The Adventurer's Son(69)
Walking upstream, we encountered a knot of miners studying their pans for gold. The youngest dug into the current with a spade. Andres told us a story about the oldest. With only two teeth and dark skin weathered from a life in the sun, he looked ancient as dirt. The old man had once been lost in the jungle for two weeks after breaking his leg. He’d been rescued when a local indigenous psychic described his location from a dream. One of the miners wrote the seer’s number in my notebook. Every call rang busy.
The miners said there were two pulperias upstream. A three-hour walk off the grid, the first pulperia was crowded nonetheless. Under the rustic shop’s roof, shaded by mango trees, a handful of men sat on wooden benches with dogs at their feet. A little girl peeked from behind her mother’s skirt. On the store counter a green parrot cocked its head, eyeing us with the same cautious curiosity as the men, the dogs, and the little girl. “The owner says no gringo came through here,” Andres told us. “You are the first ones here in memory.” We hung a poster anyway.
A wide trail led to the next pulperia, ten minutes away through what was once a bustling village. Simple framed houses surrounded by gray fences stood empty in yards crowded by encroaching jungle. Cerro de Oro was a community reached only by foot or horseback, with running water gravity-fed through black plastic pipes from nearby streams. It felt forgotten by modern Costa Rica. “Roman wouldn’t have even known about this place,” Peggy concluded, “and I doubt he’d come here if he did.”
I wasn’t so sure.
At the second pulperia, a man and his young wife—or daughter, we couldn’t tell—also reported that they had seen no gringos. The man said he had heard a gringo entered the park near the Rio Conte. The young woman shared some yellow rambutans. We thanked her for the tasty fruit, hung a poster, and left.
Farther along the trail we met an old miner. Andres asked if he had heard about the missing gringo. “Yes, of course,” he said. “That muchacho has been lost before in the Amazon, and the father went down and found him that time, too.” We had heard many rumors across the Osa, but this one was the most fanciful—so far. Later, I would hear even taller tales.
ON THE WAY back to the Iguana, we visited Vargas’s farm to make arrangements for our trip to follow the route Roman had described in his last email, then stopped in Puerto Jiménez to eat Chinese food. Sitting in the restaurant, we watched a fight break out across the street at a liquor store. A couple of guys threw punches, rocks, and boards at each other. Nobody tried to stop them and the fight fizzled out on its own.
Watching this street brawl made it easy to understand why the Costa Rican government was closing down trails and requiring guides for all park visitors. The underbelly of the Osa grew by the year, people said, a place where convicted felons go to hide, where high-volume cocaine traffic flows freely from Panama, Colombia, and farther south. The miners, we’d been told, were drug addicts, self-serving thugs.
That night the heaviest rain of the burgeoning wet season hit with thunder and lightning that knocked out the Iguana’s electricity. The wind blew hard from the Gulf. Tree fall crashed in the dark and I readied our things to escape should it feel unsafe on the second story of the Pearl, where we slept surrounded by tall ceiba forest.
By morning the Iguana’s power was back on, the lodge intact. Lauren told us over breakfast that Vargas was nervous taking a woman along on our upcoming traverse. He thought Peggy would slow us and that he’d get caught. He said if we encountered any officials, he would run and wouldn’t wait. He could go to prison for being in the park.
But Peggy, I knew, was much tougher than she looked. She had raced three times in the Wilderness Classic, holding the fastest female time for decades. She would have no problem keeping up. Lauren encouraged her: “Peggy, you need to go and show that old Tico what women can do. Straighten him out.”
We went to town for cash. The sky was clear, the air wet, the sun cooking us overhead. My ATM card didn’t work at the bank and I had too little Spanish to explain my problem. The bank declined my credit card. During a three-dollar-per-minute cell call to credit card services, I was transferred, put on hold, and asked the same questions repeatedly. My own went unanswered.
Frustrated, I vented on Peggy, telling her it was her turn to struggle with language, her turn to access money, her turn to drive everywhere. I would sit in the car and wait. Costa Ricans have a saying for misplaced anger like that: “I broke the dish, but you have to pay for it.”
Jazz ultimately saved us, as she so often does. The bank said the easiest way to get cash was by MoneyGram. We texted Jazz in Anchorage. Within minutes she had transferred us the money we needed for the private investigator.
Emotional pain inevitably manifests itself physically, it seems. Leaving in the predawn darkness to meet Vargas at five, we hurried through the dark. Peggy couldn’t fasten her seat belt because its ratchet caught with each jolt in the bumpy road. A cyclist appeared out of the black. I swerved, striking a deep pothole that sent Peggy flying out of her seat, where she hit her head on the roof, then landed on her tailbone that she had broken years before and bruised it severely.
She cried out, moaning in agony, tears in her eyes. I stopped, hurt by her suffering. I felt terrible, with no way to ease her pain other than with a gentle squeeze of her hand, a caress, an apology.
She motioned me onward. “Let’s go. We’re going to be late. I don’t want to keep him waiting.”