The Adventurer's Son(65)

Thanks to Juan Edgar’s connections, Mead’s endorsement, and Josh’s push for media exposure, we had a mechanism to enter the park. And through Peggy’s efforts back home, we had the services of three former military SERE (survival, escape, resistance, and evasion) experts from an Anchorage search-and-rescue training company called Learn to Return, or LTR. With our friends’ support, we had the funds to fly them all to Costa Rica along with two of the Veracruz packrafting crew.

In his mid-fifties, Brian Horner, owner and founder of LTR, was skilled in search, wilderness medicine, technical rope work, and rescue. He had worked on projects around the world. Clint Homestead, in his late twenties, had served as a Green Beret in the Middle East and was skilled in rope work, too. Clint was muscular and fit and worked out at the same Anchorage gym as Jazz. The third crew member, Frank Marley, had been an army medic. Now in his thirties, I remembered Frank as a graduate student at APU.

Besides LTR, two friends that Roman and I had paddled with in Veracruz joined us: Brad Meiklejohn and Todd Tumolo, who’d led the way down the Big Banana. While Brad and Todd mostly packrafted whitewater with me, Todd was an accomplished climber and mountain guide in his mid-twenties. He’d helped me on some ice worm traverses, too. I’d met Todd when he was a student at APU, where he and Jazz had briefly dated. Like the LTR crew, Todd was trained in wilderness medicine. Brad, a climber and a skier in his younger days, spoke Spanish well. A professional conservationist and avid naturalist, Brad had visited tropical forests around the world. He had also become my primary whitewater packrafting partner in Alaska.

It felt good to have such a strong team of friends and community members ready and willing to head into the jungle. My only concern—as it had been with Ole and Steve—was everyone’s safety. The afternoon rains were getting heavier, coming earlier in the day and sometimes lasting all night and into the next morning. The wet season had arrived.

THE MORNING AFTER returning from San José, a mysterious illness struck me with a pounding headache and dry heaves. After a near-delirious night, my sheets soaked from fevered sweats, I was just too sick to pack and plan. Josh and Vic cared for me. They brought fluids, food, and flu medicine from the farmacia in town.

I couldn’t eat but the meds and fluids helped enough to get me out the door to the back-to-back meetings planned that day. Sick, my son missing for over a month, and suffering repeated bureaucratic roadblocks, I wondered, Have my sins been so great as to deserve all this?

Permission to enter Corcovado required that we fax twelve pages of permit applications to three offices. In addition, we presented our detailed plan at three meetings, complete with a day-by-day description of objectives, a list of our equipment, the qualifications of our team, and a communications plan. The permits would not come until the next day. All of this felt like inefficiencies in the system. But the hardest pill to swallow was that MINAE required that Dondee join us.

And there he was at a morning meeting, aching to be the center of attention, with his Google Earth projection of waypoints and GPS tracks on the wall. Dondee reminded us that Roman had entered the park illegally; he baldly stated that there was no place left to look in the park; it had all been checked already.

As he droned on describing odors from mining tunnels, and remembering the Tico guide’s ballerina comment, I snapped. I’d had enough. This meeting was supposed to be about our plans for success, not Dondee’s failure to find my son.

Standing up, I shouted, “We have been listening to this narcissist for a month and it gets us nowhere! I’m tired of it! Fucking tired of it!”

Dondee, satisfied that he’d finally pushed my button hard, smiled.

I stormed out to take a taxi back to the Iguana and leave him behind.





Chapter 35


Tree Fall


Steve Fassbinder on tree fall above Negritos Canyon, August 2014.

Courtesy of the author



Six weeks after Roman walked into the jungle and a month after I had arrived, MINAE finally granted me permission to enter the park and lead a search of my own. Brad, Todd, and the three LTR professionals joined me on Jenkins’s route to Zeledón. Cruz Roja, MINAE rangers, and Fuerza took a parallel tourist trail and caught up to us later that day.

The crumpled landscape offered us few sites to pitch our tents. Todd, Brad, and I set up a plastic Visqueen tarp and bug tent camp where Ole, Steve, and I had camped before. The LTR guys squeezed into a dome tent on another ridge along Jenkins’s well-worn trail to the mining tunnels above the Negritos. Dondee, Cruz Roja, MINAE, and Fuerza camped near the north branch of El Tigre. One of the MINAE rangers was Kique, the tall, dark, and serious ranger who had hiked the Fila Matajambre ridge trail with Thai and Pancho the day we met Jenkins.

Jenkins had told me that on July 10, his brother, who had been with him and the other three miners on the Zeledón, had had a court date for his divorce. Walking downstream to make the appointment, Jenkins’s brother had encountered Roman hiking upstream on El Tigre. This left several places to look for Roman between the Negritos and the north branch of the El Tigre. For example, there had been a rotten smell of decay at the mouth of Negritos’s canyon. Looking there, I found a dead agouti, a spotted rabbit-sized rodent of the rainforest that looks like Borneo’s mouse deer.

On rappel, the LTR team checked each side gulley leading into Negritos’s canyon. The rest of us checked possible cliffs that Roman could have fallen from. It rained all afternoon and into the night. The next day we again looked hard, but all my ideas—the side gullies, the bad smell, the El Tigre’s north branch—came up empty. These negative results reduced the number of places to look. While there was an infinite number of unlikely places—cliffs, thick bamboo, landslides, inaccessible canyons—there was only a finite number of likely ones.