by Roman Dial
Back in Anchorage a few weeks later, we held a memorial for Roman on the winter solstice, December 21, 2016. He had often thrown summer solstice parties for his friends, with food, bonfires, wrestling, and storytelling. During the short daylight hours before people arrived, I shoveled and cleared snow, positioning four fifty-five-gallon burn barrels. Peggy handed Jazz and her cousins big earth-toned Christmas ornaments to hang from trees in the yard. I lit the barrels’ firewood and friends arranged icy luminaries lit by candles that cast a golden glow across the snow. We had thawed twenty pounds of moose meat and two sockeye salmon to barbecue on our grill. Friends brought dishes that they arranged on tables overflowing with food in the living room. Our home was warm and crowded and felt full of love.
Using a friend’s plasma torch, I had cut out images and symbols on the burn barrels. The cutouts of DNA helices, moose, insects, bicycles, and Dungeons & Dragons motifs glowed brightly in the darkness of Alaska’s shortest day of the year. The barrels were hot and threw their welcomed heat at eighty of us gathered round under the cold, clear night sky of winter. Then, one friend or family member after another came forward to tell stories about Roman, stories from twenty-seven years of an adventurous, affectionate, and fulfilling life. Some stories made us cry. Most made us laugh. They all reminded us of the love we had for him and the love he had given us. It felt good to have brought him home, to share in the memory of his life with family and friends.
After the memorial, when everyone else had left and only family remained, I asked Jazz, “How do you think it went?”
She thought for a minute and said, “It was really good, Dad. Roman would have approved.”
The year after Roman disappeared, Jazz moved in across the street from us. It was reassuring to have her there, to be family and close. While Jazz had always liked to remind us that she was the only normal one in the family, she had been raised with travel and nature, too, but after the Harding Icefield, she had called it quits with outdoor adventures that didn’t include Peggy. The two have always been close and now with our adult daughter across the street, they shopped for each other at Costco, swapped fall jackets and winter coats, and talked and texted daily.
We ate dinner together frequently, me barbecuing moose to Jazz’s liking on the grill that she’d bought me for Father’s Day. “I want some of that finger meat,” she’d say, requesting the gristle and tendon that came thick with red meat I trimmed from the “guest cuts.” Salted with rub and chewy, finger meat requires that you hold it by hand while pulling the meat free with your teeth, like a piping hot piece of jerky but juicy. Jazz had helped cut and wrap the moose when I returned home from the hunt.
While Peggy and I had been away in Costa Rica for weeks at a time, Jazz took care of our house and yard, watering the grass and Peggy’s greenhouse plants, checking in after a big earthquake had rocked south-central Alaska. She is reliable and capable, and we are proud of her. She’d been promoted from office manager to comptroller, earning a raise at the place that she’d worked for five years. The couple who owned the business liked her so much that they paid for her MBA, too. I had taught both our kids a year of calculus at APU when they were in high school. Helping Jazz with statistics for her business classes satisfied me and she seemed to enjoy the time together, too, typing code into her computer on our kitchen table.
Our family felt so much smaller, like a body missing a limb, but it felt just as close as it had ever been. Maybe closer.
IN THE YEARS following Roman’s disappearance, I made a number of short day trips around Anchorage, mostly whitewater paddling. Home from the Darién Gap, I packrafted the Grand Canyon with Brad, Ganey, Steve, and another close friend who’d been in Veracruz. The trip had been a welcome diversion from my heartbreaking inability to find my son. Six years earlier, Roman, Gordy, and I had also packrafted the Grand Canyon, an experience that was heavy in my heart during this trip, just six months after his last email. Paddling the big rapids or joking with my companions was a healthy distraction. But when our boats drifted apart, leaving me alone below the red rock walls, deep in the inner gorge’s calmer pools, melancholy crept in as I confronted the time Roman and I had spent there.
Since first moving to Fairbanks as a teenager, I have lost many friends to adventure. But the pain of losing Roman has gone far, far deeper, deeper than any pain I have ever felt, physical or otherwise. During the two years of searching, I couldn’t bear to be alone with my thoughts, which always circled back to what might have happened to Roman and what I could have done somewhere, sometime, somehow in his life to have prevented his disappearance.
Even little things in my past could somehow warp into a cause. The questions I asked myself in Costa Rica—Was I responsible? Would I have raised him differently? Had I paid close enough attention? Had I been too selfish?—are questions I still wrestle with, and perhaps always will. But I know that, like the four most famous lines in Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam, A.H.H.,” the bond we had was better to have than not. Would I have raised Roman the same way knowing that he would die on a path I led him along? The answer is obvious but the question unfair. We never know the future. There was no single moment in Roman’s upbringing that can be traced forward to his death, no chain of events, no cause and effect. Accidents happen. Time has passed, and while these questions no longer crowd my heart, they linger.
Eventually I did manage a solo trip, my first since his disappearance. I have never been much of a soloist, although I have made trips alone over the years. In September of 2017, I went to Nuuk, Greenland, its capital, for a scientific conference at which Ganey and I would both give talks related to his thesis research. Arriving early, I took my packraft and went out for a few days by myself.
I paddled with the tides through Greenland’s coastal fjords, a magical, stark landscape I’d never seen before. Flocks of eider ducks dove under the water in unison when my boat was too close. Overhead a peregrine falcon chased a huge deep-winged white-tailed eagle, bigger than any Alaskan raptor. A raucous group of eight young ravens followed me in my boat for an hour. One carried a sea urchin in its bill. The bird dropped the echinoderm to break and eat it, solving the mystery of how all the sea urchin shells had made it so far up on the hillsides I had walked across for two days.
Greenland in September felt a bit emptier of life than Alaska’s arctic, but the going was easy enough and I had ample time to reflect, surrounded by barren tundra and the fjords’ calm seas. Of course, I thought often of Roman. He had loved sea-kayaking the bays of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Greenland’s fjords and arctic tundra would have piqued his interest instantly. He would have offered a sharp analysis, brimming with comparisons to the Alaskan waterways he knew and loved, both as an explorer and as a scientist.
It was easier now than in the previous three years, to be somewhere new without him, but it was still painful, like a bruise that doesn’t heal, perpetually tender to touch. There was so much I wanted to tell him, things about the indigenous Greenlandic people of Nuuk, or the ravens that followed me, or the thousand other little details I drifted past.
I wished he’d been just an email away to share the new facts I’d learned at the conference on polar and arctic microbes. He would have found the red-colored bacteria that nucleate hailstones fascinating, the organisms that live in the salty brine of the ice pack improbable. A critical piece of Ganey’s experiment had been Roman’s suggestion. And he had been with the Japanese, Jazz, and me on the Harding Icefield looking for red snow, half his short lifetime before.
Roman and I were so close. Paddling alone in a wilderness he would have loved, I discovered that I was slowly learning to live with this chronic injury set deep in my soul. As I paddled farther into the Arctic, thoughts of him invaded every crevice of my life. They still do, where they germinate and grow like dropped seeds.
Acknowledgments
A handful of writers were invaluable in organizing my writing, particularly Michael Wejchert in several chapters of Par
t I. His skill in selecting nuggets from my stream-of-consciousness recollections and ferreting out confusion allowed me to rewrite my old stories coherently, accurately, and truthfully. He was an excellent coach and structural editor for Part II. Our discussions in my office encouraged my way forward in Part III, most of which I’d written while in Costa Rica, Panama, Alaska, and D.C. as events unfolded. I am grateful to the young writer for his advice. He was the book’s first reader and particularly adept at helping me see what was missing.
From the beginning, David Roberts has been the driving force behind my book. For decades he has encouraged me to write a memoir, but it wasn’t until my son went missing that I needed to tell a story at book length. By sheer happenstance we encountered one another in a remote Arizona canyon along the Mexican border in March 2017. At first, I thought Roberts—dressed in khaki shorts and a floppy sun hat—was just another springtime birdwatcher. Drawing closer, I saw through the willows it was he and Sharon balancing on boulders, picking their way upstream on a research expedition for yet another of his wonderful books.
Roberts invited Peggy and me to dinner in Tucson and later to the Airbnb that he and Sharon were renting. Over a bottle of merlot, he convinced me I needed to write this book. Given the auspicious serendipity of our encounter midstream along a desert creek bottom, Peggy insisted I move forward. I soon set to writing in earnest. Roberts read early drafts, reviewed grammar, and like a psychoanalyst pushed me to explore uncomfortable memories where important themes dwell.
I’d also like to thank two Alaska Pacific University faculty for each reading an early draft: David Onofrychuk and Mei Mei Evans. Like Michael, David was particularly adept at encouraging me to write more clearly and succinctly, pointing out redundancies and narrative side trips. As parents and writers, David and Mei Mei also forced me to confront the heart of this book. I am fortunate to have colleagues like them who take time to help me.
Gordy Vernon is another writer I admire and respect. Michael usually asked for more words, more sentences, more paragraphs; Gordy less. Jon Krakauer offered support and structural suggestions. I appreciate his advice. Michael, David, Gordy, and Mei Mei all made suggestions that chaffed me at first and I let them know. But in the end, I followed (almost always) their advice. Maybe I owe them my apologies as well as my thanks.
Peter Hubbard, my editor at William Morrow, has been a true pleasure since the moment I met him. His fifteen years at HarperCollins show and he has been insightful, helpful, and gentle. It would be wonderful to work with him again. Nick Amphlett took care of the many necessary details to make this a book. I appreciate the work they put into publication, going so far as to have the copyedited manuscript airdropped to me in the Brooks Range wilderness.
My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, went far beyond what I would expect any agent to do. With his team, including Laura Usselman and Aemilia Phillips, he helped me arrive at a place where my notebooks, stories, and ideas became this book. I am especially grateful to Stuart for having faith in me, given the early words I provided.
Without Peggy’s support this book would simply have been impossible. Not only did she encourage me to write, but she sacrificed her time to support me while I did. She literally took care of me during the months I did nothing but write from when I woke to when I slept. Our daughter, Jazz Dial, too, supported my efforts. Without these two I would be lost.
Friends and family who read early drafts and caught typos, provided comments, and recalibrated my recollections include: Peggy, Jazz, Steve and Maureen Haagenson, Linda Griffith, Tamara Dial, Lauren Cleaver, Thai Verzone, Brad Meiklejohn, Dick Griffith, Carl Tobin, Chris Flowers, Jon Underwood, Nancy Brady, Paul Twardock, and Michael Martin.
This book is dedicated to the family, friends, friends of friends, former and current APU students, U.S. and Costa Rican officials, acquaintances, miners, rangers, Cruz Rojas volunteers, OIJ, U.S. Embassy, FBI, TIJAT and its contractors, and even strangers who came forward to help us and support us physically, financially, emotionally, and spiritually. All of them helped Peggy and me find Roman.
About the Author
ROMAN DIAL is a pioneering American adventurer and a professor of mathematics and biology at Alaska Pacific University. “Renowned for audacious feats in mountaineering, ice climbing, rafting, and grueling backcountry endurance races,” writes National Geographic, “Roman is a mythic figure.” A former National Geographic Explorer, he received his Ph.D. from Standford University and lives in Anchorage.
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Copyright
“Sleeping in the Forest” is from Twelve Moons by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted with the permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.
THE ADVENTURER’S SON. Copyright © 2020 by Roman Dial. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Catherine Casalino
Cover photograph © Brent Olson / Aurora Photos / Getty Images
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-287662-1
Version 01172020
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-287660-7
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