The Adventurer's Son Page 41

Ole, Steve, Armida, and I needed a licensed guide to join us in the park. The pilot recommended young Nathan. When Nathan learned of our plan his eyes went wide. “We can’t leave the trail,” he declared. “I’ll lose my job and probably my guiding license.” Finally, at risk to his livelihood, Nathan agreed to lead us along the trail. Family is important in Costa Rica, and everyone we’d met was willing to do what they could. Everyone wanted me to find my son.

The flight to Sirena traced an achingly beautiful coast where the jungle tumbled down to the sea. I looked over a geography I knew well but for all the wrong reasons. Fifteen minutes after leaving Puerto Jiménez, the Cessna bumped in landing on the grassy strip. Lunchtime tourists packed the boardwalks and platforms in clusters, each with a young man like Nathan who toted a scope on a tripod and pointed out monkeys, toucans, and sloths in the trees.

Fifteen years before, when eco-tourists were few and no guides were required, Roman and I had walked with the APU class from Los Patos to Sirena, where we stayed for several days. In the forest, Roman staged battles between ants and termites, mortal enemies in the war for the jungle.

“Who wins?” I asked him.

“The termites put up a good fight with their nozzle-headed soldiers shooting goo,” he said, “but the ants always win. They have more soldiers.”

Roman even nosed around a storage building and caught a nectar-eating bat. There are few animals as exhilarating to hold as those that can fly. While Roman held it, the bat’s tongue darted out investigating and probing his gloved hand. He marveled at its long, skinny pink tongue, used to slurp nectar from tubular white flowers that open only at night.

There was a tame toucan there, too. Roman had touched its yellow-and-chestnut-colored bill. “What’s it feel like?” I asked.

“It looks heavy and solid, but it’s not. It’s hollow and light.”

So vivid were the memories at Sirena that I walked behind my friends, wiping my eyes in private.

Near the psychic-supplied GPS coordinates, Nathan looked up and down the trail. When the coast was clear, he whispered to us to leave the ten-foot-wide tourist trail and head into the lowland forest. Less than fifty yards off-trail, we encountered a dozen peccaries. The size of pit bulls, the wild pigs were curious and nearly touched us, their twitching snouts sniffing our knees.

I looked hard for Roman’s Kelty tent with the navy blue fly he’d brought from Alaska. What will I say to him? What are best-and worst-case scenarios? Why has he ended up here, of all places?

The peccaries followed us for twenty minutes through ankle-deep water beneath head-high palms and an overstory of tall buttressed trees. Peccaries, like all pigs, are omnivorous scavengers. I couldn’t help but imagine the worst. We wandered deeper into the muddy forest, but other than palm foliage pinned to the mud by fallen branches, nothing was disturbed. No sign, no footprints, no tent, no stink, nothing but another dead end.


Chapter 33


Homefront


Kitchen, Anchorage, August 2014.

Courtesy of the author

The Kübler-Ross model postulates five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These feelings swirled interchangeably in me for weeks. Every Tico and Tica suggested strength—fuerte—to cope with my grief. I did my best to do normal things: write, take pictures, tell stories, laugh. Still, almost anything could trigger a memory, sometimes so strongly that a wave of grief swelled, crested, and crashed over me. I’d weep for an instant, then get back to work.

After Sirena, I called Peggy from the Iguana to tell her I was leaving the Osa to go to San José, where Josh and Mead suggested a media campaign to drum up military support. Just hearing her voice, sweet and present, revived me from the dead ends in Negritos, Piedras Blancas, and Sirena. She never sounded down or depressed: only upbeat, empathetic, supportive, and loving. Peggy gave me the most fuerte of all.

Back home in Alaska, she faced struggles so much harder than mine. At least I could do something firsthand rather than rely on the actions of others. Unlike me, Peggy answered phone calls and emails, coordinated help and support. She communicated with everyone from reporters seeking a story to strangers offering to help. It was a full-time job.

Expenses piled up, too, with food and lodging; car rental; international cell-phone calls; logistics for friends coming down to help; hiring guides. Peggy managed the contributions that family, friends, former students, and even generous strangers gave us to help pay for all the costs.

The 2014 Wilderness Classic began while I was away. I’d planned to race with a friend in a two-person packraft and boldly descend the Tana, a major glacial river near the end of the route. Tragically, one of the 2014 racers, a well-liked, good-natured, and experienced veteran of the race, died on the Tana when his raft flipped in an icy Class IV rapid swollen with glacier melt. In spite of many close calls over the race’s thirty-year history, his was the only death ever in the event. The racers had all donated their entry fees for Roman’s search before the race start. Peggy said the dead racer’s check sitting on our kitchen table was a poignant reminder of the sometimes irrevocable cost of adventure.

Like a mother bear, Peggy squarely faced any threat to her offspring. With her phone always close and posted at her computer day and night, she dispensed news from me and answered the same questions from others over and over. We shared emotions that peaked when we were convinced that our son was alive and well (just ignoring and avoiding us), and plummeted when we imagined him lost, injured, suffering, or worse.

Peggy took care of details that could only be handled from home. Because we’d sent Costa Rican authorities an outdated picture of Roman from 2012, she searched for more recent ones: with his friend Denali in Hawaii; at home with his sister in Anchorage; on a boat fishing in Alaska’s Prince William Sound with Katelyn; in Guatemala with traveling companions. His straight white teeth showed behind a broad smile in each. Peggy forwarded these to Costa Rica for distribution to Fuerza, Cruz Roja, and MINAE.

In a little-known international agreement, the National Guard of every state in the U.S. is paired with an American ally to help in humanitarian crises. Lieutenant Governor Treadwell suggested that the Costa Ricans pull the New Mexico National Guard into the search. Peggy urged Alaskan politicians to follow up on this suggestion.

She also pleaded with bank representatives to share Roman’s last financial activities. “If there’s one thing to be learned from this,” she told her friends, “it’s to be sure that someone else is listed jointly on your children’s bank accounts. Otherwise you’ll never be able to track their financial movements if you need to find out where they were last.”

The office of Alaska’s then senator—Democrat Mark Begich—called Peggy to say the senator sometimes involved himself in missing persons cases. However, while neither he nor his office ever said so, it seemed to us unlikely that a sitting Democratic senator, up for reelection, would pitch in with Treadwell, a Republican campaigning for Begich’s seat in the upcoming November election.

All officials, from the embassy, to the FBI, to the senators’ offices, asked the same missing persons questions: did Roman have a Facebook page, a cell phone, a GPS; did he use drugs; how experienced was he; when did we last hear from him; etc., etc. Peggy answered the American authorities with the same responses Cruz Roja got from me my first day in Costa Rica.

Like Roman, Peggy had avoided Facebook. But now she found it an efficient tool for connecting with and updating people. In an outpouring of support, Facebook friends reported that family, friends, and former guides were willing to help. But what Facebook friends couldn’t know was that even an army of well-meaning acquaintances and friends of friends would have no better luck getting permission to enter Corcovado than we had.

Even if they did get into the park, how many Facebook friends had the jungle savvy to follow thin, unmarked paths used by poachers and illegal gold miners, trails meant to be hidden? How many could dodge green vipers at eye level and fer-de-lances underfoot while watching their step through slippery mud without grabbing spiny palms as handholds? Jungle travel needs four eyes and a sixth sense for hazards. How many had those and the time to come down, even if our GoFundMe campaign could foot the bill?

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