by Roman Dial
In my room I felt sick, with no appetite. I pictured Roman huddled in a soaking wet tent, too injured to travel, eating lizards and bugs. He’d eaten a lizard on his Petén trip. He knew discomfort. He had a level head. He could hang on. I just needed to find him before it was too late. What have I done?
Alone and without a task at hand, my eyes teared up and I sobbed, thinking of our family trips to the tropics. It was impossible not to reminisce. Those experiences made up our family lore, our history: hearing gibbons whoop at dawn, handling a flying lizard, eating exotic fruits. I took my eight-year-old son to Borneo’s wilderness. Was that negligence? It hadn’t seemed so then, but now I felt a sharp stab of regret. Not because we had risked his life or Jazz’s in Borneo, Australia, or any other place where humans have lived for millennia—Peggy would never have endangered her children’s lives—but because of the life it inspired.
My regret was that I had introduced Roman to adventure and the excitement of the wild. Maybe we should have limited ourselves as parents to team sports, Chuck E. Cheeses, the local cineplex. But that would have been impossible for Peggy and me. “What, take the safe but boring route?” she would ask.
“Birth is the leading cause of death,” my friend Brad Meiklejohn likes to point out. Still, the cliché “At least he died doing what he loved” is wrong, Brad says. “I most admire those who have done what they love their whole lives and died peacefully in bed at a ripe old age.”
The guilt of responsibility is persistent, pernicious—perhaps simply instinctive—in parents whose children are injured, lost, or killed, even after we rationalize or realize that it wasn’t our fault at all. For me in Costa Rica, sleep offered the only respite from worry and pain. But when I awoke, before my eyes even opened, the fact exploded as my first conscious thought: Roman is missing!
THE NEXT DAY, July 30, a Cruz Roja Land Cruiser picked me up at the Iguana and delivered me to the El Tigre ranger station in Dos Brazos. Eliecer Arce, the head of Corcovado National Park, and Carlos Herrera, the head of the Cruz Roja, were there, too. Thai, Pancho, and Kique would finish the Fila Matajambre trail in Dos Brazos, where we would all rendezvous.
Pata Lora and Cody had started their hike to Carate in Dos Brazos: witnesses had seen the pair there. Waiting for Thai at the end of the road in a small cantina, I could make out the words Pata Lora and the Costa Rican word for marijuana, mota, in conversations around me. I shook my head. The only way to prove that story wrong would be to find Roman’s body. I prayed that wouldn’t happen.
The owner of the cantina was named Elmer. He was one of the witnesses and spoke good English. Holding his young three-year-old in his arms, he recounted how he’d seen Pata Lora and Cody walk past his cantina on the trail to Piedras Blancas.
As I was listening to Elmer, Thai ran up. He was smiling, out of breath, muddy. It was good to see him. “Roman, hey!” He reached out his hand, gave me a sweaty embrace. He was visibly excited. “It sounds like somebody saw Roman!”
“What? Where?”
“Down here, just a few houses! A guy met someone in the jungle who said his name was Roman!”
The news buoyed me in a way I’d not felt since arriving in Costa Rica five days ago. Here, at last, was evidence.
Chapter 26
Jenkins
Jenkins, Dos Brazos, July 30, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
To a Costa Rican, the name “Cody Roman Dial” has both “Roman” and “Dial” as surnames—like two last names. Anybody explaining that they’d met our son Cody was either lying or mistaken. He’d been introducing himself as Roman since the start of our walk across Umnak twenty years before. No Costa Rican would think to call him “Roman” unless they had actually met him. This was another reason Pata Lora’s story didn’t add up.
Thai led me to a small wood-frame house painted yellow on a concrete pad with a sheet-metal roof. Two little girls peered out the windows. Wearing only shorts, a young man stood erect and muscular with a mustache and a small soul patch under his lip. Like Thai, he smiled easily and broadly. Like Roman, he was twenty-seven. He spoke remarkably good English. I didn’t need Thai to translate.
Breathless and excited, I blurted, “Hi! My name is Roman and my friend Thai says that you may have seen my son in the jungle!”
“Yes, that is true.” He answered in slow, measured English. “My name is Jenkins Rodriguez and I am a gold miner.” He held out his hand and we shook.
“Where did you see him?”
“We saw him in the mountains on a small trail. We have never seen any gringos or foreigners there, so it was very surprising to us.”
“When was this?”
“Maybe about fifteen to seventeen days ago. He said he’d been in the forest for two days.”
I did the arithmetic. It would have been around mid-July when Jenkins had seen him. But people here didn’t keep day planners, diaries, or even time, really. Few wore watches in the villages or jungle.
“Where did you see him?” My hand shook as I scribbled in my notebook.
“On a small creek called Zeledón. It is about three hours upriver from Dos Brazos.”
“Did he tell you his name, where he was from?”
“Yes. He said his name was Roman. He was from Alaska and he was a biologist.”
I took a deep breath, shocked. Other than Doña Berta at the hostel, this was the first person who I believed when they said they had seen Roman. I racked my brain for what the newspapers had printed, wondering how much of Jenkins’s story could have been pulled from news accounts. Certainly, the fact my son was from Alaska, maybe the part about going by “Roman,” but definitely not the part about being a biologist. To me, Jenkins’s rough dates felt like truth. He sounded honest, with nothing to gain from lying and little to hide.
“What was he doing and what did he have with him? Did you talk to him?”
“Yes, we spoke. The moment we walked up to him he was sitting there, cooking his breakfast on a stove. I think it was some rice. At first, we just walked by, surprised to see him there, and said hello. Then we turned around and came back to talk with him as it was very strange to see a gringo in this part of the forest. He spoke Spanish slowly and was easy to understand, but we switched to English.”
At this point I thought of the blue Jetboil stove I’d given him for Christmas. It wasn’t in the yellow bag. “What did the stove look like?”
“It was not the kind from around here.” Jenkins motioned with his hands that it was taller than wide, and compact. Like a Jetboil.
“Who else was with you?”
“At the time we saw him, I was with Luiz and Arley, but we waited for another miner named Coco, who came very soon. There were four of us.”
My head flooded with questions. “Did he have a camp set up?”
“No. He said he had come up the river the day before, ran into a waterfall, then climbed a cliff and made camp on the ridge. In the morning, he came down to the little creek to make breakfast. He had a green-colored pack with maybe a rolled-up pad for sleeping. I heard about the missing guy and I thought it was the same one who walked through town. The one Elmer saw. But now I don’t think those two are the same guy.”
“Did he have on glasses?” asked Thai.
“I don’t remember glasses. He was shaved, and a little bit serious. He said he was a biologist and just looking at the many different trees and the different things in the jungle. He asked if he was in Golfito, so I thought that maybe he was little bit confused. He showed me his map. It was about the size of your notebook papers. I didn’t want to scare him by staring and making him uncomfortable. I was just friendly with him that day.”
My head was spinning. Even the “Golfito” reference made sense, because the “ESRI world topo link” I’d sent Roman labeled the border between the two cantons Osa and Golfito inside Corcovado’s boundary. Roman would have been referring to the canton of Golfito on the map, not Golfito the town across the bay from Puerto Jiménez.
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I wanted to talk to Arley, Coco, and Luiz. I wanted Jenkins to sketch a map of where this all took place. And most of all, I wanted to go to this Zeledón Creek, Roman’s point last seen.
That was where I’d go look, and soon. It didn’t matter that Dondee had threatened to have me arrested if I was caught in the park. Nobody could stop me from looking there now.
Chapter 27
Zeledón
Vargas and Jefe, point last seen, July 31, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Jenkins offered to take Thai and me to the point on Zeledón where he had seen Roman. It felt like we were finally on Roman’s trail, not just milling around town or sitting quietly in the sparse headquarters at MINAE. If searching the jungle meant going in with illegal miners and other Osa criminals, so be it. Lauren connected us with another man—named Vargas—who was neither ranger nor guide but intimate with the park in ways no one else could be.
Thai, Lauren, and I met Vargas by the bank in Puerto Jiménez. It was almost eight in the morning and the sun’s heat would soon force its daily discomfort into everyone’s life. A few locals parked their trucks to sell rambutan in the shade of broad-crowned trees that overhung the street.
“That’s him,” Lauren said as we walked toward the corner. “He was a suspect in Kimberly’s death. He’s a poacher as well as a farmer. His brother was killed by a bushmaster when they were young. Vargas probably knows Corcovado’s mountains better than anyone alive.”
Dark from six decades in the tropical sun, Vargas was short and compact with a toothy grin and a mop of black hair. His hand, muscular from a life of farming, grasped mine firmly. He looked me square in the eye. Vargas was in town for business and dressed sharply in a pearl-snap shirt with crisp blue jeans pulled over pointy-toed cowboy boots. He’d taken the bus from his small oil palm farm just south of the Rio Conte.
Lauren told Vargas about the four miners who met Roman in the jungle two weeks earlier. She said the Cruz Roja and MINAE had banned Thai and me from the park, but that we were headed to Dos Brazos and up El Tigre anyway. Vargas shook his head and kicked at street dust with his boots, scoffing at the MINAE and their iron-fisted control of the park.
“Lauren,” I said, “ask Vargas if he can go today with us and the guy we met in Dos Brazos who saw Roman up the Tigre. Tell him it’s about three or four hours upstream.” Lauren rattled off my request in her thick American accent.
“Si.” Vargas nodded, looking me in the eye again, but he would need to do some shopping first.
VARGAS AND HIS eighteen-year-old son, Jefe, joined us in our rental Suzuki as we drove the bumpy road to Dos Brazos. It was nine when we picked up Jenkins.
Jenkins lived on the Piedras Blancas arm of the Rio Tigre in Dos Brazos but would lead us up the El Tigre arm into Corcovado where he had his mine and rancho, one of the small tent camps of black plastic tarps that were routinely burned by rangers and remade by miners. We parked at the end of the road. A narrow trail above the creek led past a tin shack surrounded by barbed wire where a bicycle leaned against a fence post. A toothless, shirtless guy in shorts called out Hola as we walked by.
“That’s Pata Lora’s uncle, Willim,” said Jenkins of the skinny man who looked to be in his mid-fifties.
The trail soon reached the knee-deep El Tigre. Jenkins led us into the creek and we splashed upstream below ferns, philodendrons, and figs clinging to black canyon walls. Waterfalls plunged down side streams. The creek’s waters were clear and cool, welcome in the building heat. Because the rocks on the bank were slippery, we walked directly up the sandy streambed.
Jenkins wore rubber knee boots, shorts, and a tank top: the local miner uniform. Vargas splashed upstream in his town clothes, minus the cowboy boots. He looked overdressed for wading to the waist and climbing hand-over-hand up rock walls slick with algae and mud.
Basilisks—Jesus Christ lizards—ran on the water in front of us when disturbed. Their sensational sprints reminded me of Roman at thirteen on our second trip to Corcovado, when he’d learned how to catch the miraculous creatures. First, he would chase a young basilisk across the water to the far side of a creek. Clinging to a rock, the animal would eye Roman warily until he waded too close and the reptile dove into the cool water to hide in bottom debris. Roman then reached into the mass of sticks and leaves, braving what else might lurk there, and grabbed the little lizard. Pleased with himself, he would pull it out like a trophy, inspect its dinosaur-like crest and oversized hind feet, warm it in his hands, then release it to run across the surface of the pool like some sort of windup water toy.
I tried to ignore the lizards—the memory upset me—but simply couldn’t. I watched every one dash over the stream.
Our pace accelerated. I was eager both to look for clues where Roman had last been seen and to establish that Thai and I could handle ourselves here, unlike tourist gringos. We passed miners’ camps as the creek threaded a series of flats and canyons. We scrambled up faint trails to rock rims above canyon slots too narrow or steep to traverse at water level. We pushed aside broad leaves adapted to deep shade and familiar as house plants in homes and offices back home.
After an hour or so Jenkins pointed out the boundary of the park. It was illegal to continue. We would face stiff penalties if the authorities caught us. “You can go back, Jenkins, but I need to go on,” I said, willing to take my chances with only Jenkins’s sketch map in my notebook as a guide to Zeledón. “If they find me, what can the park service say?” I asked. “I’m looking for my son. How heartless can they be? I’ll take any blame.” Urged on, the others agreed to continue.
Vargas and Jenkins expressed an honest parental empathy. Vargas was willing to risk his town clothes and flip phone wrapped in plastic. Both were willing to risk arrest to help, to take me where I needed to go. The young miner and the old poacher were fit and strong and knew the jungle well.
El Tigre opened up from its narrow canyons. We walked in sunshine below abrupt mountainsides cloaked in heliconia plants from creek side to ridgeline. A giant herb with wide green leaves, the heliconia displays its sturdy inflorescence of bright red and orange flowers to attract equally colorful hummingbirds. The birds in turn attract their predators: venomous eyelash vipers suspended in wait by their prehensile tails.
It’s not uncommon to miss an eyelash viper with its rich camouflage. While unaggressive, the petite vipers don’t hesitate to strike, and because of their arboreal habits, they often bite unsuspecting humans on the face or neck. Roman knew this and would stay clear of heliconia thickets without first clearing a path with his machete.
Piles of rocks and beds of sediment indicated active gold mining. We passed the occasional cache of hand tools—shovels and short sluice boxes—used by the Osa’s miners to sift gold from streambeds. An hour into the park, and two hours from the road, Jenkins pointed out a short cliff that parted the green vegetation: “Here we must leave the Tigre on a hidden miner’s trail.”
We spaced out for the hundred-foot climb up a broken, slimy limestone wall with sharp hand and footholds. It led to a faint trail, choked with vines. We climbed to the rim of a deep canyon, impassable at water level, Jenkins said. Up here, a huge tree had recently fallen and buried the trail. By now it was well over eighty degrees and 99 percent humidity. We were as soaked from sweat as we would be from rain.
Jenkins unsheathed his machete and hacked a path through the claustrophobic crown of the tree fall. Each whack—and it takes many to cut through even small tropical hardwood limbs—stirs up swarms of small insects. Some bite, others sting, all leave rashes. Jenkins carved us a tunnel leading fifty yards to the twin trunks of the fallen tree. We scrambled onto its slippery surface, spooking a slender six-foot snake that slithered into the undergrowth.
Seeing me recoil, Jenkins said, “It is not dangerous.” Still, I watched carefully for vipers in the foliage. The more immediate hazard was negotiating the four-foot-diameter log perched on the edge of a hundred-and-fifty-foot
overhanging cliff. We balanced nervously where the log spanned a vertical gully that dropped into the precipice, then jumped off one by one, relieved to reach the narrow footpath’s solid ground.
“This fallen tree is new,” Jenkins said as he looked back at the log across the drop. “We have another trail that goes by my rancho. I do not come this way often.”
We left the canyon rim, following a small tributary into the forest. The whole jungle was dark and dank, wet with creeks running everywhere and seeps dripping from exposed rock. The air was cool and smelled of moss, ferns, and fungi. The trail went up a shallow gully that cut into the ridgeline. In an impressive display of hand labor, miners had dug a miniature gorge ten feet deep and lined with rounded stones. It was just wide enough for us to pass, our feet splashing through ankle-deep water.
The gully opened up and we arrived at a nondescript place where the walls relaxed into slopes a person could walk up or down. Jenkins came to a stop and looked around. Filtered sunlight dappled brown leaves and black rocks. The fronds of short, waist-high palm trees swung back and forth as if in a wind, but there was no breeze. All around us katydids grated and cicadas shrieked without pause. But the two noisiest creatures of the forest could tell me nothing that I needed to know.
“This is Zeledón Creek,” Jenkins announced.
Chapter 28
Cruz Roja
Cruz Roja and MINAE leadership, July 31, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
“Here.” Jenkins pointed to a pile of three rocks. “It’s a little bit different now. But on that day, we were walking up this trail, just as we have been now, and sitting on this biggest rock was a guy eating his breakfast. It was in the morning before it gets too hot, maybe at eight or nine, and we had left my rancho, which is down the ridge behind us. It was me and Arley and Luiz. Coco was still back at the rancho. We were going to the mine and some tunnels we have been working. It was impossible not to pass him closely.”