The Adventurer's Son Page 30
By now the police should know where Roman stayed in Puerto Jiménez.
Given the email I’d sent, I expected a debriefing from the Cruz Roja about their search up the Rio Conte, a thirty-minute drive away. Instead, I was questioned by a pudgy, balding, middle-aged man wearing an orange shirt over long sleeves. Like me, his face unshaven, he perspired in the un-air-conditioned room. He introduced himself as Dondee.
I reached out and shook his limp, damp hand. Thai would translate, as my Spanish was useless. I thanked Dondee for helping. He nodded, eyes closed, and asked, “When was the last time you saw Cody?” It sounded wrong to hear Roman called Cody, a name used by his aunts, grandmothers, and those who only knew him from official documents.
“The last time I saw him was in Mexico, in January. But he emailed me every couple of weeks since then. In his last email he said Corcovado required a guide. But he didn’t want a guide. He didn’t use them in six months of traveling.” I recited the detailed route information he’d sent about the Conte and Rio Claro. “He should have been back ten days ago.”
As Thai translated, Dondee pursed his lips as if he didn’t believe me—or worse, that he wasn’t listening. He responded by asking if there’d been any unusual behavior, as if Roman was just a twenty-something kid who hadn’t been in touch with his parents for a while. Hell, I’d gone months without contacting my parents when I’d been his age. But Roman wasn’t me.
“Roman always tells us where he is going. Then he tells us when he gets back. This time we have heard nothing about getting back. That’s unusual. That’s why we’re here,” I reiterated, annoyed.
Dondee motioned for us to sit. He leaned back, arms folded. Thai translated: “He’s asking if Roman does drugs.” This took me aback. Has Roman picked up new habits?
If Roman was anything like I’d been in my twenties, then he’d tried plenty of drugs. But he had always seemed uninterested in them. As Peggy would say, “He takes good of care of his body. He doesn’t want to put drugs into his system.” In Anchorage, he lifted regularly at the gym and liked to run. He drank alcohol, sometimes dipped tobacco, and smoked an occasional marijuana or tobacco cigarette, I suspected. But the “dirty hippy” comments in his emails suggested he hadn’t started using.
“No, he doesn’t do drugs. He drinks. But of course, anything’s possible. It would be a big change in character, though.”
Dondee went on. “Cody was seen last week walking on a trail to Carate with a well-known drug dealer. He came back to town, paid him at an ATM in Puerto Jiménez, then left to go surfing in Matapalo.”
What? This can’t be true. Now I was shocked.
Did he make up his trips across El Petén and La Moskitia? Was going-into-Corcovado-without-a-guide a lie? Why hasn’t he written us? It’s been weeks. Travel changes people, for both good and bad, but how can this be our son?
Dondee’s story didn’t fit. Roman knew more about tropical ecology at age eleven than most of my college students. He hung out with friends he’d known since kindergarten, packrafted rivers, studied molecular ecology. He hugged his family and friends. To change his character so fundamentally, then lie about it to us all seemed to me not just unlikely, but fucking impossible. Besides, why would he need a guide now after walking across El Petén alone?
With Thai translating, I tried to explain again that Roman wouldn’t have taken a guide on a trail. All his emails had emphasized that popular tourist destinations held no interest in themselves. They were access points for a string of creative, independent adventures across Central America. But showing Dondee emails or explaining Roman’s travel style didn’t change his mind. The more I tried to persuade Dondee, the more he resisted.
I wanted Dondee to help. He and the others were there to help. I was so very grateful to them for that. Still, the Cody they described and the Roman I knew were two very different people. Conventional wisdom holds that parents simply don’t know their children well enough to predict their behavior. But with Dondee there was more. He had a self-importance beyond his role as leader of the search. Then, I realized, we had met before.
In 2002, we had both competed in an adventure race in Fiji. He had been on a Costa Rican team that struggled, like most teams, on the first day. I hoped our shared experiences then might create common ground. Instead, it seemed to cast me as a competitor. But this wasn’t a race between Dondee and me. We were on the same team in a race to find my son as quickly as possible.
Knowing Roman well, better than anyone, I could help. We had walked on and off jungle trails together since he was three in Puerto Rico. We’d been to tropical Asia, Australia—even to Corcovado twice. It was difficult to articulate the depth of these experiences without sounding both pretentious and arrogant, but my intuition would offer more insight than two dozen Cruz Roja volunteers.
Dondee returned to his computer. A Cruz Roja volunteer sat next to me. “Are you offering a reward?” he asked in clear English.
“No, not yet.”
“Good. There was another American, David Gimelfarb, who disappeared five years ago in another national park. He was missing for months and nobody saw anything. Then his parents offered a reward. Suddenly there were sightings everywhere, even in Nicaragua and Panama. But it never led to anything. You see, gringos with blue eyes and blond hair—they all look the same.”
The Gimelfarbs’ son had gone missing from a simple two-mile trail hike in Rincón de Vieja National Park near the border of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The Gimelfarbs’ $100,000 reward offer caused problems for everybody. Its only outcome was false information about the missing boy and false hope for his parents.
The day dragged on. People came and went. They talked quietly, ignoring me. The success of a search-and-rescue effort comes down to the first few days, the first few hours, often to the initiative and luck of just one person. This I knew from experience.
By the time the sun dropped like a rock at six-thirty, the only things we’d learned were that we shouldn’t offer a reward, that Cody was seen with a drug dealer, and that no one had looked on the Conte, the river where Roman said he would start.
“Thai, ask Dondee if they found where Roman stayed in town.” Dondee shook his head.
The answer shocked me. After two days of searching, it seemed they should know, yet they didn’t. “Thai, let’s go,” I said. “There’s nothing for us here.”
Chapter 22
The Corners
The yellow bag, Corners Hostel, July 25, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
Thai and I left into the night to find where Roman had stayed. We made our way to each of Puerto Jiménez’s half-dozen hostels. In fluent Spanish, Thai asked the proprietors if they had seen the young man in the photo we showed. An hour after leaving MINAE headquarters we crossed the only paved street in town, walked past the long-distance bus stop, and arrived at the Corners Hostel. Heavy metal bars enclosed the two-story building up to its tin roof. In front, a picnic table sat beside a small, empty parking lot.
We walked in. An old lady about four and a half feet tall shuffled out in slippers and a simple blue smock patterned in plaid. She was Do?a Berta, the owner. She had short-cropped hair, milky blue eyes, and a warm smile, but no English. Thai handed her the photo and asked if she’d seen the young man. “Si. He stayed here, in the dormitory,” Do?a Berta said in Spanish.
My heart raced. We found where he stayed! Maybe he’s coming back. Do?a Berta showed where Roman had signed in. There, on July 8, he signed his given name Cody Dial next to his passport number. This evidence of him comforted me, even if it was just his neat, small-lettered handwriting. I looked at the computers in the office for guest use, wondering if he had typed his emails there. “Ask if the police came by.”
“No,” Do?a Berta responded. Thai and I were the first to ask about him.
“Had he come back?”
“No,” she said, “but he left money for his return.” She opened a different notebook. Her diminutive hands pointed to an entry in the ledger. He had paid for a dorm bed and was coming back.
“Did he leave anything?” I asked, thinking of all the trips when we’d left things in hotel or airport storage as we headed for the mountains, rivers, and jungles from Australia to Alaska. Do?a Berta led us out to a caged-in corner of the building. Immediately I saw the small yellow duffel bag marked “Forrest McCarthy, Jackson, WY.” Another wave of warmth and excitement passed over me. The familiarity of his things made him feel close.
Where is he? What is he doing? When will he be back?
Inside the cage was a big backpack, too, but I didn’t recognize it. It belonged to another traveler, I surmised, and ignored it. Instead, I pawed through the contents of the yellow bag, looking for answers. Inside was a red spiral notebook. I tore out a page and I wrote him: