by Roman Dial
Every night we tented in the Outback as a sky full of unfamiliar stars rotated into view. After dark, we cruised the roads for nocturnal wildlife. Some nights, kangaroos bounced across the pavement like basketballs on an empty court. Other nights we saw six-foot-long black-headed pythons, or caught cat-eyed geckos, once even picking up the spiny anteater called an echidna, a unique egg-laying mammal the size of a melon but poky with spines. We studied each catch in our headlamps, took its photo, then let it go safely off the road.
The next morning we would break camp and drive onward to find still more marvels: a blue-tongued skink the size of Arizona’s Gila monster and looking just as venomous, with a long, royal blue tongue lolling out in threat; a thorny devil, the Australian version of America’s horned toad; a glass snake, a legless lizard as long as my arm and named for its ability to lose a tail half its total length. We climbed into slot canyons carved from iron ore by flash floods and swam though their cool pools beneath white-barked fig trees whose roots grew plastered to red-rock walls. At sunset, feeding dry mulga sticks to a crackling campfire, we would watch flocks of hundreds of gallahs—crow-sized pink cockatoos—fly over our deserted desert camps. I couldn’t help but reflect back on pillow talk Peggy and I had shared a decade before when we fantasized about how we would raise our family: we were living those dreams here and now in Oz.
By the time we reached Fitzroy Crossing in Australia’s remote Kimberley, we’d gone feral, the kids dark in tropic tans and red dirt, their hair bleached, their bright blue eyes wild. We turned around and drove the 1,500 miles to Perth in three days, then flew home. Back on the Stanford campus, we shared our trip at slide-show potlucks, where Peggy and I listened with our friends enthralled as four-year-old Cody narrated the travelogue himself. The four of us looked forward to more family trips like our marvelous month in Oz.
THAT FALL, I began analyzing results and writing my dissertation. Expectations were high among my grad student cohort—a group that included a future winner of the MacArthur “Genius” award and others destined to be Stanford and Harvard professors. The pressure to perform was stifling. Even so, looking at my data to uncover the workings of a tropical ecosystem excited me as much as climbing a frozen waterfall unroped. Science itself, without the punishment and pettiness of peer review, still electrifies me thirty years on.
In February 1992, the year Cody turned five, a Sandvik friend called to tell us about an assistant professor position in ecology at Alaska Pacific University. After reviewing my application, the search committee invited me up. Arriving at the interview in April was a bit of an eye-opener. The brown lawns and dirty roadsides of Anchorage, littered with a winter’s worth of trash, were dreadful. APU itself seemed like a ghost town, with few students in its sixties-era buildings.
Still, Alaska was where Peggy and I had always planned to settle, a place we called home, where family and old friends lived. When the search committee offered me the job, we were thrilled. APU might not have provided much in the way of pay, but we could raise Cody and Jazz in America’s healthiest environment, with wild foods, clean air, and water. Best of all, we could share with our children the Alaskan wilderness just beyond Anchorage’s city limits. I accepted the position and we drove north from Stanford at the end of the summer.
After my first year at APU and during our first full summer back home, I set off with our son to explore Umnak, a remote Aleutian island of geysers, glaciers, and fog. We’d moved back for just this sort of experience and I was eager to get started.
Chapter 7
Umnak
Cody, sixth birthday, 1993.
Courtesy of the author
Hand in hand in late summer 1993, six-year-old Cody and I walked off a jet into wind-blown mist and brash gusts of rain. The wet air smelled of beached kelp and diesel. Round green hills of tall grass and broken cliffs rose above a bay lined with sheet-metal warehouses and filled with boats of all sizes. We’d landed in Dutch Harbor among the Aleutian Islands, far south of mainland Alaska. It felt warm for mid-August, when autumn lurks just around the corner in most of the rest of the state. Dutch seemed too small to be the richest fishing port on earth, where crab boats, trawlers, and other vessels deliver their catch for the world’s seafood markets.
Among the three hundred islands of the Aleutian chain, I had settled on Umnak—just west of Dutch Harbor—because of its geysers and history. The ruins of Fort Glenn, a secret American military base from World War Two, sprawl across one end, while the Aleut village of Nikolski nestles in a bay on the other. Between these two sites of human habitation stretches a verdant wilderness of rolling hills, black rocks, and volcanoes with tongue-twisting names like Vsevidof and Recheshnoi. Umnak’s geysers, the only ones north of Yellowstone, were the real draw, a geologic wonder I hoped to share with my son.
I wanted to walk the sixty miles from Fort Glenn to Nikolski. I’d done my homework and found the geysers on a map of Alaska’s geothermal features, then phoned an old geologist friend, Roman Motyka, for information. Motyka sent me his published journal articles describing Umnak’s thermal features in scientific detail. He said a single family lived at Fort Glenn and harvested the island’s feral cattle. Motyka also told me about a guide named Scott Kerr who’d made Nikolski his home. After talking to a half dozen people familiar with Umnak and poring over maps of the island, I sketched out a route suitable for a soon-to-be first-grader.
From Fort Glenn’s airfield we would head west along the Pacific coast, then hop over the island to the geyser basin on the Bering Sea side, then back again to follow the bases of Recheshnoi and Vsevidof along the Pacific. The ocean side, peppered with black beaches on a ragged coastline, would offer tide pools, Cody’s favored habitat for exploration and discovery. The island also felt safe from Alaska’s biggest hazards: Umnak has neither bears nor large glacial rivers.
But danger did exist there. Separating the chilly Bering Sea from the warm Pacific Ocean, the Aleutians suffer the worst weather in the world. Always windy, often rainy, mostly foggy, the archipelago is known as the birthplace of storms. While winters rarely see subzero cold, summers are cool and cloudy. Like mountaintops above the tree line, the Aleutians support no trees or shrubs over knee high.
With hypothermia a very real threat, especially for a little boy, Umnak’s weather worried me. A one-piece Gore-Tex suit over long underwear and fleece pants and sweater would seal him in from the incessant wet wind. Pulling on his orange rain pants and jacket would protect him from a driving rain. I would fuel him with his favorite snacks kept handy all day, then quickly have him change into dry clothes each night for warm sleep. Our dome-style mountain tent would shelter us from gale-force wind and rain. And by tucking a copy of Charlotte’s Web into my pack to read aloud before bed, we could bring a little of home with us to the wild.
Full protection from Umnak’s weather was key, but the remoteness itself between Nikolski and Fort Glenn was a risk. Remoteness was not unfamiliar to us. We had driven for days across the Australian Outback when we would see few other cars. As a family, we’d day-hiked in the front country and backpacked for two and three days in the backcountry, including trips with grizzly bears and glacier river crossings. Keeping Cody safe would be simpler without bears or big rivers, but we would need to avoid accidents with a careful, cautious route choice.
Peggy encouraged our journey. She knew firsthand how time spent together in the wilderness strengthens bonds and relationships. And she knew that I would be sensitive to Cody’s needs and fears—looking after him, keeping him safe. But she also voiced her concern: “What if something happens to you?”
My answer begged her question: “Peggy, what could happen? I’ll be careful.”
“You said there are wild cattle. I don’t want you guys unprotected if a bull decides to charge. You should take a gun.” I packed a .44 Magnum.
The responsibility to keep both Cody and me safe from hypothermia, drowning, animal attacks, and injuries went without saying. But beyond
safety, I wanted this trip to initiate a lifetime of shared wilderness adventures. For that, Cody needed a profound experience that he would want to repeat. Like most parents, Peggy and I replicated the positive aspects of our own parents’ child-rearing, tried to avoid the negative, and defaulted to the rest. If I wanted Cody to join me on future wild trips, then I needed to notice what interested him.
FROM THE DUTCH Harbor airport, Cody and I hopped in a taxi and met up with George Ripley, organizer of the first Wilderness Classic. At George’s house, out of the wind and rain, we talked about our trip. Our pilot, Tom Madsen, had been flying a big Japanese group of mountain climbers and their camera crew up and down the chain all summer. Every island hop needed multiple flights and there would be an empty seat the next morning. Madsen could drop us off at Fort Glenn on his way to the Islands of Four Mountains, just beyond Nikolski.
In the hangar the next day, the Aleutian guide Scott Kerr helped the Japanese team load up. We’d spoken on the phone but never met. He turned away from a mountain of gear to shake and hand me a six-inch aluminum tube, a fraction of an inch across.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A tent-pole splint. I’ve been with the Japanese for over a month and they’ve climbed five volcanoes from Unimak to Umnak. But man-o’-man, the weather can get pretty fierce out here. The wind broke poles in three of their tents. Take this, for when the wind breaks yours.”
Cody and I followed the Japanese into Madsen’s brown twin-engine Beechcraft and crawled into a back seat. A stack of duffel bags and boxes stuffed in the tail crowded my shoulders and head. Cody sat on my lap with the seat belt buckled across us both.
Madsen bounced the plane off the tarmac and into the wind, headed for Umnak. A stormy low-pressure system would move in for the next couple of days, he warned, then it would clear up for five more. The news of good weather to come relieved me. After a short, bumpy flight, we circled Fort Glenn’s airfield. The ruins of the old military base stretched across the coastal tundra near Okmok Caldera. Madsen made a tight bank into the wind, then dropped and landed on the mile-long cinder runway. Cody and I hopped out. Madsen wrestled our single sixty-pound pack from behind the seats.
The wind blew stronger here than in Dutch. None of Fort Glenn’s original structures remained intact, save those whose four corners were anchored to the tundra by cables. The rest—walls, roofs, floors—had been gutted and scattered by Umnak’s incessant, erosive winds.
A sturdy guy in his mid-fifties, along with his wife and adult son, rode out on ATVs to meet the plane. Madsen exchanged mail and greetings with Fort Glenn’s only residents, then hustled off to fly his Japanese passengers to their next destination.
As the plane taxied away, I stepped forward. “Hi there, I’m Roman Dial.”
I hoped the guy had heard of me, maybe from an article about the Wilderness Classic in the Anchorage newspaper or Alaska magazine. Name recognition can help outlandish plans seem reasonable to strangers, but his skeptical look made it clear he wondered what the hell a man with a little boy was doing on a remote Aleutian island.
“I’m Gene Maynard. This is my wife, Rene, and my son, Cloud.” I shook hands with his family while Gene bent down to Cody.
“And what’s your name, little guy?”
“I’m Roman Two,” he replied, grinning.
What? I thought, startled. Up to that moment, he had always called himself Cody. I smiled broadly, choked down a giggle, wiped an errant tear from the wind.
“Roman and Roman,” laughed Maynard. “Well, what do you know! Come on up to the house, Roman One and Roman Two.”
From that moment on, Cody Roman Dial would introduce himself as “Roman,” a name Peggy, Jazzy, and I would address him by, too. Female relatives—grandmothers, aunts, and cousins—would continue to call him “Cody,” while my dad would call him “R2” in an affectionate attempt to differentiate us. At home, Peggy addressed “her two Romans” with a subtle yet unmistakable difference in intonation.
“Jeez, what ya got in here?” Gene wheezed, throwing my pack on his three-wheeler. “Hop on.”
Gene motored us to the ranch house, one of three intact structures at Fort Glenn. The other two were his sheds next door. An inch-and-a-half-thick cable anchored his house to the turf. Inside, their place was small and cluttered, like most cabins off the road system in bush Alaska—like my grandmother’s farmhouse, for that matter.
“So.” He looked me square in the eye. “What are you doing out here? Hiking around?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Gene and his family would be our first source of help should something go wrong. He needed to know our plans. “I want to walk to Nikolski. With my son.”
“Nikolski? That’s more than fifty miles away. You sure you wanna do that?” He looked down at Cody Roman. “That’s a tough crossing. I don’t know anybody who’s made it all the way.”
The skepticism in his voice rang all too familiar: like Dieter in Yosemite or Alaskan boaters hearing about packrafts. Once, a mountaineer even bet me and my Olympic-caliber partner a thousand dollars we couldn’t ski the length of the Hayes Range in less than a week. We finished in three days.
I deflected the conversation. “How about you? What are you doing out here?”
“Oh, we’re runnin’ a cattle business. There’s a couple thousand head of cattle brought out here after World War Two. All we gotta do is get the beef off the island.” He frowned as a gust of wind shook the house. “That’s the tough part.”
“How long you been at it?”
“’Bout six years now. But thinkin’ to get out.”
He circled back. “You know, there’s a couple o’ cowboys here who took horses out toward Nikolski. But they couldn’t cross the river. Had to come back.”
“River crossing, huh? I’ve crossed some rivers,” I said, feeling compelled to display some credentials, to tell him about swimming the Skilak or shouldering mountain bikes across a dozen rivers bigger than any between Umnak and Adak. But I knew this game well, mostly from losing. The more experience I claimed, the more desperate for acceptance I sounded, the smugger he would feel as a local. I kept my mouth shut.
Gene harrumphed. “I’ll go get those guys—you oughta talk to ’em anyway.” Gene opened the door to leave and the wind charged in like a junkyard dog. Rene shouldered the door closed behind him.
As we waited, I studied a framed photo on the wall of a bronco rider with an arm outstretched and bandana flying. The cowboy had been caught midair in a packed stadium. The horse’s hooves looked six feet off the ground. “That’s Gene,” Rene volunteered. “He rode in the rodeo.” Gene Maynard had been a saddle bronc–riding champion for much of the sixties and seventies. Clearly, he, too, had balanced physical risk against emotional reward.
Gene came back with two guys around my age. They sounded Canadian.
“So, you guys rode over toward Nikolski?” I asked, engaging them in trip-sharing talk.
“Yeah. But we couldn’t make it. The river was too deep.” Their lips tightened. “You sure you want to try that with the little guy?” These cowboys were lean, fit even, but they didn’t look like the wilderness jocks who raced in the Classic and confronted crossing after crossing. Do they even know how to read rivers, how to pick a good crossing or time of day?
“Which creek was it?” I deferred, holding out my map, probing for their depth of Umnak knowledge.
“Just before Amos Bay. It’s a long ways back to here if you can’t get across. How much food you got?”
“Eight days, ten if we stretch it. Which river exactly?” The information would be valuable.
They looked at the map. One of them smeared a finger around the southeast slope of Recheshnoi where its biggest glacier fed a four-mile stream to the sea. “Here.”
A few days of incessant rain or an afternoon of sun could swell a creek like that into an uncrossable river. “Hmm. By the coast?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if we get there and it’s
too high, we’ll camp. Wait for morning when it’s lower or for the rain to let up if it’s raining. The forecast calls for good weather after a couple days.”
“How old’s your boy?”
“I’m six,” Cody Roman piped up.
Now they worked him.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s windy,” the youngster responded seriously.
The river crossing was just a proxy for their main, unspoken worry, the same as Peggy’s and the same as mine. What if something happens to me and my little boy is left on his own? How responsible is that?
Chapter 8
Space Captain
Umnak Geyser Basin camp, 1993.
Courtesy of the author
The young, newly minted Roman and I left for Nikolski. I was alone with my six-year-old on an empty Aleutian island, and doubt gnawed deeper: What if something happens to me?
Soft green tundra stretched to the base of Okmok, where clouds wrapped around black lava towers like washrags around bad plumbing. Flowers familiar from the hills above Anchorage—Indian paintbrush, monkshood, and harebells—even the swards of grass—all seemed pumped up in size, as if the Aleutian wind had inflated them.
We made camp early, before the rain soaked us, taking refuge in our roomy yellow tent. A decade of sunshine on glaciers, deserts, and tropical beaches had faded the tent fly from blue to gray. The cowboys’ questions and Scott Kerr’s story of tents torn open left the shelter looking inadequate as protection against bad weather.
Madsen’s promised storm arrived with nightfall. Its gusts came in powerful waves with unceasing rain. Three times hurricane-force blasts barreled down Okmok, rumbling like a locomotive before they hit. Each gust crashed into us, collapsing the tent and plastering wet fabric on my face. But after each blast, the tent miraculously sprang upright.
In my sleeping bag, eyes wide in the dark, terrified that a pole might break and rip the nylon fabric to leave us exposed to hypothermia, I asked myself: Why the hell did I bring him here? What kind of dad am I really?
