We went to town for cash. The sky was clear, the air wet, the sun cooking us overhead. My ATM card didn’t work at the bank and I had too little Spanish to explain my problem. The bank declined my credit card. During a three-dollar-per-minute cell call to credit card services, I was transferred, put on hold, and asked the same questions repeatedly. My own went unanswered.

Frustrated, I vented on Peggy, telling her it was her turn to struggle with language, her turn to access money, her turn to drive everywhere. I would sit in the car and wait. Costa Ricans have a saying for misplaced anger like that: “I broke the dish, but you have to pay for it.”

Jazz ultimately saved us, as she so often does. The bank said the easiest way to get cash was by MoneyGram. We texted Jazz in Anchorage. Within minutes she had transferred us the money we needed for the private investigator.

Emotional pain inevitably manifests itself physically, it seems. Leaving in the predawn darkness to meet Vargas at five, we hurried through the dark. Peggy couldn’t fasten her seat belt because its ratchet caught with each jolt in the bumpy road. A cyclist appeared out of the black. I swerved, striking a deep pothole that sent Peggy flying out of her seat, where she hit her head on the roof, then landed on her tailbone that she had broken years before and bruised it severely.

She cried out, moaning in agony, tears in her eyes. I stopped, hurt by her suffering. I felt terrible, with no way to ease her pain other than with a gentle squeeze of her hand, a caress, an apology.

She motioned me onward. “Let’s go. We’re going to be late. I don’t want to keep him waiting.”

Chapter 39

Roman’s Route

Upper Rio Claro, September 2014.

Courtesy of the author

When we arrived at Vargas’s farm in the dark on September 4 to finally walk Roman’s planned route, it had been eight weeks since he wrote us his last email and forty-three days since we realized he was missing. We followed Vargas uphill in the tropical dawn, the best hour of every day, set between sleep and sweat. With his son Jefe in the rear, Vargas walked us along a dirt road, then an ATV trail, and finally a footpath where we slipped across the park boundary into Corcovado. Our shared language with Vargas would consist mostly of river names: Agujas, Barrigones, Conte, Rincon, Sirena, Claro, El Tigre. We had no translator.

At first Vargas moved slowly and Peggy knew why. “He thinks I can’t keep up. Tell him to go faster.” She waved her hand forward from the wrist and frowned at Vargas.

“Mas rapido!” I said in my simple Spanish. Faster! When that didn’t work, she pushed him with both hands and a smile. Physically urged onward, he looked at me quizzically but moved quicker with Peggy hot on his heels.

In the park, the trail narrowed and we squeezed past huge tree roots that sprawled across the narrow ridgeline like fat lazy pythons.

“Cerro de Oro,” Vargas said, motioning to a side trail.

“La Tarde?” I asked, pointing ahead.

“No. Aqui,” he replied pointing down the Cerro de Oro trail again. Thai, Pancho, and Kique must have passed this way on their way to Dos Brazos.

Dawn slipped away and by eight we were sweating. We passed beneath a gang of spider monkeys barking, screaming, and shaking the trees above us. We climbed higher. Just before mossy woods and overcast skies closed overhead, we took in a rare view of Corcovado Lagoon. Soon after we passed the Rincon benchmark and entered Las Quebraditas’ disorienting bamboo forest.

At one of the picas, a small, subtle trail I would hardly notice, much less follow, Vargas led us to the Mueller benchmark. Startled, I turned slowly around trying to orient myself. For the second time on the summit plateau, I had lost my sense of direction. Peggy looked at my face. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I thought we were going a completely different way and am totally turned around. I’m glad we’re with Vargas.”

“If you don’t know where we are, then I’m glad we’re with him, too!”

After climbing over deadfalls and past muddy trail braids, we came to where an empty package from Vargas’s granola bar and heliconia leaves marked our lunch spot with Thai from a month ago. I looked at the litter and thought how many times I’d hoped to find a Starburst wrapper or other sure sign left by Roman. We sat on the same leaves on the same logs, knowing little more than the same facts about him we knew then. Peggy squirmed. Her bruised tailbone prevented her from sitting squarely on anything.

After lunch we moved down the broad ridge. Vargas motioned right: “Sirena.” Then left: “Rio Claro.” And behind us: “Madrigal y Rincon.” We had passed the five-pointed star and now slipped through the keyhole that led off the plateau to Rio Claro.

At times, tangles of liana-choked deadfall pushed us off the ridge trail, but Vargas quickly got us on track. The gentle tzing of his razor-sharp machete left a wake of fresh-cut vegetation behind like bread crumbs. Smiling and joking in the oppressive heat and sweat-soaking humidity, Peggy watched for birds and monkeys. She never complained, despite waking up nauseated from dinner the night before and fretting about snakes underfoot today. She had no difficulty keeping up. This was the mother of our son.

By early afternoon Vargas announced: “Rio Claro.” He pointed to a silver sliver far below at the bottom of a steep-sided valley. It seemed unlikely that Roman, following only the small, thin pica trails that are so rarely used and easily lost, would have made it to here. I hoped he had exercised judgment enough not to try crossing Las Quebraditas. But we had to. We owed it to ourselves and to him to be here and look. We kept close to the Osa’s most experienced tracker.

On a ridge high above two branches of the Rio Claro, Vargas and his son disagreed over where we were. Once my phone’s GPS acquired a signal through a thinning in the canopy, I showed Jefe our location and pointed to the Rio Claro on both map and landscape. Going right would take us down to the river, but instead Vargas took us left and then up, up, up, rushing headlong into a sudden downpour.

While trying to hang on to his pace, I gestured this didn’t seem right. Vargas responded by plunging off the ridge on a tapir trail where the rainstorm left a small stream spilling down muddy steps. The pouring rain chilled Peggy first and then us all. “You said we’d camp before the rain! That’s what you said!” Peggy reminded me over the din of big drops pounding on layer upon layers of forest leaves. “Why not here?” she implored.

“Acampar aqui!” I yelled over the crash of water. Camp here!

“No agua!” came the reply. No water!

I smiled and held out my arms, palms up at the deluge all around us, then dropped my pack, pulled out a large Visqueen sheet, and pitched it. Peggy and I ducked under the plastic to escape the cold rain. Vargas pulled out a brand-new, tiny dome tent and erected it quickly without Visqueen above.

Peggy collected rainwater in our bottles and cookpot as it ran off our plastic shelter. I erected our bug net tent, then took a full water bottle to the other tent as a peace offering. We stripped off wet clothes and hung them to drain. Peggy ate an entire hot meal, settling her cramps and relaxing her. While she’d found her appetite, she slept little, picking off small ticks from her skin as they bit her most of the night. Early in the morning, lightning flashed and thundered. A tree crashed to the ground.

FATHER AND SON sat eating breakfast as we broke camp and packed. My GPS showed us perched on a narrow ridge with the Rio Claro’s headwater forks a thousand vertical feet below us. At first, we climbed higher, back into the dry-feeling oak forests, then dropped steeply down a knife-edged ridge to the Rio Claro. “It should be easier from here,” I said, relieved to be down.

“I hope so. That last bit was too steep! And so much off-trail—I was worried about snakes.”

At the bottom we caught our breath and scraped the leaves, twigs, spiders, and ants from between our shirt collars and sweaty, naked necks. “Roman probably realized this isn’t a good route. It’s more work than it is interesting,” Peggy said between gulps of cool stream water.

At first the creek was shallow and slippery, but it soon gained flow from tributaries and its sandbars offered good walking. In quick succession, we passed an elaborate mining system of hand-built dikes, walls, and channels, then a beautiful natural weeping wall of seeps and waterfalls, covered in hanging gardens of ferns and mosses. The air smelled earthy and wet.

Peggy inspected areas along the creek that might hide Roman and his tent. “Where would he cross and where would he camp?” Peggy asked, tears in her eyes as she saw the immensity of the problem. “We need to get ourselves into his mind.”