The Adventurer's Son(58)
About 150 yards beyond, we took the right fork at a split in the trail, following a faint trail to the ridge crest. The day before, Jenkins had taken us left to mining tunnels punched into a canyon wall above El Tigre’s Negritos branch. Roman had indicated to Jenkins he would continue onward. Using the rule he’d developed in Mexico and Guatemala, he likely chose the better-used left fork, well worn from the four miners’ daily commute to their dig.
Vargas led us on the right trail that followed a narrow ridgeline falling steeply to either side. I studied the trail for footprints of a Salomon shoe, the kind I knew Roman wore. I called down into the canyons on either side: “Ro-man! Ro-mannn!” Jefe did likewise. Thai blew a loud, fist-sized rescue whistle. Only echoes responded.
SHARP, HAPHAZARD MEMORIES of Roman crowded themselves into the search. The time he came home from school announcing “Dad, let’s play chess” came to mind. He was in his mid-teens then, during our golden age together. From his room, he brought out an ornate Balinese box, filled with hand-carved chess pieces, that unfolded as a chessboard. He assembled the board quickly, then held out his hands, a pawn in each. I chose black and he went first. His moves were swift, decisive. He beat me handily. Bewildered, I said, “Wow. Good job. Let’s play again.”
“Okay,” he agreed, beating me a second time.
“You’re pretty lucky,” I said. But when he beat me a third time—grinning from across the table—he said, “That’s not luck.” I had to agree. He was good.
It was one of those moments that marked his growth, like when he first stood up as a toddler in the little house in Fairbanks, or told me from the Mexico City airport that he was going to catch the last bus. I prayed this trip in Corcovado would also be a step forward for him, and not an end.
THIRTY MINUTES BEYOND Zeledón, a fetid odor hung in the humid air. Fearing the worst, I left the trail and found the rotting carcass of a tamandua, the small black-and-cream-colored anteater that lives throughout Central America. Thai and I had seen one alive the day we drove to Carate. Roman had an interest in the group of odd, New World mammals—the sloths, armadillos, and anteaters—classified together as the Edentates. I had hoped then that the roadside tamandua was a good omen.
We followed a subtle trail used by poachers, illegal gold miners, and the park rangers who hunted them both. Just a narrow wisp of a path, it was something most hikers would lose quickly or dismiss as an animal trail. Only the occasional machete nicks on heliconia plants, palms, and ferns showed it was actively cleared. It wasn’t blazed at all.
Small two-by-two-foot clearings on the ridgeline marked the rare spot where locals got a bar or two of cell reception. Vargas stopped at one, unwrapped his flip phone from a small plastic bag and called his daughter. It would rain soon and he wanted to let her know we were okay. Thai smiled at me and motioned toward Vargas. “It’s like a little jungle phone booth,” he joked.
We would camp our first night in the heart of Las Quebraditas on the Osa’s summit plateau. The place was a veritable maze of bamboo-choked gullies in a remote mountain wilderness. No wonder the Cruz Roja team leader in the floppy hat had been confounded here. Without Vargas, we, too, would have been circling back on our tracks.
The trail thinned. Vargas left it and we wandered through bamboo thickets and slick gullies, looking for a place to camp with running water. The rain caught us before we found a spot flat enough for tents. Soaked, Thai and I set up our fly, then erected the bug net tent beneath it, keeping dry even in the pouring rain. It felt comfortable to get out of wet clothes and into dry ones and tuck in under our sheets.
Meanwhile, Vargas and Jefe unsheathed their machetes and made camp. First, they hacked a beam and tied it to two trees to hang their Visqueen tarp to get out of the rain. Next, they cut and assembled bedposts, a frame, and slats to sleep in a handmade bamboo bed, three feet off the ground and out of the way of snakes, ants, and spiders. They used fern fronds as a thin mattress. Finally, a smudge lit under their tarp kept down the bugs while the two slept out in the open air.
In the morning, we set off into a flat jungle dense with vegetation. The sky was overcast by ten. Without the sun as a compass, I soon found myself lost, failing Vargas’s test when he asked us the direction from which we’d come. I pointed one way. Thai another. Chuckling, Vargas indicated a third. Wandering between the featureless summits of Mounts Mueller and Rincon, we found ourselves holding tight to Vargas’s lead. At times, even he seemed uncertain, slicing his way up and down trails marked only by the hoofprints of peccaries.
Dropping into the namesake little gullies of Las Quebraditas, we plunged hard on our heels to anchor our feet and tried not to grab the stems of spiny palms covered in inch-long needles. I leaned on a trekking pole for balance but wished for a handrail to keep upright. Every so often and with a single swing, Vargas would hack a bamboo stalk as big around as my arm, then offer us a drink of sweet, cool water from inside the hollow stem.
Around midday, Vargas led us down out of the claustrophobic bamboo forest onto a broad ridge of open rainforest stacked with buttressed trees and an understory of philodendrons. He cut two-foot heliconia leaves as seat covers against the ants and the fungi on logs where we sat for lunch.
Thai translated Vargas’s thick country accent with difficulty, often asking Jefe what his father had said. Thai pointed down the broad ridge where a tapir or maybe a hunter had passed. “Vargas says this is the way down to the Rio Claro.”