The Adventurer's Son(31)
As Roman traveled farther south, he emailed us more frequently, apologizing for the typos and absence of apostrophes in emails written on Spanish keyboards. I was teaching full-time, writing research reports, and working on a remodel and insulation project in our attic. Hearing from him brightened my busy days as he described the places he went, the people he met, and the foods he enjoyed.
The night before Roman’s twenty-seventh birthday, on the west coast of Mexico at an off-beat beach town in Chiapas, a thief stole his iPhone, buried beneath dirty laundry and toiletries in his blue Kelty tent. Because texts and international calls were too expensive, he rarely used the phone except for Internet, music, and occasional photos. He didn’t notice it was missing until morning. He emailed me immediately to cancel his account before any charges were made. I cringed knowing a thief had robbed him on his birthday. Roman would not replace his phone.
Roman had bought a pack to replace the one stolen in Veracruz and returned Brad Meiklejohn’s to him by mail. Roman complained that his new Mexican pack—stuffed with his tent, cookpot, Jetboil stove, cold-weather gear for climbing, and a yellow waffle-surfaced sleeping pad strapped to the back—made him a mark for hucksters. As he traveled south, he would use it for storage at hostels when he went off to climb volcanoes and canyons. On those excursions, he carried a small yellow duffel bag over his shoulder bike-messenger-style. Our friend Forrest McCarthy had marked the bag with his name and Jackson Hole address and given it to us years before.
Roman was disappointed with camping in Mexico. It was overpopulated, polluted, and dusty. He had enjoyed clean drinkable water in wilderness all of his life. But in Mexico, he wrote, “the water needs to be treated, and everything is downstream of something you dont want on you.” Between the thieves and the “cow shit everywhere,” he’d had enough of Mexico.
“What’s next?” I wrote back, curious and excited to keep track of his adventures. He said he planned to continue overland through Latin America, maybe as far as Brazil for the World Cup in July. There would be volcanos and jungles in Guatemala, the Blue Hole in Belize. Then, on to Honduras, cheap, but also one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America. He planned to surf Nicaragua’s Pacific waves, visit Corcovado in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru. His itinerary sounded adventurous, but I worried for him, too, in countries known for their desperate conditions and crime. He closed his email with Love you guys, thanks for teaching me important life skills. It was the kind of admission all parents yearn to hear from their offspring.
EVEN THOUGH ROMAN had studied Spanish through high school and taken the immersive month-long course in Mexico at sixteen, he struggled with rural Mexicans’ thick accents. Still, his command of the language improved as he went:
My spanish is good enough now that I can order a banano liquado [a fruit drink] at a cafe, be told there are no bananas, ask if I get bananas they’ll make one, leave the cafe, realize I dont know where to buy bananas, ask a nearby shop owner where I can buy bananas, get directions, buy the bananas, return to the cafe, and negotiate a lower price for my liquado.
Roman seemed surprised in his ability to navigate and remember places and people, skills he had not noticed in himself before: it’s kind of funny, ’cause I’ve spent so much time following you around, Dad, with your innate sense of direction . . . that it’s really just been a failure to pay attention.
He described tricks he had learned. He made it a point to walk through a town to get a feel for its layout in his muscles and bones and to watch for street signs, mileage markers, and landmarks when on public transport—a challenge for passengers who don’t need the kind of engagement that drivers do. With Latin American cities and towns mostly aligned north-south, Roman learned to triangulate his position using nearby mountains or tall buildings as cardinal landmarks. He found that locals willingly offered directions but mysteriously resisted using street names: I have no idea why they don’t just say 22 and 6 instead of “go left, one block, then right, four more blocks, and across from that thing.” I was encouraged that he was discovering how to travel and honored that he shared his discoveries with me.
Because Alaska’s wilderness rarely has marked or maintained footpaths, Roman and I had usually followed trails made by moose, bear, and caribou. To find and follow their routes takes a sixth sense developed through experience. Just like following game trails, Roman wrote, people trails and streets have a similar intuitiveness. He found when climbing volcanos that the widest trail was usually the right one to the summit. It was good to see that all those miles he had dogged behind me in Alaska were helping him elsewhere, too.
While Roman found physically negotiating the towns and countryside simple enough, there was a darker side to navigating Latin America, too. Almost every gringo he spoke to who had lived in Latin America was forced to leave after a year or two, due to local hostility or pervasive corruption. One woman, who had lived twelve months in Belize, told him he would be safest if he hired guides for explorations. But while guided tours were safe, even cheap, he wrote, they weren’t as fun as solving his own geographic puzzles. To climb Orizaba, the tallest mountain in Mexico, he researched online for a week, then headed up alone while trailing some locals who carried ropes and ice axes. He wrote that in the Sierra Madre:
Finding the butterflies was super fun, as I had no idea where they were. I reasoned that the butterflies were up high, so I navigated towards the highest mountain along a myriad of forest paths. Going up, I figured that the biggest path with the most horse crap would be the tourist path. And it worked perfectly.