The Adventurer's Son(39)
From the start, Jeremy and Roman marveled at the display of weaponry along the Patuca. The teenage kid in the bow of the cargo boat had protected his .50-caliber Desert Eagle from a tropical downpour by stashing the hard-hitting piece in his backpack. Cowboys in tall hats tucked pistols in their waistbands. Honduran soldiers in jackboots and stocking caps brandished submachine guns, assault rifles, and side arms. In one village, Roman watched a shirtless man with an automatic pistol sandwiched between his brown belly flesh and pants trade gold flakes for Doritos and Pepsi.
It was hard to tell the narco-traffickers from the citizens who just wanted protection. Jeremy asked the canoe captain: “Why is everyone armed? Is it dangerous?”
“No, no,” the captain replied. “It’s quite safe out here. Everyone has guns!”
Everyone has guns because La Moskitia’s lagoons, wetlands, and rivers offer Colombian smugglers a place to refuel and hide out on their way to land routes through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S. cocaine markets. Small, open boats with multiple outboard engines ferry the drug from its origin to landfall in eastern Honduras.
Jeremy and Roman talked their way onto another big dugout canoe with an outboard. This one cruised down the wide river in the dark. Hurtling through one of the most active cocaine transit areas in North America, the two ate cookies and looked at the stars as the captain texted, motoring at full throttle. The next day they boarded a twin-engine jet boat full of passengers. The boat followed narrow canoe trails through a swamp at high speed, then careened wide open around corners through the lagoons of the Mosquito Coast of the Caribbean Sea.
As I read Roman’s account, I could picture Jeremy and Roman looking at each other and grinning, shaking their heads during a “thrilling Disney World ride. Except the overhanging vines were actually close enough to hurt and the oncoming boat, also going at full throttle, came very close to being very bad.”
Arriving at Puerto Lempira, the largest town in La Moskitia, they looked for accommodation. It sounded grim: “100 lempira [$10] a night got you a soiled mattress, bug bites, and used condoms under the bed. 50 lempira was either malaria or getting stabbed in an alley.” A hospitable guy named Junior charged them one hundred lempira for the only clean place in town. Over beers, Junior barbecued chicken and cooked up a Honduran specialty of cheese over beans in a traditional clay pot. In the morning, they toured Puerto Lempira, where Junior pointed out the narco-traffickers’ kids, their bodyguards, even who’d been shot, how many times, and by what caliber bullet.
From Puerto Lempira on the Mosquito Coast of the Caribbean, they caught a pickup truck to Nicaragua. The dirt road passed “through really beautiful country. I’m not sure why I liked it so much.” The landscape reminded Roman of a surreal Dr. Seuss version of Alaska’s arctic tundra: “Too even, too green, too smooth, too pretty,” he said, “to be quite right.” Safely past multiple military checkpoints, they arrived in Nicaragua without passport stamps. With indigenous La Moskitia behind them, they had returned to Latin America.
THROUGH LATE JUNE into July, Roman headed south. I sensed from his emails that he was homesick after eight months away from Alaska. He surfed in Nicaragua for two weeks, joking that packrafting and surfing have almost no crossover skills, except maybe swimming. Worried about rabies, he asked us what he should do about a street dog bite to his leg that drew blood; gave a Honduran recipe to Peggy; recommended we watch BBC’s Sherlock; and, If you dont have it already, he suggested, you should get New Order’s 1987 Substance Album.
His music suggestion recalled that sweet spot in his adolescence, between boyhood and manhood, when he saw me as both fun and cool. During that golden age, we shared music and books, swapped interests and insights. And as he grew to know more than I did in economics, genetics, and politics, he shared his knowledge, enriching my life. It was during those years that we stared at thousands of bugs and reminisced about Borneo, packrafted whitewater when no one else did, and discovered he could beat me at chess.
“Where in Costa Rica did we go with the APU class?” he asked in mid-June.
During the month of January 1999, I led a dozen students from Alaska Pacific University on a tropical ecology course to Costa Rica. Roman joined the APU class as a precocious eleven-soon-to-be-twelve-year-old. We crossed the small nation from coast to coast in a little chartered bus and studied Central American ecology en route. We saw poison dart frogs on the Caribbean side, ctenosaurs and crocodiles on the Pacific, and rafted whitewater in between. We walked for a week across Corcovado, through its lowland rainforest and along its beaches on the park’s most iconic backcountry route. Independent travel was possible in Costa Rican national parks then and we walked on and off-trail at will. At one point we forded a lagoon on an incoming tide said to carry sharks in and crocodiles out. Young Roman waded nearly to his neck.
Fifteen years later, Roman was collecting volcanoes, high points, and major jungles throughout Mexico and Central America. He’d visited the Lacandon Jungle in Mexico, El Petén in Guatemala, Belize’s Maya Mountains rainforests, and La Moskitia in Honduras: Corcovado National Park on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula and Panama’s Darién Gap were all he had left.
He told some of his friends that Corcovado would be training for the Darién Gap, a literal gap in the transcontinental road system between Panama and Colombia. Because it is occupied by militarized Panamanian and Colombian border police, paramilitary revolutionaries, and drug traffickers (not to mention fer-de-lances, bushmasters, other poisonous snakes, bullet ants, dengue, malaria, and more), the Gap is one of the most dangerous places on Earth.