The Adventurer's Son(62)
Ole translated. “Roy and Chelo say the guy with Pata Lora was not the guy in the photos. He didn’t look like him at all.” The miners said the gringo with Pata Lora spoke little Spanish; didn’t cook; slept in a tan tent; and wore Crocs. The part about the Crocs didn’t resonate with me.
On the APU trip to Corcovado when we’d walked across the park, eleven-year-old Roman had witnessed a sandal-wearing student impale himself on a six-inch palm spine. Carl and I had sent the student out on horseback to go to the Golfito hospital. To clear his subsequent infection, the student required an antibiotic drip that he carried in a fanny pack for six months. While there may have been a Cody walking in Crocs with Pata Lora through Piedras Blancas and on to Carate, it wasn’t my Cody Roman.
BY THIS TIME, a month had passed since Roman should have returned from his Corcovado crossing. Knowing the odds and desperate to try anything, I resorted to checking the geographic coordinates supplied by a psychic. The position was off-trail near Sirena, Corcovado’s chief tourist center and a full day’s walk from Carate. Accessible only by foot, boat, or air, the flight to Sirena from Puerto Jiménez is expensive but short; we flew because it was quick.
Ole, Steve, Armida, and I needed a licensed guide to join us in the park. The pilot recommended young Nathan. When Nathan learned of our plan his eyes went wide. “We can’t leave the trail,” he declared. “I’ll lose my job and probably my guiding license.” Finally, at risk to his livelihood, Nathan agreed to lead us along the trail. Family is important in Costa Rica, and everyone we’d met was willing to do what they could. Everyone wanted me to find my son.
The flight to Sirena traced an achingly beautiful coast where the jungle tumbled down to the sea. I looked over a geography I knew well but for all the wrong reasons. Fifteen minutes after leaving Puerto Jiménez, the Cessna bumped in landing on the grassy strip. Lunchtime tourists packed the boardwalks and platforms in clusters, each with a young man like Nathan who toted a scope on a tripod and pointed out monkeys, toucans, and sloths in the trees.
Fifteen years before, when eco-tourists were few and no guides were required, Roman and I had walked with the APU class from Los Patos to Sirena, where we stayed for several days. In the forest, Roman staged battles between ants and termites, mortal enemies in the war for the jungle.
“Who wins?” I asked him.
“The termites put up a good fight with their nozzle-headed soldiers shooting goo,” he said, “but the ants always win. They have more soldiers.”
Roman even nosed around a storage building and caught a nectar-eating bat. There are few animals as exhilarating to hold as those that can fly. While Roman held it, the bat’s tongue darted out investigating and probing his gloved hand. He marveled at its long, skinny pink tongue, used to slurp nectar from tubular white flowers that open only at night.
There was a tame toucan there, too. Roman had touched its yellow-and-chestnut-colored bill. “What’s it feel like?” I asked.
“It looks heavy and solid, but it’s not. It’s hollow and light.”
So vivid were the memories at Sirena that I walked behind my friends, wiping my eyes in private.
Near the psychic-supplied GPS coordinates, Nathan looked up and down the trail. When the coast was clear, he whispered to us to leave the ten-foot-wide tourist trail and head into the lowland forest. Less than fifty yards off-trail, we encountered a dozen peccaries. The size of pit bulls, the wild pigs were curious and nearly touched us, their twitching snouts sniffing our knees.
I looked hard for Roman’s Kelty tent with the navy blue fly he’d brought from Alaska. What will I say to him? What are best-and worst-case scenarios? Why has he ended up here, of all places?
The peccaries followed us for twenty minutes through ankle-deep water beneath head-high palms and an overstory of tall buttressed trees. Peccaries, like all pigs, are omnivorous scavengers. I couldn’t help but imagine the worst. We wandered deeper into the muddy forest, but other than palm foliage pinned to the mud by fallen branches, nothing was disturbed. No sign, no footprints, no tent, no stink, nothing but another dead end.
Chapter 33
Homefront
Kitchen, Anchorage, August 2014.
Courtesy of the author
The Kübler-Ross model postulates five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These feelings swirled interchangeably in me for weeks. Every Tico and Tica suggested strength—fuerte—to cope with my grief. I did my best to do normal things: write, take pictures, tell stories, laugh. Still, almost anything could trigger a memory, sometimes so strongly that a wave of grief swelled, crested, and crashed over me. I’d weep for an instant, then get back to work.
After Sirena, I called Peggy from the Iguana to tell her I was leaving the Osa to go to San José, where Josh and Mead suggested a media campaign to drum up military support. Just hearing her voice, sweet and present, revived me from the dead ends in Negritos, Piedras Blancas, and Sirena. She never sounded down or depressed: only upbeat, empathetic, supportive, and loving. Peggy gave me the most fuerte of all.
Back home in Alaska, she faced struggles so much harder than mine. At least I could do something firsthand rather than rely on the actions of others. Unlike me, Peggy answered phone calls and emails, coordinated help and support. She communicated with everyone from reporters seeking a story to strangers offering to help. It was a full-time job.