The Adventurer's Son(75)

Soon after we had signed the contract with TIJAT, the embassy let us know that they had possession of Roman’s missing Mexican backpack. The big pack contained his sleeping bag, blue Kelty tent, Jetboil, and the cold weather clothing that he had used on volcanoes farther north. His pack also held his belt, an empty wallet, his blue jeans and flip-flops, new cotton socks still in the packaging, a puffy Patagonia pullover, notebooks, and more.

Half of what we had posted on the equipment flyer was there. In the photo I snapped of the yellow bag at Do?a Berta’s hostel the first day of my search in Costa Rica, the waist belt of the pack is visible in the corner of the frame. At the time I had no way of knowing it was Roman’s.

Peggy and I were shocked that the embassy had held his pack for so many months before telling us. The OIJ had even received it from the new owners of the Corners Hostel months before that. Nobody had bothered to tell us until the final day of a maximum sixty-day holding period: they could have—but did not—tell us the day they took possession of it. Instead they waited months. Actions like this make the harsh reveal of public servants on television necessary.

Carson himself seemed to have a serious ax to grind with the State Department, while “production”—consisting of a constellation of a dozen producers and directors—had a stake in whipping up conflict for television drama. It felt to me as if both Carson and the primary face of production, executive producer Aengus James, provoked me to confront the embassy in its failure to tell Peggy and me about the very equipment I had described to the consul general nine months before. While I was angry about their failure, answers were more important: What did he use as a backpack if he left both his Mexican pack and the yellow bag behind? And if not the Jetboil, then what stove did Jenkins see?

Production put us up at an isolated eco-lodge on the Piedras Blancas arm of the Rio Tigre just past Dos Brazos. The lodge nestled intimately in the steamy jungle. Agoutis rustled boldly off the porch. A three-toed sloth climbed a short cecropia tree near enough for us to see the cloud of small moths that call its fur home. A rainbow flock of tanagers visited the bird feeders of ripe banana morning and night. Ken caught a fer-de-lance barehanded and brought it down to show us.

For Carson and Ken it was unbearably hot and humid, without electricity at night. As if to make us squirm and sweat even more during the jungle’s daytime discomforts, production shined bright, hot, studio lights in our faces while Carson interviewed us. Straight-faced and sweating, Carson instructed me: “Tell me everything you know about Cody.”

That would be impossible. Instead I recited what I’d told Dondee, and everyone else who would listen, the story, now old, about how Roman had been raised, what he’d done in El Petén, his disdain for guides and drugs. I told Carson about Jenkins and Pata Lora. I laid it all out. But Carson, like Dondee a year before him, didn’t seem to be listening.

Meanwhile, Aengus wanted more emotion from me. “So the TV audience can better empathize,” he said. He even staged Peggy in a scene along a jungle stream where she walked over a hazardous slimy rock again and again, in hopes, it struck me, that she might slip, fall, and grimace in pain, so the audience could better “empathize.” I called him out. “A bit overproduced, don’t you think?” I wouldn’t stand for “reality” at Peggy’s expense.

From the day production’s team first entered the jungle, I wondered how a jungle search could have been part of their plan. Jenkins guided their team to Zeledón so they could film Peggy and me in the jungle with him. Half of the crew couldn’t keep up on the trail; they lacked both fitness and experience. The sound man’s shoes came apart. A cameraman slipped off the trail into a steep gully. We walked the last hours in the dark.

Production was unable to secure park permits. There would be no further searching inside Corcovado’s jungle at all. Instead, Missing Dial would follow Carson Ulrich driving around the Osa, looking for evidence someone had murdered Cody Roman, doing what Peggy and I couldn’t, what we needed Carson to do. And for that we were grateful.

Peggy and I had to head home to Alaska for some business, after which I would return to Costa Rica. On the airplane, we talked about how the show’s production wasn’t looking like it would become the documentary we were expecting. “But maybe when I get back down there it will have moved forward in the right direction.”

Unfortunately, it hadn’t. It moved back.





Chapter 43


Carson


Carson Ulrich, Iguana Lodge, August 2015.

Courtesy of the author



I returned to Costa Rica alone. Emails from the show’s producer Aengus, the director, and the producer’s assistant promised important news: Carson and Ken are on fire. Good people are risking a lot to get us the answers. You’re going to get the full download.

I wondered what it could be. It was obvious during the first week of the show’s production that the OIJ was gun-shy of the media. The embassy, too, was unwilling to go on camera. And MINAE refused to permit park access to TIJAT. With neither park access nor my willingness to search fictionally for the camera, the production company focused on Carson and Ken working together to solve a murder on TV, something neither had done before, much less on TV.

The red-eye from Anchorage to San José in a seat that didn’t recline left me spent. I slept twelve hours at the Iguana, recovering. When I finally emerged from my room, the crew was excited. Almost giddy, the show’s director, Jeff Sells, who specializes in reality TV shows, led me to the Iguana’s two-story postmodern hut and its upstairs dining room reserved for special occasions.