The Adventurer's Son(23)
Each day we’d walk the network of trails that crisscrossed the research area to explore the peat swamps and granite creeks. One day, we climbed to the top of Batu Tinggi: GP’s summit of giant boulders covered in bright green sphagnum, serpentine nepenthes, and violet-colored flowers. The cloud forest, dripping in soggy moss and lichen, was strangely silent of birdsong and surprisingly chilly. Unfortunately, it was still full of the ubiquitous leeches eager to suck our blood.
Past Batu Tinggi, I went on to recover a compass left by a GP researcher. Peggy and the kids descended without me. When I caught up with them in a pounding rain, Roman was leading. We were excited to be reunited, even if separated for only an hour or so. “Roman’s been doing a great job. He’s so brave, breaking all the spider webs for me and keeping a good pace. Sometimes the trail’s been pretty faint, but he’s kept us on track,” Peggy reported.
Roman, then eight years old, continued to lead for another hour in the rain. He only occasionally lost the trail when a fallen tree crossed it. I asked him what he liked best, what he thought was neatest about the jungle.
“The neatest thing? The neatest thing is everything!” Roman expressed the strong, innate interest in nature that nearly all young children seem to have. “I like how the jungle is never quiet. There’s always some living thing making noise.”
If Puerto Rico had initiated young Roman’s fascination with the tropics, then the four trips that he would make to Borneo as a child, teen, and young man cemented that fascination in place. A dozen other trips to tropical and subtropical Australia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Hawaii, and Bhutan would send him eventually—perhaps inevitably—to Central America for his greatest adventure of all.
Chapter 11
Jungles and Ice
Roman and Jazz, Harding Icefield, 2001.
Courtesy of the author
Most parents want to raise independent, capable offspring who still want to spend time with their family. The real test of parenting comes during adolescence, when offspring act like two-year-old toddlers in adult-sized bodies. They turn secretive, exploring nonfamily relationships that run deeper than playground friendships. Roman was typical in this regard, but fortunately he still found time for me. By his teens, our trips together had established attitudes, morals, and skills that shaped him into a useful research assistant and a competent adventure partner.
As a freshman in high school, he helped me during two months at Danum Valley Field Center in Borneo. Between three feet and two hundred feet above the ground, I dangled from ropes while handling a twenty-pound chemical “fogger” that knocked thousands of insects into collecting trays. Meanwhile, Roman learned to identify these insects from a Cambridge University graduate student named Ed Turner. Together in Danum’s air-conditioned lab, with Radiohead playing on speakers plugged into an iPod, they peered into microscopes and separated Ed’s bug samples into groups like Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and others.
Back in Anchorage, Roman assisted me with my 14,000 bugs as he had helped Ed with his. We set up dissecting microscopes across from each other on the dining room table. While hunched over scopes and our data sheets one Saturday afternoon, he said, “Looking at all these bugs and seeing all this diversity is like being back in the rainforest. Check out this praying mantis ant-mimic. It looks just like an ant!”
A few years later when the research was published, Roman would find his name in the acknowledgments of a Biotropica paper entitled “Arthropod abundance, canopy structure, and microclimate in a Bornean lowland tropical rain forest” by Ed Turner, two other Cambridge colleagues, and me. Roman and Jazz would be acknowledged in “Spatial distribution and abundance of red snow algae on the Harding Icefield, Alaska, derived from a satellite image” in Geophysical Research Letters.
The senior scientist on the snow algae paper was a Japanese scientist named Shiro Kohshima, who had studied everything from orangutans in the jungle to microbes on glaciers. He led a group of Japanese researchers up to the Harding Icefield, a 700-square-mile dome of ice in the Kenai Mountains, to study the single-celled algae that color its vast summer snowfields red. Besides red-snow algae, the scientists studied an inch-long annelid called an ice worm that feeds on the algae. The Japanese invited me along as a scientific collaborator.
My role was to collect snow algae samples and count ice worms across the Harding Icefield. I brought both kids, Roman fourteen and Jazz twelve, to ski with me. The three of us would map the red snow and count glacier ice worms on a seventy-five-mile loop during a week in August 2001.
Skiing over the Harding feels like time travel back to the Pleistocene, with ice and snow as far as the eye can see. At its center, the icefield encircles mountains known as nunataks, a Canadian Inuit word for “land surrounded by ice.” We dragged a sled full of equipment most of each day, then set up camp early, and tossed a ring-like Frisbee for fun until the ice worms came out at dusk. Then the Frisbee ring became a sampling frame for counting. In the cool of the evening, Jazz and Roman snuggled into their toasty sleeping bags inside the tent where Jazz jotted down the counts of ice worms I called out to her. We learned that the biggest populations of ice worms with a variety of sizes lived on the red-algae fields down low; higher up on the summit dome there were no worms (and no algae); in between, we found only long single worms that seemed to be moving as if on a mission. As usual, our studies generated more questions than we answered.