It felt good to have such a strong team of friends and community members ready and willing to head into the jungle. My only concern—as it had been with Ole and Steve—was everyone’s safety. The afternoon rains were getting heavier, coming earlier in the day and sometimes lasting all night and into the next morning. The wet season had arrived.

THE MORNING AFTER returning from San José, a mysterious illness struck me with a pounding headache and dry heaves. After a near-delirious night, my sheets soaked from fevered sweats, I was just too sick to pack and plan. Josh and Vic cared for me. They brought fluids, food, and flu medicine from the farmacia in town.

I couldn’t eat but the meds and fluids helped enough to get me out the door to the back-to-back meetings planned that day. Sick, my son missing for over a month, and suffering repeated bureaucratic roadblocks, I wondered, Have my sins been so great as to deserve all this?

Permission to enter Corcovado required that we fax twelve pages of permit applications to three offices. In addition, we presented our detailed plan at three meetings, complete with a day-by-day description of objectives, a list of our equipment, the qualifications of our team, and a communications plan. The permits would not come until the next day. All of this felt like inefficiencies in the system. But the hardest pill to swallow was that MINAE required that Dondee join us.

And there he was at a morning meeting, aching to be the center of attention, with his Google Earth projection of waypoints and GPS tracks on the wall. Dondee reminded us that Roman had entered the park illegally; he baldly stated that there was no place left to look in the park; it had all been checked already.

As he droned on describing odors from mining tunnels, and remembering the Tico guide’s ballerina comment, I snapped. I’d had enough. This meeting was supposed to be about our plans for success, not Dondee’s failure to find my son.

Standing up, I shouted, “We have been listening to this narcissist for a month and it gets us nowhere! I’m tired of it! Fucking tired of it!”

Dondee, satisfied that he’d finally pushed my button hard, smiled.

I stormed out to take a taxi back to the Iguana and leave him behind.

Chapter 35

Tree Fall

Steve Fassbinder on tree fall above Negritos Canyon, August 2014.

Courtesy of the author

Six weeks after Roman walked into the jungle and a month after I had arrived, MINAE finally granted me permission to enter the park and lead a search of my own. Brad, Todd, and the three LTR professionals joined me on Jenkins’s route to Zeledón. Cruz Roja, MINAE rangers, and Fuerza took a parallel tourist trail and caught up to us later that day.

The crumpled landscape offered us few sites to pitch our tents. Todd, Brad, and I set up a plastic Visqueen tarp and bug tent camp where Ole, Steve, and I had camped before. The LTR guys squeezed into a dome tent on another ridge along Jenkins’s well-worn trail to the mining tunnels above the Negritos. Dondee, Cruz Roja, MINAE, and Fuerza camped near the north branch of El Tigre. One of the MINAE rangers was Kique, the tall, dark, and serious ranger who had hiked the Fila Matajambre ridge trail with Thai and Pancho the day we met Jenkins.

Jenkins had told me that on July 10, his brother, who had been with him and the other three miners on the Zeledón, had had a court date for his divorce. Walking downstream to make the appointment, Jenkins’s brother had encountered Roman hiking upstream on El Tigre. This left several places to look for Roman between the Negritos and the north branch of the El Tigre. For example, there had been a rotten smell of decay at the mouth of Negritos’s canyon. Looking there, I found a dead agouti, a spotted rabbit-sized rodent of the rainforest that looks like Borneo’s mouse deer.

On rappel, the LTR team checked each side gulley leading into Negritos’s canyon. The rest of us checked possible cliffs that Roman could have fallen from. It rained all afternoon and into the night. The next day we again looked hard, but all my ideas—the side gullies, the bad smell, the El Tigre’s north branch—came up empty. These negative results reduced the number of places to look. While there was an infinite number of unlikely places—cliffs, thick bamboo, landslides, inaccessible canyons—there was only a finite number of likely ones.

Whenever I searched in the jungle, hope tugged me toward town, where someone might have found new clues or Roman may have finally revealed himself. But whenever I was in town, dealing with officials, reporters, logistics, family, friends, the cagey voice with the unlisted number, and all the rest, I just wanted to go back into Corcovado and look. Snakes, cliffs, rain be damned.

Soon after breakfast at dawn, Todd and I searched a landslide above the canyon rim. We walked and talked as we moved on and off trail. It was reassuring to have Todd along, a gentle, competent, intelligent young man. Todd said he’d always been a woods kid, and that his father had left his family to live in Panama when Todd was young. His story left me wondering as we came up empty of clues, if my son had left me to go to Panama. Maybe Dondee was right: he’d never entered Corcovado at all.

As the afternoon wore on and the short-billed pigeon called its melodious who-cooks-for-you from high in the canopy, we all rendezvoused back at camp. We’d found nothing.

THAT NIGHT IT rained hard and the wind blew. As snowstorms load mountain slopes that eventually avalanche, rainstorms weaken trees that eventually fall. But unlike avalanche safety, with its snow pits, locator beacons, and shovels to rescue an avalanche victim, there is no special technique, no technology, nothing like an avalanche-awareness class for safety from falling trees. Most people are surprised to learn that tree fall is a hazard at all, though the word widowmaker has been coined expressly for potentially lethal tree and limb fall.

In tropical rainforests, where trees are mostly shallowly rooted and where decay is rapid, thunderstorms can waterlog canopy deadwood with rain. The storm’s winds can then break, snap, or tip up entire trees. Tim Laman once said about Gunung Palung: “The sound of tree fall is so common that I sometimes wonder why there are any trees left standing in the forest at all.”

Brian, Clint, and Frank slept through the night’s rainstorm in their small dome five minutes away from our camp. The wind picked up. Limbs started to fall, waking the three. But “with nowhere to go anyway,” as Clint put it later, they just lay on their backs and listened, hoping for the best.

Sometime after three in the morning they heard a pulsing groan followed by an ominous pop, pop, pop, then an accelerating swish. Falling objects move fast, speeding up as they go. A blast of wind flattened their tent with a woomp! Then the tent popped back up and they found themselves unhurt, happy to be alive.

We paced out the length of the tree: 135 feet from root wad to tip-top. The crown’s six-inch-diameter limbs had landed only ten paces from their small nylon tent. I shuddered to think what would have happened had it struck them in the night. It was another reminder of how dangerous the forest could be.

“There wasn’t really much we could do,” Clint joked the next morning, “except curl into the fetal position and mess our pants!” They laughed the tension-relieving laugh of battlefield soldiers.

BETWEEN US, WE had looked on the Zeledón’s ridges and in its gullies; even farther afield when Brad joined Kique’s mining camp raids. The thoroughness of our search left me 95 percent certain that Roman was not within a half mile of where Jenkins had seen him. But we hadn’t thoroughly searched beyond that half mile.

Every doubling in distance from the point last seen tripled the additional area needed to look. No wonder the Cruz Roja gave up. The task seemed impossible. It was easier to accept that Roman had left the park and encountered foul play.

Or, like Todd’s dad left him, Roman left us.

Chapter 36

Foul Play

Willim with dead fer-de-lance, Dos Brazos, August 2015.

Courtesy of the author

The idea that Roman would one day resurface from a grand solo adventure—a possibility Lauren proposed in her cheerful voice—sure beat the alternatives. But the notion that he deserted us left me feeling that we had failed as a family. Dondee, Do?a Berta, the sightings at Matapalo, and all the doubters who thought I saw only a son I wanted to see, had sowed the seed of his abandonment in my heart. But it wouldn’t root. Roman wouldn’t desert his family and friends. He was loyal to us all. He’d written a friend to say he looked forward to seeing her soon. He had recently exchanged instant messages maintaining a friendship that he’d had since grade school.