The Adventurer's Son(67)

The thought that a miner had walked Roman at machete point up a side stream or hijacked him on a bumpy road was a parent’s worst nightmare, but investigating foul play was beyond my experience. Sniffing out criminals would require experts.

Using Todd’s satellite device, I texted from camp: Peg, he is not where I thought and pretty sure it must be foul play so I am coming home to you by end of this week. Talk tomorrow.

She texted back minutes later. Then we need to stay there.

Stay here? How come? Not any evidence.

WE ALL LEFT the jungle wet with sweat and shaken by tree fall. It hadn’t rained the final night, so the creek was low, with good walking. Dondee drove us back to the Iguana. I thanked him in Spanish, shook his hand, even fist-bumped him. He had done his job. His guys liked him. And it looked like he was right after all: Roman wasn’t in the park. Dondee drove off in the Cruz Roja Land Cruiser. We would never see or hear from each other again. LTR, Brad, and Todd headed home, too. They had offered just the kind of help Peggy and I needed and we were grateful. The Cruz Roja and MINAE were happy with them, too.

A few days later, the consul general and Barbara from the embassy drove seven hours to meet me at the lodge. The consul general, named Ravi, asked me things that went beyond the usual missing person questions. He wanted to know about Roman’s equipment. Ravi didn’t have much experience with outdoor gear, but he wanted to get it right. I pulled up Internet images of a folding sleeping pad and a Jetboil stove. These were items missing from the yellow bag at the Corners Hostel that I expected Roman would be carrying with him.

Ravi and I went through the possibilities. We agreed, given the searching, that it didn’t appear Roman was in Corcovado. After reading some of Roman’s emails, Ravi also agreed he would not have deserted his family and friends. “That leaves foul play,” I said.

“Or,” the consul general suggested, “it’s none of the above.” He smiled. “Look, Roman, I want to assure you that even though the search is over, we at the embassy will keep the case open and coordinate further investigations.”

Alone at the Iguana and emotionally spent after a month of searching, I wanted to leave but I couldn’t. Not yet. Peggy and Jazz were on their way to Costa Rica, and Peggy had plans of her own. She needed to look in the park, to see how big it was, how hard it was. She needed, also, to find solace in searching.

There could never be any single moment—unless we held his bones in our hands—when Peggy and I could be 100 percent sure he was dead. But confronting the possibility of the profound loss of my son forced me to confront my own risk taking over nearly a lifetime of adventuring. After my close call on the southeast ridge of McGinnis Peak, I hadn’t quit cold turkey, not really. There had been frozen waterfalls, whitewater rafting, tree climbing, glacier travel, and more—all of it risky, all of it thrilling.

For the first time, I realized how much suffering my death would cause in those who loved me. More shocking, though, was the fact that forty years had passed before I recognized this naked, obvious truth. The stark lesson masked by decades of selfishness was this: when I die, I am dead. I no longer feel anything. It’s those I leave behind who feel the lasting pain: the more love, the more pain.

I didn’t want to be the cause of their suffering.





Chapter 37


Peggy and Jazz


Peggy and Jazz at Iguana Lodge, September 2014.

Courtesy of the author



Peggy and Jazz arrived on the Osa. It felt so good to have them near, to hear their voices, to see their cheerful smiles, to feel Peggy’s warmth in bed and to touch her during the day. Having them present gave me far more than comfort. It gave me fuerte.

We tried to make it to Zeledón, but the rainy season had swollen El Tigre. Running brown and swift, the river turned us back half an hour upstream. Still, the day took on the feel of a tropical nature walk. We watched a small armadillo nosing around for termites and later saw a coatimundi, tropical cousin to the raccoon, climb a tall skinny tree. We marveled, like we always had, at the sights, sounds, and smells of the jungle.

We stopped to admire a poison dart frog mother, hopping along the forest floor with its tadpole clinging to her back, a miracle of motherhood in which she would climb into the rainforest’s canopy to leave the tadpole in an epiphyte’s reservoir. Mothers are so tough. I thought of Peggy holding up through all of this while I had been away.

Peggy and I had often considered Roman “mine” and Jazzy “hers” during their childhood. But Roman was every bit Peggy’s son, too. We needed to work together on this, to rely on each other for complementary skills and temperament. Walking through the jungle, Peggy offered her thoughts. She wanted to put up new flyers with pictures of his gear: “To keep him alive,” she said, “and fresh in people’s minds. Someone knows something out there. They’re just not talking.”

Through our network of friends, a young American woman who had lived off and on in Puerto Jiménez contacted Peggy with a list of people and places on the Osa. “This woman told me we should go to another lodge—Danta Lodge. With helpful people and local trackers.”

“Okay,” I said, “we’ll go there. Anything else? I’d like to hear your ideas. I’m running out.”

“Well, I think we should walk the route Roman said he was going to do. Really check it out. Nobody has done it and we need to go and look there, where he said he was going.”