The Adventurer's Son(66)
Whenever I searched in the jungle, hope tugged me toward town, where someone might have found new clues or Roman may have finally revealed himself. But whenever I was in town, dealing with officials, reporters, logistics, family, friends, the cagey voice with the unlisted number, and all the rest, I just wanted to go back into Corcovado and look. Snakes, cliffs, rain be damned.
Soon after breakfast at dawn, Todd and I searched a landslide above the canyon rim. We walked and talked as we moved on and off trail. It was reassuring to have Todd along, a gentle, competent, intelligent young man. Todd said he’d always been a woods kid, and that his father had left his family to live in Panama when Todd was young. His story left me wondering as we came up empty of clues, if my son had left me to go to Panama. Maybe Dondee was right: he’d never entered Corcovado at all.
As the afternoon wore on and the short-billed pigeon called its melodious who-cooks-for-you from high in the canopy, we all rendezvoused back at camp. We’d found nothing.
THAT NIGHT IT rained hard and the wind blew. As snowstorms load mountain slopes that eventually avalanche, rainstorms weaken trees that eventually fall. But unlike avalanche safety, with its snow pits, locator beacons, and shovels to rescue an avalanche victim, there is no special technique, no technology, nothing like an avalanche-awareness class for safety from falling trees. Most people are surprised to learn that tree fall is a hazard at all, though the word widowmaker has been coined expressly for potentially lethal tree and limb fall.
In tropical rainforests, where trees are mostly shallowly rooted and where decay is rapid, thunderstorms can waterlog canopy deadwood with rain. The storm’s winds can then break, snap, or tip up entire trees. Tim Laman once said about Gunung Palung: “The sound of tree fall is so common that I sometimes wonder why there are any trees left standing in the forest at all.”
Brian, Clint, and Frank slept through the night’s rainstorm in their small dome five minutes away from our camp. The wind picked up. Limbs started to fall, waking the three. But “with nowhere to go anyway,” as Clint put it later, they just lay on their backs and listened, hoping for the best.
Sometime after three in the morning they heard a pulsing groan followed by an ominous pop, pop, pop, then an accelerating swish. Falling objects move fast, speeding up as they go. A blast of wind flattened their tent with a woomp! Then the tent popped back up and they found themselves unhurt, happy to be alive.
We paced out the length of the tree: 135 feet from root wad to tip-top. The crown’s six-inch-diameter limbs had landed only ten paces from their small nylon tent. I shuddered to think what would have happened had it struck them in the night. It was another reminder of how dangerous the forest could be.
“There wasn’t really much we could do,” Clint joked the next morning, “except curl into the fetal position and mess our pants!” They laughed the tension-relieving laugh of battlefield soldiers.
BETWEEN US, WE had looked on the Zeledón’s ridges and in its gullies; even farther afield when Brad joined Kique’s mining camp raids. The thoroughness of our search left me 95 percent certain that Roman was not within a half mile of where Jenkins had seen him. But we hadn’t thoroughly searched beyond that half mile.
Every doubling in distance from the point last seen tripled the additional area needed to look. No wonder the Cruz Roja gave up. The task seemed impossible. It was easier to accept that Roman had left the park and encountered foul play.
Or, like Todd’s dad left him, Roman left us.
Chapter 36
Foul Play
Willim with dead fer-de-lance, Dos Brazos, August 2015.
Courtesy of the author
The idea that Roman would one day resurface from a grand solo adventure—a possibility Lauren proposed in her cheerful voice—sure beat the alternatives. But the notion that he deserted us left me feeling that we had failed as a family. Dondee, Do?a Berta, the sightings at Matapalo, and all the doubters who thought I saw only a son I wanted to see, had sowed the seed of his abandonment in my heart. But it wouldn’t root. Roman wouldn’t desert his family and friends. He was loyal to us all. He’d written a friend to say he looked forward to seeing her soon. He had recently exchanged instant messages maintaining a friendship that he’d had since grade school.
All the sights he’d seen, odors he’d suffered, and tastes he’d enjoyed on his tropical travels must have been full of family nostalgia for him. On our way back from hunting Tibetan ice worms in Bhutan’s Himalaya, Roman and I wandered around Bangkok before flying home to Anchorage. It had been an incredible trip; we didn’t want to leave. The stopover in Thailand offered us a last taste of the exotic. “This is how I remember all our trips to the tropics,” Roman told me that night in Bangkok, “with us ending up in some big Asian city on your quest to find durian.”
He found my stinky favorite fruit after first spotting a heap of mangosteens—his “yellow starburst with a tang” fruit from our first trip to Borneo—on a hawker’s stand. “Look, they have durian!” he’d said, even though he didn’t like the fruit any more at twenty-five than he had at eight when he’d written “worse than brustle sprouts! Yuck!” He sat with me on a city park bench and endured what he claimed smelled like garbage while I opened it up and ate it.
If Roman was not in the jungle and had not left for a new life, only the possibility of foul play remained, probably somewhere between the place he’d been last seen and Puerto Jiménez. Even Jenkins and his crew were not beyond suspicion. Kique suggested to Brad that we push for further investigation of the four miners as likely suspects. But I had spoken at length with them and followed behind Jenkins on jungle trails. My gut said they told the truth, that Jenkins was trustworthy. He had risked too much to be lying. I could not yet go down a path that seemed like betrayal.