by Roman Dial
Eventually the water dropped enough to reveal beaches with boot tracks. We followed the tracks to a trail, where we snuck along quietly. We were maybe twenty minutes from Sirena, the touristic heart of the park. Without the mandatory guide, we worried about being caught.
Walking along the maintained trail, we came to a puzzling arrow that a hiker had scratched across the path. Curious of its meaning, I turned and backed up in the direction the arrow aimed, nearly stepping on a fer-de-lance. A literal line in the sand not to cross, the arrow pointed directly at the snake in warning. The angry-faced serpent no doubt waited at the trail’s edge for a fat rodent to pass. It would not have struck unless threatened—or stepped on. My foolishness elicited a nervous laugh from me and a head shake from Peggy.
More challenges awaited us at the coast. A high tide had pushed into the mouth of the Rio Claro. We also needed to dodge guides who might rat us out and rangers at the park boundary, ten miles away. It would be after dark when we reached the La Leona Ranger Station; we hoped to sneak by unnoticed.
My first attempt to cross the Rio Claro found me swimming and thinking about bull sharks and crocodiles. “I’m not swimming!” Peggy called out to me.
PEGGY WAS BORN the youngest of ten. She didn’t learn how to swim until halfway through college. On our first trip to Hawaii, when we were nineteen and twenty, she had not yet swum in ocean waves. Like many Alaskan-raised kids, she was afraid of deep water and could only “doggy-paddle,” as she called it.
Somehow, I coaxed her into Waikiki’s gentle surf. Heading into the shallow surf break, we held hands at first. But then, wading deeper, the surging ocean lifted her off her feet. Taut with exhilaration, she turned and wrapped herself around me. Her arms and legs felt warm in the cool Pacific as we drifted and bounded as one, my toes pushing off the bottom with each passing swell to keep our heads above water.
She clung to me, her smile wide as the sea. In that moment, I felt something for another person that I never had before: a physical sense of safeguarding and surety entwined with an emotional depth I longed to repeat.
It came again, just as richly with Cody Roman on a family camping trip to the island of Culebra near Puerto Rico. We had pedaled from the condo we rented in Luquillo to a nearby ferry dock, towing the kids in our bike trailer. Culebra is surrounded by coral reefs and we found a white sand beach where we camped in the shade.
A passing fisherman sold us spiny lobsters for a few dollars. Jazzy collected the foot-long seed pods of the flamboyán tree that she found fascinating, while Cody Roman, wearing his mask and holding his snorkel, bent over to peer underwater. I waded out to him and suggested we go deeper. The two of us set off to explore beyond the shallows where he normally stood.
At first, he rode on my back as I finned with my flippers. He clutched my neck with his left arm, holding his snorkel with his right. After he had ridden there a while, I reached to his hand with mine and he slipped off my back to glide along as we swam hand in hand.
It was a profound moment, somehow as deep as the instant I had witnessed Peggy give birth to him. There, over the splendor of a coral reef, to be so physically a part of his development, felt more enriching than holding his hand as he learned to walk.
The feeling intensified when we came to a deep channel in the reef and he climbed onto my back for the crossing. I could feel him tense up in my hand as the bottom fell away, then physically relax when on my back again. Once we’d crossed the channel, he slipped off to again swim hand in hand, but this time by his own volition. Without words he’d said, “Dad, I’m nervous and need reassurance.” Then, “I’m okay, let’s keep going.”
Experiences like those with my family are moments I cherish. Enriching their lives with physical trust has always enriched mine. Roman and I would learn to scuba dive together when he was old enough and Peggy would learn more than the doggy paddle, but fortunately she wouldn’t need to swim the Rio Claro.
MY FEET FELT a submerged sand bar that led all the way across the river. It would be no deeper than my navel. I came back for Peggy’s hand and we carried our nearly empty packs on our heads as we waded across to follow a trail through the coastal forest. During the afternoon hike we saw a crested guan and a pair of great curassows, big, turkey-sized birds clumsily balancing in the trees. Later we watched a tapir feed on sour fruits with its dexterous, elephantine snout. Halfway to Carate, we stopped to watch the sun drop into the Pacific as the full moon rose in the east in a cosmic balance. With tide out and sun down, we slipped by the guard station unnoticed, limping on sore feet to Carate.
The next day we caught the morning colectivo to Puerto Jiménez, convinced Roman didn’t complete the route he had described in his emails. “I think it’s got to be foul play,” Peggy said on the way into town. “He doesn’t seem to be in the park. Maybe somebody’s got him. Let’s talk to the private investigator.”
Chapter 41
Back to Alaska
Yaviza, Darién Gap, Panama, January 2015.
Courtesy of the author
At the end of the first week of September, soon after we’d returned from the Rio Claro, Lauren put us in touch with Fernando Arguedas, the private investigator who had cracked Kimberly Blackwell’s case and once been OIJ. Suspicious that people were telling us only what we wanted to hear, I gave Arguedas the names of those I’d interviewed to see if they would tell him what they had told me. He followed up other leads, too, talking to a dozen people altogether.
Most important, he asked Pata Lora our list of thirty-five questions about Roman’s gear, mannerisms, past, and intentions. The questions were meant to see if Pata Lora had actually been with Roman. Peggy even asked that Pata Lora draw Cody’s tent and hairline and describe the shape of his hands. Her intuition is sensitive to people’s behavior and motivations and her questions showed that perspective.
Arguedas and his partner went out each day to ask about our son, reporting their findings every night to Peggy, Lauren, and me at the Pearl. It was the rainy season, so guests were few. Arguedas spoke only Spanish, and I transcribed Lauren’s translation into my notebook. At the end of his investigation Arguedas gave us a written report.
Among those who had seen Pata Lora and the gringo together, the middle-aged Arnoldo of Dos Brazos had the most details because the pair had stopped by and smoked marijuana with him at his house. Arnoldo told Arguedas on September 9, 2014:
I saw “Pata de Lora” walk by with a gringo and sit at the entrance of my house. They stopped to rest for a while and asked for water. “Pata de Lora” had marijuana in a plastic cup. It was around three ounces. “Pata de Lora” told me he was going to take him for free. The gringo told me they were going to “Carate.” The gringo had money, food, a cell phone and a large camera. He was carrying a large backpack, blue. They were there for about half an hour, then packed their backpacks and left. Carate is about five hours away walking. The gringo was dressed with a blue-collar shirt. The gringo said they would return in eight days. The gringo had a good roll of money in a briefcase.
As with Arnoldo, most of the individuals interviewed by Arguedas confirmed and extended what we’d found already. Some were honest and said they didn’t remember. Others recounted bizarre stories that didn’t make sense. Pata Lora’s answers seemed to blend fiction based on fact with fantasy. Nobody disputed Pata Lora had hiked with a gringo. The fantasy was calling him Cody.
During the week that Arguedas investigated, the OIJ brought a short-legged bloodhound to the Osa. Nose down sniffing for scent, the earnest dog’s ears dragged in the jungle mud. An ad hoc group accompanied the dog and his handler into the forest as they headed for one of the tunnels where people reported the fetid smell of decay. A miner’s bones would be found there two months later.
I had hoped to join the canine-led investigative team but couldn’t, and instead ran to meet them on their return. I was overwhelmed to see Kique and Jenkins with the dog handler and Jorge Jimenez of the OIJ. Kique had convinced Brad Meiklejo
hn that Jenkins needed a more thorough investigation in his role in Roman’s disappearance. But here were two sworn enemies—ranger and miner—working together, looking for my son.
The PI’s report confirmed what we’d learned, leaving Peggy and me with no new direction to go. Maybe Roman had gone to Panama. Maybe he had been kidnapped, or worse. In any event, it was time to go home. We would return before Christmas to look in Panama. We said farewell to our friends, Lauren and Toby, and their sympathetic employees at the Iguana and flew back to Alaska.
ONCE HOME MID-SEPTEMBER, I felt emotionally drained, broken and empty. Peggy and I distracted ourselves with house projects and work. I had research reports due, classes to teach, graduate students to advise. Sitting in my office, my grad student Ganey came by to say that he knew that I loved Roman and that he was sorry Roman was missing. These simple words moved me, and I thanked him as he hurried, perhaps embarrassed, out of my office to work on his thesis.
Of course, I knew Roman loved me, too. I remembered the times he showed it, the moments he said it. Once, home from a two-month mountain bike trip the length of the Alaska Range, my hair wild, my beard long and thick, he said, “Dad, you look like what you are—an adventurer!” When he learned in school that the ancient Greeks espoused balance among mathematics, science, philosophy, reading, writing, and sports he complemented me in his understated way: “Hey, Pops, you would have made a good ancient Greek.” But my love for him was obviously not enough. He was still missing.
Peggy and I watched escapist shows on Netflix in which investigators solved missing persons cases in a single episode. We binged on TV series that featured middle-aged and young men working together with mutual respect and a lot of good-natured back-and-forth teasing. Each night we would fall asleep to these diversions. My friends took me packrafting down my favorite run before freeze-up, then ice skating on wild ice across frozen lakes, rivers, and marshes.
On one long-distance skate trip in November, two of us flew to arctic Alaska. With backpacks and camping gear, we skated one hundred miles between remote Inupiaq villages in two days. Moving that fast so simply was exhilarating, invigorating, even momentous. In Kotzebue, where we ended the marathon skate, cell service was poor and I texted Peggy to tell her we’d made it and that I’d only fallen fifty times.
Well, I only fell once, she texted back, but I broke my wrist in three places!
Oh NO! I texted. Let me call you. I felt a familiar pang. Once again, I was guilty of being gone when a loved one suffered. I called Peggy on the hotel phone. Out at a friend’s lakeside cabin, she’d caught an edge on her skates and gone down, reflexively catching herself with an outstretched arm but snapping her wrist instead. Lying there, she set her own broken limb, got in her car, then drove—alone and with one hand—an hour and a half to the hospital. She would require a surgeon to screw a plate to her arm bone, then a second surgery to have it removed once her wrist had healed.
HER ARM WAS still in a splint when we went to Costa Rica before Christmas. We drove around looking for green Salomon shoes on the wrong feet, familiar gear in a second-hand store, recognizable clothes hanging in a backyard. A Catholic priest took us to the small chapels that he served around the Osa. We posted flyers offering a $5,000 reward. Lauren suggested the amount as a believable figure and enough to motivate locals to look. It listed her and Jorge Jimenez’s numbers.
Nobody called. Unlike David Gimelfarb, Roman was nowhere to be seen. Either no one was talking, nobody knew anything, or five grand wasn’t enough to attract scam artists. Maybe he just wasn’t there.
We drove to the Panamanian border a couple of hours south of the Osa. We met with the police, thinking maybe Roman had tried to sneak into Panama on his way to the Darién Gap, the last jungle on his checklist. We asked what happened to illegal entrants and learned that the police detain them until they have collected a sufficient number to send en masse back to their country of origin.
The embassy had inquired early on, but found no indication Roman ever crossed into neighboring Nicaragua or Panama or ended up in either country’s hospitals or jails. Afterward, Peggy headed home and I flew to Panama City to rent a car and drive to the end of the Pan-American Highway at the Darién Gap. The half-dozen police checkpoints along the way question every driver and passenger in every vehicle. Could Roman have possibly passed through all these without a passport stamp, like he had the Nicaraguan border?
Yaviza, the village at the end of the road, felt hostile and dangerous with its grim-faced creoles, armed soldiers, bored Emberá natives, and end-of-the-roaders. After walking around the village on both sides of the river, hanging posters with the $5,000 reward, I spent the night in a guesthouse, shutting the louvers to keep out Anopheles mosquitoes from crawling into my room through the tattered screen windows. The room had no air-conditioning, no ceiling fan. Belly-up, sweaty, naked on a thin sheet over a soiled mattress alone in the dark, I reviewed the last five months. Our efforts, assumptions, and fears had crystallized in verse:
Trial and error,
Failure and terror,
The truth of the matter at hand.
Death in a whisper
Is so much to weather
For the life of a wife
And her man.
Chapter 42
TIJAT
Carson Ulrich, Ken Fornier, Jeff Sells, Roman, and Peggy, Dos Brazos, July 2015.
Courtesy of the author
The next day I drove back to Panama City, relieved to escape the Gap unscathed. My gut said Roman had never made it that far, but if he had decided to slip into Panama unannounced and undetected, he had succeeded.
By February 2015, we had run out of options. We decided it had to be foul play because no one had found any sign of him in Corcovado beyond Zeledón. This didn’t mean that I wouldn’t go back into the jungle to look, but it did mean we needed expertise that we simply didn’t have: criminal investigative skills by an American, rather than—or together with—a Costa Rican. Ideally, it would be someone bilingual who knew how to get people to talk but who would also listen to us and learn what we knew of our son. It was a tall order.
For most parents of missing children, there is no point—until they are able to lay their hands on the remains of their offspring—when they will concede: My missing child is dead. Six weeks after he’d disappeared, the odds of finding Roman alive seemed even. But after six months, I knew enough biology and human survival to realize that the odds were nearly zero. Still, we had faith that he was alive somewhere, somehow.
A memoir entitled The Cloud Garden describes how its authors, Tom Hart Dyke and Paul Winder, were kidnapped and held hostage for nearly a year. Reading it gave us hope. So did the psychics who contacted us, performed a “remote viewing,” and reported that Roman was still alive.
Over the following winter, television producers sought out our story, but we ignored them. We had been disappointed with media coverage of Roman in general. It had been sensationalized at best, exploitative at worst, and always mistaken in some way that heaped hurt upon our pain.
One television production company connected with Peggy through the Missing Americans Project. The project’s founder, Jeff Dunsavage, maintains an online presence with updated postings of U.S. citizens who have disappeared while out of the country. Reading the monthly accounts of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans who disappear in Latin America is enough to give any tourist second thoughts about visiting there. Peggy found that the project’s mission statement struck a chord and she joined. “Adding my son to the list,” she wrote on the web page.
Dunsavage once claimed, “Media is the tail that wags the government dog,” and cynically pointed out that without the harsh light of publicity, public servants don’t always serve. He emailed Peggy, then arranged a call with a television production company called TIJAT (This Is Just a Test).
A TIJAT producer told her about his own father, who had been murdered in Honduras. The producer spent a decade, he said, trying to
get his father’s murderer jailed, but without success. Then, within days of using a video camera as an investigative tool, justice was served and the killer convicted. The TIJAT producer found that using cameras opened people up in rural Central America in a way nothing else did. He suggested that TIJAT make a documentary film to speed up our search for answers.
I was doubtful about TV, but after her call with Dunsavage and TIJAT, Peggy told me, “They want to help and I think they can. Let’s hear what they have to say.”
TIJAT offered us a two-pronged effort to help us with permits and personnel. There would be a former Air Force PJ named Ken Fournier, who would help in the jungle, and a criminal investigator named Carson Ulrich. Short-statured, middle-aged, and muscle-bound, Ken and I knew each other from adventure racing and shared a mutual respect. Carson was a recently retired, twenty-five-year veteran of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. With his bald head, goatee, tattoos, and towering stature, he looked like a guy who could kick ass and take names. These two were exactly what we wanted. The plan sounded ideal.
The producers said that they would step back and simply document the story as it unfolded. We were wary of reality TV. Mark Burnett’s Eco-Challenge shows rarely looked like the adventure races that I had participated in, even when his camera crews followed and filmed my teams to feature. During our first conversation with TIJAT’s producers, I asked how they differentiated between documentary and reality TV. After a long pause on the conference call, one of the producers volunteered that reality TV was “overproduced.”
TIJAT would compensate Peggy and me for our time by hiring Ken and Carson. They would also pay us royalties for any family photos or videos they used. In June of 2015, we contractually agreed to this arrangement. It fit with our view that TV would keep the search alive, provide permits and expertise we lacked, and put pressure on Costa Rica’s government and the embassy. But the arrangement came at an unexpectedly high price.
