The Adventurer's Son(61)
It was early afternoon and clouds obscured the sun. Rain was coming. We set up the first rappel to slide down the rope into a bowl carved from pebbly walls. “Ole, have you done much climbing?” Steve asked casually.
“Nah, not much,” Ole replied, “but I have rappelled before.”
“How about climb a fixed rope with ascenders?”
Smiling, he shook his head. “No, I haven’t done that, I’m afraid.”
Steve and I stretched out the long rope and dropped off one waterfall and then another. Ole followed. Steve scouted deeper into the slot canyon downstream. By the time he had returned it was raining hard. Steve yelled over the din, “It’ll go with more rope! But I think we should get out, now!”
Steve had seen enough flash floods to know when to go. By the time we all had climbed out of the gorge, the creek had risen to an uncrossable depth. We got out just in time. Clawing our way up the greasy canyon walls and worried about these two friends in a dangerous place, I understood now the park officials’ and Cruz Roja’s concerns about me.
The next morning, Ole stayed at camp. Steve and I rappelled Negritos’s waterfalls, cutting our rope at the bottom of each drop so we could climb back up with ascenders. Between waterfalls, we scrambled and swam the Negritos as it slithered through slot canyons coated in green algae and moss.
Each waterfall was choked with logs and wood. Midway through, we found a broken machete, its rusty blade thrust into a log spanning the creek. It looked too old for Roman to have left it only weeks before. Other than the machete, we found no sign that anyone had ever been there. Below the last waterfall, the walls barely kicked back enough to exit the canyon, just as Roman had described to Jenkins when they had met.
By the time we left on our third day, I was convinced Negritos’s waterfall-filled side gullies and its upper tributary El Doctor needed thorough searching, too. Zeledón itself was perched between the Negritos and another branch of El Tigre that we also had not explored. It was just damned hard to get there, bushwhacking through all the red tape.
Chapter 32
Piedras Blancas
Roy Arias’s house, Piedras Blancas, August 10, 2014.
Courtesy of the author
While we searched Corcovado’s canyons, Armida Huerta interviewed people in town. Most told her the Pata Lora story. But she did hear a new one. Sean Hogan, an American living on the Osa, described a gringo he’d met on a weekday morning in Puerto Jiménez around July 7 or 8. The gringo “looked similar to the photo on the poster, but was more tanned, a bit thinner and older too, in travel-worn clothes, like he’d been out for a while.” The young man Sean met was quiet and didn’t volunteer much. Instead he’d asked questions of Sean. That sounded like Roman to me.
Lauren picked us up in Dos Brazos near noon. Back at the Iguana we sat down with Josh Lewis and his wife, Vic. The families of Josh and Juan Edgar Picado were united by the Fellowship, a Christian political organization based in the United States but international in scope. I’d soon be impressed by the reach and effectiveness of this group and grateful for its efforts to get search-and-rescue personnel from the U.S. military involved. Josh and his wife had flown down from Alaska to help. With his big white beard and aloha shirt, he looked like Santa on vacation.
Josh had employed a Tico driver from San José. Over lunch the driver earnestly recounted the Pata Lora story that he had heard at a bar the night before. I rolled my eyes and tried to explain that was not my son. The driver’s look alone was enough to say: “This father sees his son through rose-colored glasses.”
On the phone Peggy told me, “You should question the people who say this Pata Lora guy was with Roman. We know he lied about the ATM. We should at least find out why.”
I had no doubt at all that Pata Lora had made the Dos Brazos–Carate crossing with a gringo. Multiple people had seen them together. What I needed to know was if Pata Lora’s Cody was our Roman. It was time to visit Piedras Blancas, midpoint along the “Pata Lora trail” from Dos Brazos to Carate.
At the heart of Piedras Blancas is its only permanent structure, a two-story house occupied by Roy Arias—a responsible miner, according to Lauren. Pata Lora and Cody had visited with Roy on their way to Carate, even camping near the house. The Iguana Lodge’s gardener, nicknamed Chico, agreed to lead us there. Chico’s own father had been killed by a terciopelo, the local name for the velvety-skinned fer-de-lance, when Chico was a child.
After four hours of hard walking, we arrived at Roy Arias’s place. White ponies grazed in a grassy pasture outside the open-plan house. Inside, several hammocks hung between posts; colorful laundry dried from a line on the first floor. We questioned several Piedras Blancas miners whose stories roughly matched those of witnesses from Dos Brazos. My notebook recorded Luis describing Cody: older than thirty; yellowish-brown hair; no glasses; no beard; more hair than me that was combed back; wearing Crocs; and smoking pot that he pulled from a big satchel.
Next, we tracked down Roy Arias. Wearing the miner’s uniform of knee boots, board shorts, and a cutoff T-shirt, Roy looked to be in his forties. He was digging at a placer gold deposit with his partner, Chelo. The two worked the stream by muscle alone, prying pay dirt with an old shovel and sifting gold in a three-foot sluice box. I showed them recent photos of Roman. They laughed and nodded favorably at the photo where Roman posed next to a bikini-clad friend pulled close to his side.