by Roman Dial
If Puerto Rico had initiated young Roman’s fascination with the tropics, then the four trips that he would make to Borneo as a child, teen, and young man cemented that fascination in place. A dozen other trips to tropical and subtropical Australia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Hawaii, and Bhutan would send him eventually—perhaps inevitably—to Central America for his greatest adventure of all.
Chapter 11
Jungles and Ice
Roman and Jazz, Harding Icefield, 2001.
Courtesy of the author
Most parents want to raise independent, capable offspring who still want to spend time with their family. The real test of parenting comes during adolescence, when offspring act like two-year-old toddlers in adult-sized bodies. They turn secretive, exploring nonfamily relationships that run deeper than playground friendships. Roman was typical in this regard, but fortunately he still found time for me. By his teens, our trips together had established attitudes, morals, and skills that shaped him into a useful research assistant and a competent adventure partner.
As a freshman in high school, he helped me during two months at Danum Valley Field Center in Borneo. Between three feet and two hundred feet above the ground, I dangled from ropes while handling a twenty-pound chemical “fogger” that knocked thousands of insects into collecting trays. Meanwhile, Roman learned to identify these insects from a Cambridge University graduate student named Ed Turner. Together in Danum’s air-conditioned lab, with Radiohead playing on speakers plugged into an iPod, they peered into microscopes and separated Ed’s bug samples into groups like Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and others.
Back in Anchorage, Roman assisted me with my 14,000 bugs as he had helped Ed with his. We set up dissecting microscopes across from each other on the dining room table. While hunched over scopes and our data sheets one Saturday afternoon, he said, “Looking at all these bugs and seeing all this diversity is like being back in the rainforest. Check out this praying mantis ant-mimic. It looks just like an ant!”
A few years later when the research was published, Roman would find his name in the acknowledgments of a Biotropica paper entitled “Arthropod abundance, canopy structure, and microclimate in a Bornean lowland tropical rain forest” by Ed Turner, two other Cambridge colleagues, and me. Roman and Jazz would be acknowledged in “Spatial distribution and abundance of red snow algae on the Harding Icefield, Alaska, derived from a satellite image” in Geophysical Research Letters.
The senior scientist on the snow algae paper was a Japanese scientist named Shiro Kohshima, who had studied everything from orangutans in the jungle to microbes on glaciers. He led a group of Japanese researchers up to the Harding Icefield, a 700-square-mile dome of ice in the Kenai Mountains, to study the single-celled algae that color its vast summer snowfields red. Besides red-snow algae, the scientists studied an inch-long annelid called an ice worm that feeds on the algae. The Japanese invited me along as a scientific collaborator.
My role was to collect snow algae samples and count ice worms across the Harding Icefield. I brought both kids, Roman fourteen and Jazz twelve, to ski with me. The three of us would map the red snow and count glacier ice worms on a seventy-five-mile loop during a week in August 2001.
Skiing over the Harding feels like time travel back to the Pleistocene, with ice and snow as far as the eye can see. At its center, the icefield encircles mountains known as nunataks, a Canadian Inuit word for “land surrounded by ice.” We dragged a sled full of equipment most of each day, then set up camp early, and tossed a ring-like Frisbee for fun until the ice worms came out at dusk. Then the Frisbee ring became a sampling frame for counting. In the cool of the evening, Jazz and Roman snuggled into their toasty sleeping bags inside the tent where Jazz jotted down the counts of ice worms I called out to her. We learned that the biggest populations of ice worms with a variety of sizes lived on the red-algae fields down low; higher up on the summit dome there were no worms (and no algae); in between, we found only long single worms that seemed to be moving as if on a mission. As usual, our studies generated more questions than we answered.
For the first two nights on the Harding, we camped where three glaciers spilled off in three directions; the Japanese camped an hour’s ski away on its edge. South of us, the Harding Icefield opened up in earnest: flat, featureless, blindingly white, with only distant nunataks as landmarks. The icefield is sometimes blasted by powerful, storm-driven cyclones that spin off the Gulf of Alaska at over a hundred miles an hour. These storms usually come at night, following a day of rain.
It had rained all day. We were holed up in our big dome tent where we played rummy and Yahtzee, drank coco and killed time. Roman teased Jazz. The siblings have always been close, but because she’d beaten him in cards, he used his sharp tongue to even the score.
The Japanese scientists came by to drill for ice worms and establish where in the snowpack the nocturnal annelids spent the day. While the Japanese drilled through snow and into the ice below, I stood in the wind and rain outside the tent and monitored the kids’ giggles and barbs.
Kohshima pulled up a three-foot core of solid, blue glacier ice. At the bottom was a living ice worm. How it got there, we had not a clue. Perhaps it followed hairline cracks, or used a unique gland to somehow melt its way down. We scratched our heads, noting the mystery in our yellow waterproof field books. After the Japanese left for camp, the winds picked up. Strong gusts interrupted the kids’ card games and the tent banged and flapped during dinner and hot drinks. We laughed at first. But as the storm bullied the tent and darkness fell, the mood changed.
“Dad,” Jazz asked, “should we be worried about this?”
“No,” I lied, hoping to hide my fear.
“What are we going to do?” she pushed.
I thought about that. If the tent blew apart, we would be vulnerable to strong wind and freezing rain and unable to see where to go. There was no boulder to tuck behind, no soft snow to dig into for a cave, no place to hide. Not until morning would we be able to ski to a shelter hut located five miles away at the edge of the icefield, beyond a mile-long maze of crevasses.
Eventually, bigger gusts flattened the brand-new dome tent, but, as with the faded old one on Umnak, its shape rebounded each time. The kids moved to my end, all three of us in a four-person, group-sized overbag that trapped heat escaping from our individual sleeping bags. If the tent failed, we could hunker down inside the overbag and cling to each other for warmth until morning. We shoved our cookpot and stove, lighters, compass, map and food, rain shells, extra clothes, and Nalgene bottles full of warm water into our big overbag. We wanted to be ready in case the tent should blow apart and the wind scatter its contents.
We sang songs and told jokes until the wind’s roar silenced us with wet tent fabric pushed flat to our faces. We retreated deep into the muggy blackness of the overbag, where Jazz asked, “How long is this going to last, Dad?”
“I don’t know, Jazz, but it should be better tomorrow,” I said hopefully.
Clutching tight to each other, we fell asleep eventually and woke to a calm, clear morning. The Japanese crew came by to visit. We laughed and shook our heads, sharing stories about the storm’s ferocity. They had lost a tent and the five of them had crowded into one shelter, up all night, their backs against the windward wall to keep their tent erect.
The Japanese team would stay at their camp on the edge of the icefield, repair their broken tent poles, and continue their research measuring the light reflected from snow with varying densities of snow algae that actually melt snow to survive. The kids and I would push onward, deeper into the icefield, to sample snow for algae and count ice worms. “Dad,” Jazz questioned as we packed up to head out, “are we going to have any more storms like that? It was scary.”
“Not like that,” I reassured her. “Usually good weather follows bad. We’ll be okay.”
A few days later, we skied among nunataks as we crossed the rounded dome at the icefield’s high point. A fog rolled in of
f the Gulf. In those days before low-cost GPS, we relied on compass navigation and maps. Roman held the compass like he’d learned on Umnak and kept me on course as I led the way with his direction.
We came to a crevasse field creased by cracks: some big enough to swallow a skier whole in their gaping maw. “What do I do with all this stuff again?” asked Jazz as she held out a handful of carabiners, pulleys, and ascenders that hung on her gear sling like clunky costume jewelry. The cracks were open and easy to see, and the slope flat enough that we could shuffle past. Still the potential hazard was clear. The Japanese were miles away. Both kids had ascended ropes hung from tropical trees in Borneo and Costa Rica, as well as from backyard spruce, but Jazzy wanted a refresher.
“What do Roman and me do if you fall in?” she asked.
Good question, I thought. “It’s pretty safe here. It’ll be hard to fall in. You’d almost have to jump into a crevasse. But if I fall in, you and Roman need to anchor the rope with your skis and throw Roman’s end of the rope down to me.”
We moved nervously through the mile or so of icy cracks and fissures, relieved when we reached the other side of the crevasse field, where we camped out of danger. “I don’t like those crevasses, Dad. They look scary and deep.”
“I know. There won’t be any more. We’re done with them.”
I had hoped this experience would get the kids interested in more glacier travel, but it had the opposite effect. Neither would ever want to go skiing in summer again. “Nah,” Roman answered the next time I asked him out on an ice-worming ski trip. “Why waste summer on the snow when we have all winter to ski?”
It was hard to argue with that.
LIKE MANY OF us, Roman shifted his interests when puberty arrived and he became more interested in adventure than natural history. Between his junior and senior year of high school, he suggested we compete together in the 2004 Wilderness Classic. Roman’s initiative to enter the race was a natural outcome of family hiking trips and the fact that Peggy and I had participated together three times ourselves. At sixteen, he figured he could meet any outdoor challenge his mother could.
At fourteen, Roman had helped me field-test an adventure race course in the Alaska Range. As he preran the course with Peggy, me, and a handful of others, Roman discovered his endurance and tolerance for discomfort on a new scale. He also discovered the excitement of swift-water packrafting. The Classic would test his boating skills, as well as his tolerance for discomfort and his endurance. I also knew from a dozen Classics that the grueling event’s rugged courses destroyed participants’ feet. For Roman’s first race, I proposed that we use mountain bikes and packrafts to avoid “feet-beat,” making the experience as positive as possible for him.
Fortunately, Roman had commuted by mountain bike, winter and summer, five miles each way every day all through middle and high school. To train specifically for the Classic, we pedaled and pushed our bikes up nearby mountains and paddled down rivers and streams in our packrafts with bikes strapped to their bows—“bikerafting.” We also made a ten-day trip to the Brooks Range, where we packrafted three rivers that we linked with overland treks. Come race time, we were ready.
Thirty-five of us started the race at Eureka Roadhouse, a hundred miles from Anchorage. The finish line waited 150 miles away in Talkeetna. By the end of the first day the sky threatened rain and both of us found ourselves exhausted and butt-sore. For well over fifteen hours, we had pedaled, pushed, and carried our mountain bikes across fifty miles of Alaskan backcountry and wilderness.
We set down our bikes on a tundra shelf, high in the Talkeetna Mountains, and pulled on our puffy Patagonia pullovers. After arranging our sleeping pads next to each other, we pressed ourselves together to share body heat, pushed our feet into our empty backpacks, and pulled our deflated packrafts over us like blankets against the rain. To save weight, we carried no sleeping bags, bivy sacks, tent, or even tarp. Before we settled in to bivouac a few hours, Roman reached into his food bag. “Here you go, old man,” he said, grinning as he tossed me a Cadbury bar. “I didn’t eat my full ration today and figured you’d need this to stay warm tonight.”
“Thanks, son. That’s very generous of you,” I replied, smiling back. “I’ll just stash it for later, in case you want it back.”
After cycling, pushing, and sometimes carrying our bikes for three days, pausing only long enough to shove food in our mouths or nap a few hours, we prepared to float the Talkeetna River for the final stretch of the race. We had followed well-used grizzly bear trails to portage a canyon full of burly Class IV rapids. As we inflated our rafts and assessed our progress, Roman asked, “Do you think we’ll sleep tonight, or just paddle straight through?”
“Up to you. It’s about twenty-five miles to Talkeetna. How do you feel?” We had slept maybe eight hours of the last seventy-two or so. He looked strong, although near three in the morning the previous “night” he’d dragged a bit while shoving his bike through the thick alder brush.
Roman stood up from his boat. Scratching his head with both hands, he thought for a minute, then said, “I feel pretty good.” He gave me the punchy grin of a sleep-deprived adventure racer, his shoulders broad, his back straight. “I say we go for it and get this thing done. It’ll be great to get off our feet and into our rafts. Here, Dad, let me help you get that bike on your boat.”
Ever since Dick Griffith had pulled out his “secret weapon” two decades before, packrafting had been a staple of the Classic. The Talkeetna River on this course presented the biggest whitewater challenge of any Classic to that point. Fortunately, Roman had moved to the forefront of whitewater packrafting in the previous couple of years.
At sixteen, during his first trip down a local Class IV canyon on Ship Creek—a run that most packrafters found terrifying in the early 2000s—he declared, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had!” He reveled in the amusement-park excitement of dropping off Ship’s back-to-back four- to six-foot waterfalls. My friend Brad Meiklejohn, one of those early white-knuckled packrafters, first met Roman there. Brad told me he had been blown away by how calmly Roman handled its whitewater. Photos of Roman paddling the creek pepper my book on the sport.
Over the next decade, Roman and I took our Ship Creek skills to the Appalachians, Brooks Range, Mexico, Tasmania, Bhutan, even the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, where he and I were the first paddlers ever permitted to packraft its length.
While we had passed the Talkeetna’s biggest canyon, there were still eddy lines, hydraulics, and riffles to negotiate while top-heavy with bicycles strapped to our bows. Below one canyon wall, I watched a whirlpool grab Roman’s stern. He looked startled, but in control. Leaning forward and digging hard with his paddle blades, he pulled himself free, then flashed his teeth at me in a big smile. “That one almost got me!”
After three nights, we arrived in Talkeetna in sixth place for the 2004 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic without a single blister. Roman’s finish remains the top placement by a seventeen-year-old in the history of the race. A decade after Umnak, he wasn’t only carrying his own weight and keeping up: he was wilderness racing.
Chapter 12
Dungeons and Dragons
Hulahula River, Brooks Range, 2004.
Courtesy of the author
Roman was more than just my adventure partner and research assistant. He listened to what his mom and I said, but challenged us, too, unafraid to speak his mind. “Dad, you’re pretty smart, but Mom”—he grinned—“well, Mom’s wise.”
Even as a kid he shared Peggy’s circumspection. He shared her hairline, too: a widow’s peak. He kept his straight hair short, buzzing it himself. Sure, he had a mohawk when he was eight, but by high school he had discovered that girls went for his clean-cut, Harry Potter looks with his wire-rimmed glasses and high cheekbones like his mother’s. He not only resembled a young wizard, he was also smart enough to be authentic, sans tattoos or piercings.
While other kids watched television, Roman read book
s—we didn’t have a TV. He read fantasy, entomology, the dictionary, even crappy books where he’d skip every second page. At nine in Borneo, he read Tolkien’s The Hobbit in a single day, then the Lord of the Rings trilogy the next week, a binge that left a big gap in his journal. Later, he and his friends passed around Frank Herbert’s Dune series, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Mark Twain. He read so much I wondered if it was why he needed glasses.
In high school he read science, history, economics, and texts on the world of Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game based on imaginative narratives and magical scoring. For years, he spent each Friday evening at a friend’s immersed in DnD. Roman was a renowned dungeon master, the game-play creator, storyteller, and guide. All Peggy and I knew about it was that he left home excited to cook and share meals with a group of all ages and backgrounds. Roman cheerfully joined us for natural history and packrafting trips, but knowing that he’d developed his own identity comforted us.
Roman belonged to a creative, gregarious circle of friends who met in grade school and stayed close. At the group’s center was Roman’s best friend, Vincent Brady. Charismatic, athletic, artistic, Vince painted and drew, played music, and wrote poetry. The two met in kindergarten when Roman found Vince belly-down on a lawn pushing dandelions into his face, dusting his nose, lips, and cheeks with pollen. Roman asked what he was doing. Vince replied he was a bumblebee, pollinating flowers. In that moment, a beautiful lifelong friendship bloomed like the yellow weeds around them.
Starting in middle school, Roman threw solstice parties for this sometimes rowdy crowd, who came over, stoked a backyard bonfire, barbecued meat, and stayed up all night in the endless light of summer. A young woman from Vince’s circle once wrote that Roman was known for his story-telling of surreal adventures, his sharp wit and humor, for contributing to late-night conversations, drawing pictures, wrestling and laughing, waxing abstractions into the wee hours, and joking with everyone in cuddle puddles.