The Adventurer's Son

by Roman Dial

  Chased out of the range by May’s sloppy conditions, we returned to Kuyuktuvuk Creek in July to walk and packraft for the month. Midway through the 350-mile journey, we discovered Peggy was pregnant. To ease her morning sickness with something fresh, we caught grayling, a kind of arctic trout. Peggy was nervous in water, so I took her hand when we waded creeks and rivers. She sang while I paddled us both in our packraft. Each day we kept each other company; each night we kept each other warm beneath our single sleeping bag draped like a quilt across us. We fought and worked it out. And one memorable moment, we shared a deep and primal fear as a grizzly—all the while in the sights of my shaking .30-06—charged us, stopping only yards away when it finally caught our scent. Our month in the Brooks Range pulled us closer than either of us had ever been to anyone.

  Years later, Peggy and I entered the Wilderness Classic, held in the Brooks Range that year. The course would head up Kuyuktuvuk Creek. In a prerace briefing, a park ranger told all us racers that the local Nunamiut name Kuyuktuvuk meant “place to make love many times.”

  Peggy smiled and glanced at me. “How did he know?”

  NINE MONTHS AFTER our honeymoon on Kuyuktuvuk and the day a Fairbanks cold snap ended, Peggy went into labor just before midnight. “Roman, this is it. The baby’s coming.”

  “No, it’s Braxton Hicks,” I said, citing the false contractions that don’t signal birth. “Go back to sleep.” I turned over.

  She chuckled. “No, these are real. I can feel it. Let’s go!” We got up and her water broke there in the bedroom. We hurried to the Fairbanks hospital in our little red Toyota. It was February 22, 1987.

  Like many first-time moms, Peggy labored all night, her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. Helpless, I could only hold her hand as she squeezed and pumped mine in rhythm with her contractions. When our newborn boy, red with blood and mucus, finally slipped out headfirst—I nearly fainted. Peggy, it was clear, was far tougher than I could ever be.

  She held him and cooed, happy and exhausted like me, except I had only watched the miracle of birth: she had done its labor. I was pleased our firstborn was a son and looked forward to bonding with him as a father, and to maintaining that bond in ways my own father had not. Peggy said she wanted “another Roman,” so we made it his middle name. His first name I took from Cody Pass, the wilder Alaska beyond Usibelli I had imagined as a kid. Cody Roman, I reasoned, would be what lay beyond me.

  We spent the following winter in the one-bedroom house and watched infant Cody transform into a toddler. He began by balancing against walls on two feet while looking at us with awe, feeling his legs support him. His tiny hand felt good, wrapped tightly around my index finger as I walked him around the house.

  One day, he sat on the floor with me and looked up expectantly. He was ten months old in a red sweater and diapers. He’d been bracing himself against the house walls for a week. I looked at him and smiled. “Stand up,” I encouraged. “Stand up.” Puzzled, he looked back at me. “Stand up!” I repeated with enthusiasm.

  And then, shockingly, in one fluid movement, he lurched forward onto all fours, pushed off with his hands, and stood up on his own. He wobbled there, smiling as I smiled back.

  “Peggy!” I called out, “Peggy! Cody just stood up! On his own!”

  Peggy ran out and we watched him take a few steps, walking and smiling with his newfound freedom.

  Baby Cody slept well each night and toddled with determination. From early on, he displayed a long attention span and deep curiosity. Sometimes I carried him around in a backpack carrier on my bike or on foot. Sometimes I held him on my chest as we both fell asleep. Sometimes he cried and nothing I did would soothe him: not changing his cloth diaper, nor feeding him; not rocking or jostling him; not making silly faces or sounds. No one but Peggy could calm him then.

  FALLING OIL PRICES crashed Alaska’s economy in spring of 1987 with “For Sale” signs on every block in Fairbanks. When a job offer teaching math in Barrow fell through, I called an old friend, Matt, who’d taken his UAF mining engineering degree to Nome to work for Alaska Gold. The biggest gold mining company in Alaska, it could offer me a job as a manual laborer. Peggy and Cody would remain in Fairbanks while I headed west to work.

  Matt, an Iditarod musher as well as an engineer, offered me his “dog shack” as a place to stay in exchange for looking after his kennel. Each morning after feeding his barking white sled dogs, I rode my mountain bike to the thaw fields, where a crew of misfit laborers melted the permafrost to mine for gold. Alaska Gold operated two gold dredges, enormous 1940s-era boats that floated in the ponds they dug. At their bow, a conveyer belt of one-ton buckets slurped up the tundra and passed the diggings to giant sluice boxes that rinsed nuggets and gold dust from pay dirt. I worked ahead of Dredge #6. My job was connecting water hoses to two-inch steel pipes sunk eighty feet down into the permafrost, then jacking and twisting the pipes with heavy tools to break them free of the ice that gripped them.

  I sent nearly all my earnings home, happy to make sixteen bucks an hour. But living in the dog shack so far from Peggy and baby Cody was lonely. That spring, my high school class would hold their ten-year reunion. The invitation reminded me that my science career had been sidetracked. A decade had passed, yet I worked side by side with kids who had just graduated from high school. It was time to grow up and get that Ph.D.

  After a full season in Nome’s thaw fields, my visits to graduate schools on bustling campuses like Princeton and Stanford offered a contrast in cultures, and not just with Alaska’s frontier. Pretentious Princeton put me off, yet the Stanford vibe was exciting. The Bay Area’s nearby mountain bike trails, redwood forests, and rocky coastlines appealed to me—almost as much as Stanford’s outdoorsy students and eclectic faculty.

  Stanford professor Jonathan Roughgarden was a tall, lanky man who wore his mop of brown hair carefully combed to the side. Brilliant, with an owlish look befitting his Harvard education, Roughgarden beamed in excitement as he used his hands to give comprehensible shape to abstract ideas. The National Science Foundation had funded his proposal to develop mathematical models of food webs based on fieldwork with Caribbean lizards. It was a project that needed a student like me, one with athletic abilities who was also competent in the quantitative arts. From my perspective, Roughgarden and the project’s fieldwork would complete my training as a modern ecologist.

  It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a Ph.D. from Stanford either.

  Chapter 6

  Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn

  Cody and Jazz, Culebra, 1991.

  Courtesy of the author

  The Ph.D. program started in the fall of 1988. Peggy, who was pregnant with our second child and finishing her own degree in elementary education, stayed in Alaska with eighteen-month-old Cody. Midwinter, I flew home and drove our Subaru to California. Peggy and Cody followed soon after, flying down with frozen moose and caribou meat, part of our strategy for surviving on a grad student stipend in Silicon Valley.

  A couple of weeks later we threw a barbecue potluck with my new California friends. Early on at the party and stimulated by the day’s preparty cleaning, Peggy went into labor. We handed off the hosting duties to a pair of Alaskan friends and headed to the Mountain View hospital. Just after midnight on January 22, 1989, Peggy gave birth easily to our daughter. We christened her Jasper Linda Dial, her middle name honoring my mother and her first name the muscular beauty of the Canadian Rockies.

  Jazzy was a sweet, beautiful baby. Her features were tiny, her smile darling on minuscule tender lips, and her sparkling personality matched both her name and arrival into the world at a party. As expected, Peggy made an attentive, loving mother of two, although a mother at times overwhelmed.

  Ph.D. programs are essentially poorly paid apprenticeships with a boss expecting constant, unpaid overtime. This left me unable to pull my full weight as a parent. Alone all day in the condo complex where we lived with no other young mothers nearby, Peggy felt isol
ated caring for a toddler and an infant. She took a low-paying job teaching movement classes to preschoolers at a women’s health club where she could bring our kids with her to work. She wasn’t about to let someone else raise them.

  “Roman, it doesn’t make sense for me to work at the club. The kids are always getting sick there. And if I take another job, all the money I make will just go to child care. I’d rather stay home and raise them myself.” Her kids paramount, Peggy gave up the companionship of coworkers to keep Cody and Jazz healthy. We agreed that emotional wealth was worth more than money, so she focused on her role as housewife and mother, an arrangement that made everyone happy.

  ARTICULATING A VIABLE Ph.D. project consumed my first year at Stanford; completing it took three more. Roughgarden’s NSF proposal had described the Caribbean’s common anole lizards as ideal organisms to study complex food webs in tropical rainforests. The small, colorful, and active creatures are abundant in the canopy, far above the jungle floor. At the time, scientists viewed the canopy as an inaccessible, unexplored landscape just overhead but far out of reach.

  Most canopy studies cataloged life as seen through binoculars from a tower or the crotch of a single tree. Our research involved manipulative experiments in multiple trees sixty to one hundred feet above the ground. The protocol called for removal and exclusion of anoles from individual trees for nearly a year. Because anoles spend their lives in the canopy but hatch from eggs in the forest floor’s soil, we would keep the lizards out of the crowns following their removal with plastic collars around the tree trunks. Next, we would compare both the counts of bugs and the amount of leaves eaten by bugs in trees without lizards to the same counts in trees with natural populations of lizards. In this way, Roughgarden and I could measure the myriad impacts of an abundant predator on its environment. That was the idea of the experiment: to bump an ecosystem and quantify its response. To make it happen would require ropework, courage, and plenty of sweat and muscle. It sounded like my kind of challenge.

  Before moving to Puerto Rico, I went down to scout for living arrangements and brought three-year-old Cody with me. This eased Peggy’s duties as she finished up with our move. It also provided my first real father-son trip with him. Together we explored a world new to us both: the tropical rainforest. We investigated giant land snails clinging to rainforest palms; watched bright green lizards do push-ups on buttressed trees; and tossed insects into the webs of hand-sized Nephila orb-weaver spiders. Cody displayed a child’s innate fascination with life—biophilia, a relic from the past when children’s interest in their environment made the difference between life and death. Some of us never outgrow it.

  As a family, we had often visited California’s tide pools. Young Cody thrilled to the incredible diversity of invertebrates he found there: starfish, sea anemones, and amphipods, to name but a few. The Puerto Rican jungle offered a similar diversity, but with land creatures instead of intertidal ones. Like every three-year-old, our boy asked a bottomless barrel of questions starting with why: Why do lizards lose their tails? Why do birds sing? Why are flowers bright? I tried hard to nourish this insatiable curiosity on a trip that initiated our shared explorations across five continents and two decades.

  Soon after Peggy and Jazz arrived, we settled into a condo a block from Luquillo Beach. With no car, we pedaled bicycles locally, pulling the kids in a bike trailer. Each morning after a mug of Puerto Rican coffee, I’d crank my mountain bike five miles and a thousand feet up into the Luquillo Mountains to work in the treetops. My old climbing partner Carl Tobin, himself a grad student in ecology, came for a month at the start. During January 1991, we strung horizontal traverses and vertical access lines in the forest using a mixture of mountaineering and arborist techniques I’d learned from Mike Cooper, my best friend from childhood.

  Mike had started an arborist business after college. The autumn before I left for Puerto Rico to start the project, he showed me the ropes in my parents’ front yard, where we went up, across, and down tall white oaks and tulip poplars. Mountain and tree climbing both use harnesses and ropes, but their use and design differ. Arborists hang from harnesses on thick-sheathed ropes meant for pulling across limbs. Their techniques for tree climbing rely on sliding ropes and clever knots, rather than hardware. Arborists move around for pay, unlike mountain climbers, who go straight up for thrills.

  Mike’s rope tricks allowed Carl and me to move around inside each tree’s crown. With access throughout the canopy, we could mark every lizard we saw with our paint guns; it was good fun, squirting droplets of blue, pink, and yellow paint from up to twenty feet away for mark-remark statistics to estimate anole abundance. We used blue paint the first day, pink the second, and yellow the third, recording how many lizards we saw in each tree with each color scheme each day. One-color animals were seen only once; two-color twice; and three-color three times. We then applied a statistical model to calculate how many lizards we missed, based on the chances of painting we observed. Summing all these observed animals and the single “guess” gave the estimate of total lizards in a tree. We even authored a scientific paper on the arborist techniques, then unknown to the canopy science community. Among other things, we illustrated how to go from tree to tree, enabling a multiday, canopy-level forest traverse without touching the ground—a sort of “canopy trek.”

  Down in Luquillo, Peggy and the kids spent most days at the beach. Playing in the warm water and collecting seashells left them tanned, blond, and barefoot. Cody delighted in watching colorful reef fish through a kid-sized snorkeling mask. He stood in the shallows, bent over and holding his breath, exploring the watery world at his feet. Yards away on the beach sand, Jazz gathered foot-long tropical seedpods washed ashore by gentle waves.

  Inspired by visits to my study site, Cody decided to establish his own in our yard of low shrubs and fleshy ornamentals. Marking its corners with surveyor’s tape, he’d catch and release the anoles that lived there.

  “Dad, I made a map of my study site!” he said, running up to me, home from my day in the jungle. He had watched me labor over my study-site map, then worked hard on his own in crayon and colored pencil. “Do you want to see it?”

  “Yes! Of course, I want to see it!” I said, both delighted and impressed my four-year-old son had made his own map.

  “Well, here are the corners. They have orange flagging.” He pointed to squiggly orange Xs. “And here is where I caught a cristatellus in this bush.” He moved his pudgy little finger to a green scribble that marked where he’d caught the brown anole with the orange dewlap and tail crest, an animal he recognized by its scientific name, Anolis cristatellus.

  “And over here a grass anole lives by the fence. I caught him and let Jazzy hold him, too. She was careful, Dad,” he assured me. Both kids knew to hold the delicate animals by a toe with the creature perched on their fist. “And here”—he moved his finger to two parallel lines—“here is where the Ameiva lives. He’s big!” Unlike the svelte anoles that spend their time in trees or bushes, the fat-headed ameiva with its striped sides is a ground lizard that prowls the leaf litter for insects like a tiger prowls for deer: stopping, looking, moving on.

  When Roughgarden heard about Cody’s study site and map, he warned, “Better watch out, or he’s going to be a biologist, Roman.” That doesn’t sound so bad, I thought, pleased and imagining a future when we did science together.

  READING THE WALL Street Journal one night, I found an unbeatable airfare bargain. For the same price we’d pay to fly from San Francisco to Fairbanks, we could fly round trip from San Francisco to Australia. “Let’s go!” exclaimed Peggy, the stay-at-home wife of a grad student pauper. A coupon clipper and smart shopper, she is always on the lookout for deals. “It’s like paying for a ticket to Alaska—where we have to go anyway—and flying to Australia for free!” The frequent-flyer miles we would earn by flying to Australia and back would get us round trip from California to Fairbanks, where we went each year to maintain our Alaska re
sidency. As Alaska residents, we were entitled to certain benefits, like no-interest student loans and the State’s Permanent Fund Dividend, an annual payout to each resident in lieu of an income tax.

  With the research in Puerto Rico complete, we flew to San Francisco, left the ropes and data at Stanford, and continued westward to Sydney. From Sydney, we flew across Australia to Perth on the Indian Ocean. In Perth we rented a car to drive north to the tropics of Western Australia. Most parents would hesitate to jump into an economy-sized car for a month-long, 1,500-mile road trip with their four- and two-year-old children. But we’d had no car for almost a year. The simple novelty of being in one kept the kids entertained. Besides, there was something new and exciting to see nearly every hour in “Oz,” slang for Australians’ homeland.

  Oz’s west coast looked like California’s and Baja’s between Santa Cruz and Cabo San Lucas, but without the corners, cliffs, and traffic. Northward from Perth, tall eucalyptus forest gave way to Australian chaparral, savanna grassland, then desert, and finally tropical woodland. When we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, twelve time zones from where we had lived in Puerto Rico near the Tropic of Cancer, we had come exactly halfway around the world.

  We drove deeper into the Outback with its red dirt and clouds of annoying bush flies, pushing onward through the Great Sandy Desert. The desert’s dunes spilled into the Indian Ocean at Eighty Mile Beach. Here we beachcombed for intricate, colorful seashells, unlike anything we’d seen before. Cody and I found a small dead pilot whale half buried in the sand. Jazz collected dried starfish and heart urchins by the dozens. Between the city of Perth and the frontier town of Broome, we watched emus and black swans, inspected road-killed kangaroos heavier than a man and with a middle toe as long as my hand; we touched curious dolphins, snorkeled over corals on Ningaloo Reef, even rode camels along a tropical beach.