by Roman Dial
I couldn’t eat but the meds and fluids helped enough to get me out the door to the back-to-back meetings planned that day. Sick, my son missing for over a month, and suffering repeated bureaucratic roadblocks, I wondered, Have my sins been so great as to deserve all this?
Permission to enter Corcovado required that we fax twelve pages of permit applications to three offices. In addition, we presented our detailed plan at three meetings, complete with a day-by-day description of objectives, a list of our equipment, the qualifications of our team, and a communications plan. The permits would not come until the next day. All of this felt like inefficiencies in the system. But the hardest pill to swallow was that MINAE required that Dondee join us.
And there he was at a morning meeting, aching to be the center of attention, with his Google Earth projection of waypoints and GPS tracks on the wall. Dondee reminded us that Roman had entered the park illegally; he baldly stated that there was no place left to look in the park; it had all been checked already.
As he droned on describing odors from mining tunnels, and remembering the Tico guide’s ballerina comment, I snapped. I’d had enough. This meeting was supposed to be about our plans for success, not Dondee’s failure to find my son.
Standing up, I shouted, “We have been listening to this narcissist for a month and it gets us nowhere! I’m tired of it! Fucking tired of it!”
Dondee, satisfied that he’d finally pushed my button hard, smiled.
I stormed out to take a taxi back to the Iguana and leave him behind.
Chapter 35
Tree Fall
Steve Fassbinder on tree fall above Negritos Canyon, August 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Six weeks after Roman walked into the jungle and a month after I had arrived, MINAE finally granted me permission to enter the park and lead a search of my own. Brad, Todd, and the three LTR professionals joined me on Jenkins’s route to Zeledón. Cruz Roja, MINAE rangers, and Fuerza took a parallel tourist trail and caught up to us later that day.
The crumpled landscape offered us few sites to pitch our tents. Todd, Brad, and I set up a plastic Visqueen tarp and bug tent camp where Ole, Steve, and I had camped before. The LTR guys squeezed into a dome tent on another ridge along Jenkins’s well-worn trail to the mining tunnels above the Negritos. Dondee, Cruz Roja, MINAE, and Fuerza camped near the north branch of El Tigre. One of the MINAE rangers was Kique, the tall, dark, and serious ranger who had hiked the Fila Matajambre ridge trail with Thai and Pancho the day we met Jenkins.
Jenkins had told me that on July 10, his brother, who had been with him and the other three miners on the Zeledón, had had a court date for his divorce. Walking downstream to make the appointment, Jenkins’s brother had encountered Roman hiking upstream on El Tigre. This left several places to look for Roman between the Negritos and the north branch of the El Tigre. For example, there had been a rotten smell of decay at the mouth of Negritos’s canyon. Looking there, I found a dead agouti, a spotted rabbit-sized rodent of the rainforest that looks like Borneo’s mouse deer.
On rappel, the LTR team checked each side gulley leading into Negritos’s canyon. The rest of us checked possible cliffs that Roman could have fallen from. It rained all afternoon and into the night. The next day we again looked hard, but all my ideas—the side gullies, the bad smell, the El Tigre’s north branch—came up empty. These negative results reduced the number of places to look. While there was an infinite number of unlikely places—cliffs, thick bamboo, landslides, inaccessible canyons—there was only a finite number of likely ones.
Whenever I searched in the jungle, hope tugged me toward town, where someone might have found new clues or Roman may have finally revealed himself. But whenever I was in town, dealing with officials, reporters, logistics, family, friends, the cagey voice with the unlisted number, and all the rest, I just wanted to go back into Corcovado and look. Snakes, cliffs, rain be damned.
Soon after breakfast at dawn, Todd and I searched a landslide above the canyon rim. We walked and talked as we moved on and off trail. It was reassuring to have Todd along, a gentle, competent, intelligent young man. Todd said he’d always been a woods kid, and that his father had left his family to live in Panama when Todd was young. His story left me wondering as we came up empty of clues, if my son had left me to go to Panama. Maybe Dondee was right: he’d never entered Corcovado at all.
As the afternoon wore on and the short-billed pigeon called its melodious who-cooks-for-you from high in the canopy, we all rendezvoused back at camp. We’d found nothing.
THAT NIGHT IT rained hard and the wind blew. As snowstorms load mountain slopes that eventually avalanche, rainstorms weaken trees that eventually fall. But unlike avalanche safety, with its snow pits, locator beacons, and shovels to rescue an avalanche victim, there is no special technique, no technology, nothing like an avalanche-awareness class for safety from falling trees. Most people are surprised to learn that tree fall is a hazard at all, though the word widowmaker has been coined expressly for potentially lethal tree and limb fall.
In tropical rainforests, where trees are mostly shallowly rooted and where decay is rapid, thunderstorms can waterlog canopy deadwood with rain. The storm’s winds can then break, snap, or tip up entire trees. Tim Laman once said about Gunung Palung: “The sound of tree fall is so common that I sometimes wonder why there are any trees left standing in the forest at all.”
Brian, Clint, and Frank slept through the night’s rainstorm in their small dome five minutes away from our camp. The wind picked up. Limbs started to fall, waking the three. But “with nowhere to go anyway,” as Clint put it later, they just lay on their backs and listened, hoping for the best.
Sometime after three in the morning they heard a pulsing groan followed by an ominous pop, pop, pop, then an accelerating swish. Falling objects move fast, speeding up as they go. A blast of wind flattened their tent with a woomp! Then the tent popped back up and they found themselves unhurt, happy to be alive.
We paced out the length of the tree: 135 feet from root wad to tip-top. The crown’s six-inch-diameter limbs had landed only ten paces from their small nylon tent. I shuddered to think what would have happened had it struck them in the night. It was another reminder of how dangerous the forest could be.
“There wasn’t really much we could do,” Clint joked the next morning, “except curl into the fetal position and mess our pants!” They laughed the tension-relieving laugh of battlefield soldiers.
BETWEEN US, WE had looked on the Zeledón’s ridges and in its gullies; even farther afield when Brad joined Kique’s mining camp raids. The thoroughness of our search left me 95 percent certain that Roman was not within a half mile of where Jenkins had seen him. But we hadn’t thoroughly searched beyond that half mile.
Every doubling in distance from the point last seen tripled the additional area needed to look. No wonder the Cruz Roja gave up. The task seemed impossible. It was easier to accept that Roman had left the park and encountered foul play.
Or, like Todd’s dad left him, Roman left us.
Chapter 36
Foul Play
Willim with dead fer-de-lance, Dos Brazos, August 2015.
Courtesy of the author
The idea that Roman would one day resurface from a grand solo adventure—a possibility Lauren proposed in her cheerful voice—sure beat the alternatives. But the notion that he deserted us left me feeling that we had failed as a family. Dondee, Doña Berta, the sightings at Matapalo, and all the doubters who thought I saw only a son I wanted to see, had sowed the seed of his abandonment in my heart. But it wouldn’t root. Roman wouldn’t desert his family and friends. He was loyal to us all. He’d written a friend to say he looked forward to seeing her soon. He had recently exchanged instant messages maintaining a friendship that he’d had since grade school.
All the sights he’d seen, odors he’d suffered, and tastes he’d enjoyed on his tropical travels must have been full of family nostalgia for
him. On our way back from hunting Tibetan ice worms in Bhutan’s Himalaya, Roman and I wandered around Bangkok before flying home to Anchorage. It had been an incredible trip; we didn’t want to leave. The stopover in Thailand offered us a last taste of the exotic. “This is how I remember all our trips to the tropics,” Roman told me that night in Bangkok, “with us ending up in some big Asian city on your quest to find durian.”
He found my stinky favorite fruit after first spotting a heap of mangosteens—his “yellow starburst with a tang” fruit from our first trip to Borneo—on a hawker’s stand. “Look, they have durian!” he’d said, even though he didn’t like the fruit any more at twenty-five than he had at eight when he’d written “worse than brustle sprouts! Yuck!” He sat with me on a city park bench and endured what he claimed smelled like garbage while I opened it up and ate it.
If Roman was not in the jungle and had not left for a new life, only the possibility of foul play remained, probably somewhere between the place he’d been last seen and Puerto Jiménez. Even Jenkins and his crew were not beyond suspicion. Kique suggested to Brad that we push for further investigation of the four miners as likely suspects. But I had spoken at length with them and followed behind Jenkins on jungle trails. My gut said they told the truth, that Jenkins was trustworthy. He had risked too much to be lying. I could not yet go down a path that seemed like betrayal.
The thought that a miner had walked Roman at machete point up a side stream or hijacked him on a bumpy road was a parent’s worst nightmare, but investigating foul play was beyond my experience. Sniffing out criminals would require experts.
Using Todd’s satellite device, I texted from camp: Peg, he is not where I thought and pretty sure it must be foul play so I am coming home to you by end of this week. Talk tomorrow.
She texted back minutes later. Then we need to stay there.
Stay here? How come? Not any evidence.
WE ALL LEFT the jungle wet with sweat and shaken by tree fall. It hadn’t rained the final night, so the creek was low, with good walking. Dondee drove us back to the Iguana. I thanked him in Spanish, shook his hand, even fist-bumped him. He had done his job. His guys liked him. And it looked like he was right after all: Roman wasn’t in the park. Dondee drove off in the Cruz Roja Land Cruiser. We would never see or hear from each other again. LTR, Brad, and Todd headed home, too. They had offered just the kind of help Peggy and I needed and we were grateful. The Cruz Roja and MINAE were happy with them, too.
A few days later, the consul general and Barbara from the embassy drove seven hours to meet me at the lodge. The consul general, named Ravi, asked me things that went beyond the usual missing person questions. He wanted to know about Roman’s equipment. Ravi didn’t have much experience with outdoor gear, but he wanted to get it right. I pulled up Internet images of a folding sleeping pad and a Jetboil stove. These were items missing from the yellow bag at the Corners Hostel that I expected Roman would be carrying with him.
Ravi and I went through the possibilities. We agreed, given the searching, that it didn’t appear Roman was in Corcovado. After reading some of Roman’s emails, Ravi also agreed he would not have deserted his family and friends. “That leaves foul play,” I said.
“Or,” the consul general suggested, “it’s none of the above.” He smiled. “Look, Roman, I want to assure you that even though the search is over, we at the embassy will keep the case open and coordinate further investigations.”
Alone at the Iguana and emotionally spent after a month of searching, I wanted to leave but I couldn’t. Not yet. Peggy and Jazz were on their way to Costa Rica, and Peggy had plans of her own. She needed to look in the park, to see how big it was, how hard it was. She needed, also, to find solace in searching.
There could never be any single moment—unless we held his bones in our hands—when Peggy and I could be 100 percent sure he was dead. But confronting the possibility of the profound loss of my son forced me to confront my own risk taking over nearly a lifetime of adventuring. After my close call on the southeast ridge of McGinnis Peak, I hadn’t quit cold turkey, not really. There had been frozen waterfalls, whitewater rafting, tree climbing, glacier travel, and more—all of it risky, all of it thrilling.
For the first time, I realized how much suffering my death would cause in those who loved me. More shocking, though, was the fact that forty years had passed before I recognized this naked, obvious truth. The stark lesson masked by decades of selfishness was this: when I die, I am dead. I no longer feel anything. It’s those I leave behind who feel the lasting pain: the more love, the more pain.
I didn’t want to be the cause of their suffering.
Chapter 37
Peggy and Jazz
Peggy and Jazz at Iguana Lodge, September 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Peggy and Jazz arrived on the Osa. It felt so good to have them near, to hear their voices, to see their cheerful smiles, to feel Peggy’s warmth in bed and to touch her during the day. Having them present gave me far more than comfort. It gave me fuerte.
We tried to make it to Zeledón, but the rainy season had swollen El Tigre. Running brown and swift, the river turned us back half an hour upstream. Still, the day took on the feel of a tropical nature walk. We watched a small armadillo nosing around for termites and later saw a coatimundi, tropical cousin to the raccoon, climb a tall skinny tree. We marveled, like we always had, at the sights, sounds, and smells of the jungle.
We stopped to admire a poison dart frog mother, hopping along the forest floor with its tadpole clinging to her back, a miracle of motherhood in which she would climb into the rainforest’s canopy to leave the tadpole in an epiphyte’s reservoir. Mothers are so tough. I thought of Peggy holding up through all of this while I had been away.
Peggy and I had often considered Roman “mine” and Jazzy “hers” during their childhood. But Roman was every bit Peggy’s son, too. We needed to work together on this, to rely on each other for complementary skills and temperament. Walking through the jungle, Peggy offered her thoughts. She wanted to put up new flyers with pictures of his gear: “To keep him alive,” she said, “and fresh in people’s minds. Someone knows something out there. They’re just not talking.”
Through our network of friends, a young American woman who had lived off and on in Puerto Jiménez contacted Peggy with a list of people and places on the Osa. “This woman told me we should go to another lodge—Danta Lodge. With helpful people and local trackers.”
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll go there. Anything else? I’d like to hear your ideas. I’m running out.”
“Well, I think we should walk the route Roman said he was going to do. Really check it out. Nobody has done it and we need to go and look there, where he said he was going.”
We returned to the Iguana for lunch. The sea breeze blew the sound of gentle surf past palm trees and into the open Pearl. Roman, so clearly missing from what felt otherwise like a family vacation, obliged an unspoken agreement that we carry on as if we’d soon be sharing with him the delights we’d seen, then hearing his own humorous, self-effacing stories, his awkward guffaw.
As Roman’s younger sister, Jazz had often felt overshadowed, but she needn’t have. Even as a preschooler, she’d been the family spark, its nucleus. It was Jazzy whom Roman missed most on Umnak. She made him laugh; he took great pleasure in humoring her, too. Still, there was sibling rivalry, and while Roman was praised for his intellect, it was Jazz who had the highest grades, Jazz who had the common sense, Jazz who’d win at nearly every game. As much as I included Roman on outdoor adventures, Peggy did even more with Jazz at home and daily: making homemade Play-Doh, holiday cards, beaded jewelry, baking, sharing as only mothers and daughters can share. “I’m the only normal one in the family,” she would remind us.
Before high school, Jazz discovered a variety of short-season summer camps: Super Camp, Surf Camp, and Golf Camp. She then researched, applied to, and attended each. She also wanted to play soccer,
but unlike the shorter camps, and because we traveled in summer, there wasn’t an opportunity for her to join a team. Instead, she became a competitive climber at the local rock gym in high school. She did well and competed at a national level. After graduating from Lewis and Clark College on a full scholarship and majoring in psychology, she took up body building and entered in a local competition, finishing fifth.
Ever since she was old enough to understand the chores assigned her, Jazz has been responsible and reliable. And since earning her driver’s license, she has always held down a job. As a teen she shopped for groceries, drove the family car for oil changes and tire swaps. At sixteen, she sided our house with me, eventually taking the lead, thinking ahead, measuring then marking the boards for the cuts, and hitting the first nail. After college, she was the one who solved problems at home when Peggy and I were away, once calling the plumbers to unfreeze our frozen pipes after checking in at our empty house to find the water didn’t work. Just like she had on the Harding Icefield, Jazz anticipates problems and asks the right questions to solve them.
But Jazz, I sensed, felt helpless in Costa Rica. As brother and sister, she and Roman had been very close, one of Peggy’s goals as a mother. Being here likely distressed her, although she showed no sign of that. All of us had girded ourselves in search-and-rescue mode, but Jazz saw no reason to stay. She didn’t want to do the hike Roman had sketched out and needed to get back to work in Anchorage.
After Jazz left, Lauren and Toby encouraged Peggy and me to assemble a poster offering a reward for Roman’s missing gear. Todd Tumolo sent a photo of Roman’s green Salomon shoes on his feet during our trip to Mexico. We copied and pasted Internet images of a yellow folding sleeping pad, a blue-colored Jetboil, a red dry bag, a puffy blue Patagonia pullover, the Kelty logo of his tent. I asked Lauren if we shouldn’t hold back a few items, in case someone was—as with David Gimelfarb—trying to take advantage. “I don’t think so,” Lauren said, who’d been a defense attorney for a decade. “We want to get as much information out there as possible. It’s time for a criminal investigation. Having lots of people looking for distinctive gear is useful.”
