The Adventurer's Son

by Roman Dial

  Roman could handle himself on his own, too. When he was sixteen his grandpa paid for a month of Spanish language classes in Mexico’s artsy San Miguel de Allende. Payment for the course included a driver who would meet him on his arrival in Mexico City. But Roman’s flight from L.A. was late and the driver left without him.

  Roman called home. It was late in the evening.

  “Dad, my flight out of L.A. was delayed, so I missed my ride in Mexico City. I bought this phone card but it’s only got five minutes. What should I do?” We had to solve the problem under the time constraint of his card.

  “Hang up and call the school. Ask them what their advice is. Then call me back and tell me what they say.”

  He hung up and I waited. A few minutes later the phone rang again. “Dad, they said that there’s a hotel in the airport. I wouldn’t have to leave and they’ll send the car in the morning. Or I can take a bus. There’s one more tonight and it leaves in less than an hour. It goes to another town where I get a second bus to another town and then I get a taxi. They said the whole trip is three or four hours.”

  “Where do you get the bus?”

  “Outside the airport. If I leave the airport, I can’t get back in for the hotel.”

  “Do you have all the directions written down?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to try and catch the bus.”

  “Okay, Son. Good luck. Call the school and tell them what you’re doing. And then call me back when you get there.”

  Of course, he made it. And so began his first Mexican adventure. He grew up on that trip and came back a young man full of rich, humorous, self-effacing stories. We were still close; he still wanted to do things, but there was a noticeable shift toward independence.

  SOON AFTER, AS a junior in high school, Roman was selected to participate in the school district’s gifted mentorship program. Genetics had interested him since middle school when he had read the Cartoon Guide to Genetics and pronounced, “I’m just a genetic enhancement of you, Dad.” I introduced Roman to a colleague, the lead scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Molecular Ecology Lab. She would mentor him his junior year, beginning a ten-year relationship with the lab. Running polymerase chain reactions, sequencing genes, and reading gels helped Roman pay for college and graduate school.

  Working in the lab, he often listened to NPR. I asked him what his favorite show was. “Marketplace,” he said. “I like hearing about how the economy works.”

  He entered Virginia’s College of William and Mary in 2005 as an economics major. He met his good friend Brad in an econ class their first year. It seemed fitting that Roman, the son of an ecologist, would be drawn to the mathematics of human ecology, but by the end of freshman year he said he didn’t have a feel for economics like he did for biology; he changed majors. He also met his first serious girlfriend his freshman year in an art history class.

  Roman had kept his high school relationships with girls to himself, but the young woman he met at William and Mary was different. Following their junior year, she came to Alaska for the month of June. He shared with her the adventures he had grown up associating with family—backpacking in Denali, sea kayaking in Prince William Sound, packrafting Eagle River—a clear signal that he was serious about this girl. We had never seen him smile and joke as much with anyone. I was happy for him and thought he’d found his soul mate.

  After graduating in June 2009, he returned to Alaska with a biology degree and this college sweetheart. The two moved into an Anchorage apartment right after graduation. All of his friends and ours delighted in his girlfriend. But the following spring—during the Alaskan season known as “break-up,” when the ice and snow melt and the rivers run free—she ended the relationship. Soon after, his friend Vincent Brady died from an extremely progressive form of cancer. The dual loss left Roman heartbroken and crushed.

  One day, he came by the house. He stood at the door, the pain on his face like he’d been physically kicked. I gave him a hug and asked how he was doing, if he was okay.

  “How do you think I feel, Dad? My girlfriend left me and my best friend died. I feel stormy and difficult, mean and sad.” His world painted black, I didn’t know how to recolor it, beyond suggesting obliquely that someday, somehow, he might reconnect with her.

  After the split, he moved in with a roommate across town. I came by to drop off his things from storage at his new apartment. Three upside-down bottles of hard alcohol stood on tap in the kitchen: vodka, bourbon, and tequila ready for an easy drink. He said the liquor was his roommate’s. I had my doubts: in his room there was a big dent in the sheetrock.

  “What happened here, Roman?” I asked.

  “I hit the wall with my fist,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  “How come?”

  “I dunno. I was mad?”

  No doubt he was mad. Mad with his ex, mad with the world for taking his best friend, and mad with himself, helpless and hurt with no apparent way out.

  That summer, Roman collected specimens in arctic Alaska as one of a trio of scientists studying the effects of climate change on small mammals. His notebook recorded solo hikes and hunts each day. Neat, legible details filled page after page: the animals he saw and caught, the coming of autumn, the game trails he followed, and the bears, caribou, and wolves who made them. “Anticipate getting more voles later in the season as food begins to run out,” he hypothesized, an idea supported by counts of small mammals that he recorded next to his hand-drawn maps.

  Roman didn’t mention his feelings of loss for Vince or his girlfriend. His notebook’s entries focused outward, ignoring the grief and turmoil inside. He described hunger and the satisfaction of good meals; sore feet and the discovery of good walking. Most outdoor adventurers turn to the wilderness after emotional loss; others turn away. For Roman it distracted from the pain of losing the girl he had most loved in his life and the friend he most respected and admired. Time would mend his broken heart, while comfort, love, and companionship could speed its healing.

  WE REGROUPED AS a family during Jazz’s Christmas break from her third year at Lewis and Clark College in Portland and returned to Borneo in December 2010. Both Roman and Jazz recalled vivid childhood memories there. We went to new places, including an island resort in the Celebes Sea. Both kids were tickled to sleep with air-conditioning and eat rich, gourmet food. We participated in organized activities—even tried karaoke. At least Peggy could sing; my croaking put the kids into stitches. The staff held a competition for guests: Roman used his hands to put makeup on Jazz from behind her back, unable to see what he was doing. By the end her face looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. The two of them nearly collapsed in laughter. It was good to see Roman happy and having a good time.

  Back from Borneo, Roman entered the master’s program at Alaska Pacific University and threw himself into a sophisticated thesis project building an evolutionary tree for the thumb-sized isopod Saduria entomon. He continued to struggle with the loss of his girlfriend, writing in his journal while doing fieldwork in Alaska’s arctic:

  Of course everything hurts . . . I don’t want any of these feelings. I don’t like being sad or feeling crushed. I’m obsessed and angry and feel so vulnerable. No reason to write down my feelings. They’re boring and I don’t want to feel them twice. Not drinking is hard. This trip will test me, I think. I would like to see it through. See something through . . . I keep telling myself I have a high threshold for discomfort. Not sure what that means though. Need to do more outside. This trip is awesome, but I need to be moving more. Not hard enough? Need a hard solo trip, to remind me I’m weak but alive.

  He was looking for something other than alcohol to resolve his lasting feelings of loss. Returning from the field, Roman worked on two scientific papers published in 2012. The article in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, “Historical biogeography of the North American glacier ice worm, Mesenchytraeus solifugus,” was a particularly
daunting manuscript for a young scientist who’d not yet completed his master’s degree. The other was a technical note on the genetics of snowy owls. Roughgarden was right after all: at twenty-five, Roman was the lead author on both published papers, a bona fide biologist.

  Roman’s friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers later reached out to us. Their emails and conversations helped us to see what kind of man he had become, beyond our family’s perspective. As one of his friends wrote, After Vince was gone, the emptiness settled in. Roman seemed to maintain the vibrancy of that atmosphere we had all shared with each other, his exuberance, and I was so thankful for that. Another elaborated on a gift Roman brought her from Bhutan:

  It was after Vince’s death that Roman opened his heart to me in a way I had not experienced previously. He was cooking dinner and he had a gift for me. When I arrived, he pulled me aside, and he placed a set of prayer flags in my hands. He looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “I owe you an apology and have for many years.”

  While Roman had a tender side—nursing me to health once in a Bornean hotel while I recovered from a tropical fever—he also had a cynical one. As a graduate student at APU, he’d made friends with a group of students who’d go on to medical school and other professions. In a touching email to Peggy and me, a friend named Don Haering described him:

  . . . an unusually intelligent and interesting character. I loved interacting with him, as nearly everything he said was thought-provoking in some way. He was the type of person who made me think carefully before I spoke, as I knew that he would probably have a well-informed question or response. Not only was he usually the smartest person in the room, I think he made everyone around him a little bit better too. In class, or any group discussion, he had a way of listening quietly and letting the conversation play out, before delivering a comment or response that was always on point, and which often completely reframed the dialog. It was a little skill of his that I came to anticipate, enjoy, and which I still attempt to emulate. Whenever I spoke with Roman personally, I always had the sense that he was amused by the world around him, like there was humor in every situation, even the mundane. In that way, as well as his obvious sense of general curiosity towards the world, I felt that he was a kindred spirit. I feel fortunate that we crossed paths.

  Don’s moving character sketch confirmed how Peggy and I had hoped Roman would turn out: informed, influential, equipped with a sense of humor. It satisfied me that even the smart kids saw him as a role model.

  Don was also going pretty easy on Roman: “reframing the dialog” often meant challenging disagreement. Roman sometimes found me a bit too sentimentally liberal, for instance. But for all of us in the Dial household, the actual differences in our opinions are less of a problem than our similarities in the way we disagree: disagreements often escalate, but subside just as quickly. Nobody holds a grudge for long.

  In 2012, when Roman and I walked out after searching Bhutan’s Himalaya for the Tibetan ice worm, we followed a trail that led to a remote village called Laya, perched in a picturesque valley pushed hard against the Tibetan border. At the time, Laya’s two-story stone and wood homes were off the grid and days from the road system in a wilderness where people lived.

  Leaving Laya, we encountered laborers and horses ferrying power poles and spools of cable. I complained that the arrival of electricity would kill the village’s charm. Roman accused me of projecting my sentimentality onto people who deserved the convenience of electrical power. I responded it would dilute their culture. He retorted it was up to them, not us. For miles, we each stammered in frustration as emotion eclipsed logic, each of us clinging stubbornly to our side of the argument.

  All fathers readily see their foibles reflected in their sons, and there, plain as day, were mine.

  Chapter 13

  Big Banana

  Twenty-footer, Rio Alseseca, Veracruz, Mexico, January 2014.

  Courtesy of Todd Tumolo

  Roman dated Katelyn, another APU student, in 2012. Working with her on a project to estimate small mammal abundance near Anchorage, Roman taught her techniques he had learned during his previous field seasons up north. A year later, when his computer simulations of isopod evolution didn’t converge on a solution, he decided he needed a break.

  He settled on heading east to visit college friends, followed by a bicycle tour through Kentucky’s bourbon country, then a long-term sojourn through Latin America. In October 2013, with his student loans paid off, $15,000 in savings, plans to spend Christmas with Brad, and enough Spanish to travel to South America, he told Katelyn he was breaking off their relationship. They remained close, though, and she joined him in Mexico for some packrafting and Maya ruin exploration in early January 2014. Shortly after she headed home, I met up with Roman in Veracruz, a state in eastern Mexico, to packraft with him and a handful of our Alaskan friends. We both looked forward to doing the kind of things we’d been doing together for decades.

  Roman greeted me at the Veracruz airport. He was a month shy of twenty-seven. He had gone a few weeks without shaving and his new beard accentuated the lean angle of his jaw. He certainly had his mother’s good looks and the scruffiness didn’t hide them.

  Roman was up for some whitewater adventure on what’s been called the “best bedrock” in North America. Kayakers come from around the world for Veracruz’s steep, polished gorges, vertical waterfalls, and tumbling cascades. We were eager to go paddling, but first we had to get something to eat.

  I rented a car and we drove off into the coastal city of Veracruz looking for good Mexican food, maybe some carne asada tacos, or “street meat” as he liked to call it. He was excited. We hadn’t seen each other for months and had a lot of catching up to do. He told me what he’d been doing, where he’d been, about his travels with Katelyn across the Yucatán. His words poured out. The son of a noisy father, he tended to be quiet, so when he spoke, I wanted to hear all that he had to say. Besides, we’d soon pick up two more boating buddies, including my good friend from Alaska, Brad Meiklejohn, who’s my age. When they showed up, Roman would listen more than talk.

  Our friends arrived the next afternoon and we headed inland to paddle warm whitewater. We did a day trip down a limey creek that issued full of life from a hillside spring to twist and turn through open woods and pastures where Brahma bulls laid in the shade. Packrafts have come far since Dick Griffith unrolled his pool toy in the first Wilderness Classic. Three decades on, they look more like fat little kayaks than small round life rafts and increasingly imaginative boaters paddle them down whitewater creeks and rivers normally kayaked or never run previously at all. Many experts can even “Eskimo-roll” their packrafts: if a rogue wave or turbulence flips the boat, the paddler rights it and paddles onward, all while still in the boat.

  After the lime springs creek, we drove to a town called Jalcomulco, where we hoped to find a local who’d shuttle us to the put-in of the “Grand Canyon” of the Rio Antigua. Unfortunately, all of Jalcomulco’s boating community were busy protesting a proposed dam that would flood the Antigua’s canyons. We’d have to drive ourselves and leave the rental car at the put-in during our overnight trip downstream.

  We enjoyed our paddle down the clear, moderate Class III waters set deep in lush, green gorges. We camped in the woods on the river’s banks and warmed up the selection of Mexican foods that Roman had picked out for us to eat around our crackling campfire. Tenting with him was familiar and we fell into an easy routine.

  A second full day of bigger water brought us back to the town of Jalcomulco, where we spent the night, then drove to retrieve our car the next day. Returning to the rental parked at the canyon put-in, I was puzzled to see the Volkswagen sagging with a door wide open. Pulling closer it was apparent that all four wheels were gone. So were the battery, the carburetor, the radio and CD player, and the few items we’d left in the trunk, including Roman’s empty backpack. Roman would eventually replace his pack with one he’d buy in Mexico after the rest of
us left; until then, he borrowed Brad Meiklejohn’s. As with any theft, we felt violated, frustrated, and hurt. The episode cost us a day or two but soon we were off to Tlapacoyan, the center of the Veracruz whitewater scene. Adrenaline has a way of washing away unpleasant feelings.

  The highlight of our two weeks paddling packrafts on rocky streams was an exciting descent of the Rio Alseseca’s “Big Banana,” a steep creek rushing through the jungle.

  Even though our friends from Alaska, Todd Tumolo and Gerard Ganey, had completed the committing run down the river before we arrived, I was nervous for Roman. He hadn’t been on the likes of the Alseseca for more than a year, and while we had worked our way up to the Big Banana’s challenging Class IV waterfalls on easier runs over the previous ten days, I was still concerned for his safety. He was, after all, my son.

  Ganey, Todd, and other friends all said the Big Banana was the best whitewater run in the state of Veracruz. It sounded thrilling and relatively safe to me. We could easily walk around its biggest, most dangerous waterfalls, thirty and forty feet tall. But I wanted Roman to feel good about it and have fun, too.

  Despite our collective experience and our three friends’ run the week before, our descent of the Big Banana nearly ended in its first hundred yards. Ganey, an expert paddler, decided to try a short, messy cascade that poured through a jumble of boulders. The rest of us had already walked past the hazard because it didn’t look very “clean.” Clean rapids don’t trap and potentially drown a swimmer like “chossy” ones can. We positioned ourselves below the drop with safety ropes.

  Ganey paddled smoothly into the rapid’s entrance, maneuvered off the lip and prepared for his landing. But instead of plopping smoothly down, he was grabbed by the rapid’s rocky edge and flipped out of his boat. Almost immediately, a whirlpool sucked Ganey underwater into a sieve of boulders where the river’s hydraulics brought him back to the surface, only to shove him under again in a recirculating current.