by Roman Dial
Indeed. There were only about four feet of level ground along the creek bottom to walk and much of that was taken up by the braids of the little creek as it spilled among the rocks.
I could feel Roman’s presence here, where it was easy to see him sitting alone, enjoying the coolness of the morning, the best part of the day, pondering a line of termites on a nearby log or the curve of a tree’s buttress on the hillside above while he waited for his water to boil and his food to cool. I studied the slopes and the rocks and the vegetation closely, looking for clues and wondering: Where did you camp? Where did you descend? And most of all, Where did you go from here?
Cupping my hands, I called out, “Roman! Roooo-mann! Rooo-ooo-mann!” But there was no answer beyond the unrelenting peeps, whistles, and buzzes of the noonday jungle.
Jenkins toured us around his mine located above the south branch of El Tigre, a creek that he called Negritos. He showed us the charred remains of the rancho that MINAE had burned to the ground, then led us down other hidden trails he and his partners used. At every turn, I studied the forest floor looking for sign of Roman: the mark of his shoes, a food wrapper, anything that might move us forward. The trails looped back to the base of the ridge at the edge of the Negritos branch of El Tigre. There we headed downstream, hiking out faster than we had hiked in, familiar now with the route.
It had been stirring to visit where Roman had last been seen. I anticipated returning soon to Zeledón. Roman was near, I could feel it. I hoped he was okay—I prayed he was alive.
AT THE CAR, I slipped money to Jenkins, who looked surprised and hesitant. He turned it down. “I have children, too. I don’t need to be paid.”
“Please, take it. And thank you, Jenkins,” I said. “I know this was a risk for you.” He turned to divide it with Vargas and Jefe sitting next to him.
“No. That’s all for you, Jenkins. I’ll pay them, too.”
I handed Vargas an equal sum. He smiled and accepted the money in both hands, graciously.
After we dropped Jenkins off at his home and Vargas in Puerto Jiménez, Thai and I drove back to the Iguana, changed clothes, and headed to a big meeting at MINAE to debrief and discuss the search, now in its seventh day. Thirty people crowded the room: Cruz Roja, MINAE, Fuerza. Many were fresh from searching and stood in field clothes. The Cruz Roja alone had enlisted twenty-five people, nearly all volunteers. Now muddy in their faded shirts, Thai joked they should be called the “Cruz Chocolata.”
A projector displayed a Google Earth image of the Osa on the wall. More than a hundred red-colored virtual pushpins showed where search teams had logged GPS locations. Three sheets torn from an oversized paper tablet were taped to the wall. Roman’s missing person poster hung from one. A timeline of the last several weeks stretched across a second. Seven team names with dates next to the major trails and drainages were written on the third. Herrera, the head of the Cruz Roja, asked everyone, “Where do we go from here?”
Dondee stood up. Gesticulating to the crowd, he said that there’d been many people, and many groups, looking on all the obvious trails. He added that immediately before this search, MINAE had made a sweep of the park for illegal mining activity, adding even more information. MINAE’s sweep occurred soon after Jenkins had seen Roman, when Jenkins’s rancho was burned.
Dondee introduced the team leaders who’d combed the trails and logical routes across the hundred square miles of Corcovado. They rarely found signs of other teams who had passed only days before; rain and litterfall had erased their tracks. Cruz Roja and MINAE, escorted by Fuerza, had looked in every drainage mentioned in Roman’s emails. They had even struggled across the disorienting plateau known as Las Quebraditas, visiting its high points Mueller and Rincon, marked by geodetic benchmarks, which are metal disks embedded in concrete pads.
The four-day search through Las Quebraditas’ cloud forest was led by a thin young man in a floppy sun hat who would be my first pick for a search team—if Dondee would let me assemble one. His team had followed a tourist trail on a two-hour approach to Las Quebraditas. The trail then thinned to an unmaintained trace following a poacher’s trail. For six miles, they struggled to find and hold the faint track, crisscrossed with fallen trees that deflected them into thickets of bamboo riven by shallow, slick ravines. Each step off-trail reminded the team members how easily they could lose their way.
Beneath a canopy too thick for GPS signals, and in vegetation too tangled to follow compass bearings, the searchers found themselves wandering in circles. The only tracks they saw were their own. The challenge was that the most likely place to become lost was also the most difficult to search.
Not a single team unearthed any sign of Roman. Superintendent Arce pointed out that some places were just too steep and illogical to look.
After the seven teams briefed the assembled group, Dondee turned to me. In a challenging voice, he said that he knew that we had gone illegally into the park that day. “Who were the three others in the car with you?” he asked accusingly. “And where did you go?”
To protect those who’d helped at great risk to themselves, I withheld Vargas’s name and claimed that Jenkins walked us to the park boundary but no farther. Thai and I had pushed on alone, I lied, to visit the point last seen. While all of Costa Rica and the U.S. wanted to help, a poacher and an illegal miner had been most effective. I wasn’t about to give them up.
Dondee saw through my lie and scowled. Adding injury to insult, he finished by saying the search would end soon. MINAE would continue to look for sign as part of their ongoing park patrols, but, in his opinion, Cody had never entered the park in the first place: he had been with Pata Lora on the Piedras Blancas trail.
Chapter 29
Whiteout
Above El Doctor, August 1, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Dondee’s opinion mattered as much to me as mine did to him.
Cruz Roja would officially suspend the search three days later. While society’s expectations might then be met, mine would not until my son was found. A parent’s loss goes so deep that they’ll do anything, stand up to anybody, to save their child. Dondee knew this and warned us that there’d be people waiting to arrest us in case we searched the park illegally, especially if we paid people who were not licensed guides, further violating the park’s regulations.
Based on Jenkins’s and his two partners’ descriptions and Roman’s own emails, I was certain Roman had entered the park and been seen on Zeledón Creek—maybe as recently as sixteen days before. He could still be alive somewhere upstream. And instead of thirty people with computerized debriefings and thousand-dollar-an-hour helicopters, why not a focused search by Vargas, his son, Thai, and me, starting near Roman’s place last seen on Zeledón? We could head upward from there, into Las Quebraditas, the most likely place to be lost and injured. We made plans to meet at six the next morning.
ANOTHER SEARCH FROM thirty years before emboldened me. It was a time before specialized teams of roped rescuers existed in Fairbanks and it was up to us in the climbing community to bring home our own. One night we got a call from the Alaska State Troopers who said there had been a climbing accident in the Hayes Range. Our community was small. We all knew it was Carl Tobin or Matt Van Enkevort climbing Ninety-four Forty-eight, a mountain Carl and I had failed on three years before. As more information trickled in, we discovered that Carl had been seriously hurt during a long fall in an avalanche. Leaving Carl in a small bivouac tent, Matt had skied and hiked twenty miles until he found a moose hunter’s camp with a radio and used it to call for a rescue. It wasn’t clear yet what the extent of Carl’s injuries were, only that he had broken both legs, including his femur. Carl was my regular climbing partner and I feared he could die.
The next morning, four of us left before dawn in an army helicopter that dropped us at the toe of the Gillam Glacier. The Range was swallowed in storm, but we headed up-glacier anyway. We pulled a big sled to bring Carl back. Whiteout had reduced vi
sibility to a few yards and forced us to follow the wind’s direction calibrated by compass. Never sure where we were, we knew only the direction we moved.
Tied together, we skied into a wind so fierce it knocked each of us down at some point. Miraculously the storm slackened and a hole in the blizzard opened that reached across the glacier. Through this window I saw we were near Ninety-four Forty-eight, and with the improved visibility, I spotted Carl’s tent above the glacier on a moraine, a low ridgeline of rocks left by the glacier’s movement.
The break in the weather had come at just the right moment. Realigning my compass, we skied into the teeth of the wind as the hole in the storm closed again. First on the rope, I fought off my fear for the worst as we skied up the moraine. But as we pulled to its top, we saw that it wasn’t Carl’s tent, but a boulder. Dismayed, I feared we might not find him at all. The glacier was big and the whiteout hid everything more than fifty yards distant.
I led us to the boulder anyway and looked downhill past it, seeing behind the moraine for the first time. And there was the tent! We hurried down the moraine. My mind raced. Will we find Carl alive? And what if we don’t? What then? The tent flapped wildly in the wind, but had a strange, counter beat to it, too. As I closed in on the half-buried shelter, I heard loud cursing.
“Carl!” I yelled. “Carl!”
“Yeah!” I heard Carl’s voice from inside the tent, “Yeah. Hey, who’s with you?” he asked.
We were all relieved he was alive. It seemed incredible, given the conditions, that we had found him at all. We secured Carl in the sled and worked him down the glacier through the storm and whiteout to the helicopter pickup. I thought about how we had found him. We were a small group of his friends who had the skills and knowledge to know where to look and how to get there, coupled with resources, like the army’s helicopter, for support.
But the real lesson had been this: Follow intuition. It often leads in the right direction, if not directly to the destination. If we could find Carl on the Gillam Glacier in a whiteout, then we could find Roman in the jungle.
CRUZ ROJA’S ANNOUNCEMENT that they would soon call off the search had only galvanized our resolve to search on our own. Thai and I shopped for three days of lunch food to supplement the freeze-dried dinners we had brought from Alaska. We packed light: a bug tent with a tarp-like rain fly, stove and a cookpot, sleeping pads, sleeping sheets, dry clothes, and head lamps, all wrapped in dry bags inside our packs. We would be ready to leave at dawn.
That night at the Iguana, as I tried to sleep, my phone rang with an unknown number. The caller was cagey, but offered to help. “How?” I asked.
“Tell me what’s happening.”
I gave him the story, ending with how the Costa Rican Red Cross had kept us out of the park.
“The Red Cross sucks,” he said. “But I can help. I hear through the grapevine that a black snake has your son.”
“A black snake?”
“Yeah, a bad motherfucker. That’s what we do. We deal with black snakes and do extractions. I have an asset in Costa right now. It usually costs thirty but we’ll do it for fifteen.”
Unsure what I was hearing, I stuck to the facts. “Well, I’m going in tomorrow. Somebody saw my son, talked to him a couple weeks ago. I went in there today, where he was last seen, and we’re going back.”
“Who are you going with?”
“A local guy. He knows the place well.”
“Do you have anybody to watch your back?”
“Watch my back?”
“Yeah. Can you trust this guy? What do you have for a weapon?” That got my attention.
“Um, no. No weapon. But I have another friend from the States with me.”
“Oh, okay,” said the cagey voice. “Look, I’m going to text you my number and if you need help with the black snake, get a hold of me.”
Then he hung up.
What the hell was that?
Chapter 30
Las Quebraditas
Vargas in Las Quebraditas, August 1, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Early the next morning and supplied with food and camping gear, Thai, Vargas, his son, and I retraced Jenkins’s route to Zeledón. Hungry for anything that might help me find Roman, I lingered and searched for clues at the nondescript boulder where he had eaten breakfast weeks before. If he’d come this far, he would have likely kept going, toward the disorienting jungle of Las Quebraditas, where we would head to next.
About 150 yards beyond, we took the right fork at a split in the trail, following a faint trail to the ridge crest. The day before, Jenkins had taken us left to mining tunnels punched into a canyon wall above El Tigre’s Negritos branch. Roman had indicated to Jenkins he would continue onward. Using the rule he’d developed in Mexico and Guatemala, he likely chose the better-used left fork, well worn from the four miners’ daily commute to their dig.
Vargas led us on the right trail that followed a narrow ridgeline falling steeply to either side. I studied the trail for footprints of a Salomon shoe, the kind I knew Roman wore. I called down into the canyons on either side: “Ro-man! Ro-mannn!” Jefe did likewise. Thai blew a loud, fist-sized rescue whistle. Only echoes responded.
SHARP, HAPHAZARD MEMORIES of Roman crowded themselves into the search. The time he came home from school announcing “Dad, let’s play chess” came to mind. He was in his mid-teens then, during our golden age together. From his room, he brought out an ornate Balinese box, filled with hand-carved chess pieces, that unfolded as a chessboard. He assembled the board quickly, then held out his hands, a pawn in each. I chose black and he went first. His moves were swift, decisive. He beat me handily. Bewildered, I said, “Wow. Good job. Let’s play again.”
“Okay,” he agreed, beating me a second time.
“You’re pretty lucky,” I said. But when he beat me a third time—grinning from across the table—he said, “That’s not luck.” I had to agree. He was good.
It was one of those moments that marked his growth, like when he first stood up as a toddler in the little house in Fairbanks, or told me from the Mexico City airport that he was going to catch the last bus. I prayed this trip in Corcovado would also be a step forward for him, and not an end.
THIRTY MINUTES BEYOND Zeledón, a fetid odor hung in the humid air. Fearing the worst, I left the trail and found the rotting carcass of a tamandua, the small black-and-cream-colored anteater that lives throughout Central America. Thai and I had seen one alive the day we drove to Carate. Roman had an interest in the group of odd, New World mammals—the sloths, armadillos, and anteaters—classified together as the Edentates. I had hoped then that the roadside tamandua was a good omen.
We followed a subtle trail used by poachers, illegal gold miners, and the park rangers who hunted them both. Just a narrow wisp of a path, it was something most hikers would lose quickly or dismiss as an animal trail. Only the occasional machete nicks on heliconia plants, palms, and ferns showed it was actively cleared. It wasn’t blazed at all.
Small two-by-two-foot clearings on the ridgeline marked the rare spot where locals got a bar or two of cell reception. Vargas stopped at one, unwrapped his flip phone from a small plastic bag and called his daughter. It would rain soon and he wanted to let her know we were okay. Thai smiled at me and motioned toward Vargas. “It’s like a little jungle phone booth,” he joked.
We would camp our first night in the heart of Las Quebraditas on the Osa’s summit plateau. The place was a veritable maze of bamboo-choked gullies in a remote mountain wilderness. No wonder the Cruz Roja team leader in the floppy hat had been confounded here. Without Vargas, we, too, would have been circling back on our tracks.
The trail thinned. Vargas left it and we wandered through bamboo thickets and slick gullies, looking for a place to camp with running water. The rain caught us before we found a spot flat enough for tents. Soaked, Thai and I set up our fly, then erected the bug net tent beneath it, keeping dry even in the pouring rain. It felt co
mfortable to get out of wet clothes and into dry ones and tuck in under our sheets.
Meanwhile, Vargas and Jefe unsheathed their machetes and made camp. First, they hacked a beam and tied it to two trees to hang their Visqueen tarp to get out of the rain. Next, they cut and assembled bedposts, a frame, and slats to sleep in a handmade bamboo bed, three feet off the ground and out of the way of snakes, ants, and spiders. They used fern fronds as a thin mattress. Finally, a smudge lit under their tarp kept down the bugs while the two slept out in the open air.
In the morning, we set off into a flat jungle dense with vegetation. The sky was overcast by ten. Without the sun as a compass, I soon found myself lost, failing Vargas’s test when he asked us the direction from which we’d come. I pointed one way. Thai another. Chuckling, Vargas indicated a third. Wandering between the featureless summits of Mounts Mueller and Rincon, we found ourselves holding tight to Vargas’s lead. At times, even he seemed uncertain, slicing his way up and down trails marked only by the hoofprints of peccaries.
Dropping into the namesake little gullies of Las Quebraditas, we plunged hard on our heels to anchor our feet and tried not to grab the stems of spiny palms covered in inch-long needles. I leaned on a trekking pole for balance but wished for a handrail to keep upright. Every so often and with a single swing, Vargas would hack a bamboo stalk as big around as my arm, then offer us a drink of sweet, cool water from inside the hollow stem.
Around midday, Vargas led us down out of the claustrophobic bamboo forest onto a broad ridge of open rainforest stacked with buttressed trees and an understory of philodendrons. He cut two-foot heliconia leaves as seat covers against the ants and the fungi on logs where we sat for lunch.
Thai translated Vargas’s thick country accent with difficulty, often asking Jefe what his father had said. Thai pointed down the broad ridge where a tapir or maybe a hunter had passed. “Vargas says this is the way down to the Rio Claro.”