by Roman Dial
We posted copies at every pulperia, soda, cantina, and colectivo stop between Los Patos and Carate. Everywhere we went, people sympathized with us, the parents of the muchacho. It felt good to be doing something new that might have results. For nine hours one day we hung posters, heard stories, peered into every backyard we drove past looking for his clothes on laundry lines. We studied every young man’s feet for shoe color and brand, wondered about every kettle of vultures circling above forests and pastures.
One ex-pat said that when she had moved here in the nineties, it felt like paradise at the end of the world. Now, fifteen years on, she had nothing good to say. She wanted off the Osa but had her life savings tied up in her house and property. She had married a local Tico and had his child, but his substance abuse led to their divorce.
“I knew those two Austrians. I knew Kimberley, too, who was beaten and shot right at her house. And I knew Lisa, smothered in her bed. And you know what? I lock my front door each night, and then I take my child in my bedroom with me and I lock my bedroom door, too. I got a gun. I keep it loaded right there with me. And to top it all off, I let my ex live with me. Otherwise the criminals will just come and take everything. I’m trapped. Cody’s disappearance is part of this,” she concluded. “This inbred, lawless, uneducated, unscrupulous backwater of a place.”
She stood up and took a deep breath. “Look, I’m always around. Stop by anytime. And sorry I just talked about myself. I hope you find your son. I can’t imagine what a nightmare this is for you two.”
Chapter 38
Cerro de Oro
Pulperia, Cerro de Oro, September 2014.
Courtesy of the author
After my return from San José with Josh and Vic and ten days before Peggy arrived, Vargas had called me at the Iguana to say he’d heard a story about a lone gringo at Cerro de Oro, an off-the-grid mining community on the north side of Corcovado’s mountains. Cerro de Oro is beyond La Tarde, where Dondee had abandoned Thai, Pancho, and me. To go there, Peggy and I hired a guide named Andres who spoke good English and knew the trails. Tall, young, and curly-haired, he led us to Cerro de Oro with the patient, attentive gate of a nature guide. He pointed out a mother sloth in a cecropia, a fast-growing, hollow-stemmed tree that looks like the house plant called an umbrella tree and is the sloth’s favored food. Through our binoculars we could see the baby clinging to the mother’s greenish-gray hair, looking down. Elsewhere, a stately king vulture, biggest in the Americas, dried its white wings at the top of a tall snag.
Walking upstream, we encountered a knot of miners studying their pans for gold. The youngest dug into the current with a spade. Andres told us a story about the oldest. With only two teeth and dark skin weathered from a life in the sun, he looked ancient as dirt. The old man had once been lost in the jungle for two weeks after breaking his leg. He’d been rescued when a local indigenous psychic described his location from a dream. One of the miners wrote the seer’s number in my notebook. Every call rang busy.
The miners said there were two pulperias upstream. A three-hour walk off the grid, the first pulperia was crowded nonetheless. Under the rustic shop’s roof, shaded by mango trees, a handful of men sat on wooden benches with dogs at their feet. A little girl peeked from behind her mother’s skirt. On the store counter a green parrot cocked its head, eyeing us with the same cautious curiosity as the men, the dogs, and the little girl. “The owner says no gringo came through here,” Andres told us. “You are the first ones here in memory.” We hung a poster anyway.
A wide trail led to the next pulperia, ten minutes away through what was once a bustling village. Simple framed houses surrounded by gray fences stood empty in yards crowded by encroaching jungle. Cerro de Oro was a community reached only by foot or horseback, with running water gravity-fed through black plastic pipes from nearby streams. It felt forgotten by modern Costa Rica. “Roman wouldn’t have even known about this place,” Peggy concluded, “and I doubt he’d come here if he did.”
I wasn’t so sure.
At the second pulperia, a man and his young wife—or daughter, we couldn’t tell—also reported that they had seen no gringos. The man said he had heard a gringo entered the park near the Rio Conte. The young woman shared some yellow rambutans. We thanked her for the tasty fruit, hung a poster, and left.
Farther along the trail we met an old miner. Andres asked if he had heard about the missing gringo. “Yes, of course,” he said. “That muchacho has been lost before in the Amazon, and the father went down and found him that time, too.” We had heard many rumors across the Osa, but this one was the most fanciful—so far. Later, I would hear even taller tales.
ON THE WAY back to the Iguana, we visited Vargas’s farm to make arrangements for our trip to follow the route Roman had described in his last email, then stopped in Puerto Jiménez to eat Chinese food. Sitting in the restaurant, we watched a fight break out across the street at a liquor store. A couple of guys threw punches, rocks, and boards at each other. Nobody tried to stop them and the fight fizzled out on its own.
Watching this street brawl made it easy to understand why the Costa Rican government was closing down trails and requiring guides for all park visitors. The underbelly of the Osa grew by the year, people said, a place where convicted felons go to hide, where high-volume cocaine traffic flows freely from Panama, Colombia, and farther south. The miners, we’d been told, were drug addicts, self-serving thugs.
That night the heaviest rain of the burgeoning wet season hit with thunder and lightning that knocked out the Iguana’s electricity. The wind blew hard from the Gulf. Tree fall crashed in the dark and I readied our things to escape should it feel unsafe on the second story of the Pearl, where we slept surrounded by tall ceiba forest.
By morning the Iguana’s power was back on, the lodge intact. Lauren told us over breakfast that Vargas was nervous taking a woman along on our upcoming traverse. He thought Peggy would slow us and that he’d get caught. He said if we encountered any officials, he would run and wouldn’t wait. He could go to prison for being in the park.
But Peggy, I knew, was much tougher than she looked. She had raced three times in the Wilderness Classic, holding the fastest female time for decades. She would have no problem keeping up. Lauren encouraged her: “Peggy, you need to go and show that old Tico what women can do. Straighten him out.”
We went to town for cash. The sky was clear, the air wet, the sun cooking us overhead. My ATM card didn’t work at the bank and I had too little Spanish to explain my problem. The bank declined my credit card. During a three-dollar-per-minute cell call to credit card services, I was transferred, put on hold, and asked the same questions repeatedly. My own went unanswered.
Frustrated, I vented on Peggy, telling her it was her turn to struggle with language, her turn to access money, her turn to drive everywhere. I would sit in the car and wait. Costa Ricans have a saying for misplaced anger like that: “I broke the dish, but you have to pay for it.”
Jazz ultimately saved us, as she so often does. The bank said the easiest way to get cash was by MoneyGram. We texted Jazz in Anchorage. Within minutes she had transferred us the money we needed for the private investigator.
Emotional pain inevitably manifests itself physically, it seems. Leaving in the predawn darkness to meet Vargas at five, we hurried through the dark. Peggy couldn’t fasten her seat belt because its ratchet caught with each jolt in the bumpy road. A cyclist appeared out of the black. I swerved, striking a deep pothole that sent Peggy flying out of her seat, where she hit her head on the roof, then landed on her tailbone that she had broken years before and bruised it severely.
She cried out, moaning in agony, tears in her eyes. I stopped, hurt by her suffering. I felt terrible, with no way to ease her pain other than with a gentle squeeze of her hand, a caress, an apology.
She motioned me onward. “Let’s go. We’re going to be late. I don’t want to keep him waiting.”
Chapter 39
Roman’s
Route
Upper Rio Claro, September 2014.
Courtesy of the author
When we arrived at Vargas’s farm in the dark on September 4 to finally walk Roman’s planned route, it had been eight weeks since he wrote us his last email and forty-three days since we realized he was missing. We followed Vargas uphill in the tropical dawn, the best hour of every day, set between sleep and sweat. With his son Jefe in the rear, Vargas walked us along a dirt road, then an ATV trail, and finally a footpath where we slipped across the park boundary into Corcovado. Our shared language with Vargas would consist mostly of river names: Agujas, Barrigones, Conte, Rincon, Sirena, Claro, El Tigre. We had no translator.
At first Vargas moved slowly and Peggy knew why. “He thinks I can’t keep up. Tell him to go faster.” She waved her hand forward from the wrist and frowned at Vargas.
“Mas rapido!” I said in my simple Spanish. Faster! When that didn’t work, she pushed him with both hands and a smile. Physically urged onward, he looked at me quizzically but moved quicker with Peggy hot on his heels.
In the park, the trail narrowed and we squeezed past huge tree roots that sprawled across the narrow ridgeline like fat lazy pythons.
“Cerro de Oro,” Vargas said, motioning to a side trail.
“La Tarde?” I asked, pointing ahead.
“No. Aqui,” he replied pointing down the Cerro de Oro trail again. Thai, Pancho, and Kique must have passed this way on their way to Dos Brazos.
Dawn slipped away and by eight we were sweating. We passed beneath a gang of spider monkeys barking, screaming, and shaking the trees above us. We climbed higher. Just before mossy woods and overcast skies closed overhead, we took in a rare view of Corcovado Lagoon. Soon after we passed the Rincon benchmark and entered Las Quebraditas’ disorienting bamboo forest.
At one of the picas, a small, subtle trail I would hardly notice, much less follow, Vargas led us to the Mueller benchmark. Startled, I turned slowly around trying to orient myself. For the second time on the summit plateau, I had lost my sense of direction. Peggy looked at my face. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I thought we were going a completely different way and am totally turned around. I’m glad we’re with Vargas.”
“If you don’t know where we are, then I’m glad we’re with him, too!”
After climbing over deadfalls and past muddy trail braids, we came to where an empty package from Vargas’s granola bar and heliconia leaves marked our lunch spot with Thai from a month ago. I looked at the litter and thought how many times I’d hoped to find a Starburst wrapper or other sure sign left by Roman. We sat on the same leaves on the same logs, knowing little more than the same facts about him we knew then. Peggy squirmed. Her bruised tailbone prevented her from sitting squarely on anything.
After lunch we moved down the broad ridge. Vargas motioned right: “Sirena.” Then left: “Rio Claro.” And behind us: “Madrigal y Rincon.” We had passed the five-pointed star and now slipped through the keyhole that led off the plateau to Rio Claro.
At times, tangles of liana-choked deadfall pushed us off the ridge trail, but Vargas quickly got us on track. The gentle tzing of his razor-sharp machete left a wake of fresh-cut vegetation behind like bread crumbs. Smiling and joking in the oppressive heat and sweat-soaking humidity, Peggy watched for birds and monkeys. She never complained, despite waking up nauseated from dinner the night before and fretting about snakes underfoot today. She had no difficulty keeping up. This was the mother of our son.
By early afternoon Vargas announced: “Rio Claro.” He pointed to a silver sliver far below at the bottom of a steep-sided valley. It seemed unlikely that Roman, following only the small, thin pica trails that are so rarely used and easily lost, would have made it to here. I hoped he had exercised judgment enough not to try crossing Las Quebraditas. But we had to. We owed it to ourselves and to him to be here and look. We kept close to the Osa’s most experienced tracker.
On a ridge high above two branches of the Rio Claro, Vargas and his son disagreed over where we were. Once my phone’s GPS acquired a signal through a thinning in the canopy, I showed Jefe our location and pointed to the Rio Claro on both map and landscape. Going right would take us down to the river, but instead Vargas took us left and then up, up, up, rushing headlong into a sudden downpour.
While trying to hang on to his pace, I gestured this didn’t seem right. Vargas responded by plunging off the ridge on a tapir trail where the rainstorm left a small stream spilling down muddy steps. The pouring rain chilled Peggy first and then us all. “You said we’d camp before the rain! That’s what you said!” Peggy reminded me over the din of big drops pounding on layer upon layers of forest leaves. “Why not here?” she implored.
“Acampar aqui!” I yelled over the crash of water. Camp here!
“No agua!” came the reply. No water!
I smiled and held out my arms, palms up at the deluge all around us, then dropped my pack, pulled out a large Visqueen sheet, and pitched it. Peggy and I ducked under the plastic to escape the cold rain. Vargas pulled out a brand-new, tiny dome tent and erected it quickly without Visqueen above.
Peggy collected rainwater in our bottles and cookpot as it ran off our plastic shelter. I erected our bug net tent, then took a full water bottle to the other tent as a peace offering. We stripped off wet clothes and hung them to drain. Peggy ate an entire hot meal, settling her cramps and relaxing her. While she’d found her appetite, she slept little, picking off small ticks from her skin as they bit her most of the night. Early in the morning, lightning flashed and thundered. A tree crashed to the ground.
FATHER AND SON sat eating breakfast as we broke camp and packed. My GPS showed us perched on a narrow ridge with the Rio Claro’s headwater forks a thousand vertical feet below us. At first, we climbed higher, back into the dry-feeling oak forests, then dropped steeply down a knife-edged ridge to the Rio Claro. “It should be easier from here,” I said, relieved to be down.
“I hope so. That last bit was too steep! And so much off-trail—I was worried about snakes.”
At the bottom we caught our breath and scraped the leaves, twigs, spiders, and ants from between our shirt collars and sweaty, naked necks. “Roman probably realized this isn’t a good route. It’s more work than it is interesting,” Peggy said between gulps of cool stream water.
At first the creek was shallow and slippery, but it soon gained flow from tributaries and its sandbars offered good walking. In quick succession, we passed an elaborate mining system of hand-built dikes, walls, and channels, then a beautiful natural weeping wall of seeps and waterfalls, covered in hanging gardens of ferns and mosses. The air smelled earthy and wet.
Peggy inspected areas along the creek that might hide Roman and his tent. “Where would he cross and where would he camp?” Peggy asked, tears in her eyes as she saw the immensity of the problem. “We need to get ourselves into his mind.”
Vargas wanted only to charge downstream. Near three-thirty in the afternoon, Peggy said it felt like rain was coming. I tried to get Vargas to stop. Instead he shook his head and urged us on. We’d already suffered one icy cold shower. Peggy wanted to camp before another but it went dark before we could. Sharp lightning exploded in thunder overhead and the sky cracked open, dumping rain and chilling us instantly. We stopped, waiting for it to slow so we could set up the tents.
With no end to the deluge in sight, I strung a line and hung the Visqueen. We huddled under it, Peggy pushing us all close to her, body to body for warmth. The river rose past our toes, our ankles, our shins. “Rio crescendo! Muy peligroso!” said Jefe. River rising! Very dangerous!
In a flash, the Rio Claro flooded from a knee-deep, clearwater creek to a ten-foot deep, brown torrent, flooding the beach where we had planned to pitch camp. I left to find a campsite on an old river terrace in the forest, beyond the reach of rising floodwaters. By the time I hurried back to the others, the water was nearing their knees.
“Vargas, aqui!�
�
Together we wrapped plastic around a cross pole and resuspended our Visqueen on the old, forested river terrace. Peggy and I set up our bug net tent atop the palm and heliconia leaves that father and son had cut to cover the mud. We fell asleep to the roar of the flood. It seemed unlikely we would reach the beach the next day, much less catch the three o’clock colectivo in Carate, sixteen miles away.
In the morning, Vargas made it clear that he and his son were heading back the way we’d come. Sirena, hours downstream and a half mile from the mouth of the Rio Claro, had the highest concentration of tourists, guides, and rangers in the park. He couldn’t risk being caught. Vargas gave us a machete, its point sharpened as a weapon. I shook his hand and then his son’s. He gave Peggy a farewell embrace.
Startled, she looked at me and smiled big: “He just kissed me! On the mouth!”
The sixty-two-year-old grinned, turned away, and headed back upstream with his son in tow.
Peggy and I would be on our own.
Chapter 40
Rio Claro
Rio Claro, September 2014.
Courtesy of the author
The heliconia and short palms were still wet with rain, but the bright sun shining in a cloudless blue sky left the jungle friendly again. Birds were singing and insects buzzing as another day got under way, as if the storm had never happened. The Rio Claro had crested hours before dawn. Logs and other fresh flotsam lined its banks, left by the receding flood. And while it was still high and brown, it was no longer pushy and we waded at times to our chests with little fear. Where the river narrowed between vertical walls that plunged into its waters making it too deep to wade, the reassuring tzing of the machete left a path clear of snakes, ants, and vines through the trackless forest. Peggy’s bravery in the deep water and jungle amplified her beauty and strengthened my love and admiration for her.
