The Adventurer's Son(83)
My battery was nearly spent. The reporter from People called back. I sputtered something about the discovery, but her interview seemed superfluous, and I said I had to go. Peggy and I studied the images, teary-eyed and nostalgic. We reminisced about Roman, held each other and cried on the bus stop bench. We pored over every image again and again, checking and rechecking that these were indeed his shoes, his pad, his pack, his headlamp, his compass. There was no doubt.
After the miner had dialed 911 from one of Thai’s “little jungle phone booths,” the news traveled fast. Texts and emails poured in from Lauren and Toby soon after those from the embassy. The Cleavers knew the ranger who had gone with the miner to the site that morning. He marked the find on his GPS. The ranger’s wife emailed me two topo maps showing the discovery site. It was a half-mile past Zeledón, upstream of Negritos in a canyon. I’d walked its rim many times.
How could I have missed him?
Chapter 48
Sleeping in the Forest
Above El Doctor, May 21, 2016.
Courtesy of the author
We would head to Costa Rica as soon as we could get on a flight. I left Virginia while Peggy waited for Jazz to send her passport by air express. Somehow, my flight escaped a volcanic ash-fall that shut down all other flights into San José. I made it to Puerto Jiménez the same day.
Ken and a Tico named Gerhardt met me at the Fiscal’s office in Puerto Jiménez at five the next morning. Gerhardt is a lean and gentle multisport athlete who worked as a local fixer for Missing Dial. He could handle the jungle better than anyone who’d worked on the show and we had become good friends during filming.
Gerhardt translated, explaining that the discovery site was on a small creek called El Doctor. This was the uppermost tributary of the Negritos canyon that Steve and I had descended on rope. The creek was named for a doctor killed there many years ago in an airplane crash. Miners know it for its strange, focused winds that knock down trees remarkably often, like the one that nearly landed on the LTR crew above the Zeledón.
It was the day that Missing Dial would air its first episode. Aengus had returned to the Osa for the unexpected turn of events. The timing seemed suspicious to him. He hurried to Dos Brazos to capture what he could of the action. In Dos Brazos, production shoved cameras into people’s lives, probing without asking, only checking that a release had been signed to excuse their intrusions. There’s no poetry in reality TV, no doing more with less.
I was embarrassed to be part of it now, especially in Dos Brazos, where residents who’d seen the trailers were horrified by the portrayal of their village and had encouraged the miner to go into the jungle. The miner explored the one corner that no one had searched and nearest to where Jenkins met Roman. It was the dry season, when the uppermost little tributaries like El Doctor are traditionally accessed.
Ken, Gerhardt, and I arrived in Dos Brazos at dawn. Pancho, the patient ranger who had taken Thai and me into the Conte years before, led us to El Doctor. I wanted to meet the OIJ forensics team while it was still on site. The four of us raced along park trails through the forest to Zeledón. Struggling to keep up with my younger, healthier companions, I felt fat, old, hot, thirsty, and tired. The last two years had taken their toll on my health. But our mission was urgent and I pushed myself.
By eight we reached the campsite where Ole and Steve, Brad and Todd had all camped with me. Twenty minutes later, we were at the forensic team’s camp on the ridge above El Doctor. The Fuerza prevented Ken and Gerhardt—employed by TIJAT—from visiting the site. I went down with Pancho.
Ken had heartily drunk Carson’s Kool-Aid. “I’ll only believe it wasn’t foul play if there’s money and his passport with his pack. Otherwise, someone put all this here—or killed him—either Joe or the Guichos.”
Pancho and I met the team carrying Roman’s remains and camping equipment up a steep muddy trail. The group was big, over a dozen people. Among them was the director of the OIJ and the two detectives who’d worked the case from the beginning. The OIJ dog handlers and Jorge from the embassy greeted me. Jorge introduced me to the OIJ forensic anthropologist, a polite young woman named Georgina who spoke excellent English.
Returning with the team to their camp on the ridge, I sat with Georgina. The rangers put down their packs. Some were loaded with clear plastic bags filled with recognizable items: the yellow sleeping pad and an orange lash strap I had given Roman. The strap was one of many we had at our house and used to strap gear to packs and packrafts. Seeing these things and a clear bag of his bones, I broke down in tears and I sobbed. Georgina comforted me as I turned away from the crowd. This was really him.
I composed myself. Georgina told me that they’d found many bones. She said that the equipment and bones had been washed downstream and trapped behind logs. The OIJ found his pelvis in his shorts, a femur under the log, his skull near his pack. A ranger found a live fer-de-lance in the creek bottom and speculated that snakebite had killed Roman. The green Salomon shoes that had looked so fresh in the photos were actually falling apart. One contained foot bones, Georgina said, but the other did not; he had at least one shoe on when he had died.
Importantly, none of the bones showed any trauma. Nobody had hit him over the head. Nobody had hacked him with a machete. There were no signs of bullets striking bone.
AS THE REST of the team ate lunch and prepared to head back to Dos Brazos, Pancho led me and Gerhardt down a steep muddy trail to El Doctor. Only inches deep and two feet wide, the creek twisted through black bedrock with tropical plants arching overhead. It was good walking and we made our way quickly to the discovery site downstream.