BOOK | The Adventurer's Son: Love, Loss and Science in the Wild

Inquisitive toddler Cody Roman Dial studies a starfish while tide-pooling with his father, Roman, on the California coast. The family traveled with Roman to points across the globe for his scientific field reseasrch. Photo: Dial Family Collection

Interview by Faith Model 

I consumed Roman Dial’s new book, The Adventurer’s Son, in a weekend. Once I picked it up, I left it only to eat, sleep, and redirect my children. As a parent, it was impossible not to feel devastated and spellbound by Dial’s account of his search for his son, Cody Roman, who disappeared in the Corcovado rainforest in Costa Rica in 2014. 

It’s hard to imagine anything more terrifying than the disappearance of a child, but the torment of following dead ends and grappling with conflicting accounts in Dial’s frantic search for his son is the stuff of nightmares. Allegations that Cody Roman was involved with a local drug dealer turned the family’s search into a house of mirrors that questioned the very character of their beloved son with whom they shared a close bond. Through it all, we follow Dial as he wrestles with the complicated and weighty matters of being human—of love, suffering, loss, and healing. It’s the best kind of book, one that creeps into your thoughts in the wee hours of the morning and urges you to examine your own journey. 

Threaded through this book, I also found a celebration of wild places, an enthusiasm for physical challenges in the wild, and a regard for scientific inquiry. Ultimately, what compels Roman Dial to explore is a drive to study and protect some of the last wilderness areas on the planet. Through masterful storytelling, Dial invites the reader into his world where it is easy to appreciate why he is such a revered scientist, adventurer and educator.

I spoke to Dial earlier this summer as he was preparing to head out with students into the Brooks Range of Alaska to study the greening of the Arctic. He is the kind of thoughtful conversationalist who inspires interest and ideas, but also makes you feel heard. I was reluctant to hang up the phone.

—Faith Model

Faith Model: Your accomplishments are many: You are a renowned adventurer—packrafting, mountaineering, biking, skiing, and endurance racing. You are also an accomplished professor of biology and mathematics at Alaska Pacific University. It sounds like you’ve made a living doing what you love. Is there a secret to figuring out how to do that?

Roman Dial: It’s not really a secret—it’s simply a willingness to give up one thing to pursue another—that and having a supportive family and network of friends. Without emotional support and human connection, it’s difficult to make dreams happen. I’ve been lucky, too, of course, yet have made a point to seek out the people willing to mentor me or to share in realizing wild ideas.

Roman Dial pack rafts the Nenana River with Paul Adkins just behind, on a summer traverse of the Alaska Range in 1996. The team’s journey was featured in National Geographic magazine the following year. Dial is renowned for his many decades of scientific exploration in Alaska’s most remote and challenging terrain, largely farthest north in the Brooks Range. Photo: Bill Hatcher

FM: Where does your motivation for adventure come from? Was there one particular event or time in your life that hooked you?

RD: It traces back to living in the city as a little kid, when I’d visit my grandmother’s farm with animals and nature nearby. My uncles took me into the woods and fields, hunting, fishing, even collecting wild honey from a hollow oak. My mom, who’d left the farm to move to Seattle, often took her younger brothers to Seattle. I think entertaining me was a way of repaying her. But surely the most momentous time was when I was nine years old and I spent the summer in Alaska with those same uncles. After that I was hooked on the outdoors. First, simply nature—animals and plants—was the outdoor appeal. But once in high school and college it became challenge, adventure, and excitement that pulled me outside.

FM: Are there any burning questions or issues that drive your projects or research?

RD: Right now, how the living landscapes of wild Alaska are changing under rapid climate change is fascinating. As America’s most pristine natural environment, with a remarkably stable economy and access to modern technology, Alaska is a fabulous place to study the interaction between a warming environment and organisms’ response to that warming. For example, there are forests moving uphill and hopping over Arctic mountain ranges during my lifetime. In just the last few decades, bushes and shrubs have colonized tundra and wetlands where they’ve been otherwise absent since before the last ice age. And the opportunity to study these phenomena with young people in wild places that I have loved and explored for over forty years is a wonderful way to mix exploration and discovery with science and teaching.

Humans have an innate drive to explore and move over the Earth. Not all of us, but maybe those of us ‘that don’t fit in…who roam the world at will,’ to paraphrase the 19th century poet, Robert Service. 

FM: You helped devise a method for traversing forest canopies with an arborist friend in Puerto Rico, tell me more about that.

RD: By the early 1990s, my friends in Alaska and I had discovered that crossing big, wild landscapes could be very satisfying. Humans have an innate drive to explore and move over the Earth. Not all of us, but maybe those of us “that don’t fit in…who roam the world at will,” to paraphrase the 19th century poet Robert Service. For some of us—scaling mountains, running rivers, crossing ice fields—is reward enough for something primal. In graduate school, I thought to apply my mountaineering skills to a research project on tropical rainforest ecology by climbing and then moving around in trees. I’d learned from an arborist friend some rope tricks and techniques and during my research in Puerto Rico, and envisioned the idea of moving across a whole forest, camping out and not coming down for an extended period of time. Afterward I learned that there was a whole tree climbing scene, but apart from Cosimo, the protagonist in Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees, nobody had tried to cross a forest from tree-top to tree-top. For a few years, myself and some big-tree climbers from northern California had a go at what we called “canopy trekking.” We invented special techniques and hardware, and even published an illustrated article titled, “Methods for horizontal movement through forest canopies” in a scientific journal. In many ways, the canopy treks we did through Borneo’s dipterocarp, Australia eucalypt, and California’s redwood and sequoia forests were among the most amazing adventures I ever had: mostly because we realized a vision of landscape movement that had neither been accomplished nor attempted. It was a satisfying form of novel exploration and discovery in the 21st century.

FM: You’ve inspired countless students, young explorers and scientists, but I wonder who inspired you? Who were your heroes growing up?

RD: Of course it began with my uncles Zinn and Brian in Alaska. Paul A. Zahl and other nature writers in National Geographic magazine fueled my pre-adolescence imagination. By the time I was in high school my heroes were the mountaineers Galen Rowell, David Roberts, and Yvon Chouinard. Then, once I moved to Alaska for college, my heroes became the local climbers in Fairbanks who made first ascents and grand traverses in the Alaska and Brooks Ranges.

It’s about the fact that being in front doesn’t make you the leader, that leading is about being sure that those you lead are well-taken care of, not left to keep up or fend for themselves.

FM: You’ve taught undergraduate and graduate students for 30 years. What are the lessons you’ve learned on your own adventures that you try to pass on to your students?

RD: That’s a great question. Right now, I’ve been leading a half dozen students in a project in the local Chugach Mountains where we hike off-trail through the forests, shrublands, and tundra  in a sort of “ground-truth trekking,” where we check out the vegetation that NASA satellites have identified as possibly changing over the last twenty years. To those students who have an interest and an aptitude for how to route-find across landscapes, I’ve been teaching the rules-of-thumb for finding and following wild animal trails and choosing what kind of vegetation is good for travel and what’s not. I try to warn and educate them about hazards through story-telling, rather than lecture. Stories that recount mishaps and near-misses from my own travels and those of my friends and companions work better than saying, “do-this.” When I do lecture, it’s about sharing and not being selfish. It’s about taking no more than you need, about not being greedy. It’s about the fact that being in front doesn’t make you the leader, that leading is about being sure that those you lead are well-taken care of, not left to keep up or fend for themselves. It’s not about what you carry in your pack, but what you leave behind that makes you skilled in wilderness travel.

FM: What do you enjoy most about teaching and mentoring students? 

RD: Their enthusiasm to learn and experience life, and to encourage that enthusiasm and to share that experience. The fact that it’s a very ancient human activity for us old, slow, gray-hairs to pass on knowledge and experience about the natural world to the young, fast and fresh. An appreciative reception can be reward enough to anyone passing on knowledge.

FM: You have accomplished a great deal in your life, what would consider your greatest achievement?

RD: Raising two kids with a woman who made me a better person.

FM: You and your wife, Peggy, included your two children—Cody Roman and Jazz—on adventures from an early age. You not only explored your home state of Alaska with them, but you brought them on extended trips to Latin America, Borneo, and Australia. Your son ultimately became one of your most cherished adventure partners. How valuable were these early experiences for your kids? And for you as parents?

Dial’s wife, Peggy, with Cody Roman and daughter Jazz on one of their frequent family trips into the Alaska wilderness—this time on the Chilkoot Trail in 1992.

RD: I think those early experiences profoundly bonded us as a family. As parents, we got to know our kids in ways we might not if we didn’t face the novel and unknown together. They also gave the kids a sense of confidence and courage to deal with the new and unfamiliar. My son became a wonderful storyteller. And while he was self-confident, he was neither arrogant nor boastful. Travel opens your mind and makes you more accepting of other people and their cultures. While our duty as parents includes applying our experience to raise them, it was certainly a delight to share in completely new experiences that made us more equal, too.

FM: Your book, The Adventurer’s Son, was published earlier this year to critical acclaim. The book is a moving, yet harrowing account of your two-year search for your son who disappeared in the Corcovado rainforest in Costa Rica in July of 2014. How did the experience of losing your son change the way you think about adventure? 

His disappearance, and the grief I felt as I searched, forced me to confront the fact that those who love us most are hurt the most when we die. 

RD: That’s a difficult question to answer as Cody Roman disappeared when I was in my mid-50s, a time when reflexes slow, testosterone diminishes, and the need for a healthy adrenaline fix wanes in most men that age. But his disappearance, and the grief I felt as I searched, forced me to confront the fact that those who love us most are hurt the most when we die. As an artist friend told me, “Love and grief go hand in hand.” The simple fact that I could die doing something for “fun,” as recreation, suddenly seemed very selfish. Selfish in that my pursuit of “fun” might well end my life, hurting those I love most with unimaginable pain for the rest of their lives, while I’d feel nothing once I died. That has changed the way I think about what I do.

FM:  In what ways did writing the book help you work through your grief of losing your son?

RD: The first third of the book, Part I, is 13 chapters long and perhaps a bit self-indulgent in its reminiscences. It’s meant to tell the story of how I came to live in Alaska, meet Peggy, decide to have a family, and raise our son. In the first chapter I fall in love with Alaska. By the second chapter, I’ve met my future wife. In the third chapter we fall in love. In the fourth chapter, a near-death experience reveals to me the importance of having a family. Cody Roman is born in the fifth chapter, and from there forward I write about our relationship. That part of the book offered me a chance to revisit our life together. It was nostalgic, and I enjoyed reading it aloud to Peggy as I worked through it. We relived the highlights of raising our family.

For the six chapters of Part II, I took his emails, notebooks, and maps describing his six months travelling in Mexico and Central America and passed his words through my thoughts and heart to write the story of his travels. It was a fantastic, satisfying way to internalize and understand what he’d done, seen, and felt. It left me feeling very proud of him.

Psychologists believe that losing an adult child in their twenties may be the most traumatic event that can occur in a parent’s life. Writing this book was a way to process that tragedy.  

Part I is meant to be slow, perhaps idyllic. Part II is meant to show that his upbringing had brought him to this grand Latin American adventure of his own, that he’d grown up and become his own man, competent and confident. Part III is the heart of the book. In Part III he goes missing and I go looking. Writing this [book] really did help me to process not just what happened, but what I thought and felt. Psychologists believe that losing an adult child in their twenties may be the most traumatic event that can occur in a parent’s life. Writing this book was a way to process that tragedy. Of course, I wept as I revisited events, but tears are the heart’s way of passing grief.

Writing this book also helped me deal with my own sense of guilt. The way we raised our kids was certainly the reason why he was traveling through Central America, but it was not the reason for his death.

Instead, the way we raised him was a source of joy that we shared during his life. That’s what writing the book did for me: reaffirmed that.

FM: Shifting to your environmental work, you have mentioned how landscapes have shifted due to rapid climate change, but I’m also curious about changing human behavior and how it’s impacted these landscapes. In your travels and research over the years, how do you make sense of what humans have done to the planet?

RD: Having just returned from the largest protected mountain wilderness in the US, this is a very pertinent question. For several consecutive years now I have spent three to six weeks each summer in the Brooks Range witnessing the incredibly rapid climate-driven transformations occurring there and wrought by human action. 

When I was a kid in suburban northern Virginia, I spent much of my free time catching turtles, salamanders, and snakes and looking for lady slipper orchids in a relatively large fragment of natural landscape called the Chiles Tract. In high school I tried to generate interest in protecting the Chiles Tract, which was sold to developers the year I left for college. Coming home I found that my beloved “woods," “creek," and “swamp” had been cut-up, drained, and replaced with suburban housing. It was crushing to see. But having moved to Alaska, I felt that I was safe from witnessing further destruction of landscapes that have formed me as a person. 

But climate change, air travel, and the escape of our plastic waste, prove that even the most distant beaches, primal rainforest, and desolate tundra are touched by humans. It’s a bit ironic to go to the most remote place in the United States, over 100 miles in every direction from roads and human habitation, to find that trees and other plants and even the very ground and waters are changing in ways they haven’t for 100,000 years and changing due to human activity on the other side of the Earth.

I believe these large protected wilderness areas will be the most resilient to change and so it is important that we develop young people’s interest in protecting big, wild landscapes all over the world.

Having visited the Brooks Range regularly over the last 40 years, I’ve witnessed the disappearance of large-bodied birds, mountain sheep, and caribou; the reduction in abundance of insects and other arthropods; the slumping of hillsides; the draining of lakes and wetland iron-oxides as permafrost melts; the drying of ponds and wetlands; the expansion of seedling spruce onto mountain tops and tussock bogs; the doubling in height of tall shrubs blocking caribou migrations; the movement of boreal species like chickadees, wasps, spruce trees, and beavers into Arctic tundra.  

While these changes are alarming, I believe these large protected wilderness areas that will be the most resilient to change and so it is important that we develop young people’s interest in protecting big, wild landscapes all over the world.

Roman Dial packrafting the John River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska this summer with several of his students. Photo: Maddy Zietlow

FM: I’m also wondering about the influence your students have had on you? What have you learned from them?

RD: Obviously, I’ve learned a lot about using my phone! Seriously—we actually call our science in the Brooks Range “iPhone ecology” because we rely on our phones as small computers that perform the duties of multiple devices. While there is no cell coverage in Gates of the Arctic National Park or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, we connect our phones to satellite transmitter/receivers to text for communication, use mapping apps and our phones’ GPS to navigate, use electronic data sheets to record our observations, and, of course, take photos and store field guides and scientific papers to read while we travel. I like to joke that the smart phone is basically the 21st century version of a Swiss army knife.

I have also learned to appreciate that everyone has unique talents and skills that make the team so much more than just a group of individuals. For example, Julia Ditto is a young artist and wonderful photographer who’s joined me on month-long Brooks Range traverses two years in a row. Toshio Matsuoka is a musician and teenage jester whose first backpack trip more than a weekend long was a month in the Brooks Range. He carried a ukulele and played it while we packrafted down wild rivers. Both students, besides being creative and fun-loving, are keen, curious observers too. Their sense of humor and eternal optimism teach me to lighten up and have some faith that the future is in good hands with people like them.

The shift from teaching and showing them, to learning and exploring together—that’s the reward of education for me. 

Two others on the trip, Maddy Zietlow and Russell Wong, will use the data we have collected as the basis of their senior projects. They will, I expect, discover formerly unknown relationships between the vegetation they recorded on their iPhones during our 375-mile journey this summer and the 20 years of NASA satellite data collected from 700 miles above the Earth. During my three-decade career at Alaska Pacific University, that shared sense of scientific discovery with students has kept me sharp and happy with my job. The shift from teaching and showing them, to learning and exploring together—that’s the reward of education for me. 

Connect with Roman Dial on Instagram and Facebook. You can order his book, The Adventurer’s Son, on Amazon. 

Interested in booking Roman Dial to present for an event? Please contact rmartin@explorationconnections.com.

Faith Model, a former humanitarian aid worker, lived and worked in Kenya and Sudan for 12 years. She is now a writer based in Cody, Wyoming, and co-chairs the Bobby Model Charitable Fund.