The Adventurer's Son

by Roman Dial

  Hungry after a long day, Roman asked where he could find food. “The bossiest little girl took me to the house next door and asked the grandmother there to make dinner.” As he waited, three little boys grilled him in Spanish about everything, which, he said, was fun. Over the course of the meal, the entire extended family trickled in. An older brother had spent eight years in the States, so he and Roman traded stories, each practicing their second language on the other.

  Roman easily made it up Tajulmuco’s straightforward route to the top, but was disheartened to find the mountain’s forests overgrazed by goats, its trails littered in trash, and the summit views obscured by cloud. He had approached and reached the summit using nothing more than his Spanish language skills in gritty, rural Guatemala. That was the fun part. As parents, Peggy and I admired Roman for this creative approach to travel in the Internet age. He went beyond securing transport, food, and lodging in a foreign land. He relied on his command of a foreign tongue and his ability to interact with strangers to find his way.

  Roman was as thrifty abroad as he was at home. Equipped with local knowledge about prices, he bargained before committing to any purchase. “Money talks, loudly, in Guatemala,” he wrote, where budget travel made him less of a target. He traveled for a spell with a British woman whose parents were Scottish, observing that “She is exceptionally stingy. Which is great, because we can practice our Spanish negotiating prices.”

  Peggy emailed him about making friends. He described the budget travelers who wanted to do things, but who were too intimidated without a guide and too cheap to hire one. He enjoyed playing the role of trip leader for these newfound friends and described his approach in detail: First, it was important to be friendly: “Hey, let’s go get food.” Next, inclusive: “Hi there, you’ve been here a month, how do I do this, what’s it cost?” Then offer a suggestion: “I hear there’re free salsa lessons tonight, want to go?” or a bit of advice: “Here’s how you climb X on your own, but you might not get as good a view without doing a tour package that leaves earlier because of clouds.” Now, set the hook with an invitation: “Want to go to the hot-springs tomorrow? It’s easy and safe.” Finally, lead them there and escalate: “Hey, the hot-springs were fun, weren’t they? How about climbing a volcano? It has a sacred lake in the crater surrounded by Mayan shrines. No, we won’t need a guide. We can just go there and ask some people.”

  It sounded like Roman was far from a lone wolf on a solo adventure. One traveler he met—who wrote us later—remembered how helpful he had been to her:

  Roman was always so knowledgeable when he was showing me around or translating for me and I will always remember how cunning and strong he is and all of the valuable lessons he taught me. . . . He took me under his wing and took care of me since I was traveling alone in Guatemala, and as I have told him, I will be forever grateful for crossing paths.

  BY MID-MARCH, AFTER he had spent a week or so around Guatemala’s Lake Atitlan, climbing volcanos and visiting hot springs, Roman planned to head for Tikal, the ancient Maya’s most iconic ruin. There he’d talk to people about El Petén, the biggest Latin American wilderness north of Panama and full of Mayan ruins. He identified his next adventure there in northern Guatemala near its borders with Mexico and Belize.

  “Dad,” he wrote me in mid-March 2014, “there’s an undeveloped Mayan ruin 63 km into the jungle. Everything I’ve found says get a guide and mules because there’s no freshwater and carrying water that far is impossible.” At eight pounds a gallon and one gallon a day, Roman couldn’t carry much. He’d be too heavy and slow. Apparently five thousand people do the trek a year, so he wasn’t worried about pathfinding without maps: “If I get lost I just turn around and follow my blazes out. What do you think? Hump 12L out and see what drinking swamp water is like? No good, head back?”

  I was flattered he asked my opinion and pleased to see his evaluation of the risks. While we had spent months in rainforests in Asia, Australia, and Central America, other than a week-long walk across Corcovado when he was eleven, we had generally stayed at research stations, where we slept in huts or base-camp tents and made day hikes in search of animals and plants.

  Our self-propelled camping adventures, where we moved by foot, boat, bike, or ski across a hundred miles or more, had been mostly in temperate, boreal, and arctic landscapes. He could certainly boil water for drinking as we had at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and across cattle lands in Mexico and Australia. Unfortunately, fuel for his Jetboil stove had been difficult to find. But because it was the dry season, he said, fires wouldn’t be “equatorially hard” to start, a nod to his experience with 100 percent humidity and daily afternoon rains at the center of the Earth’s tropical regions on the equator.

  Roman admitted that safety from criminals was his biggest concern. Like most of the world’s international borders that are largely wilderness, El Petén has its share of bandits, hostile locals resentful of outsiders, and narcos transporting Colombian cocaine to Mexico. Even tourism could be dangerous. He met one young traveler who had witnessed a “tourism cartel” send armed men with guns to chase down tourists and ensure that they hired the “right” coopertiva guides. Guiding was a big source of cash for the rural economy; nearby narco traffic and access to weapons, apparently, had encouraged its criminality.

  He had asked for my advice, so I wrote back. If thousands of people did the trek each year, he wouldn’t really be alone.

  I expect that you’d be able to find fresh water—there’s no way to carry enough. I like your walk in with two gallons. If you find none the first night you have enough to walk out. Ideally you find water coming out of limestone cenotes [sinkholes]. If it’s moving and there’s no trash or people around, it’ll be pretty good. Otherwise boil some at night in camp, let it cool and carry it the next day. Boiling swamp water is OK. I am pretty sure you will find water.

  My email reminded him about tinadizole, the one-pill treatment for giardia that we would buy in developing countries where giardia and dysentary are common.

  I’d say go for it, I wrote in closing.

  But two weeks later his plan had changed. Now he described a new route, much longer and far more remote. He’d be gone ten days. He lacked a good map of the area’s “thin jungle trails” and would follow them with little more than a compass and his wits. I shared his apprehension:

  I expect I’ll spend a couple days out there, eat a snake, get scared, and turn around. If all else fails, I can always just walk south and hit a road. The distances here are quite small. Honestly, I’m more worried about dealing with the tourism cartel on the mule track from Carmelita to El Mirador than I am of getting lost in the woods.

  Roman had designed a tent for his trek, bought material, and had a Guatemalan child sew it together. He looked forward to seeing how his design would work. I’m also pretty excited about getting to use a machete, he wrote. He promised to update me once more before he left and to leave his plans with a local ex-pat in the nearby town of El Remate. But reading and rereading the email describing his new plans, my lips tightened. Ten days? Thin trails? No map?

  I OPENED GOOGLE Earth and searched for the place names he’d listed. Uaxactun and El Mirador—both in El Petén—looked far off the “Gringo Trail” of popular tourist destinations. I zoomed in. Flat, featureless forest stretched like a green Berber carpet in every direction. I panned around. Other than a handful of brown patches that looked like wetlands to avoid, there was nothing to help guide a hiker. There were no mountains, no rivers, no pastures, no visible roads or trails. It also looked far from Uaxactun to El Mirador—and empty.

  I Googled images of El Petén: flat jungle with ancient Mayan buildings, their steps climbing far above adjacent forest trees. A Wikipedia map confirmed that the northern borderlands of El Petén are desolate. Roman’s planned route was in the center of the largest area of rainforest left in Central America: seven million acres, covering parts of Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize.

  I started
picking apart his email, composing a response. He needed to know that a map wouldn’t be much help without topography, rivers, or trails. He needed to be reminded to watch out for the most dangerous snakes in the Americas: the fer-de-lance that kills more people than any other and the bushmaster, an aggressive viper that can grow to ten feet long.

  I wrote one email, then another, and another—several. They all said, No, don’t do it! or, Do this, it’s safer. Each one I deleted, struggling to warn but not discourage him. While he was my son, at twenty-seven he was also his own man, capable, experienced, careful.

  Roman, that way to El Mirador from the west, from Carmelita, looks better. I don’t think you should go from Uaxactun. It looks too remote and without a GPS it’ll be really hard to know where you are and not get disoriented in the flat karst jungle. Maybe you can find somebody to go with you. It looks like a long ways and it’s really remote. Remember that guy we met who was out with a friend in Peru and he got bit by a bushmaster? The friend died before they could get help. I don’t think you should go the way you’ve planned. It seems too dangerous.

  I can’t send this. He knows what he’s up against. He speaks Spanish. He’s young. It’s his trip and he’s there because of me. I’ve always resented people who warned me off my plans with “No, it’s too dangerous” or “No, it’s impossible” or “No, do this instead.” Roman even joined me on many of those trips. How can I deny him his own adventure? Shouldn’t I feel satisfaction he’s adventuring instead of fear?

  I deleted the discouraging email and wrote instead:

  Be careful with the machete. Clumsy me almost cut off my toe once when it went through the shoe, the sock and into the toe. Also watch for the snakes that sit and wait, motionless, hard to see. Don’t want to step on a fer-de-lance or the other big bad aggressive one, bushmaster! And thanks for thinking of your safety. So is your plan to essentially look for trails heading NW from Uaxactun? Off trail jungle walking can get pretty disorienting.

  Dad

  I pushed send and hoped his trip would go well.

  What else can I do?

  Chapter 16

  El Petén

  Volcano climbing, Guatemala, March 2014.

  Courtesy of the author

  Roman had dug into the Internet to uncover an ambitious M-shaped route through El Petén. A traveler named Frenchfrog described the route on an online forum: “[It] is almost impossible to do it by yourself unless you have been trained by the Marines or Navy SEALs and you have a perfect knowledge of the jungle, how to find your way.” Frenchfrog added, “This is the best adventure I had of all my adventures,” but warned, “You must be very careful otherwise you can be easily lost.”

  In an email to me on the day that he left, Roman described the M’s three legs. The easternmost portion started on an unmarked jeep track that weaved below the jungle canopy to Dos Lagunas ranger station. The route then continued northwest on seldom used trails to the most remote Mayan site of all, Naactun (pronounced “Nash-toon”), near the Mexican border. The middle of the M dipped twenty miles to another ancient city, Nakbe, ten miles from El Mirador—Roman’s “undeveloped Maya ruin in the jungle.” The final leg led to the road at Carmelita, which Roman hoped to reach after dark to avoid its armed tourism cartel. To navigate the M, he would use only a compass, a crude sketch map, and his Spanish.

  While Roman was on his traverse, I finished my attic remodel and treated his absence like that of any other adventurer who left me with the responsibility of taking action should they not return by their out-date.

  An out-date is the day that we adventurers request a loved one, friend, or some other responsible person to initiate a search to find us, should they not have heard from us by then. In Alaska, this means contacting the Alaska State Troopers, the U.S. Air Force’s Pararescue “PJs,” the pilot who flew us into the wilderness, or the local mountain rescue team. Besides an out-date, we provide our destinations and route descriptions; the colors of our shelter, pack, raft, and clothing; and any general information that would aid them in a search for us. We strive to be responsible for ourselves and our actions. If we need help, we want our helpers to find us and bring us home.

  Roman emailed me his M-shaped route description with an out-date: April 18. If he had not yet emailed me by that day, then I would initiate search and rescue. Tomorrow I am heading to el remate to try and leave details with a gringo guide so you guys have contact info in case I go missing, he wrote. El Remate is the jumping-off point for Tikal. The guide was an older American expat named Lou Simonich.

  Ten days later on April 16, two days before his out-date, Roman emailed three sentences: 200km in Guatemala’s wildest jungle, only lost for two days. I’ll write you more later. Have to find accommodation and wash gear.

  It was a relief to hear from him. The full story came the next day. I read it twice, then forwarded it to my own dad and a dozen friends who had watched Roman grow up and done trips with us both. I wanted them to read in his own voice what he had accomplished.

  Roman explained why he’d written the six thousand words: There’s a lot of stuff I want to record, to see how I remember it right now and how I’ll remember it later, and because if I give the brief summary, it sounds not only super badass, but kind of foolhardy. It wasn’t really either of those things, just walking for 8 days and asking people where to go.

  Before he set off, Roman had spent the night with Lou. A guide and experienced jungle trekker himself, Lou cautioned Roman against telling locals his full plan. Like Umnak’s cowboys twenty years before, they would raise an eyebrow at a gringo who took the long way to El Mirador alone. The two stayed up late studying maps and watching Quentin Tarantino movies.

  In the morning, Roman helped Lou bake bread. He sharpened his machete and packed away a hand-sketched map of his route. Lou drove Roman to Tikal, where he caught a bus to Uaxactun, a ruin at the end of a dirt road. He camped there for the night. Lou’s advice not to mention anything about El Mirador was good, Roman noted, as the reception I got from the locals was to discourage me walking there.

  Anticipating the jungle to be hot, and looking to save weight in order to carry water, Roman had left his sleeping bag and extra clothes behind with Lou. Carrying only his jungle clothes and big Mexican pack for insulation, he would sleep cold most nights of his trek. Chilled and stiff hours before dawn, he’d wake to the lion-like roar of howler monkeys, climb out of the backpack he’d pulled to his waist like a bivy sack for warmth, then spark a fire in the dark and hunker over it while boiling the day’s drinking water.

  He left Uaxactun at dawn following directions he didn’t know were bad, checking his compass and sketch map relentlessly as he passed side trail after side trail. Eventually, he left the rolling wet hills of karst and entered dry, flat scrublands with an overstory of short palms. The road straightened out. A gallon into his water reserves he came to his first aguada, or water hole, next to a well-used campsite. He stopped there and boiled up a gallon in the afternoon heat.

  It might seem ironic that Roman saw the crux of his rainforest crossing as water, but it was the dry season on an enormous limestone shelf, porous as a brick of Swiss cheese. Frenchfrog himself had run out of water mid-trek.

  Water wasn’t his only concern though. Being alone in a foreign wilderness left him nervous. Traffic on the jeep trail could include narcos, thieves, or belligerent locals, as well as friendly campesinos, archaeologists, rangers, and even tourists. His apprehension increased as a guy with a long gun slung over his shoulder zoomed by on a motorcycle.

  I could barely return his bemused greeting, Roman wrote, as my eyes were fixed on the firearm. It was old and rusty and looked like a break-barrel 16-gauge. Not a narco weapon, but a poacher’s. He was smiling when he went past, though. Roman relaxed but not for long. As dusk settled, he upset two huge birds in the dark. The pair erupted in honking, clumsy flight, startling him. From his description they sounded like long-necked, long-legged, turkey-looking guans.

>   On his second morning, he woke cold, boiled water from the aguada, and left before the sun had risen. Despite his heavy load, his feet felt fresh, his spirits high. At dawn, warm, welcome light spilled into the forest—then something crashed out of the brush and onto the trail.

  Before I could register that the barking, charging blur was a terrified wild pig and not a ferocious feral dog, my machete was out and pointing in the right direction. Later, a puma stepped into view, looked at him, then loped down the trail and slipped back into the forest. I didn’t pull my machete out that time, he said.

  Besides the big animals with teeth, there were lesser creatures that could also bite. Roman nearly stepped on a couple of snakes camouflaged among the dry season’s leaf litter. One long one—stretched halfway across the jeep track—rattled its tail in the leaves and enticed him as a potential meal. I started looking around for a stick, he wrote, as six feet of snake would make a good dinner. But I think it realized my intentions and slunk off into the underbrush.

  Roman continued northwest on a lesser-used track mentioned by Frenchfrog. He hoped to bypass the Dos Lagunas ranger station by heading more directly to Naactun through the jungle. As the side track braided, he applied his volcano-climbing rule and followed the best-used tracks headed toward his destination, confident with his route finding: “Marching merrily along, avoiding bullhorn acacia [a small tree protected by painful stinging ants] and spiny climbing palm, I’m thinking about how well my trip is going, and if this is jungle travel, you sure as hell don’t need to be a Navy Seal.”

  But soon the track thinned and he trail-blazed trees with his machete to ensure his return on what now alternated between game trail, dry creek bed, and impenetrable bracken, a tropical fern that grows in tangled thickets five to ten feet high. It can take hours to make a hundred yards through the stuff.

  After fighting his way through one such thicket, he found he’d lost the trail. It was midafternoon. He set down his pack to scout beyond the dry creek in wetter, taller jungle with a head-high understory of dwarf palms. Intrigued by a 150-foot hill, he climbed it but lost his way on the descent: everything looks the same in the jungle, and the forest’s multilayered canopy blocks the sun’s use as a navigational handrail. Disoriented and a little freaked out by how quickly the uniformly green landscape had swallowed his trail, he was relieved to stumble back to his pack.