anchorage, August 2014.
Courtesy of the author
The Kübler-Ross model postulates five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These feelings swirled interchangeably in me for weeks. Every Tico and Tica suggested strength—fuerte—to cope with my grief. I did my best to do normal things: write, take pictures, tell stories, laugh. Still, almost anything could trigger a memory, sometimes so strongly that a wave of grief swelled, crested, and crashed over me. I’d weep for an instant, then get back to work.
After Sirena, I called Peggy from the Iguana to tell her I was leaving the Osa to go to San José, where Josh and Mead suggested a media campaign to drum up military support. Just hearing her voice, sweet and present, revived me from the dead ends in Negritos, Piedras Blancas, and Sirena. She never sounded down or depressed: only upbeat, empathetic, supportive, and loving. Peggy gave me the most fuerte of all.
Back home in Alaska, she faced struggles so much harder than mine. At least I could do something firsthand rather than rely on the actions of others. Unlike me, Peggy answered phone calls and emails, coordinated help and support. She communicated with everyone from reporters seeking a story to strangers offering to help. It was a full-time job.
Expenses piled up, too, with food and lodging; car rental; international cell-phone calls; logistics for friends coming down to help; hiring guides. Peggy managed the contributions that family, friends, former students, and even generous strangers gave us to help pay for all the costs.
The 2014 Wilderness Classic began while I was away. I’d planned to race with a friend in a two-person packraft and boldly descend the Tana, a major glacial river near the end of the route. Tragically, one of the 2014 racers, a well-liked, good-natured, and experienced veteran of the race, died on the Tana when his raft flipped in an icy Class IV rapid swollen with glacier melt. In spite of many close calls over the race’s thirty-year history, his was the only death ever in the event. The racers had all donated their entry fees for Roman’s search before the race start. Peggy said the dead racer’s check sitting on our kitchen table was a poignant reminder of the sometimes irrevocable cost of adventure.
Like a mother bear, Peggy squarely faced any threat to her offspring. With her phone always close and posted at her computer day and night, she dispensed news from me and answered the same questions from others over and over. We shared emotions that peaked when we were convinced that our son was alive and well (just ignoring and avoiding us), and plummeted when we imagined him lost, injured, suffering, or worse.
Peggy took care of details that could only be handled from home. Because we’d sent Costa Rican authorities an outdated picture of Roman from 2012, she searched for more recent ones: with his friend Denali in Hawaii; at home with his sister in Anchorage; on a boat fishing in Alaska’s Prince William Sound with Katelyn; in Guatemala with traveling companions. His straight white teeth showed behind a broad smile in each. Peggy forwarded these to Costa Rica for distribution to Fuerza, Cruz Roja, and MINAE.
In a little-known international agreement, the National Guard of every state in the U.S. is paired with an American ally to help in humanitarian crises. Lieutenant Governor Treadwell suggested that the Costa Ricans pull the New Mexico National Guard into the search. Peggy urged Alaskan politicians to follow up on this suggestion.
She also pleaded with bank representatives to share Roman’s last financial activities. “If there’s one thing to be learned from this,” she told her friends, “it’s to be sure that someone else is listed jointly on your children’s bank accounts. Otherwise you’ll never be able to track their financial movements if you need to find out where they were last.”
The office of Alaska’s then senator—Democrat Mark Begich—called Peggy to say the senator sometimes involved himself in missing persons cases. However, while neither he nor his office ever said so, it seemed to us unlikely that a sitting Democratic senator, up for reelection, would pitch in with Treadwell, a Republican campaigning for Begich’s seat in the upcoming November election.
All officials, from the embassy, to the FBI, to the senators’ offices, asked the same missing persons questions: did Roman have a Facebook page, a cell phone, a GPS; did he use drugs; how experienced was he; when did we last hear from him; etc., etc. Peggy answered the American authorities with the same responses Cruz Roja got from me my first day in Costa Rica.
Like Roman, Peggy had avoided Facebook. But now she found it an efficient tool for connecting with and updating people. In an outpouring of support, Facebook friends reported that family, friends, and former guides were willing to help. But what Facebook friends couldn’t know was that even an army of well-meaning acquaintances and friends of friends would have no better luck getting permission to enter Corcovado than we had.
Even if they did get into the park, how many Facebook friends had the jungle savvy to follow thin, unmarked paths used by poachers and illegal gold miners, trails meant to be hidden? How many could dodge green vipers a
t eye level and fer-de-lances underfoot while watching their step through slippery mud without grabbing spiny palms as handholds? Jungle travel needs four eyes and a sixth sense for hazards. How many had those and the time to come down, even if our GoFundMe campaign could foot the bill?
At first, Peggy kept a list of these names and their contact details. Some offered places to stay, locals to translate. But as our private search efforts were both illegal and risky, she stopped keeping the list and instead politely thanked those who offered. By two weeks in, the sleepless nights, incessant communication, and stress over her missing son had just plain worn Peggy out. Thinking about what her son was going through—out of food and three weeks overdue—made it harder and harder to keep it together.
She confided her fears to her friends, but never to me. She was confident Roman was alive, and I needed her faith. Early on in the ordeal she had broken down and sobbed long and hard, flushing grief from her system to better focus on the tasks at hand. Friends invited her to get away from the phone and the computer, to berry-pick, or just walk and talk. They gave their prayers, their love, their money. They shared stories about their kids as distraction.
Peggy’s brother-in-law Steve, together with sister Maureen, Carl Tobin, and other friends and neighbors, completed a house siding project left unfinished when I dropped everything to head south. Steve and Maureen helped Peggy strip and sand our living room floor. Peggy sent me photos of their work. It all looked great and provided her a constructive diversion from worry. “Keeping busy is good,” she wrote. “It helps keep the breakdowns at bay.”
AS EARLY AS July 29, a slew of high-ranking politicians—Treadwell; Alaska senators Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich and Congressman Don Young; Florida senator Bill Nelson; and a handful of generals including General John F. Kelly—all expected that National Guard personnel would soon be deployed, like a cavalry to the rescue.
But by the middle of August, Peggy was fed up with the National Guard runaround. All the back and forth, sucking up to the press, begging people to write their congressman, enlarging the circle of contacts to see who might finally get the message to President Obama for permission to send a small group of trained rescue personnel—like the Air Force’s PJ rescue squad—had stretched from days into weeks. All Peggy and I could see was the ticking clock.
“I’m starting to ignore this shit and told Roman to just get back into the jungle and fuck em all. If alive, my son is presently dying, or dead from all this bullshit,” she wrote, venting to a friend, sick of the empty promises and broken dreams. Frustrated at the pace of action, she fired off a scathing email to Begich’s office:
We still have not received capable people with jungle/rope skills—something we have been striving for three weeks. We feel so close, then get pushed back ten steps. I’m not sure what Mark has actually done himself, but it sounds like he could do more. ONE TELEPHONE CALL OF HIS TIME. PLEASE.
The Republican Party is shining bright right now. Really Bright. Extra Bright. I’d like to see Mark kick it up a notch.
That worked. Begich called me the next day. But every politician’s promise from D.C. to San José delivered little more than the false hope I’d found in the psychic’s GPS coordinates near Sirena.
Chapter 34
The Fellowship
Juan Edgar Picado, San José, August 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Back in Costa Rica, I joined Josh and his wife, Vic, in San José, where I felt like a sad pony trotted out for sympathy. We hoped that Juan Edgar’s political contacts and Costa Rican media exposure would motivate the Costa Rican government to invite U.S. military support in the search. Meanwhile, Mead worked back channels to get special-ops soldiers, like the PJs, down to Costa Rica.
Mead, Josh, and Juan Edgar all thought it was a sure thing. Lauren was skeptical. The Costa Ricans pride themselves on having no military. “I’d love to see a Black Hawk helicopter land in Puerto Jiménez, but I’m telling you”—she smiled—“it’s just not going to happen.”
By now Roman’s disappearance was national news. Men’s Journal, ABC News, and a who’s who of celebrities, media, and influential contacts from the Fellowship and Explorers Club all spoke to me. Midway through a marathon phone session we heard from Mead: “I just got off the phone with the number one motherfucker in charge of Southern Command—General Kelly!”
Four years before, four-star general John F. Kelly had lost his twenty-nine-year-old son—a marine killed by a land mine in Afghanistan. General Kelly himself had called Mead and told him he had learned just that day of the request to send special ops to Costa Rica. “I don’t know what I have, or the legality,” he told Mead, but General Kelly was on it.
I was honored, flattered, and a bit overwhelmed. I couldn’t believe it. The cavalry was coming after all!
These powerful and successful people—media stars, generals, senators, governors—had strong but not overbearing personalities. They made things happen by applying vision coupled with persuasion. And they worked a network of social relationships that acted as “hands and feet” to accomplish shared goals. Josh and Mead (and the whole orb connected to them) were family and friend–oriented, less self-centered, and more likely to build and maintain relationships.
My own parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins are good people, but my extended family seemed in tatters. I hadn’t stayed in Virginia. My dad didn’t stick around, my sister moved to London, and my own mom had left home when she was sixteen. They had their reasons—good ones. But mine were self-indulgent and selfish: head for Alaska to do what I wanted.
Peggy and I had worked hard to make our own family better than what we’d each grown up with. Our marriage, like many, had rough spots. Peggy once told me, “You haven’t always been a good husband, but you are a good father.”
My kids showed they loved me, even though I felt undeserving. Home from college, Roman once responded to my apology for being a less-than-ideal parent by saying, “No, Dad, you were—you are a great dad. I love you.” My main hope was that Roman would be a better dad than I had been.
The next day, Alaska’s Republican senator Lisa Murkowski emailed me with bad news. The Southern Command, air force, and joint chiefs of staff had concluded that the legal authority doesn’t exist because the SAR isn’t requested for humanitarian assistance or disaster relief. There’d be no American military-based search and rescue for Cody Roman Dial. The roller coaster plunged again.
During the full moon of August, I had looked up and imagined that Roman, too, saw the same bright disk in the sky: he was wondering where I was, when I would come get him. The image compelled me to return to Corcovado’s mountains, jungles, and canyons. Fed up and exasperated with the effort to get Department of Defense support, I emailed Josh and Mead: I am done with this and have better ways to spend my time. Thank you two for your efforts. They were something to behold.
Lauren had been right. “The legal authority doesn’t exist.” I was disappointed that the cavalry wasn’t coming. But not surprised. I couldn’t help but think that the stink of the Pata Lora story had wafted its way north and suppressed any action. If Jenkins’s story is true, and I believed that it was, then where is my son? It was time to go back to Zeledón.
Thanks to Juan Edgar’s connections, Mead’s endorsement, and Josh’s push for media exposure, we had a mechanism to enter the park. And through Peggy’s efforts back home, we had the services of three former military SERE (survival, escape, resistance, and evasion) experts from an Anchorage search-and-rescue training company called Learn to Return, or LTR. With our friends’ support, we had the funds to fly them all to Costa Rica along with two of the Veracruz packrafting crew.
In his mid-fifties, Brian Horner, owner and founder of LTR, was skilled in search, wilderness medicine, technical rope work, and rescue. He had worked on projects around the world. Clint Homestead, in his late twenties, had served as a Green Beret in the Middle East and was skilled in rope work, too. Clint w
as muscular and fit and worked out at the same Anchorage gym as Jazz. The third crew member, Frank Marley, had been an army medic. Now in his thirties, I remembered Frank as a graduate student at APU.
Besides LTR, two friends that Roman and I had paddled with in Veracruz joined us: Brad Meiklejohn and Todd Tumolo, who’d led the way down the Big Banana. While Brad and Todd mostly packrafted whitewater with me, Todd was an accomplished climber and mountain guide in his mid-twenties. He’d helped me on some ice worm traverses, too. I’d met Todd when he was a student at APU, where he and Jazz had briefly dated. Like the LTR crew, Todd was trained in wilderness medicine. Brad, a climber and a skier in his younger days, spoke Spanish well. A professional conservationist and avid naturalist, Brad had visited tropical forests around the world. He had also become my primary whitewater packrafting partner in Alaska.
It felt good to have such a strong team of friends and community members ready and willing to head into the jungle. My only concern—as it had been with Ole and Steve—was everyone’s safety. The afternoon rains were getting heavier, coming earlier in the day and sometimes lasting all night and into the next morning. The wet season had arrived.
THE MORNING AFTER returning from San José, a mysterious illness struck me with a pounding headache and dry heaves. After a near-delirious night, my sheets soaked from fevered sweats, I was just too sick to pack and plan. Josh and Vic cared for me. They brought fluids, food, and flu medicine from the farmacia in town.
