The Adventurer's Son(15)

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.