The Adventurer's Son

by Roman Dial

  Somehow, Roman slept through it all and the tent remained intact.

  The next day, clear skies revealed a peculiar landscape of corduroy-textured green domes and coarse black cliffs. Tall grass reached to Roman’s waist and pulsed in traveling waves up and over the summits of the surrounding hills. Bundled in his one-piece Patagonia suit with its hood pulled over his hat, he marched onward, waving his red mittens in time with his steps.

  We passed a herd of forty piebald reindeer milling about on a low divide, then descended to camp at Hot Springs Cove on a Bering Sea beach. Grass crept up and over dunes of black sand. Waterfalls spilled from high cliffs, but the wind blew their discharge upward against the laws of gravity.

  Roman wanted a fire. It would be tough to get it going, but what kind of outdoor father would I be not to start one? With dry grass, driftwood, and persistence, we built a campfire behind the dunes, pressing ourselves together and next to its dry warmth. My boy poked at the burning driftwood with a stick, keeping the flames alive and cheery.

  “What’s fire, Dad?” he asked.

  I thought for a minute, searching for truth in simplicity. “Trees make wood by gluing parts of air and water together with sunshine. When the wood burns, the sunshine comes back out as fire and the water and air go up in smoke.”

  He looked at my face for some hint of jest, then turned to study the coals.

  “Is that why fire makes light? It’s sunshine?”

  “Yep. And the water comes out as steam. That makes the smoke gray.”

  The night passed calm and clear, the morning hot. We dried our gear and relaxed on the warm black sand.

  By the third day of hiking, Roman didn’t complain about sore feet or tired legs. Bundled in his pile clothes and one-piece suit, he trod along, looking for strawberries, blueberries, and sweet nagoon berries to pop in his mouth. He’d pick up interesting rocks and hollow grass stems that he called straws and piped between his lips. I felt a parental profoundness in simply watching him engage so purely as a child with his creative attraction to nature.

  The weather held—windy, but never cold or wet.

  Climbing out of Hot Springs Cove was steep, yet Roman managed it well. Our family day hikes up gentle mountains near Anchorage had prepared him for climbs like this. As we descended the other side, we could see puffs of steam rising near Geyser Bight Creek.

  “Look at that, Roman!” I called, trying out his new name.

  A miniature Yellowstone, the geyser basin was sized just right for a six-year-old. Knee-high geysers gushed over limey aprons, their discharge spilling as hot little waterfalls into the creek. Fumaroles roared, mud pots plopped. Even here, five miles from either coast, we could hear the ocean waves crashing. Recheshnoi, draped in small glaciers and broad snowfields, rose above the marshy valley.

  One hot spring—a deep indigo at the bottom with a pool of blue rimmed in a rainbow of green, yellow, and orange—held a pile of reindeer bones.

  “What happened to the reindeer, Dad?”

  “He probably got too close in the wintertime and fell in,” I guessed, thinking back to bison bones in Yellowstone.

  “Why would he get close in winter? To stay warm?”

  “Maybe, or maybe because the snow was deep everywhere else except here.”

  I told Roman that people name hot springs and geysers. He dubbed the hot-spring “Caribou Stew,” chanting the rhyme as he tossed in a rock.

  Wet meadows filled the valley between thermal features. We camped on a low spongy dome where water oozed through the tent floor, warmed by the basin’s thermal activity. “Feel this, Roman,” I offered, my hand pressed against the tent floor.

  His eyes lit up. “It’s warm.”

  Dry in sleep clothes, we scrunched together on our overlapping foam pads. Perched there, I read three chapters of Charlotte’s Web aloud. Roman studied Garth Williams’s illustrations and searched the text for words he recognized. We reclined on our sleeping bags and pushed ourselves close to share the book and our love.

  On the fourth day, we walked hand in hand up a Roman-sized babbling brook that splashed over rough, hardened black lava. He asked questions that six-year-olds ask to make sense of their ever-expanding world. He made analogies involving Legos and reminisced more about Jazz than about Peggy. Apparently, one parent could replace the other, but a parent couldn’t replace a sibling. He talked about kids at school, like Vincent Brady, who would be a lifelong friend, and the things that they’d done together.

  As we neared a pass that led back to the Pacific side, the landscape went lunar. We were both taken by the otherworldliness of the place, with its rugged black rocks, sand and gravel, the total lack of plant life. The scene ignited our imaginations and we slipped into role playing as explorers on another world.

  “Captain,” I asked, inspired by the barrenness, “where are we?”

  “On another planet,” he answered, jumping into the game without pause.

  “Be careful, Captain,” I went on, encouraging him. “There might be monsters here.”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I’m your sergeant. You command me.”

  There were space hazards everywhere. My pack carried oxygen that we shared when the Captain ran low as he battled aliens. Asteroids fell around us but our wind-shells-turned-space-suits protected us in an extraterrestrial universe. Roman led us onward, incorporating the ground we covered in our role-playing fantasy.

  Two hours off Earth went by quickly, easing the difficult terrain.

  Once over the pass, we stumbled across a long stretch of rubbly ‘a‘a, the Hawaiians’ word for sharp and broken, clinker-like lava. Whenever it was especially rough, Roman slipped into space captain mode, his imagination lightening his challenges. Eventually, small patches of plant life reappeared, then green carpets of heather and dwarf willows. We walked along tiny beaded streams that snaked through low-growing gardens of wildflowers. There were occasional shallow caves, too, at the base of short lava cliffs.

  A bit nervously, Cody Roman peered into a stream that disappeared as it went subterranean.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” I asked.

  “Nah, I don’t like it. It’s dangerous,” Space Captain said. “C’mon, Sergeant.”

  Arriving at the Pacific beaches relieved me. Injuring myself was my greatest fear. Falling on the ‘a‘a and breaking a leg seemed a real possibility as I labored under a fifty-pound load of food, camping gear, and clothes for us both. In order to keep the trip more enjoyable for him, young Roman carried no pack.

  Sometimes, when Roman’s feet hurt, I put him on my shoulders, doubling the weight that I carried. There’d been very few carries that day, thanks largely to the Captain’s active explorations and battles with aliens. It had been our longest, hardest, and highest day yet. The setting sun cast long shadows and a warm glow across Recheshnoi.

  The next day broke sunny, without a breath of wind, but so many mosquitoes! We could see why. The cattle were as thick as the bugs. We hiked along the coast to distance ourselves from the lone bulls who tore at the dirt with their hooves and threw dust over their backs with long pointy horns. I kept the .44 handy.

  Sea lions croaked and puffins dove beyond the surf line. Alongshore, Roman delighted in feeding the green tentacles of sea anemones with small creatures he caught and named, like “dinglehoppers” and “jumping jacks.” He wanted to catch a salmon, but we saw none in the streams, including the knee-deep, glacier-fed river that had repulsed the cowboys. We camped near it to get an early crossing when it would be lowest. The cowboys must have been here after a big rain. I crossed it first with my pack; then carried Roman. It was easy.

  Along the coast we walked over lava reefs, uncovered by the low tide and teeming with life. Isopods—ancient, trilobite-looking relatives of shrimp the size of my thumb—crawled so slowly across blades of brown kelp that they hardly seemed to move. Years later in graduate school, Roman would study the geography of these creatures’ genetics—a sign, pe
rhaps, of how deeply our first “big trip” had touched him.

  WE WERE CAMPED fifteen miles from Nikolski. Mist arrived with morning, burying Umnak in fog. We broke camp in wind and rain on our last and longest day of the walk. I pulled out the compass, showing Roman how to read it. “Press the compass to your chest and keep it level,” I instructed, looping its lanyard over his head. “Now turn your body to put the red arrow in the red shed and when it’s in there, keep it there by walking straight.”

  The day passed gray and dull, with visibility limited to fifty yards and fewer. The wind whipped our faces with the draw cords from our rain jacket hoods. Cody Roman worked his imagination, naming the hills we climbed, names I didn’t record in my journal with so little time to write each night. His feet hurt more in bad weather than good, so I took to longer carries. “Son,” I asked at one point, “can you walk a while? My back hurts.”

  “Sure, Dad.” He slipped off my shoulders, lightening my load by half, taking my hand as we walked side by side. An hour or two later, out ahead leading the way with the compass, he stopped and asked, “Dad, can you carry me? My feet hurt.”

  “Sure, Rome, let’s take a break first.” Clothes sticky with sweat under rain gear, we collapsed on my pack. Resting there, sheltered from the wind by tall grass, he chewed on a strip of jerky, then unwrapped a yellow Starburst candy, his favorite.

  When we finally reached Nikolski, the weather broke. The Islands of Four Mountains—green, perfect cones striped in snow—rose from a deep dark sea like art on a Japanese scroll. Whale bones and skiffs rested outside the homes of Nikolski’s three dozen villagers. Orange fishing floats hung under the eaves of their weathered wood houses. A hundred yards up the beach from the surf, bleached white logs traced the power and reach of winter storms. There weren’t any forests for a thousand miles.

  We found Scott Kerr, the guide who’d given us the tent-pole splint. In his warm little house, we felt free from the elements at last.

  News spreads quickly in rural Alaskan villages, especially about six-year-old boys who walk sixty miles. A weathered old Aleut in a Carhartt jacket named Simeon Peter Pletnikoff dropped by Scott’s place. During World War Two, nearly all Aleuts, or Unangan as they call themselves, had been forcibly removed by the U.S. government. “Aleut Pete” had been allowed to stay and help fight because he was such a talented outdoorsman who knew the Aleutians well. As one of a motley army squad known as Castner’s Cutthroats, he fought against the Japanese soldiers who had invaded his island chain.

  Aleut Pete sat down and cupped his hands around a mug of coffee. Round glasses on high cheekbones suggested a gentle wisdom. He raised his eyebrows, smiling. “Well, aren’t you a strong little fella? Not many people who aren’t Unangan have walked across Umnak. Were you scared?”

  “Sometimes,” Roman admitted, “like when the wind blew our tent down. Or when the bulls were ripping up the dirt with their feet. Or when the geysers went too big. But look what I found!” Roman opened his hand, revealing an orange-colored agate. “A volcano made this!”

  In his other hand, he held a polished black rock, smooth and round as a ball bearing. “And this one, too. I found it by the river where we camped. And my dad found a glass ball in the seaweed! And big, big barnacles that came from a whale’s back!”

  Aleut Pete sat back, his smile widening at the young boy’s enthusiasm. Then he reached into the pockets of his Carhartt jacket and pulled out a glass ball from a Japanese fishing boat and a sea lion’s canine.

  “Here you go, little hiker. Something to remember from Umnak.”

  After the visit with Aleut Pete, Kerr led us to Nikolski’s deserted school and let us in. We spread our things on the carpeted floor and felt grateful to sleep someplace other than a damp, flapping tent. I hoped the scheduled flight from Dutch would get us straightaway so Roman could return to his sister and mom. Instead, as often happens in bush Alaska, we waited for the weather to clear. We waited a week.

  The first night in the school, cozy in our sleeping bags, I felt pleased with my young son’s performance over the previous week. There’d been no complaining from the curious and imaginative six-year-old, asked to walk all day, every day, for a week. “Roman, you’re a good hiker,” I praised, “and a strong one, too. Jazzy and Mom are going to be very impressed with you.”

  We had averaged one mile an hour, eight hours a day, making twelve and fifteen miles the last two days. But the numbers didn’t matter. We’d grown close. Roman had learned about nature and about himself, how to deal with discomfort, wind, and rain, walking day after day. I’d learned how to pace, care, and sacrifice for my son.

  Maybe it was too soon, but I asked anyway. “Roman, did you like this six-day trip? Would you want to do one again?”

  “Yeah, Dad, it was okay. But let’s bring Mom and Jazzy next time.”

  “Okay. We will,” I promised, smiling at the thought of a Dial family adventure.

  “Now. Can we finish Charlotte’s Web?” he asked.

  We pushed ourselves together to read the final chapters and fell asleep contented, trip partners for life.

  Chapter 9

  Borneo

  Draco, Malaysian Borneo, 1995.

  Courtesy of the author

  In the heat and humidity of the equatorial night, Peggy and I lay naked, unable to touch. Outside our open hut, tree frogs piped incessantly while katydids sawed and cicadas buzzed, a cacophony pierced by the screeches and hoots from an inky blackness. We were careful not to press against the flimsy mesh of the tent-like mosquito net that protected us from Borneo’s biting insects and the diseases they might carry. The kids, now six and eight, slumbered under their own mosquito net in a bed next to ours.

  We were in Bako National Park on Asia’s largest island. Bako was meant to be a warm-up for Gunung Palung National Park, or “GP,” where we planned to spend a month. GP is a roadless Indonesian wilderness of rainforests, mountains, swamps, and rivers. Its sole structures then were a small collection of tin-roofed open-air huts set deep in the jungle, reached only by dugout canoe. The primitive Cabang Panti (“Cha-bong Pon-tee”) Research Station served as base camp for the scientist or two working there at any given time. A network of trails and incredible wildlife, not yet discovered by National Geographic, provided a glimpse of tropical rainforest perhaps unmatched in the world. I had visited GP the year before and left a changed man.

  “Indonesia is a lot more primitive than this,” I told Peggy. “Nobody speaks English. There’s malaria, dengue, hookworm. I’m not sure we should go, really. I’m worried about the kids.”

  Peggy turned to me. “We’ve come this far. We’re close. Your pictures from last year make it look amazing. We can protect the kids. And you know where to go and how to get there. I think we should do it.”

  TROPICAL RAINFORESTS IN Asia, Africa, and South America have long fascinated scientists and laymen alike with their stunning, overwhelming array of life. Straddling the equator, Borneo’s tropical rainforest supports a higher-order biodiversity than any other on Earth. As in the Amazon, there is a dizzying array of small and tiny fantastical creatures that fill every square inch of rich, green plant life. But Borneo’s rainforests are twice as tall as those in South America: Borneo’s dipterocarp trees grow as high as redwoods. The world’s largest flower, Rafflesia, three feet across and smelling of rotten meat, lives there, too. Lianas—woody vines as big around as pine trees—hang from buttressed trees. Gourd-shaped carnivorous pitcher plants called nepenthes grow in spectacular diversity, with some specializing in catching bird droppings, some trapping rats and frogs, and others, with a more prosaic diet, feeding simply on ants and flies.

  Unlike South American jungles, where there are few large animals of any kind, Borneo has pygmy forest elephants, dwarf rhinos, even wild forest cattle called banteng, and like the Amazon, it has big cats and small. But while the New World tropics have only the familiar white-tailed deer, Borneo has five species, ranging from the rabbit-sized mouse dee
r to the elk-sized sambar. The strange, fanged muntjac deer even barks like a dog. Besides eight varieties of monkeys, there are primitive primates, too, including the fist-sized tarsier that snatches insects with its alien-looking hands and the nocturnal slow loris, a small bear-shaped fruit eater. Best known are Borneo’s lesser and greater apes: the acrobatic gibbon and the 150-pound orangutan. Less famous are its dozen kinds of “flying” squirrels, flying lemurs, flying lizards, flying frogs, and even flying snakes, all of which glide from tree to tree. These wonders and more live on an island half the size of Alaska. Visiting Borneo is like going to another planet.

  My first trip followed an invitation from Tim Laman, then a graduate student at Harvard. We had met at an international canopy conference and with mutual interests in science, adventure, and documentary photography we hit it off immediately. A tall, mustachioed redhead, Tim studied strangler figs in Borneo’s forest canopy and when he suggested we climb strangler figs together at his research site in GP, I jumped at the chance. Tim faxed me directions from a faded Xerox copy. It took me ten days in December to get from Anchorage to Cabang Panti by way of a malarial village called Teluk Melano. From Melano, I hired two locals to paddle a dugout sampan canoe to meet Tim at GP. As two young canopy scientists at the beginning of our careers, we climbed trees, took photos, and recorded observations in the forests, mountains, and swamps. We woke every morning to the delightful whoops of serenading gibbon families. We watched orangutans hang upside down by their hand-like feet feeding for hours on wild durian, then we tried the delicious fruit ourselves. And of course, we picked hundreds of terrestrial leeches from our clothes and sometimes—plump with blood—from our skin. While a nuisance, those bloodsuckers didn’t deter us from going out day after day in search of wonders.

  That trip and the time I spent with Tim provided the most dazzling tropical experience of my life. The entire forest was fruiting—hundreds of species of trees, lianas, and herbs—during an infrequent and irregular mast event, alive with more different kinds of vertebrates and invertebrates than I’d ever seen anywhere. A highlight was a night spent one hundred and eighty feet up in a fruiting dipterocarp, my hammock suspended over a crow’s-nest-like orchid epiphyte encircling the trunk and fully ten feet across with dozens of hand-sized blossoms pollinated by thumb-sized bumblebees. That night, dew fell but no rain. At dawn, the rising sun melted away diaphanous mist clinging to rainforest giants. Awakened by the lion-like roar of a big male orangutan, I knew that Peggy and the kids had to experience Borneo.