At first, Peggy kept a list of these names and their contact details. Some offered places to stay, locals to translate. But as our private search efforts were both illegal and risky, she stopped keeping the list and instead politely thanked those who offered. By two weeks in, the sleepless nights, incessant communication, and stress over her missing son had just plain worn Peggy out. Thinking about what her son was going through—out of food and three weeks overdue—made it harder and harder to keep it together.

She confided her fears to her friends, but never to me. She was confident Roman was alive, and I needed her faith. Early on in the ordeal she had broken down and sobbed long and hard, flushing grief from her system to better focus on the tasks at hand. Friends invited her to get away from the phone and the computer, to berry-pick, or just walk and talk. They gave their prayers, their love, their money. They shared stories about their kids as distraction.

Peggy’s brother-in-law Steve, together with sister Maureen, Carl Tobin, and other friends and neighbors, completed a house siding project left unfinished when I dropped everything to head south. Steve and Maureen helped Peggy strip and sand our living room floor. Peggy sent me photos of their work. It all looked great and provided her a constructive diversion from worry. “Keeping busy is good,” she wrote. “It helps keep the breakdowns at bay.”

AS EARLY AS July 29, a slew of high-ranking politicians—Treadwell; Alaska senators Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich and Congressman Don Young; Florida senator Bill Nelson; and a handful of generals including General John F. Kelly—all expected that National Guard personnel would soon be deployed, like a cavalry to the rescue.

But by the middle of August, Peggy was fed up with the National Guard runaround. All the back and forth, sucking up to the press, begging people to write their congressman, enlarging the circle of contacts to see who might finally get the message to President Obama for permission to send a small group of trained rescue personnel—like the Air Force’s PJ rescue squad—had stretched from days into weeks. All Peggy and I could see was the ticking clock.

“I’m starting to ignore this shit and told Roman to just get back into the jungle and fuck em all. If alive, my son is presently dying, or dead from all this bullshit,” she wrote, venting to a friend, sick of the empty promises and broken dreams. Frustrated at the pace of action, she fired off a scathing email to Begich’s office:

We still have not received capable people with jungle/rope skills—something we have been striving for three weeks. We feel so close, then get pushed back ten steps. I’m not sure what Mark has actually done himself, but it sounds like he could do more. ONE TELEPHONE CALL OF HIS TIME. PLEASE.

The Republican Party is shining bright right now. Really Bright. Extra Bright. I’d like to see Mark kick it up a notch.

That worked. Begich called me the next day. But every politician’s promise from D.C. to San José delivered little more than the false hope I’d found in the psychic’s GPS coordinates near Sirena.

Chapter 34

The Fellowship

Juan Edgar Picado, San José, August 2014.

Courtesy of the author

Back in Costa Rica, I joined Josh and his wife, Vic, in San José, where I felt like a sad pony trotted out for sympathy. We hoped that Juan Edgar’s political contacts and Costa Rican media exposure would motivate the Costa Rican government to invite U.S. military support in the search. Meanwhile, Mead worked back channels to get special-ops soldiers, like the PJs, down to Costa Rica.

Mead, Josh, and Juan Edgar all thought it was a sure thing. Lauren was skeptical. The Costa Ricans pride themselves on having no military. “I’d love to see a Black Hawk helicopter land in Puerto Jiménez, but I’m telling you”—she smiled—“it’s just not going to happen.”

By now Roman’s disappearance was national news. Men’s Journal, ABC News, and a who’s who of celebrities, media, and influential contacts from the Fellowship and Explorers Club all spoke to me. Midway through a marathon phone session we heard from Mead: “I just got off the phone with the number one motherfucker in charge of Southern Command—General Kelly!”

Four years before, four-star general John F. Kelly had lost his twenty-nine-year-old son—a marine killed by a land mine in Afghanistan. General Kelly himself had called Mead and told him he had learned just that day of the request to send special ops to Costa Rica. “I don’t know what I have, or the legality,” he told Mead, but General Kelly was on it.

I was honored, flattered, and a bit overwhelmed. I couldn’t believe it. The cavalry was coming after all!

These powerful and successful people—media stars, generals, senators, governors—had strong but not overbearing personalities. They made things happen by applying vision coupled with persuasion. And they worked a network of social relationships that acted as “hands and feet” to accomplish shared goals. Josh and Mead (and the whole orb connected to them) were family and friend–oriented, less self-centered, and more likely to build and maintain relationships.

My own parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins are good people, but my extended family seemed in tatters. I hadn’t stayed in Virginia. My dad didn’t stick around, my sister moved to London, and my own mom had left home when she was sixteen. They had their reasons—good ones. But mine were self-indulgent and selfish: head for Alaska to do what I wanted.

Peggy and I had worked hard to make our own family better than what we’d each grown up with. Our marriage, like many, had rough spots. Peggy once told me, “You haven’t always been a good husband, but you are a good father.”

My kids showed they loved me, even though I felt undeserving. Home from college, Roman once responded to my apology for being a less-than-ideal parent by saying, “No, Dad, you were—you are a great dad. I love you.” My main hope was that Roman would be a better dad than I had been.

The next day, Alaska’s Republican senator Lisa Murkowski emailed me with bad news. The Southern Command, air force, and joint chiefs of staff had concluded that the legal authority doesn’t exist because the SAR isn’t requested for humanitarian assistance or disaster relief. There’d be no American military-based search and rescue for Cody Roman Dial. The roller coaster plunged again.

During the full moon of August, I had looked up and imagined that Roman, too, saw the same bright disk in the sky: he was wondering where I was, when I would come get him. The image compelled me to return to Corcovado’s mountains, jungles, and canyons. Fed up and exasperated with the effort to get Department of Defense support, I emailed Josh and Mead: I am done with this and have better ways to spend my time. Thank you two for your efforts. They were something to behold.

Lauren had been right. “The legal authority doesn’t exist.” I was disappointed that the cavalry wasn’t coming. But not surprised. I couldn’t help but think that the stink of the Pata Lora story had wafted its way north and suppressed any action. If Jenkins’s story is true, and I believed that it was, then where is my son? It was time to go back to Zeledón.

Thanks to Juan Edgar’s connections, Mead’s endorsement, and Josh’s push for media exposure, we had a mechanism to enter the park. And through Peggy’s efforts back home, we had the services of three former military SERE (survival, escape, resistance, and evasion) experts from an Anchorage search-and-rescue training company called Learn to Return, or LTR. With our friends’ support, we had the funds to fly them all to Costa Rica along with two of the Veracruz packrafting crew.

In his mid-fifties, Brian Horner, owner and founder of LTR, was skilled in search, wilderness medicine, technical rope work, and rescue. He had worked on projects around the world. Clint Homestead, in his late twenties, had served as a Green Beret in the Middle East and was skilled in rope work, too. Clint was muscular and fit and worked out at the same Anchorage gym as Jazz. The third crew member, Frank Marley, had been an army medic. Now in his thirties, I remembered Frank as a graduate student at APU.

Besides LTR, two friends that Roman and I had paddled with in Veracruz joined us: Brad Meiklejohn and Todd Tumolo, who’d led the way down the Big Banana. While Brad and Todd mostly packrafted whitewater with me, Todd was an accomplished climber and mountain guide in his mid-twenties. He’d helped me on some ice worm traverses, too. I’d met Todd when he was a student at APU, where he and Jazz had briefly dated. Like the LTR crew, Todd was trained in wilderness medicine. Brad, a climber and a skier in his younger days, spoke Spanish well. A professional conservationist and avid naturalist, Brad had visited tropical forests around the world. He had also become my primary whitewater packrafting partner in Alaska.