The Adventurer's Son(17)
“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.