The Adventurer's Son(28)

Roman’s friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers later reached out to us. Their emails and conversations helped us to see what kind of man he had become, beyond our family’s perspective. As one of his friends wrote, After Vince was gone, the emptiness settled in. Roman seemed to maintain the vibrancy of that atmosphere we had all shared with each other, his exuberance, and I was so thankful for that. Another elaborated on a gift Roman brought her from Bhutan:

It was after Vince’s death that Roman opened his heart to me in a way I had not experienced previously. He was cooking dinner and he had a gift for me. When I arrived, he pulled me aside, and he placed a set of prayer flags in my hands. He looked me straight in the eyes, and said, “I owe you an apology and have for many years.”

While Roman had a tender side—nursing me to health once in a Bornean hotel while I recovered from a tropical fever—he also had a cynical one. As a graduate student at APU, he’d made friends with a group of students who’d go on to medical school and other professions. In a touching email to Peggy and me, a friend named Don Haering described him:

. . . an unusually intelligent and interesting character. I loved interacting with him, as nearly everything he said was thought-provoking in some way. He was the type of person who made me think carefully before I spoke, as I knew that he would probably have a well-informed question or response. Not only was he usually the smartest person in the room, I think he made everyone around him a little bit better too. In class, or any group discussion, he had a way of listening quietly and letting the conversation play out, before delivering a comment or response that was always on point, and which often completely reframed the dialog. It was a little skill of his that I came to anticipate, enjoy, and which I still attempt to emulate. Whenever I spoke with Roman personally, I always had the sense that he was amused by the world around him, like there was humor in every situation, even the mundane. In that way, as well as his obvious sense of general curiosity towards the world, I felt that he was a kindred spirit. I feel fortunate that we crossed paths.

Don’s moving character sketch confirmed how Peggy and I had hoped Roman would turn out: informed, influential, equipped with a sense of humor. It satisfied me that even the smart kids saw him as a role model.

Don was also going pretty easy on Roman: “reframing the dialog” often meant challenging disagreement. Roman sometimes found me a bit too sentimentally liberal, for instance. But for all of us in the Dial household, the actual differences in our opinions are less of a problem than our similarities in the way we disagree: disagreements often escalate, but subside just as quickly. Nobody holds a grudge for long.

In 2012, when Roman and I walked out after searching Bhutan’s Himalaya for the Tibetan ice worm, we followed a trail that led to a remote village called Laya, perched in a picturesque valley pushed hard against the Tibetan border. At the time, Laya’s two-story stone and wood homes were off the grid and days from the road system in a wilderness where people lived.

Leaving Laya, we encountered laborers and horses ferrying power poles and spools of cable. I complained that the arrival of electricity would kill the village’s charm. Roman accused me of projecting my sentimentality onto people who deserved the convenience of electrical power. I responded it would dilute their culture. He retorted it was up to them, not us. For miles, we each stammered in frustration as emotion eclipsed logic, each of us clinging stubbornly to our side of the argument.

All fathers readily see their foibles reflected in their sons, and there, plain as day, were mine.





Chapter 13


Big Banana


Twenty-footer, Rio Alseseca, Veracruz, Mexico, January 2014.

Courtesy of Todd Tumolo



Roman dated Katelyn, another APU student, in 2012. Working with her on a project to estimate small mammal abundance near Anchorage, Roman taught her techniques he had learned during his previous field seasons up north. A year later, when his computer simulations of isopod evolution didn’t converge on a solution, he decided he needed a break.

He settled on heading east to visit college friends, followed by a bicycle tour through Kentucky’s bourbon country, then a long-term sojourn through Latin America. In October 2013, with his student loans paid off, $15,000 in savings, plans to spend Christmas with Brad, and enough Spanish to travel to South America, he told Katelyn he was breaking off their relationship. They remained close, though, and she joined him in Mexico for some packrafting and Maya ruin exploration in early January 2014. Shortly after she headed home, I met up with Roman in Veracruz, a state in eastern Mexico, to packraft with him and a handful of our Alaskan friends. We both looked forward to doing the kind of things we’d been doing together for decades.

Roman greeted me at the Veracruz airport. He was a month shy of twenty-seven. He had gone a few weeks without shaving and his new beard accentuated the lean angle of his jaw. He certainly had his mother’s good looks and the scruffiness didn’t hide them.

Roman was up for some whitewater adventure on what’s been called the “best bedrock” in North America. Kayakers come from around the world for Veracruz’s steep, polished gorges, vertical waterfalls, and tumbling cascades. We were eager to go paddling, but first we had to get something to eat.

I rented a car and we drove off into the coastal city of Veracruz looking for good Mexican food, maybe some carne asada tacos, or “street meat” as he liked to call it. He was excited. We hadn’t seen each other for months and had a lot of catching up to do. He told me what he’d been doing, where he’d been, about his travels with Katelyn across the Yucatán. His words poured out. The son of a noisy father, he tended to be quiet, so when he spoke, I wanted to hear all that he had to say. Besides, we’d soon pick up two more boating buddies, including my good friend from Alaska, Brad Meiklejohn, who’s my age. When they showed up, Roman would listen more than talk.