The Adventurer's Son(88)
After the memorial, when everyone else had left and only family remained, I asked Jazz, “How do you think it went?”
She thought for a minute and said, “It was really good, Dad. Roman would have approved.”
The year after Roman disappeared, Jazz moved in across the street from us. It was reassuring to have her there, to be family and close. While Jazz had always liked to remind us that she was the only normal one in the family, she had been raised with travel and nature, too, but after the Harding Icefield, she had called it quits with outdoor adventures that didn’t include Peggy. The two have always been close and now with our adult daughter across the street, they shopped for each other at Costco, swapped fall jackets and winter coats, and talked and texted daily.
We ate dinner together frequently, me barbecuing moose to Jazz’s liking on the grill that she’d bought me for Father’s Day. “I want some of that finger meat,” she’d say, requesting the gristle and tendon that came thick with red meat I trimmed from the “guest cuts.” Salted with rub and chewy, finger meat requires that you hold it by hand while pulling the meat free with your teeth, like a piping hot piece of jerky but juicy. Jazz had helped cut and wrap the moose when I returned home from the hunt.
While Peggy and I had been away in Costa Rica for weeks at a time, Jazz took care of our house and yard, watering the grass and Peggy’s greenhouse plants, checking in after a big earthquake had rocked south-central Alaska. She is reliable and capable, and we are proud of her. She’d been promoted from office manager to comptroller, earning a raise at the place that she’d worked for five years. The couple who owned the business liked her so much that they paid for her MBA, too. I had taught both our kids a year of calculus at APU when they were in high school. Helping Jazz with statistics for her business classes satisfied me and she seemed to enjoy the time together, too, typing code into her computer on our kitchen table.
Our family felt so much smaller, like a body missing a limb, but it felt just as close as it had ever been. Maybe closer.
IN THE YEARS following Roman’s disappearance, I made a number of short day trips around Anchorage, mostly whitewater paddling. Home from the Darién Gap, I packrafted the Grand Canyon with Brad, Ganey, Steve, and another close friend who’d been in Veracruz. The trip had been a welcome diversion from my heartbreaking inability to find my son. Six years earlier, Roman, Gordy, and I had also packrafted the Grand Canyon, an experience that was heavy in my heart during this trip, just six months after his last email. Paddling the big rapids or joking with my companions was a healthy distraction. But when our boats drifted apart, leaving me alone below the red rock walls, deep in the inner gorge’s calmer pools, melancholy crept in as I confronted the time Roman and I had spent there.
Since first moving to Fairbanks as a teenager, I have lost many friends to adventure. But the pain of losing Roman has gone far, far deeper, deeper than any pain I have ever felt, physical or otherwise. During the two years of searching, I couldn’t bear to be alone with my thoughts, which always circled back to what might have happened to Roman and what I could have done somewhere, sometime, somehow in his life to have prevented his disappearance.
Even little things in my past could somehow warp into a cause. The questions I asked myself in Costa Rica—Was I responsible? Would I have raised him differently? Had I paid close enough attention? Had I been too selfish?—are questions I still wrestle with, and perhaps always will. But I know that, like the four most famous lines in Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam, A.H.H.,” the bond we had was better to have than not. Would I have raised Roman the same way knowing that he would die on a path I led him along? The answer is obvious but the question unfair. We never know the future. There was no single moment in Roman’s upbringing that can be traced forward to his death, no chain of events, no cause and effect. Accidents happen. Time has passed, and while these questions no longer crowd my heart, they linger.
Eventually I did manage a solo trip, my first since his disappearance. I have never been much of a soloist, although I have made trips alone over the years. In September of 2017, I went to Nuuk, Greenland, its capital, for a scientific conference at which Ganey and I would both give talks related to his thesis research. Arriving early, I took my packraft and went out for a few days by myself.
I paddled with the tides through Greenland’s coastal fjords, a magical, stark landscape I’d never seen before. Flocks of eider ducks dove under the water in unison when my boat was too close. Overhead a peregrine falcon chased a huge deep-winged white-tailed eagle, bigger than any Alaskan raptor. A raucous group of eight young ravens followed me in my boat for an hour. One carried a sea urchin in its bill. The bird dropped the echinoderm to break and eat it, solving the mystery of how all the sea urchin shells had made it so far up on the hillsides I had walked across for two days.
Greenland in September felt a bit emptier of life than Alaska’s arctic, but the going was easy enough and I had ample time to reflect, surrounded by barren tundra and the fjords’ calm seas. Of course, I thought often of Roman. He had loved sea-kayaking the bays of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Greenland’s fjords and arctic tundra would have piqued his interest instantly. He would have offered a sharp analysis, brimming with comparisons to the Alaskan waterways he knew and loved, both as an explorer and as a scientist.
It was easier now than in the previous three years, to be somewhere new without him, but it was still painful, like a bruise that doesn’t heal, perpetually tender to touch. There was so much I wanted to tell him, things about the indigenous Greenlandic people of Nuuk, or the ravens that followed me, or the thousand other little details I drifted past.