by Roman Dial
The chossy drop wouldn’t let him go. He cycled around and around, fighting for air and his life. I threw him a rope but the Alseseca swallowed him again before he could find it. Fortunately, Todd’s throw line followed mine and Ganey grabbed it the next time he resurfaced. Todd dragged him, exhausted, from the current. We all breathed a sigh of relief.
Watching Ganey there, splayed on a rock heaving for air, an unease informed my judgment. Although a practicing scientist and college professor, I’ve learned the hard way never to ignore intuition, either mine or others’, especially when it involves my offspring.
How about the other rapids downstream? How safe are they? I wondered. We were able to walk around this drop, but if we would later be forced to paddle dangerous cascades like the one that grabbed Ganey, then I was ready to pack up and head right out on the dusty trail we’d followed in.
I turned to the others. “What do you think, Roman?” I asked.
He looked cool as a cucumber. But I knew my taciturn son could hold back his emotions. Roman had watched Todd pull Ganey from the water trap. “I don’t know—that drop looks pretty hairy,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “It’s why we’re all putting in below it, right?” Unlike me, he had never been accused of being an adrenaline junkie.
“What’s it like downstream?” I asked Todd. Ganey’s near miss had been on a short, five-foot drop on a big creek. Twenty-foot waterfalls, impossible to portage, waited below.
“Oh, it gets better. Much better. This is the chossiest drop on the whole run. It cleans up.”
“Are you sure?” I wanted to know.
In adventurer’s slang, Todd denied he was downplaying the river’s challenges: “I wouldn’t sandbag you, Roman.”
I turned to my son to read past his composure. We had packrafted whitewater together for over a decade. He knew when to say no. He knew when to walk. I had made it a point never to force anything on him that he didn’t want to do. He would let me know. While he was often quiet, he was never shy. He was his mother’s son, as much as my own: risk-aware, vigilant, never hesitant to tell me what he thought.
“Well, Rome?”
“I say we go for it, Dad.”
“Okay, then, I guess that’s settled.” I looked at the others. “Todd, you want to lead? Ganey can you bring up the rear and run sweep?” They nodded and we got into our colorful little boats.
“Let’s go.”
We slid into green water that flowed smoothly over dark rock as canyon walls rose overhead and closed in all around us. Broadleaf crowns of contorted jungle trees dangled from the rim above as we followed the twisting, crystalline creek. Sometimes we shot over rocky underwater ledges where we paddled aggressively off powerful pour-offs. Other times we performed aquatic pirouettes as we maneuvered through tumbling cascades, stabbing our paddles into the current to turn us abruptly and dodge the obstacles. We enjoyed the Alseseca’s challenging rapids and welcomed walking around its dangerous ones. I felt parental pride watching Roman, back to his old whitewater form, negotiate drops with skillful strokes of his paddle.
Midway down, the Alseseca River rushed through a narrow gorge to plunge off a twenty-foot waterfall that was impossible to portage. We surrendered to the drop, whooping as we launched off its edge, falling with the water into the warm, clear pool that yanked us all from our little boats with the force of our entry.
Roman and I clambered back into our packrafts. After catching our breath and soaking in the endorphins, we laid back and looked up. The pool was set deep in an overhung alcove, a natural amphitheater. There was no way out but down. The next drop, while falling a vertical twenty feet, was nowhere near as violent: we’d slide down it, not plummet like we just had.
“That was something, huh, Roman?”
“Yea! That was crazy! There was no way I could stay in my boat,” Roman said. “When I hit, the current just ripped the boat right off me and my thigh straps. It felt like someone forcibly pulling off my pants!” He laughed at the recollection, exhilarated by the thrill. “I was really nervous going off, not being able to see where we were landing. And it was a long fall! But WOW! A twenty-footer!” He shook his head with a look that said he felt vibrantly alive.
Despite my concerns at the put-in, the Big Banana turned out to be a fitting end to our two weeks together. Exhilarating but safe, the run felt like an amusement park ride, albeit with consequences, like Ship Creek only far, far bigger.
WHEN I HEADED home to Alaska, Roman came to the airport to see me off. He grabbed my black duffel full of boating gear from the rental car’s trunk, threw it on his shoulders, and hauled it to the terminal. As we made our way to the check-in counter, he told me about his plans to head overland to Brazil. He would start with a trip into Mexico’s Sierra Madre to see millions of butterflies roosting in tall pine trees—nearly the entire population of monarchs overwintering at the end of their migration. There were guided tours available, but, he said, “I’m going to find the monarchs on my own.”
That a boy—chip off the old block, I thought, grinning. He’d been raised on trips of independent discovery where we used our wits, knowledge, and experience to explore the natural world. It was good to see him continuing those kinds of adventures on his own.
He set my bag down at the check-in counter and spoke to the attendant in Spanish. He turned toward me and I told him, “Good luck, Roman. Have fun. Be safe and stay in touch. Mom and me will want to hear about those butterflies and everything else.”
“I will.”
I pulled him in for a hug. “I love you, Son.”
“I love you, too, Dad.” He smiled and I turned for the gate to head home, happy to have spent this time with him in wild nature and looking forward to what his next adventures would be.
Part II
El Petén
Triangles are mountains, squares are regions, bullets are locations, the diamond symbol is a beach, and the white line is the Patuca River.
Courtesy of the author
The M-shaped route. Bullets indicate place names in the text.
Courtesy of the author
Chapter 14
Mexico
Dry forest, Guatemala, April 2014.
Courtesy of the author
After we said good-bye at the Veracruz airport, Roman stayed in Mexico. He climbed its highest peak—Orizaba—the first week in February, then searched out the overwintering monarch butterflies in the Sierra Madre soon after. Peggy and I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, until Todd posted a YouTube video of our trip. Roman replied-all with one word: “Bitchin.” He lamented sending his boat home with me.
I really miss my boat. Theres been a bunch of stuff that would have been great with a packraft, and Guatemala and Honduras are full of rivers. Costa Rica and Colombia, too. Should have sent the tent back with you and kept the raft. I met a German who was traveling around with his parapent. Hes up in Michoacan flying right now.
As Roman traveled farther south, he emailed us more frequently, apologizing for the typos and absence of apostrophes in emails written on Spanish keyboards. I was teaching full-time, writing research reports, and working on a remodel and insulation project in our attic. Hearing from him brightened my busy days as he described the places he went, the people he met, and the foods he enjoyed.
The night before Roman’s twenty-seventh birthday, on the west coast of Mexico at an off-beat beach town in Chiapas, a thief stole his iPhone, buried beneath dirty laundry and toiletries in his blue Kelty tent. Because texts and international calls were too expensive, he rarely used the phone except for Internet, music, and occasional photos. He didn’t notice it was missing until morning. He emailed me immediately to cancel his account before any charges were made. I cringed knowing a thief had robbed him on his birthday. Roman would not replace his phone.
Roman had bought a pack to replace the one stolen in Veracruz and returned Brad Meiklejohn’s to him by mail. Roman complained that his new Mexican pack—stuffed with his tent
, cookpot, Jetboil stove, cold-weather gear for climbing, and a yellow waffle-surfaced sleeping pad strapped to the back—made him a mark for hucksters. As he traveled south, he would use it for storage at hostels when he went off to climb volcanoes and canyons. On those excursions, he carried a small yellow duffel bag over his shoulder bike-messenger-style. Our friend Forrest McCarthy had marked the bag with his name and Jackson Hole address and given it to us years before.
Roman was disappointed with camping in Mexico. It was overpopulated, polluted, and dusty. He had enjoyed clean drinkable water in wilderness all of his life. But in Mexico, he wrote, “the water needs to be treated, and everything is downstream of something you dont want on you.” Between the thieves and the “cow shit everywhere,” he’d had enough of Mexico.
“What’s next?” I wrote back, curious and excited to keep track of his adventures. He said he planned to continue overland through Latin America, maybe as far as Brazil for the World Cup in July. There would be volcanos and jungles in Guatemala, the Blue Hole in Belize. Then, on to Honduras, cheap, but also one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America. He planned to surf Nicaragua’s Pacific waves, visit Corcovado in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru. His itinerary sounded adventurous, but I worried for him, too, in countries known for their desperate conditions and crime. He closed his email with Love you guys, thanks for teaching me important life skills. It was the kind of admission all parents yearn to hear from their offspring.
EVEN THOUGH ROMAN had studied Spanish through high school and taken the immersive month-long course in Mexico at sixteen, he struggled with rural Mexicans’ thick accents. Still, his command of the language improved as he went:
My spanish is good enough now that I can order a banano liquado [a fruit drink] at a cafe, be told there are no bananas, ask if I get bananas they’ll make one, leave the cafe, realize I dont know where to buy bananas, ask a nearby shop owner where I can buy bananas, get directions, buy the bananas, return to the cafe, and negotiate a lower price for my liquado.
Roman seemed surprised in his ability to navigate and remember places and people, skills he had not noticed in himself before: it’s kind of funny, ’cause I’ve spent so much time following you around, Dad, with your innate sense of direction . . . that it’s really just been a failure to pay attention.
He described tricks he had learned. He made it a point to walk through a town to get a feel for its layout in his muscles and bones and to watch for street signs, mileage markers, and landmarks when on public transport—a challenge for passengers who don’t need the kind of engagement that drivers do. With Latin American cities and towns mostly aligned north-south, Roman learned to triangulate his position using nearby mountains or tall buildings as cardinal landmarks. He found that locals willingly offered directions but mysteriously resisted using street names: I have no idea why they don’t just say 22 and 6 instead of “go left, one block, then right, four more blocks, and across from that thing.” I was encouraged that he was discovering how to travel and honored that he shared his discoveries with me.
Because Alaska’s wilderness rarely has marked or maintained footpaths, Roman and I had usually followed trails made by moose, bear, and caribou. To find and follow their routes takes a sixth sense developed through experience. Just like following game trails, Roman wrote, people trails and streets have a similar intuitiveness. He found when climbing volcanos that the widest trail was usually the right one to the summit. It was good to see that all those miles he had dogged behind me in Alaska were helping him elsewhere, too.
While Roman found physically negotiating the towns and countryside simple enough, there was a darker side to navigating Latin America, too. Almost every gringo he spoke to who had lived in Latin America was forced to leave after a year or two, due to local hostility or pervasive corruption. One woman, who had lived twelve months in Belize, told him he would be safest if he hired guides for explorations. But while guided tours were safe, even cheap, he wrote, they weren’t as fun as solving his own geographic puzzles. To climb Orizaba, the tallest mountain in Mexico, he researched online for a week, then headed up alone while trailing some locals who carried ropes and ice axes. He wrote that in the Sierra Madre:
Finding the butterflies was super fun, as I had no idea where they were. I reasoned that the butterflies were up high, so I navigated towards the highest mountain along a myriad of forest paths. Going up, I figured that the biggest path with the most horse crap would be the tourist path. And it worked perfectly.
I wasn’t surprised Roman eschewed guides. After twenty-five years of travel with him, I could count on one hand the number of times we’d used them—a night walk in Australia looking for tree kangaroos; scuba diving; on a wildlife-watching tour from an eco-lodge in Borneo; in Bhutan where all foreigners must be guided.
Following Orizaba, Roman climbed more volcanoes, including Tacaná, a 13,800-foot mountain that straddles the Mexico-Guatemala border. Because alpinism had been both so addictive and dangerous for me, I had purposefully resisted introducing it to him. But climbing volcanos is, in essence, uphill hiking at high altitude without the objective hazards of falling rock, ice, or snow—or the subjective ones of falling off a cornice or into a crevasse.
A French traveler had recommended Tacaná and suggested Roman hire a guide to do it, probably because land mines from previous conflicts were rumored to booby-trap its slopes. Roman ignored his advice. Instead he asked a hotel desk clerk about the route while near the base of the volcano in Mexico, bought water, chips, cookies, and chocolate, then caught a colectivo (the cheap minivan used by locals as transport all over Latin America) at dawn that took him to the end of the road. There he followed the obvious trail leading up.
As on nearly all of Central America’s mountains, campesinos farm Tacaná’s slopes, where they grow potatoes and beans and graze cattle and goats. Near villages, the trail braided out confusingly and he asked the friendly villagers where to go. Their Spanish directions led him over the border into a clean, Guatemalan village. Next, he followed goat trails marked by little cloven hoofprints. He climbed higher into the clouds, where, with limited visibility, he scrambled over boulders and wandered through tall pines filled with birdsong. Unlike rural Mexico, there was no trash, and little sign of humans. “It was nice to feel alone for a little while and the white-out clouds obscured the myriad villages below,” he wrote. “The air was fresh, too, above the perennial smog that hangs over Latin America.”
By the time he reached the summit cone, a thunderstorm hastened the arrival of night. His headlamp beam bounced uselessly against the mist, so he picked his way down in the fog and darkness without it, unsure where he’d arrive—Mexico or Guatemala—at bottom. With farmers in bed at sundown, there was no one around to ask for directions.
Luckily, I’ve followed Roman Dial around the wilderness all my life, so my instincts led me to the right place. I missed the last colectivo, but caught a crowded taxi. Driving was terrifying, since the same problem with my headlamp was 100-fold with the headlights. Three of us hung out the windows in the rain and clouds shouting “Derecha! Derecha!! Izquerda!” to keep from going over a cliff.
The next day he bought a pound of local Chiapas coffee for 50 pesos—about $2.50—loaded it in his pack and left Mexico for good. He entered Guatemala with his clothes smelling like the fresh grounds: “Amazing,” he wrote. Guatemala, Roman surmised, was “a legitimate Third World country,” recalling how Indonesia, rural Malaysia, and Bhutan had felt, sounded, and smelled. Stories of robbery and murder, he said in an email, gave Guatemala an edgy feel.
Roman soon set out to tackle the highest mountain between Mexico’s Orizaba and Colombia’s Andes: Guatemala’s 13,845-foot Tajumulco. To increase the challenge—and hence the reward—he decided to skip even the Internet and guidebooks. He wouldn’t ask any Frenchies, he emailed, but just ask locals, as a good way to sharpen his language skills. His plan was to navigate the rural confusion of dirt roads, trails, and farmlan
ds with just his wits and his Spanish. It would be a different sort of hard and risky, he said. And more like true exploration, I thought.
Chapter 15
Guatemala
With friends, San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, March 2014.
Courtesy of the author
After his almost three months of traveling alone and translating for others, Roman’s conversational Spanish edged toward proficient. Knowing only that the closest town to Tajumulco was San Marcos, he befriended an old cowboy campesino who showed him where to catch the bus. In San Marcos, he asked for directions from a group of middle-aged women. With his mother’s cheekbones and heart-melting smile, he had good luck with this demographic. “Plus,” he said, “they had great directions.”
Roman found his smile went a long way in Guatemala, especially with the Maya. The Maya reminded him of the Malays in Borneo. They were short-statured, friendly, and smiley, with no outward aggression—except the Maya seemed more willing to thieve than the Malays. Thieves or not, it was clear from his emails during his seven months of travel that he preferred Guatemala over all the other countries he visited.
Near Tajumulco, he jumped in a cab with five locals. Dropped off at a hotel, he went to the desk where three “tittering little girls” and a teenage boy checked him in. Roman tried to pry information from them about the climb, but couldn’t understand their directions. Then the children’s charismatic father appeared and in “tourist” Spanish gave “spectacular directions” (which I made him repeat about a dozen times).