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 visibility 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?”