It was hard to tell the narco-traffickers from the citizens who just wanted protection. Jeremy asked the canoe captain: “Why is everyone armed? Is it dangerous?”

“No, no,” the captain replied. “It’s quite safe out here. Everyone has guns!”

Everyone has guns because La Moskitia’s lagoons, wetlands, and rivers offer Colombian smugglers a place to refuel and hide out on their way to land routes through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S. cocaine markets. Small, open boats with multiple outboard engines ferry the drug from its origin to landfall in eastern Honduras.

Jeremy and Roman talked their way onto another big dugout canoe with an outboard. This one cruised down the wide river in the dark. Hurtling through one of the most active cocaine transit areas in North America, the two ate cookies and looked at the stars as the captain texted, motoring at full throttle. The next day they boarded a twin-engine jet boat full of passengers. The boat followed narrow canoe trails through a swamp at high speed, then careened wide open around corners through the lagoons of the Mosquito Coast of the Caribbean Sea.

As I read Roman’s account, I could picture Jeremy and Roman looking at each other and grinning, shaking their heads during a “thrilling Disney World ride. Except the overhanging vines were actually close enough to hurt and the oncoming boat, also going at full throttle, came very close to being very bad.”

Arriving at Puerto Lempira, the largest town in La Moskitia, they looked for accommodation. It sounded grim: “100 lempira [$10] a night got you a soiled mattress, bug bites, and used condoms under the bed. 50 lempira was either malaria or getting stabbed in an alley.” A hospitable guy named Junior charged them one hundred lempira for the only clean place in town. Over beers, Junior barbecued chicken and cooked up a Honduran specialty of cheese over beans in a traditional clay pot. In the morning, they toured Puerto Lempira, where Junior pointed out the narco-traffickers’ kids, their bodyguards, even who’d been shot, how many times, and by what caliber bullet.

From Puerto Lempira on the Mosquito Coast of the Caribbean, they caught a pickup truck to Nicaragua. The dirt road passed “through really beautiful country. I’m not sure why I liked it so much.” The landscape reminded Roman of a surreal Dr. Seuss version of Alaska’s arctic tundra: “Too even, too green, too smooth, too pretty,” he said, “to be quite right.” Safely past multiple military checkpoints, they arrived in Nicaragua without passport stamps. With indigenous La Moskitia behind them, they had returned to Latin America.

THROUGH LATE JUNE into July, Roman headed south. I sensed from his emails that he was homesick after eight months away from Alaska. He surfed in Nicaragua for two weeks, joking that packrafting and surfing have almost no crossover skills, except maybe swimming. Worried about rabies, he asked us what he should do about a street dog bite to his leg that drew blood; gave a Honduran recipe to Peggy; recommended we watch BBC’s Sherlock; and, If you dont have it already, he suggested, you should get New Order’s 1987 Substance Album.

His music suggestion recalled that sweet spot in his adolescence, between boyhood and manhood, when he saw me as both fun and cool. During that golden age, we shared music and books, swapped interests and insights. And as he grew to know more than I did in economics, genetics, and politics, he shared his knowledge, enriching my life. It was during those years that we stared at thousands of bugs and reminisced about Borneo, packrafted whitewater when no one else did, and discovered he could beat me at chess.

“Where in Costa Rica did we go with the APU class?” he asked in mid-June.

During the month of January 1999, I led a dozen students from Alaska Pacific University on a tropical ecology course to Costa Rica. Roman joined the APU class as a precocious eleven-soon-to-be-twelve-year-old. We crossed the small nation from coast to coast in a little chartered bus and studied Central American ecology en route. We saw poison dart frogs on the Caribbean side, ctenosaurs and crocodiles on the Pacific, and rafted whitewater in between. We walked for a week across Corcovado, through its lowland rainforest and along its beaches on the park’s most iconic backcountry route. Independent travel was possible in Costa Rican national parks then and we walked on and off-trail at will. At one point we forded a lagoon on an incoming tide said to carry sharks in and crocodiles out. Young Roman waded nearly to his neck.

Fifteen years later, Roman was collecting volcanoes, high points, and major jungles throughout Mexico and Central America. He’d visited the Lacandon Jungle in Mexico, El Petén in Guatemala, Belize’s Maya Mountains rainforests, and La Moskitia in Honduras: Corcovado National Park on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula and Panama’s Darién Gap were all he had left.

He told some of his friends that Corcovado would be training for the Darién Gap, a literal gap in the transcontinental road system between Panama and Colombia. Because it is occupied by militarized Panamanian and Colombian border police, paramilitary revolutionaries, and drug traffickers (not to mention fer-de-lances, bushmasters, other poisonous snakes, bullet ants, dengue, malaria, and more), the Gap is one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

Roman emailed me June 6: I’ve spent the last week or so trying to figure out how to do the Darien gap and it’s starting to give me bad dreams. He wrote his college friend Brad:

Seriously planning a trip through the Darien Gap. It’s fucking stupid and there’s a really good chance I die or get kidnapped. Senafront, the Panamanian border police, doesn’t let foreigners cross the Colombian border over land. My plan is to get permission to go to Darien National Park, dip out on the rangers, follow a river south up into the low, extremely steep limestone border range, cross it into Colombia, then follow a river down to an Indian village and hire a boat out.

I shared Roman’s sentiments about the Darién. It sounded too dangerous to try. But while part of me hoped that he wouldn’t, another part hoped that he would. In my younger days, like many adventurers, I had imagined its wilderness as a worthy challenge to travel. But its social hazards of lawlessness and paramilitary groups had made it too dangerous for me. If we as parents live vicariously through our kids, then after Roman crossed the Darién, my empty ambition to try wouldn’t matter. On the other hand, I knew well its reputation.

On the Fourth of July 2014, and still in Nicaragua, Roman asked me in an email, Do you have any super-secret access to topo maps of central american countries?

I wish, I wrote back. Try googling ESRI world topo. Better than nothing. I checked the world topo’s version of Corcovado to compare it to somewhere we’d been. It identified the Osa Peninsula as part of the canton of Golfito.

On July 6, Roman arrived in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, and bought a backpack that he planned to use in Corcovado and farther south. Roman’s bulky Mexican pack held his insulated pullover, a thin summer-weight sleeping bag, two stoves, and our old Kelty tent. He also carried Forrest McCarthy’s small yellow duffel as a daypack. On Tuesday, July 8 at eight in the morning, Roman left San José on an eight-hour bus ride headed for the Osa Peninsula.

His destination: Corcovado National Park.

Chapter 19

“The Best Map Yet”

The Osa Peninsula and Golfo Dulce, Costa Rica.

Courtesy of the author

The Osa Peninsula, situated just north of Panama’s west coast, separates the muscular Pacific from the calm Golfo Dulce, Spanish for “Sweet Gulf.” The Osa’s main road is a two-lane highway that parallels Golfo Dulce as far as Puerto Jiménez. There the pavement ends. In the nineties, the Osa’s remoteness, abundant wildlife, and sparse population drew a cohort of North Americans and Europeans who settled and started businesses that thrived until the recession of 2008.

Today, a collage of billboards greets travelers at the end of the highway promising “waterfalls, tours, and massage” and “Affordable Beachfront Luxury!” Also available: “sport fishing,” “sea kayaking,” even “zip-lining.” These tourist establishments are small, family-run operations that contribute to the economy and English fluency of the locals, but hardly qualify the Osa as a tourist mecca like those farther north.