The Adventurer's Son(52)
Early the next morning, we left La Tarde and walked half a mile to a trail junction. One fork followed the central ridge, called Fila Matajambre, to Dos Brazos. The other fork dropped into the upper Rio Conte. Dondee said he’d wait there with Pancho’s pack while Pancho led us into the Conte valley. The owner of a small ranch said no gringo had been through in months. I insisted we go to the creek itself, to look and intuit where Roman might go.
We followed the Conte upstream into its headwater canyons. Clear water spilled over bedrock slick with algae and moss. Philodendrons smeared themselves on near-vertical walls between ferns and small trees that somehow clung to crevices and nubbins. It was green, hot, and humid.
Pancho urged me to lead, gesturing that I search for sign. I picked my way slowly, looking for broken sticks, crushed and broken plants, a foot pad, praying for a candy bar wrapper—anything that said, “YES! Roman was here!” But instead of signs that a human had passed three weeks ago, I found only evidence that a tapir—the five-hundred-pound, three-toed animal that looks like a chimera of elephant, rhino, and pig—had pushed past palms and pepper plants three hours earlier.
We returned to the trail junction. Dondee and Pancho’s pack were gone. Pancho marched back to La Tarde, finding that Dondee had driven off with our only vehicle. Pancho returned to us and, irate, declared Dondee loco. The three of us walked to La Tarde and waited.
Dondee drove up hours later. When confronted, he complained that our two-hour search in the Conte had been too long. He turned to me. “You have to go,” he said. “Go back to town and stay there. You’re unstable. And if you try to go into the park, you’ll be arrested.”
“But this is where Roman said he’d come,” I pleaded. “We need to look here, follow the Matajambre trail. That’s where the Conte trail leads.”
Thai entered a longer discussion with Dondee. “They seem like they’re trying to isolate you, Roman. Keep you in a little bubble. They say it’s because they are concerned for your safety.” Thai had negotiated a search along the Matajambre trail. “You can’t go, but they’ll let me go with Pancho and another ranger, Kique.” Thai would spend the night at La Tarde and walk the Fila Matajambre to Dos Brazos the next day.
A CRUZ ROJA driver took me on the long, lonely ride back to the Iguana, arriving in an afternoon downpour. Alone in my room, I imagined all the ways to suffer and die in the jungle. Quickly, by the deadly bite of a bushmaster or fer-de-lance on the leg. More slowly and painfully by a small arboreal eyelash viper’s bite to the face. Crushed by tree fall. Through sepsis in a leg or arm, broken when a rotten log gives way. By dengue, malaria, or other fevers. Debilitated and starved after a fall from a cliff or waterfall. Finally, there are the other snakes—the two-legged kind.
In my room I felt sick, with no appetite. I pictured Roman huddled in a soaking wet tent, too injured to travel, eating lizards and bugs. He’d eaten a lizard on his Petén trip. He knew discomfort. He had a level head. He could hang on. I just needed to find him before it was too late. What have I done?
Alone and without a task at hand, my eyes teared up and I sobbed, thinking of our family trips to the tropics. It was impossible not to reminisce. Those experiences made up our family lore, our history: hearing gibbons whoop at dawn, handling a flying lizard, eating exotic fruits. I took my eight-year-old son to Borneo’s wilderness. Was that negligence? It hadn’t seemed so then, but now I felt a sharp stab of regret. Not because we had risked his life or Jazz’s in Borneo, Australia, or any other place where humans have lived for millennia—Peggy would never have endangered her children’s lives—but because of the life it inspired.
My regret was that I had introduced Roman to adventure and the excitement of the wild. Maybe we should have limited ourselves as parents to team sports, Chuck E. Cheeses, the local cineplex. But that would have been impossible for Peggy and me. “What, take the safe but boring route?” she would ask.
“Birth is the leading cause of death,” my friend Brad Meiklejohn likes to point out. Still, the cliché “At least he died doing what he loved” is wrong, Brad says. “I most admire those who have done what they love their whole lives and died peacefully in bed at a ripe old age.”
The guilt of responsibility is persistent, pernicious—perhaps simply instinctive—in parents whose children are injured, lost, or killed, even after we rationalize or realize that it wasn’t our fault at all. For me in Costa Rica, sleep offered the only respite from worry and pain. But when I awoke, before my eyes even opened, the fact exploded as my first conscious thought: Roman is missing!
THE NEXT DAY, July 30, a Cruz Roja Land Cruiser picked me up at the Iguana and delivered me to the El Tigre ranger station in Dos Brazos. Eliecer Arce, the head of Corcovado National Park, and Carlos Herrera, the head of the Cruz Roja, were there, too. Thai, Pancho, and Kique would finish the Fila Matajambre trail in Dos Brazos, where we would all rendezvous.
Pata Lora and Cody had started their hike to Carate in Dos Brazos: witnesses had seen the pair there. Waiting for Thai at the end of the road in a small cantina, I could make out the words Pata Lora and the Costa Rican word for marijuana, mota, in conversations around me. I shook my head. The only way to prove that story wrong would be to find Roman’s body. I prayed that wouldn’t happen.
The owner of the cantina was named Elmer. He was one of the witnesses and spoke good English. Holding his young three-year-old in his arms, he recounted how he’d seen Pata Lora and Cody walk past his cantina on the trail to Piedras Blancas.