Before high school, Jazz discovered a variety of short-season summer camps: Super Camp, Surf Camp, and Golf Camp. She then researched, applied to, and attended each. She also wanted to play soccer, but unlike the shorter camps, and because we traveled in summer, there wasn’t an opportunity for her to join a team. Instead, she became a competitive climber at the local rock gym in high school. She did well and competed at a national level. After graduating from Lewis and Clark College on a full scholarship and majoring in psychology, she took up body building and entered in a local competition, finishing fifth.

Ever since she was old enough to understand the chores assigned her, Jazz has been responsible and reliable. And since earning her driver’s license, she has always held down a job. As a teen she shopped for groceries, drove the family car for oil changes and tire swaps. At sixteen, she sided our house with me, eventually taking the lead, thinking ahead, measuring then marking the boards for the cuts, and hitting the first nail. After college, she was the one who solved problems at home when Peggy and I were away, once calling the plumbers to unfreeze our frozen pipes after checking in at our empty house to find the water didn’t work. Just like she had on the Harding Icefield, Jazz anticipates problems and asks the right questions to solve them.

But Jazz, I sensed, felt helpless in Costa Rica. As brother and sister, she and Roman had been very close, one of Peggy’s goals as a mother. Being here likely distressed her, although she showed no sign of that. All of us had girded ourselves in search-and-rescue mode, but Jazz saw no reason to stay. She didn’t want to do the hike Roman had sketched out and needed to get back to work in Anchorage.

After Jazz left, Lauren and Toby encouraged Peggy and me to assemble a poster offering a reward for Roman’s missing gear. Todd Tumolo sent a photo of Roman’s green Salomon shoes on his feet during our trip to Mexico. We copied and pasted Internet images of a yellow folding sleeping pad, a blue-colored Jetboil, a red dry bag, a puffy blue Patagonia pullover, the Kelty logo of his tent. I asked Lauren if we shouldn’t hold back a few items, in case someone was—as with David Gimelfarb—trying to take advantage. “I don’t think so,” Lauren said, who’d been a defense attorney for a decade. “We want to get as much information out there as possible. It’s time for a criminal investigation. Having lots of people looking for distinctive gear is useful.”

We posted copies at every pulperia, soda, cantina, and colectivo stop between Los Patos and Carate. Everywhere we went, people sympathized with us, the parents of the muchacho. It felt good to be doing something new that might have results. For nine hours one day we hung posters, heard stories, peered into every backyard we drove past looking for his clothes on laundry lines. We studied every young man’s feet for shoe color and brand, wondered about every kettle of vultures circling above forests and pastures.

One ex-pat said that when she had moved here in the nineties, it felt like paradise at the end of the world. Now, fifteen years on, she had nothing good to say. She wanted off the Osa but had her life savings tied up in her house and property. She had married a local Tico and had his child, but his substance abuse led to their divorce.

“I knew those two Austrians. I knew Kimberley, too, who was beaten and shot right at her house. And I knew Lisa, smothered in her bed. And you know what? I lock my front door each night, and then I take my child in my bedroom with me and I lock my bedroom door, too. I got a gun. I keep it loaded right there with me. And to top it all off, I let my ex live with me. Otherwise the criminals will just come and take everything. I’m trapped. Cody’s disappearance is part of this,” she concluded. “This inbred, lawless, uneducated, unscrupulous backwater of a place.”

She stood up and took a deep breath. “Look, I’m always around. Stop by anytime. And sorry I just talked about myself. I hope you find your son. I can’t imagine what a nightmare this is for you two.”

Chapter 38

Cerro de Oro

Pulperia, Cerro de Oro, September 2014.

Courtesy of the author

After my return from San José with Josh and Vic and ten days before Peggy arrived, Vargas had called me at the Iguana to say he’d heard a story about a lone gringo at Cerro de Oro, an off-the-grid mining community on the north side of Corcovado’s mountains. Cerro de Oro is beyond La Tarde, where Dondee had abandoned Thai, Pancho, and me. To go there, Peggy and I hired a guide named Andres who spoke good English and knew the trails. Tall, young, and curly-haired, he led us to Cerro de Oro with the patient, attentive gate of a nature guide. He pointed out a mother sloth in a cecropia, a fast-growing, hollow-stemmed tree that looks like the house plant called an umbrella tree and is the sloth’s favored food. Through our binoculars we could see the baby clinging to the mother’s greenish-gray hair, looking down. Elsewhere, a stately king vulture, biggest in the Americas, dried its white wings at the top of a tall snag.

Walking upstream, we encountered a knot of miners studying their pans for gold. The youngest dug into the current with a spade. Andres told us a story about the oldest. With only two teeth and dark skin weathered from a life in the sun, he looked ancient as dirt. The old man had once been lost in the jungle for two weeks after breaking his leg. He’d been rescued when a local indigenous psychic described his location from a dream. One of the miners wrote the seer’s number in my notebook. Every call rang busy.

The miners said there were two pulperias upstream. A three-hour walk off the grid, the first pulperia was crowded nonetheless. Under the rustic shop’s roof, shaded by mango trees, a handful of men sat on wooden benches with dogs at their feet. A little girl peeked from behind her mother’s skirt. On the store counter a green parrot cocked its head, eyeing us with the same cautious curiosity as the men, the dogs, and the little girl. “The owner says no gringo came through here,” Andres told us. “You are the first ones here in memory.” We hung a poster anyway.

A wide trail led to the next pulperia, ten minutes away through what was once a bustling village. Simple framed houses surrounded by gray fences stood empty in yards crowded by encroaching jungle. Cerro de Oro was a community reached only by foot or horseback, with running water gravity-fed through black plastic pipes from nearby streams. It felt forgotten by modern Costa Rica. “Roman wouldn’t have even known about this place,” Peggy concluded, “and I doubt he’d come here if he did.”

I wasn’t so sure.

At the second pulperia, a man and his young wife—or daughter, we couldn’t tell—also reported that they had seen no gringos. The man said he had heard a gringo entered the park near the Rio Conte. The young woman shared some yellow rambutans. We thanked her for the tasty fruit, hung a poster, and left.

Farther along the trail we met an old miner. Andres asked if he had heard about the missing gringo. “Yes, of course,” he said. “That muchacho has been lost before in the Amazon, and the father went down and found him that time, too.” We had heard many rumors across the Osa, but this one was the most fanciful—so far. Later, I would hear even taller tales.

ON THE WAY back to the Iguana, we visited Vargas’s farm to make arrangements for our trip to follow the route Roman had described in his last email, then stopped in Puerto Jiménez to eat Chinese food. Sitting in the restaurant, we watched a fight break out across the street at a liquor store. A couple of guys threw punches, rocks, and boards at each other. Nobody tried to stop them and the fight fizzled out on its own.

Watching this street brawl made it easy to understand why the Costa Rican government was closing down trails and requiring guides for all park visitors. The underbelly of the Osa grew by the year, people said, a place where convicted felons go to hide, where high-volume cocaine traffic flows freely from Panama, Colombia, and farther south. The miners, we’d been told, were drug addicts, self-serving thugs.

That night the heaviest rain of the burgeoning wet season hit with thunder and lightning that knocked out the Iguana’s electricity. The wind blew hard from the Gulf. Tree fall crashed in the dark and I readied our things to escape should it feel unsafe on the second story of the Pearl, where we slept surrounded by tall ceiba forest.

By morning the Iguana’s power was back on, the lodge intact. Lauren told us over breakfast that Vargas was nervous taking a woman along on our upcoming traverse. He thought Peggy would slow us and that he’d get caught. He said if we encountered any officials, he would run and wouldn’t wait. He could go to prison for being in the park.

But Peggy, I knew, was much tougher than she looked. She had raced three times in the Wilderness Classic, holding the fastest female time for decades. She would have no problem keeping up. Lauren encouraged her: “Peggy, you need to go and show that old Tico what women can do. Straighten him out.”