Most days are the same for Barbara Klita. She wakes, dresses and drapes herself in a clapboard sign bearing images of her son, Fred Frontier, and bold-face Chinese characters asking if anyone has seen him. She has breakfast at McDonalds and heads out to meetings with someone who has offered her some type of assistance in the search for her son.
It's been a year to the day since Frontier is believed to have walked off on a day hike in Taroko National Park, Taiwan's postcard-picturesque east coast tourist destination. He'd come to teach English at a Hess language school and had been in the country just three days after arriving from his home in Seattle, Washington. An avid outdoorsman, he quickly made his way to Taroko to check out some of the sites he'd read about in his dog-eared copy of Lonely Planet's Taiwan guidebook. He packed a change of clothes and a Pentax camera in a small backpack and a few items in a red waist bag, checked out of the Catholic hostel at which he was staying and set off to explore the park. Ten days later the bags mysteriously made their way back to the hostel, but there is no indication that Frontier ever did.
A month after his disappearance, he was reported missing and two months after that authorities conducted the first physical search for him. His mother came to Taiwan to assist in the investigation and has been here for much of the past year prodding the police and government. Despite her efforts, the case has stalled.
Klita's world is bound in a bulging plastic business card holder held together with a black rubber band. Hundreds of cards from all the people she's met in the past year have notes scribbled in the corners. It's a ragtag rolodex filled with the names of government officials, police administrators, attorneys, reporters, Buddhist monks, fortunetellers and US governors.
She's a Polish immigrant to the US whose accented English has kept her from securing part-time work teaching language at a bushiban, and so she lives off her modest savings and the kindness of strangers. The government has granted her a five-year renewable visa. She had been staying on a cot in a Taipei hostel until an attorney spotted her clapboard and offered her a spare room in his home. A devout Catholic, she says it's her faith that keeps her company in a country where she doesn't speak the language.
At lunch earlier this week, she crossed herself before a McDonalds Fillet-O-Fish and recounted the few facts she's learned over the past year and the many questions that remain unanswered.
"The police still know nothing," she said. "I ask them: What about Fred's bag? Who brought them back to the hostel? What about the people that were at the hostel at the same time as Fred? What do they remember?' The police say they will go ask and then they never tell me what they learn."
She has presented letters to the Presidential Office, the American Institute in Taiwan, the National Police Administration and others, asking for such simple things as an official report on the status of her son's case, and that all the information that's been collected be compiled in a single place to better coordinate the investigation. She claims the requests have not been met.
None of the law enforcement officials contacted for this report were willing to go on record, but some intimated that, in all likelihood, Frontier simply stepped off one of the many trails that cling to cliffs throughout the national park. The steep, densely foliated terrain, they say, has hindered their ability to recover his body.
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