The Adventurer's Son(13)

READING THE WALL Street Journal one night, I found an unbeatable airfare bargain. For the same price we’d pay to fly from San Francisco to Fairbanks, we could fly round trip from San Francisco to Australia. “Let’s go!” exclaimed Peggy, the stay-at-home wife of a grad student pauper. A coupon clipper and smart shopper, she is always on the lookout for deals. “It’s like paying for a ticket to Alaska—where we have to go anyway—and flying to Australia for free!” The frequent-flyer miles we would earn by flying to Australia and back would get us round trip from California to Fairbanks, where we went each year to maintain our Alaska residency. As Alaska residents, we were entitled to certain benefits, like no-interest student loans and the State’s Permanent Fund Dividend, an annual payout to each resident in lieu of an income tax.

With the research in Puerto Rico complete, we flew to San Francisco, left the ropes and data at Stanford, and continued westward to Sydney. From Sydney, we flew across Australia to Perth on the Indian Ocean. In Perth we rented a car to drive north to the tropics of Western Australia. Most parents would hesitate to jump into an economy-sized car for a month-long, 1,500-mile road trip with their four-and two-year-old children. But we’d had no car for almost a year. The simple novelty of being in one kept the kids entertained. Besides, there was something new and exciting to see nearly every hour in “Oz,” slang for Australians’ homeland.

Oz’s west coast looked like California’s and Baja’s between Santa Cruz and Cabo San Lucas, but without the corners, cliffs, and traffic. Northward from Perth, tall eucalyptus forest gave way to Australian chaparral, savanna grassland, then desert, and finally tropical woodland. When we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, twelve time zones from where we had lived in Puerto Rico near the Tropic of Cancer, we had come exactly halfway around the world.

We drove deeper into the Outback with its red dirt and clouds of annoying bush flies, pushing onward through the Great Sandy Desert. The desert’s dunes spilled into the Indian Ocean at Eighty Mile Beach. Here we beachcombed for intricate, colorful seashells, unlike anything we’d seen before. Cody and I found a small dead pilot whale half buried in the sand. Jazz collected dried starfish and heart urchins by the dozens. Between the city of Perth and the frontier town of Broome, we watched emus and black swans, inspected road-killed kangaroos heavier than a man and with a middle toe as long as my hand; we touched curious dolphins, snorkeled over corals on Ningaloo Reef, even rode camels along a tropical beach.

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.