The Adventurer's Son(48)
After saying good-bye to Roger, we encountered a group of high school kids from the U.K. They had walked over from Piedras Blancas, the off-road/off-grid mining community halfway between Dos Brazos and Carate. They were waiting for the big Mac truck that operated as the colectivo. We asked if they’d seen any other gringo hikers. No, they said.
A local guy in shorts and a T-shirt, wearing rubber boots and smelling of alcohol, hoisted himself into the front seat of the colectivo after it arrived. In a conspiratorial voice, he leaned out the window and told Thai that the kid we were looking for had been seen with a very bad guy on the trail from Piedras Blancas. Then the truck pulled out and drove back to town, carrying the British kids, the drunk miner, and the story to Puerto Jiménez.
FROM 2009 TO 2011 four ex-pats were murdered on the Osa. The two Austrians in their mid-sixties had been living and buying gold in Dos Brazos when they went missing during Christmas 2009 from their blood-spattered house. Their vehicle was gone, too. Two years later, a flooding stream washed bones out of the beach where the murderer had buried their dismembered corpses. The same year, the fifty-three-year-old Canadian friend of Lauren and Toby named Kimberly Blackwell was found beaten and shot at the gate to her home and cocoa farm between the Barrigones and Conte Rivers, near where Roman had said he’d start his hike. Later that year, fifty-two-year-old Lisa Artz, an American and another friend of the Cleavers, was suffocated when thieves stole her laptop and iPod.
While these murders ultimately resulted in convictions, such justice was rare. In fact, it took a private investigator hired by Lauren, Toby, and other friends of Kimberly Blackwell to identify the killer. Overall, statistics show that less than 5 percent of murder charges in Costa Rica end in conviction: nine times out of ten, perhaps, people get away with murder. The Osa works hard to mask this darker side, offering surfing lessons, yoga retreats, and guided walks. Still, some locals often rely on illegal activity for their livelihoods and the people who know the jungle best include poachers and gold miners who somehow avoid the poisonous snakes, tree fall, mudslides, wild animals, and flash floods while dodging park rangers who burn their illegal camps.
Roman might well have overlapped with characters connected to the Osa murders. An early suspect in Kimberly’s murder lived in the foothills above the Rio Conte. Pata Lora’s cousin was sentenced to fifty years in prison for killing the two Austrians. Cody was reportedly seen near Matapalo where Lisa Artz was murdered in her own bed.
While we were in Carate, Do?a Berta, the little old lady at the Corners Hostel, had changed her story. She now remembered Cody had returned, then left again. We accompanied Dondee and Tony, a Cruz Roja employee stationed in Puerto Jiménez, back to the Corners to investigate. The pair studied Do?a Berta’s cryptic entries, asking questions that to me sounded like interrogation.
I’d hoped to see something concrete in the ledger: “Dial” or “Cody.” Instead I saw “XXXX” and “?5,000 pago” marked in green highlighter. Fingers pointed at text, flipped pages, and settled on “Martes 22 Julio.” The three concluded that Cody had returned on Monday, July 21, then left again for Dos Brazos on Tuesday, July 22, leaving money for a bed on his return on Wednesday, July 23. Today was Saturday, July 26. According to this account, Cody had been here only four days ago and was expected back any day.
The relief of this news settled over me like a warm blanket on a shock victim. I smiled broadly at Thai. I looked forward to seeing my son. It had been six months since our rafting trip, the second longest gap in his life without physical contact between us, without a hug, a shared meal, a pun, or a grinning story. I was sure he had some new tales to tell from his weeks on the Osa.
Prior to our arrival, Cody sightings had come from all over the Osa Peninsula. Cody had been seen wearing a safari outfit between Carate and Matapalo. A bus driver had dropped him off at Dos Brazos; miners had seen him in Piedras Blancas. Pata Lora had claimed he was with Cody in Puerto Jiménez and that Cody went surfing afterward, where he was seen near a Matapalo bar.
Listening to all these sightings, it seemed easier for all to disregard Cody as an irresponsible twenty-something who was too cheap to hire a real guide than to accept Roman as lost or injured in Corcovado’s wilderness. The sentiment was “Let’s just wait for Cody to show up. If he doesn’t, then he doesn’t want to.”
Besides, the kid sounded foolish: illegally in the park, alone and off-trail in its wilderness. To look for Roman in a trackless jungle of poisonous snakes, lawless miners, and few trails was like looking for a needle in a burning haystack. The more I claimed that the Roman I knew differed from the Cody that everyone cast as a stereotypical gringo kid, the more they pitied me as a father in denial, the first stage of grief.
This reaction reminded me of an incident a decade ago. One of my former students at APU, a popular, easygoing kid named Joe, had taken up climbing. Joe and a more experienced mountaineer were climbing a local Anchorage peak unroped when a cornice collapsed and sent Joe thousands of feet to his death. When his father heard of the accident, he rushed to Alaska, arriving at the airport ready to head onto the glacier where Joe had fallen, thinking he might still be alive.
The father had no experience with glacier travel. He brought downhill skis and boots unsuited for skiing uphill. Although he could, of course, conceive of the danger and knew he lacked the skills of professionals who had been unable to find his son, he was still a father who loved his son deeply. His instincts had implored him to act. The father never set foot in the mountains, perhaps talked down by the leader of the search, or simply aware of his own limitations. After Joe’s father returned home, I telephoned him, partly to give my condolences, but mostly to empathize father to father. “I have a son,” I said. “I can’t think of anything worse than losing him.”