The Adventurer's Son(84)
Pancho, who’d been one of the first rangers at the site the Friday before, stopped and pointed out where the stove and fuel canister had been found near a pile of grapefruit-sized rocks that looked like a good camp kitchen. A few yards farther, he said, was where Roman’s machete had rested on the pea-sized gravel of the streambank.
I looked around. The canyon was somewhat wider here, where the gravel bed offered the only place wide and flat enough to camp. The canyon walls, while still steep, slippery, and eroding, pitched back to less than forty-five degrees. It was easy to see this as a place where Roman might decide to camp. There was water and a soft gravel bar to stretch out his yellow pad.
Downstream was a mass of logs and forest debris, sticks of all sizes, leaves and twigs caught up in a choke point between rocks and the broken crown of a forty-foot hardwood tree trunk. It had fallen, rolled into the creek, and left its buttress perched at the top of a small waterfall with its crown upstream.
Time, decay, and the action of floodwaters had left the crown a logjam of eight-inch-diameter limbs. Yellow crime scene tape boxed in the tangle of branches and sticks. Roman’s bones, clothes, and camp were found partly buried in this debris washed downstream by six hundred rainstorms.
So, this is where my son died.
Taking in the chaos of greenery, I thought about our young atheist at the end of his biological being. Roman would have considered his absorption and acceptance by the rainforest a fitting disposition. He was part of the jungle now.
It was little wonder that I had been drawn to the area again and again. It was so near to where Roman had met Jenkins. I had walked the ridgeline above El Doctor—only two hundred yards away—more than a half-dozen times. I had smelled the foulness of death on the first trip with Vargas and Thai when I found a dead tamandua, just short of where the rangers now set their packs holding Roman’s bones and gear. A quarter mile downstream of the logjam, below a series of waterfalls, was a drop that Steve and I had scrambled past after our exploration of Negritos’s slot canyon. We had turned back there to explore Jenkins’s tunnels rather than proceed farther upstream.
Young spindly trees grew in the red dirt above the fallen log in the creek bed. “This all looks like new vegetation,” I told Gerhardt, waving my arms toward the saplings.
“The miner who found him thought maybe a tree fell down on his camp,” Gerhardt said. “He thought that the blast from the falling tree blew the stove upstream.”
After taking pictures of the scene, I signaled to Pancho and we returned up the hill. We all hiked as a big group to Dos Brazos, where Aengus waited with cameras rolling. Elmer, who owned the cantina at the end of the road and worried about tourism, came up to me and suggested that, because we had now found Roman, we should cancel the show.
I agreed with him. But it wasn’t my show to cancel.
Chapter 49
Closure
Passport, money, machete, map: May 22, 2016.
Courtesy of the author
We regrouped at the Fiscal’s office in Puerto Jiménez. Roman’s gear and clothing were laid out in a back room. All of it was muddy. Much of it looked rotten. Asking questions, I inspected it closely, piece by piece, handling it, weighing its meaning in my hands. The pack lid was found separated from the pack. Inside was an unopened bag of cookies labeled “Chiky Chips” and a package of Tang. “He hadn’t starved,” somebody pointed out.
His passport had been in the lid, too, and inside his passport were three colorful bills totaling $37 worth of colónes and the disintegrating folded remains of “the best map yet.” Inside his pack OIJ had found his mosquito-net tent and some extra clothes; outside of it, they found his headlamp, his Visqueen tarp, and his sleeping pad. It appeared he had stopped and was perhaps making camp. His compass, too, had been on the ground, its bearing set at 240 degrees, the direction from there to the Rio Claro. It had probably been around his neck for reference.
The heavier, metal things lying in the stream bed had been upstream a few yards from the logjam: the machete, a green fuel canister about eight inches long and four inches across, and the unidentified green item in the photo. This last piece was now obviously part of the stove. Roman must have assembled the stove, which was then struck by a massive blunt object that snapped the burner from the canister and pinched and folded the threads on the burner’s valve. The steel fuel canister was dented with a broad divot, as if something hard and large in diameter—perhaps a hardwood tree limb—had hit it with extreme force.
Like Ken, Jorge from the embassy had been sure it was foul play until he saw the site. Now it was clear: a natural death, an accident. Snakebite or tree fall, it was all speculation now. I preferred a scenario that matched all of the facts with as little anguish as possible.
IT SEEMED TO me that Roman had met Jenkins and his band of miners along the Zeledón on July 10 or 11, then hiked upstream after breakfast. He would have taken the left and better-used fork, following Jenkins’s trail. He passed by the path to their tunnels and descended to the Negritos, having bypassed its canyon. From there he negotiated a series of waterfalls upstream for a half mile to where he died.
This is what closure feels like.
Peggy arrived the next day and we inspected Roman’s things together. We spread them across a table outside the Pearl. Like I had, she handled and inspected everything, verifying Roman’s presence in the material remains, seeing his passport’s muddy and faded photo taken when he was a teen, his name and birthdate visible, his neat handwritten notes on a folded sheet of paper.