The Adventurer's Son(71)
FATHER AND SON sat eating breakfast as we broke camp and packed. My GPS showed us perched on a narrow ridge with the Rio Claro’s headwater forks a thousand vertical feet below us. At first, we climbed higher, back into the dry-feeling oak forests, then dropped steeply down a knife-edged ridge to the Rio Claro. “It should be easier from here,” I said, relieved to be down.
“I hope so. That last bit was too steep! And so much off-trail—I was worried about snakes.”
At the bottom we caught our breath and scraped the leaves, twigs, spiders, and ants from between our shirt collars and sweaty, naked necks. “Roman probably realized this isn’t a good route. It’s more work than it is interesting,” Peggy said between gulps of cool stream water.
At first the creek was shallow and slippery, but it soon gained flow from tributaries and its sandbars offered good walking. In quick succession, we passed an elaborate mining system of hand-built dikes, walls, and channels, then a beautiful natural weeping wall of seeps and waterfalls, covered in hanging gardens of ferns and mosses. The air smelled earthy and wet.
Peggy inspected areas along the creek that might hide Roman and his tent. “Where would he cross and where would he camp?” Peggy asked, tears in her eyes as she saw the immensity of the problem. “We need to get ourselves into his mind.”
Vargas wanted only to charge downstream. Near three-thirty in the afternoon, Peggy said it felt like rain was coming. I tried to get Vargas to stop. Instead he shook his head and urged us on. We’d already suffered one icy cold shower. Peggy wanted to camp before another but it went dark before we could. Sharp lightning exploded in thunder overhead and the sky cracked open, dumping rain and chilling us instantly. We stopped, waiting for it to slow so we could set up the tents.
With no end to the deluge in sight, I strung a line and hung the Visqueen. We huddled under it, Peggy pushing us all close to her, body to body for warmth. The river rose past our toes, our ankles, our shins. “Rio crescendo! Muy peligroso!” said Jefe. River rising! Very dangerous!
In a flash, the Rio Claro flooded from a knee-deep, clearwater creek to a ten-foot deep, brown torrent, flooding the beach where we had planned to pitch camp. I left to find a campsite on an old river terrace in the forest, beyond the reach of rising floodwaters. By the time I hurried back to the others, the water was nearing their knees.
“Vargas, aqui!”
Together we wrapped plastic around a cross pole and resuspended our Visqueen on the old, forested river terrace. Peggy and I set up our bug net tent atop the palm and heliconia leaves that father and son had cut to cover the mud. We fell asleep to the roar of the flood. It seemed unlikely we would reach the beach the next day, much less catch the three o’clock colectivo in Carate, sixteen miles away.
In the morning, Vargas made it clear that he and his son were heading back the way we’d come. Sirena, hours downstream and a half mile from the mouth of the Rio Claro, had the highest concentration of tourists, guides, and rangers in the park. He couldn’t risk being caught. Vargas gave us a machete, its point sharpened as a weapon. I shook his hand and then his son’s. He gave Peggy a farewell embrace.
Startled, she looked at me and smiled big: “He just kissed me! On the mouth!”
The sixty-two-year-old grinned, turned away, and headed back upstream with his son in tow.
Peggy and I would be on our own.
Chapter 40
Rio Claro
Rio Claro, September 2014.
Courtesy of the author
The heliconia and short palms were still wet with rain, but the bright sun shining in a cloudless blue sky left the jungle friendly again. Birds were singing and insects buzzing as another day got under way, as if the storm had never happened. The Rio Claro had crested hours before dawn. Logs and other fresh flotsam lined its banks, left by the receding flood. And while it was still high and brown, it was no longer pushy and we waded at times to our chests with little fear. Where the river narrowed between vertical walls that plunged into its waters making it too deep to wade, the reassuring tzing of the machete left a path clear of snakes, ants, and vines through the trackless forest. Peggy’s bravery in the deep water and jungle amplified her beauty and strengthened my love and admiration for her.
Eventually the water dropped enough to reveal beaches with boot tracks. We followed the tracks to a trail, where we snuck along quietly. We were maybe twenty minutes from Sirena, the touristic heart of the park. Without the mandatory guide, we worried about being caught.
Walking along the maintained trail, we came to a puzzling arrow that a hiker had scratched across the path. Curious of its meaning, I turned and backed up in the direction the arrow aimed, nearly stepping on a fer-de-lance. A literal line in the sand not to cross, the arrow pointed directly at the snake in warning. The angry-faced serpent no doubt waited at the trail’s edge for a fat rodent to pass. It would not have struck unless threatened—or stepped on. My foolishness elicited a nervous laugh from me and a head shake from Peggy.
More challenges awaited us at the coast. A high tide had pushed into the mouth of the Rio Claro. We also needed to dodge guides who might rat us out and rangers at the park boundary, ten miles away. It would be after dark when we reached the La Leona Ranger Station; we hoped to sneak by unnoticed.
My first attempt to cross the Rio Claro found me swimming and thinking about bull sharks and crocodiles. “I’m not swimming!” Peggy called out to me.