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Roman Dial on Werner Herzog, protégés, sons, and masculinity as force of nature
68 Plays17 days ago
Roman Dial is a scientist, adventurer, and author based in Alaska. His scientific work has appeared in journals like Science and Nature. He’s a pioneer of packrafting— using lightweight boats to explore remote rivers and landscapes that were previously unreachable. And he’s the author of The Adventurer’s Son, a memoir about the love of exploration, the bond between parent and child, and his two-year search for his son.
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Transcript
Introduction to Guest Roman Dial
00:00:05
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis.
00:00:19
Speaker
Roman Dial is a scientist, adventurer, and author based in Alaska. His scientific work has appeared in journals like Science and Nature.
Roman Dial's Work and Inspirations
00:00:29
Speaker
He's a pioneer of packrafting, using lightweight boats to explore remote rivers and landscapes.
00:00:35
Speaker
And he is the author of The Adventurer's Son, and most recently, an article for Adventure Journal, which I loved, called Despite Himself...
00:00:46
Speaker
And here's the subtitle. The line between life and death can be thin indeed. Roman, hello. Hi, Ken. Nice to to meet you here on the on the podcast.
00:00:59
Speaker
it's um It's an honor to meet you, Roman. I've been diving into your stuff this week and um watching some films of one of your favorite um movie directors. Could you guess who that might be?
00:01:12
Speaker
ah I'm guessing that it's going to be Werner Herzog and his early stuff.
Werner Herzog Films Discussion
00:01:17
Speaker
So what are your some of your favorite early Herzog movies and and why do you like him, do you think?
00:01:25
Speaker
Well, you know, the the two that I really, really liked, um the first one I ever saw was Aguirre, The Wrath of God. and And I saw it when i I, think I was like a teenager and I saw it in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I was living at the time.
00:01:40
Speaker
And it it was at the Bunnell Auditorium at the University of Alaska there. And I was just like blown away by the opening scene of these like conquistadors marching through the fog in Peru, I guess. It looked like, you know, I don't know. and It was in the Andes.
00:01:57
Speaker
and um And it just looks so realistic. and And then the story went on where... um Aguirre was um you know trying to conquer the jungle there.
00:02:12
Speaker
and And I guess it wasn't so much the story as it was the way that that ah Herzog had made the movie. like He'd gone on this big wilderness trip and carried a film camera, of of a you know like a film movie camera, and hired, you know, locals to, to participate.
00:02:33
Speaker
And I, I'd been on, you know i was just a kid, but I'd been on ah a couple of wilderness trips in Alaska to realize that that would be a real challenge to be yeah doing a trip and making ah like a fictional movie and, and directing the actors in period um dress and whatnot. Yeah. I was just blown away. And then,
00:02:53
Speaker
you know, Fiskoraldo, people told me i should I'd really like Fiskoraldo, and that was even like more of that sort of thing amplified and blown up. I don't know how he kept just the camera equipment dry because you had like these tropical storms, they're on the river all the time. And they're like oftentimes going through like dense
Filmmaking Challenges and Anecdotes
00:03:15
Speaker
brush. Like i I don't know how you keep your camera equipment safe, let alone the other hundred things necessary to run a movie. But I'd seen um Wrath of God ah as ah in a film class when I went to in my undergraduate. So I kind of crossed that one off my list. But last night I finished watching Fitzcarraldo for the first time in honor of this interview. And man, I was blown away by that.
00:03:42
Speaker
um Some of that footage of this steamboat getting kind of knocked around in these rapids is just like, ah, And you're right, like the the story has balls. You know, it's about this guy Fitzcarraldo who wants to go up these tributaries in the Amazon and then like haul this massive steamship over this hill to get to another river. So there's that.
00:04:09
Speaker
But just like the making of the movie takes a ton of balls, too. So, yeah, I was really impressed. Yeah. Well, then you hear the stories afterwards um about the main character or the main actor whose name, like, Krinsky or... Klaus Kinski, who just has, like, the craziest face. He looks just like a crazy German. Yeah, and apparently, and i this is sort of lore that I did read recently, but it was told to me by her a friend that um that the the natives, that you know, the locals who participated in that...
00:04:45
Speaker
filmmaking, um they offered to kill to kill Klaus for Werner because he was such such a problematic personality,
Nature's Indifference and Personal Growth
00:04:53
Speaker
you know, which is just like, that's way over the top to have that kind of thing happening.
00:04:58
Speaker
You should watch um My Best Fiend, ah which is about the friendship fiendship, whatever you want to call it, between Herzog and Klaus Kinski, which to say the least was...
00:05:12
Speaker
turbulent and they oftentimes threaten to to kill each other. And the interesting thing is about Kinski is in Fitzcarraldo, he's the protagonist in there, he kind of plays a gentleman and he's not that hot-headed in it. So it doesn't kind of match his kind of off-screen persona. But I think the interesting things about Herzog's movie is kind of how he presents ah men going into nature and nature...
00:05:39
Speaker
itself Nature itself, there's a beauty to it, but there's also... and Sinisterness might be something too strong, but there's like an indifference nature has for for human beings. And oftentimes these men going in there, whether it's Fitzcarraldo or Aguir, whatever you call it, they're kind of...
00:06:04
Speaker
megalomaniacs and obsessed with their dream and they're grandiose and you yourself, you're an adventurer. I've been on a few, nowhere near what you've done, but like, I kind of identify with some of those words.
00:06:21
Speaker
What about, what about you? Well, I have to say that I, you know, I don't know if I'm a megalomaniac. Um, and I, I have turned back on many attempts. Uh, But um the way that I i feel, this and I've always felt this, is is that you know nature is um sort of indifferent you know to me. Like ah the mountains, I used to be a mountain climber, um like an alpinist, and I just got the feeling the mountains didn't really care how good you are. you know like Like they're going to kill you if you know you're not careful. And i I never felt like it was me against nature. I always felt um that it was just –
00:07:01
Speaker
me being challenged, you know, like trying to, you know, trying to do it didn't have to be in an athletic way, but like me trying to do as many pull ups as I could do or it was it was often sort of like ah a challenging backdrop rather than and a challenge for myself rather than me against nature.
Wilderness as a Medium for Growth
00:07:19
Speaker
Then why does it have to be in nature? Because the way you just described it, it sounds just like a physical challenge. Like you could just run around a a track around a football field a thousand times. What is it about wilderness and nature? Is it just the stakes are higher?
00:07:36
Speaker
ah That's great question. No, it's not necessarily that the stakes are higher. like um I get really bored um you know running around a track. um And I feel that excuse me and when I'm out in the natural world, it's sort of...
00:07:51
Speaker
um exercise a part of my brain or, or maybe not even my brain, more like my spirit or my emotions. Like it's not necessarily a thought process. Is it as much as it is an emotional process, you know, and I'm, I'm thinking more along the lines that, um, in my glands, you know, the hormones are affected more than the intellectual side.
00:08:15
Speaker
I absolutely exercise my intellectual side, in nature. I mean, doing the science over the last few years has really been great about that. But um I think all of us have some, um all humans have some ability to to deal with nature in sort of a genetic way. Like in other words, we're hardwired to sort of be able to make our way in it.
00:08:42
Speaker
um But we don't necessarily get the opportunity to tune that. And um What I'm trying to say is that that kind of intuition or emotion or because I don't I don't think we can genetically be hardwired in our brain so much as we are hardwired in our our glands, you know, or like where the hormones are produced, like fear, for example, like when a big animal jumps up in front of you like a bear. It's not your brain that's going, oh, oh there's a bear. It's your.
00:09:13
Speaker
it's this hard wiring like in i don't know the lizard brain that's down there in the middle of the regular human brain that's reacting and i i feel like by going in nature i can really activate that human side you can activate that so what does that mean on the ground that you just feel more alive and more in tuned with your body and you're experiencing the extremes of experience Yeah, it doesn't even have to be extreme. I mean, um almost always if I go to ah a new place, I used to travel quite a bit, my wife and I and even my my family, we used to travel quite a bit. And and I always wanted whenever we go to a new place to get off trail.
Exploring Montana's American Prairie
00:09:59
Speaker
so that I could feel kind of feel the landscape. When you're on a trail, you don't have to deal with the brush or the bushes or the pokey bits or the uneven terrain. In fact, you can disassociate your brain and your emotions from the nature around you and you know just march along like you're not even like you're walking down a sidewalk.
00:10:21
Speaker
But when you've got to get into the bushes or the brush, you really have to engage with the landscape. And and I feel that that's really what I'm after. I felt that with my nephew when we were out in Montana this past summer. We did 12 days of of hiking, and you know a lot of it was just kind of by compass and topographic maps, and it was just enlivening for those 12 days. And then we got to the Missouri River and did eight days of kayaking on the river, and just something kind of went away when we were on the river. I mean...
00:10:51
Speaker
We no longer had to just kind of discuss and figure out like where we were going, where were where we were going was decided by millennia of of erosion. You know, the path had been figured out for us. So, so yeah, that resonates a lot with me.
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah. Tell me about that trip there in Montana. Like what motivated you to, to go there in the first place? That's a good question. um I'm not someone who's so much motivated simply by a physical feat.
00:11:22
Speaker
Maybe I was early on um in my early 20s or so, but nowadays I'm more attracted to kind of ideas.
00:11:33
Speaker
And if I can kind of couple that with like a physical feat, that's just a wonderful combination for me. so about 10 years ago when I was writing my second book called trespassing across America, which was about my walk across the North American great plains.
00:11:52
Speaker
Um, I was doing some research and I read about this place called American Prairie in Montana, where they were creating this huge wildlife refuge. And they're like, it's going to be 3.2 million acres when
Wilderness Preservation Models
00:12:04
Speaker
it's done. And I was kind of, I was a seasonal park ranger at the time. So I knew acreages when it comes to like protected areas. i was like, wow, that's huge for the lower 48. How is that even possible? I thought kind of the days of kind of large scale ecological ah preservation or restoration were kind of over, but yet here's this like group of entrepreneurs um trying to build a rock wildlife refuge in the middle of private land. So that got me really fascinated. And I think I was really drawn there because
00:12:39
Speaker
American prairie and the model of wilderness preservation, i think, can be replicated across the American West. So if you're looking for things to be hopeful for for the next couple centuries, I'm just like, ah I had to be out there and I had to have my feet on the ground and I had to talk to people and I had to see it. So that's what drew me out there.
00:13:01
Speaker
Wow, cool. That seems seems like a really neat experience um to to actually go visit a place um that's wild and also in some sense sort of has been erased from the American West. You know, I mean, um wide open prairie, if I, you know, and I haven't been, i haven't been there. Um, but I know when I drive across like the Midwest, there's a lot of fences and houses occasionally and windmills. It just feels very much touched by humans.
00:13:34
Speaker
So it's, it's neat to hear that there is a place that's, um, sort of being re rewilded. Is, is that what you'd, yeah. Yeah. Use that word. Use ecologically, ecologically restore. I think those are very, uh, but you're right. Like when you look at say, the Dakotas on down to Texas, and you go further east than that into kind of Indiana and Illinois and Ohio. I mean, when you look at how much public land is out there, it's almost nothing. Like some of these states, Iowa and Kansas, for instance, it's like 1% publicly owned, 99% is just farms and and ranches. And when it's like that, you can't have any sort of
00:14:15
Speaker
exploration or relationship with that land unless you're willing to to trespass, which means basically nobody is going to have that relationship. So American Prairie is finding a way to do something that the government um ken't can't do in this political climate or almost any political
Youthful Adventures and Lessons Learned
00:14:34
Speaker
climate. So it's it's really fascinating. And I went on this journey, not as a young man, I'm 42 right now, but I want to talk about young man journeys to kind of take it back to this recent American Journal article you wrote, which I found um really resonated. Again, the title of it was called Despite Himself, the Line Between Life and Death Can Be Thin Indeed. I think i think we need just a little bit of background about this article so we can talk about it. Do you mind kind of giving just a quick summary of it
00:15:11
Speaker
Sure, yeah. um Well, when I was a kid, when I was a teenager, 18 years old, I i put together, guess, climbing expedition to the Brooks Range, to the Aragatch Peaks, and I went up there.
00:15:24
Speaker
and we were there for a month that kind of rained every day and we climbed a few things. Um, there were a couple other young guys. I think, you know, they were, they were like 19. I think we were all, there are three teenagers and and and then ah a 25 year old who seemed like ah an old man at the time.
00:15:40
Speaker
And, uh, And um after a month, ah we were getting ready to go. We were crushing some cans and a bear walked up the valley, probably smelling the you know oily cans we were crushing to carry out. And he walked up the valley and ended up in our camp.
00:15:57
Speaker
And and ah we climbed up on our food rock. This was before bear barrels and bear bags. And we climbed up on the food rock and I had a rifle. um And the the other guy said, Roman, go get your gun. I think this is time, you know, to use it.
00:16:12
Speaker
So I ran down to the creek. ah where we would get our water and there was the bear just on the other side of the creek. And I told myself, you know, well, I'll shoot the bear when he crosses the creek. But I was 18. I'd never killed anything bigger than ah like a marmot.
00:16:27
Speaker
And as soon as he put a paw in the water, you know, i kind of was standing there and the guns waving around. Boom. You know, I shot this 30-06. And i I didn't hit him well. i I wounded him. And he spun around and he ran off.
00:16:41
Speaker
And I went back to the guys on the rock and they said, oh, we heard the shot. Did you kill him? I said, no. But I wounded him and he left. And they go, wow, we got to walk out tomorrow down this valley with a wounded bear.
00:16:51
Speaker
So i I ran after the bear and um and killed him. And then ah I, we ate a bunch of them, me and this other guy, the other two were vegetarians. the two of us ate a bunch of them in a pressure cooker so we could get rid of the trichinosis or whatever.
00:17:07
Speaker
And then, you know, I felt bad about wasting a bunch of the meat, you know, and, uh, And so i I stashed it in the snowbank because I didn't know how to I was I didn't know what to do with meat. I mean, I was from the suburbs of Virginia. You know, we put meat in the refrigerator.
00:17:21
Speaker
And so I stuffed it in the snowbank and then I was going to hike out with these guys to the lake that we were getting picked up at and and then hike back and then, you know, live off the land. You know, I was going to build a cabin and spend the winter.
00:17:37
Speaker
um But I chickened out. and flew out with the other guys to Bettels. But then I got to Bettels and I was thinking, you know, gosh, I really, i didn't follow through with what I want to do. And, and these, these three fishermen from Fairbanks landed in an airplane, in a float plane. And they were going up to that Takahula Lake and I hitchhiked a ride back with them ah because I decided to go get this meat after all.
00:18:01
Speaker
I hiked up to the meat and it had all gone bad, you know, like it kind of melted out of the snow and some animal had grabbed it and, pooped on it, you know, and, and then it was raining and I was like, what am I going to do? I was planning to spend the winter up there. I don't know what I was thinking. And, uh, and I was kind of, um, discouraged and I hiked to where we'd camped for the month and there was a tent. There it was like the only tent other tent besides ours that I'd ever seen in the Valley.
00:18:29
Speaker
And I went up to the tent and it turns out there was a guy in the tent, a botanist. And, um, and he'd had some experiences in the Brooks range too, you know, like he'd,
00:18:39
Speaker
he'd gone up to the Brooks Range to live off the land like three or four years before. And his plan was to like, um you know, live off the land for a couple of months and build a raft and float down a river or either to ah you know, an Upiat village or a Koyukan village. You know, he didn't even know where he was going to go. And this was like in the mid seventies.
00:19:01
Speaker
He was even like, I'm way beyond me. You know, he had like ah a bow and arrow and he had a hundred pound pack. He'd never been to the Brooks range. He'd never lived off the land. He'd never built a raft.
00:19:12
Speaker
And here he was trying to do all this stuff. And at one point, you know, he he was able to to build a raft. He learned from somebody that he met on his flight up to Anaktuvik Pass in the Brooks Range. He learned how to make a raft. He made one. But at one point, his raft had drifted away while he was in the woods picking berries with all of his stuff. And he went out to the river and his raft was gone. But while he'd been picking berries, he'd heard a motorboat coming up river.
00:19:39
Speaker
And, um, and he ran down the river looking for his boat and he found it. And that Koyukan couple who'd gone by in the motorboat, they'd seen his raft floating down river and they grabbed it and tied it to a tree. So if they hadn't passed by and caught his boat, he would have been in trouble.
00:19:57
Speaker
And so, um, so anyway, you know, I, I, and hello met this guy, Dave Cooper, in his ah in his tent. I didn't know anything about him at the time. I just was like, where'd
Reflecting on Chris McCandless and Perceptions
00:20:10
Speaker
you come from? And he was like, you know, kid, what are you doing here? You know, like you've got no food and no pack and you're bare meat rotted. You know, you're, he didn't say it, but he acted like I was an idiot, which I was.
00:20:25
Speaker
And he said, you know, I can't really spare any food. He gave me a couple of granola bars. But he said, if you hurry, you know, about 45 miles from here is a geology camp and they're getting ready to go.
00:20:36
Speaker
and um And you could probably catch a ride out with them. And if you you know if you need to, you could eat these Eskimo potatoes that grow on the river bars. So then, you know, that was in 1979. And then in 1993 or 92,
00:20:48
Speaker
and then in ninety ninety three 92, 1992, I, um um i i moved to Anchorage to become a professor at a little university here.
00:21:01
Speaker
And I heard about this body that was found in a bus up by Healy on the stampede trail. And I was like, wow, I'd been to that bus before. wonder what's going on. And, um, and then, you know, over the next year, John Krakauer's outside magazine article came out and then, um,
00:21:21
Speaker
I learned more about what had happened to John, to, ah to Chris McCandless. And, um and I really kind of, you know, I really related to him in the sense that, you know he tried to live off the land. You know, he didn't know what to do with his moose meat.
00:21:37
Speaker
um And then he starved, you know, and i i i i kind of related to him. Like it could have been me. you know, I could have been the first Chris McCandless if it hadn't been for this guy, David Cooper. um And I, you know, lived here in Alaska. i think that book is like 30 years old now. Yeah, this would be the 30 year anniversary. 1996 came out Okay, yeah. and And boy, nobody in Alaska likes Chris McCannis. They all think he's a freaking dumbass who got what he deserved almost. And I just can't believe anybody would say that because I know that most everybody who comes up to Alaska you know has some blunder that they make and it's just kind of you know luck that gets them out of that trouble.
00:22:22
Speaker
But if something happens- do you think Alaskans are that way? Why do you think Alaskans, what's what's happening psychologically when they, say, oh, this he's he was a dumbass when they discount him like that?
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, not 100% sure. And I'm not sure it's an Alaskan thing. I mean, in the bigger sense. i'm not even sure that it's an alaskan thing i think i mean in the bigger sense In the bigger sense, i I think psychologically that when somebody dies, when there's a tragedy and somebody dies, um even if it is kind of like accidental, you know, or just bad luck, we try to get a take home message from that. So we don't make that mistake ourselves.
00:23:10
Speaker
And and so Anytime somebody dies, we don't get to ask them, you know what did you do wrong? What we do is we go, wow, that guy did something wrong. We better not do that.
00:23:21
Speaker
That guy was a dumbass. Let's not do what he did. And I think in some sense it's a way of getting meaning from somebody's death. I guess that's that would be my, you know, my...
00:23:32
Speaker
my my two cents. can i Can I share two alternative and more cynical takes on it? Oh, I'd love to hear them. um Well, one, i think there's a bit of envy there.
00:23:49
Speaker
I think McCandless kind of puts a mirror in front of some people and you kind of get to take a look at yourself and maybe the life that you made and maybe unconsciously you've made a lot of compromises from those original dreams of coming to Alaska. Yeah.
00:24:08
Speaker
you know Maybe you had visions of hunting moose, but then you just kind of end up living a semi-boring suburban life in Fairbanks or or Alaska. So I think McCandless presents a challenge because I think he kind of out-Alaskaned the Alaskans in many ways. So I think there's there's that. And like when there's like a like a backpacker outside announces someone died from like a cougar attack on on Facebook or whatever, i just I don't check the comments because I know there's just going to be some idiot out there who's just like...
00:24:43
Speaker
you know i shouldn't be doing that. You shouldn't be carrying that. And they just kind of get to experience a bit of kind of righteousness or moral superiority or like outdoorsman superiority. So those, those are my cynical takes.
00:25:01
Speaker
Oh, that's cool. I like that. I think, I think all of that's gotta be a play. I mean, it's all seems like just social reaction. I mean, it's just human reacting to human. um And I,
00:25:12
Speaker
And I think in large part, a lot of it is just um kind of, hard we're sort of hardwired as ah as social, as organisms that live in a social dominance hierarchy.
Youthful Arrogance and Exploration Drive
00:25:26
Speaker
You know, like we're not territorial. We are to a little, to some extent, but it's more about who's better than who. And I i can see that, I don't know if you're being necessarily cynical as as much as you are sort of being a a pretty keen observer of Social behavior. That's a generous um synthesis of what I said. um How do you think of yourself, ah of of young Roman Dial, the the young man who who first came out to Alaska, like and making those dumb mistakes and having these over-grandiose plans? Are you just like, man, you're an idiot? Or is there part of you like...
00:26:08
Speaker
Yeah, man, like you were dreaming big. You were trying. Like, how how do you think of him?
00:26:14
Speaker
Oh, wow. How do I think of young me? ah Well, um yeah, I guess i'm i'm I'm a bit embarrassed about young me um in a lot of ways. I think, you know, young me was um I was I was really young, ah kind of too young. um You know, I moved up here when I was 16 and the fact that I graduated from high school at such a young age kind of made me ah kind of insecure and and and and into to kind of counter that insecurity, I think I was kind of, i don't think I was, i I know I was a bit of a punk, you know, and and maybe a bit of an arrogant punk.
00:26:55
Speaker
And so I wished that, um you know, I hadn't been that way, I guess. and i I think just, and I'll say one more thing about this. I think the things that I did, the climbs that I did, um especially mountain climbing, you know, made just made things worse.
00:27:12
Speaker
o How so? Well, you know. and you did some really hardcore stuff for people unfamiliar with your your body of work and and climbing.
00:27:26
Speaker
Well, you know, at the time, you know, people now do that stuff. It's, it's no big deal at all, you know, but at the time, you know, like the climb that I did in the Arragatch, um, you know, it had only been done once before, you know, by the first descent party, you know, by a super famous Alaskan climber named David Roberts.
00:27:45
Speaker
And, uh, and, and he hadn't really done it that many years before, you know, like six or seven years. And then I show up as a ah teenager and do it. And then, you know, I did some ice climbs and some mountain climbs. And each time I did those, I'd come back with this really like overdosed sense of, of confidence, you know? And what do you think of kind of young men generally who, who go off and do some stuff? Are they all,
00:28:21
Speaker
foolhardy and kind of not informed enough and, um, you know, got too big of a head or do you kind of take a more of a, a romantic view on kind of young men going out and doing things that they borderline can't do? Uh-huh.
00:28:40
Speaker
Yeah. Those are great questions. I, I really enjoy hearing your perspective because, um you know, it, My understanding is you're like a liberal art. You're a writer, right? And you studied history and um literature, I suppose. or Yeah, yeah, a little bit.
00:28:58
Speaker
And so I come from like, and I never, I didn't, like I took one English class in college and and no history. um And so I kind of did all this, you know, evolutionary biology and ah and then the theory of evolutionary biology. And and so i I have these, you know, weird goggles on that are very Darwinian.
00:29:23
Speaker
ah So you're looking through at things through an evolutionary psychology sort of lens? It must be. you know i I think that that evolutionary psychology kind of came out a little bit you know later than I was right when I was studying things along those lines. you know But there was like the social sociobiology by E.O. Wilson was sort of a landmark um book or that...
00:29:48
Speaker
um that kind of maybe spawned evolutionary psychology. um But absolutely, yeah I'd say, for example, that the foolhardiness of men, of young men, and um and this kind of confidence gaining activity that they do where they take risks is part of sort of developing us is sort of a human animal living in the wild. Because i don't I just don't think it was that long ago that humans were living in the wild instead of you know, talking on a computer screen like this or, you know, writing books. I think we've only been, you know, writing things down or discussing things this way for maybe a couple thousand years, but we've been humans for much longer than that.
00:30:42
Speaker
So in that case, through um um an and an evolutionary cycle ah psychology, I can't say it, psychology lens, yeah Some young men might feel this, might be blessed or cursed with this kind of drive to go explore and climb and kind of do the things that people say it's impossible to do. And therefore, it could possibly benefit the tribe or greater humanity if, say, they discover something. um am am I reading that the right way?
00:31:17
Speaker
Almost. i I would say that I'm a more Darwinian than I am sort of, ah um you know, what's the the group
Thrill-Seeking and Human Nature
00:31:27
Speaker
selection? you know, group selection is that idea where you do something to sacrifice for the group, you know, the altruism idea. And what I'm saying is that um we do it for our individual fitness, you know, like we're more likely like...
00:31:42
Speaker
reduce it to the absurd almost. we're We're doing it to sort of attract mates and and then develop mechanisms for survival under um difficult situations. So for example, and this is this would be real, I'm probably paraphrasing somebody's idea already that I just, that I don't know who to attribute to.
00:32:05
Speaker
um But for example, why, we know, what's what what do we get out of scaring ourselves? You know, Like, why why is scaring ourselves so so fun? And it's not the adrenaline. I don't think adrenaline is that good. Adrenaline doesn't make me feel that good. But what makes me feel good is after the adrenaline, you get this like, oh, wow, I survived. Oh, my God, that feels so good. Sometimes laugh. I get like a big laugh out of that. and Yeah. Exactly. The laugh. And I think what that is, is that's another, i think our glands rule our body a lot more than we realize. And that what happens is, you know, a ah gland squeezes some adrenaline into your bloodstream where you can react more quickly or have superhuman strength or whatever adrenaline does for us.
00:32:52
Speaker
And then after you've survived that fearful episode, Then another gland releases this drug or this hormone, this chemical that just feels so good. It's a reward. It's like, hey, whatever you did, you know, whatever you just did that allowed us to survive, I'm giving you this reward so that, you know, this is your your body telling you, I'm giving this reward so that you'll do that next time too.
Societal Views on Exploration
00:33:19
Speaker
And so what happens is, you know, you kind of get into that mode in today's world where you can go scare yourself over and over and over and get hit up with that. It's like a drug. You can become addicted to it. You know, like, you know, there's, they call them, know, there's white, they call them adrenaline junkies, but I don't think it's really the adrenaline. I think it's the good feeling that comes after. The good feeling after.
00:33:44
Speaker
I remember um for the park service, I had to do a patrol from Aniktuvik Pass, um I think down to Bedles. So we took the Tiniguk River. Have you ever been on that one?
00:33:57
Speaker
Yeah, I have. yeah the tinue Some people call it the Tiniguk. I like that river, yeah. uh it was it was amazing and the tinnegook was kind of creating like a new channel through a forest so it was taking us through some really dicey um areas where there was just like log jams everywhere and some really swift water and i had two interns behind me we were each in pack grafts who knows if we would have been in pack grafts if you didn't pioneer all that roman but we were carrying pack grafts And um I turned a corner and it was just like boiling white water going into these this log jam. And I pulled off to the side and I grabbed a branch and the interns were going past me. And I reached out and we like we cla clasped forearms like like in the movies. And i was able to pull them in. We all kind of were on like holding branches and we just let out like the most wild laughter and Ever. it It felt so good. So I'm ah very familiar with just what you're talking about.
00:35:00
Speaker
um And I think, I think your, your evolutionary theory, i mean, that works for me. You think of it on an individual level. I think two things can be true at once and maybe it is on an individual level. Maybe these men are going to climb a mountain or whatever to, to get laid or, you know, to find resources or whatever. But,
00:35:23
Speaker
But I also think that in our genetic in our species, there is um a need for variety. And there's always like certain sorts of types of people who just kind of keep popping up in the population. And one of them kind of tends to be kind of the explorer type. So I just kind of wonder if that's just kind of programmed into our species as a whole. Like we just need some...
00:35:50
Speaker
people looking for these experiences, you know, the Chris McCannless's or the Alex Honnold's or just that Polynesian guy who's going to get on a raft and say, you know what, I bet there's an Island, uh, 500 miles away. I'm going to go prove you all wrong. But yeah, let me just sort of follow up on that. I agree with you 100%. I think that humans are like the super weed of the world. Okay. Like what is a weed? And I don't mean it in a derogatory way. Like, um,
00:36:19
Speaker
a weed. And again, you know, I've got these darn, you know, ecology goggles that I can't just seem to remove. I'm kind of stuck with them. I think they're more like permanent contact lenses. And, um and so like a weed is something that can kind of live anywhere, um tends to grow really quickly and ah spreads rapidly and ends up in places where resources are readily available. But, um you know,
00:36:47
Speaker
if you think about the weeds that, that there are like dandelions and rats and, uh, you know starlings and, um, house sparrows, uh, cats, um, you know they can live anywhere and do anything, but we, we got them surpassed. And most of them are just following along. Most of those are just following along on our coattails because we're able to, to disperse so well, you know, to disperse is to go from where you were born to like,
00:37:14
Speaker
where you're going to reproduce or where you're going to sort of be an adult. And, and we're especially good at at dispersing. And then we're especially good when we disperse to a new place, we're especially good at like living there. You know, even primitive humans were really good at. I mean, now we're like, we can go to freaking outer space. You know, it's like amazing what we can do. um and then we wouldn't mind dispersing a few people up to Mars, by the way. Yeah, I can name them. Um,
00:37:43
Speaker
but I think they want to go themselves. so they want yeah They can disperse themselves and and we'll we'll wave away. Yeah. um But i I guess what I was going to say is that um as far as like, you know, dispersal, ah if we...
00:38:02
Speaker
ah you know I don't read enough books. I wish I read more books. i I feel like whenever I'm reading a book, I think, oh, I should be writing instead of reading. um But um in movies, which are easy to watch, um I can sit with my wife on the couch and watch a movie. There's a remarkable number of movies where you know humans are going off someplace to do something, like out into space or out into the West. or you know And we're always like, oh, yeah, those are the heroic people. And I think that they're heroic because I think we think they're heroic because they they represent what we are, like a weedy species heading off to colonize a new place. And and and ah you know and I don't want to get into the, pardon the pun, the weeds of you know group selection versus you know individual natural selection. But I think you and I are on the same page that you know humans admire that in people.
00:38:57
Speaker
Um, and, and it's part of being a human animal is basically this, we're going to live anywhere we we can. Yeah. Well, sometimes we view them as heroic and sometimes they trigger something in us. And I think that's the case with someone like a, like a Chris McCandless or an Alex Honnold, who I brought up. I watched Free Solo. Have you seen Free Solo? Yeah.
00:39:21
Speaker
I did. I did watch that. Yeah. Okay. Free Solo is about his kind of unsupported ascent of El Capitan in um ah Yosemite National Park. I think that's right. But I was watching it with um my best friend years ago, and he got up and left halfway through the movie. I'm like, dude, why are you leaving? This is this is riveting stuff. He's just like, I can't i can't take it. He's just...
00:39:49
Speaker
he's a sociopath, he doesn't care about ah dying or who it would crush. And I was like, yeah, but this is also a beautiful thing, what he's doing. Like I saw what he was doing as as a beautiful thing. And I see, to make a broader point about this kind like young men theme, we're talking about that, that,
00:40:13
Speaker
masculine kind of force of energy that is present, especially in young men where you're so driven, so obsessed, so determined, so monomaniacal. There's other words I could use.
00:40:33
Speaker
And it's a force of nature. And I feel like you kind of have to respect it when it shows up in someone because one, that's how were they how they were made and that's um where they're going to find some sort of contentment and fulfillment and purpose. And yeah, it might just end up with someone climbing up a rock face, but it could also redefine what's physically possible or find one of those Polynesian
Impact of Personal Loss on Risk Perception
00:41:02
Speaker
islands. So, so yeah.
00:41:06
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree with you totally. I, I do have to say you asked a difference between young Roman and old Roman dial. um Yeah. Young Roman dial didn't realize like your friend did like you, whoever your friend was, you werere watching that um free solo with who said, this guy's a sociopath. He doesn't care about,
00:41:26
Speaker
whose feelings are going to get crushed when he falls to the earth and crushes himself. um Yeah, young Roman doll, that never even occurred to me. like i was I remember being in my 20s thinking, I'm going to be lucky if I leave ah if i live to be 30. I'll probably die in an avalanche. And it never occurred to me that if I died, you know my mom and my dad and my sister would be crushed. Never occurred to me. Never.
00:41:50
Speaker
Or that my girlfriend and at the time would be like crushed. you know i i can't believe I even... I can't believe I didn't realize how painful it was um to lose somebody or could be how painful it could be to lose somebody until I was in my fifties and my son disappeared, you know, in the, in the Costa Rican jungle.
00:42:14
Speaker
And then I was like, holy shit, man, what have I been doing all these years? This is incredibly selfish. And so now I'm at this point where I do know these young men,
00:42:25
Speaker
who are, um, who are off doing like amazing climbs. you know, there's this young guy lives up here and he won the highest award in climbing, you know, Alpine climbing, the, the golden ice axe award, the PLA to Ord from France. And he won it.
00:42:41
Speaker
And, um, And i I'm really kind of torn between like saying, wow, that's awesome. Atta boy. Yeah, just keep going. And saying, no, stop doing this. You know, you've there's people who love you.
00:42:52
Speaker
And when you're dead, you're fucking dead and you don't know you're dead. But the rest of us are going to hurt.
Mentorship in Wilderness Adventures
00:42:58
Speaker
And then I think, well, wait a minute. Am I being selfish because I don't want to be hurt? And so, um yeah, then I get kind of stuck.
00:43:07
Speaker
I'm kind of like a coward. I don't even talk to the kid at all, you know, because I i don't know what to say to him. You're unsure of what to say. ah Yeah. And that kind of brings me back to your your article, because one of the interesting things about it as is it that there's it's kind of a...
00:43:26
Speaker
communal survival theme to it in which there's this kind of like this pay it forward where Dave, David Cooper goes out there and kind of some old hands up in the Brooks range say, hey, you could do this instead. And they kind of channel him towards kind of a more oh logical way of kind of exploring. And the same thing happened with you, with with David. Like he helped channel you in a way.
00:43:55
Speaker
um So that kind of, it's kind of different than the usual survival story, which is man goes into nature, fights off a bear and comes home. This is more relational.
00:44:05
Speaker
Like you're going into nature and interacting with people and gleaning wisdom and and transforming because of those human interactions. Oh, absolutely. I i think, um honestly, um sort of, I don't know what to call it. Outdoor recreation just sounds sort of like too cheap.
00:44:25
Speaker
um I think it's one of the... one of the few places left, I mean, there are others for sure, but in this highly technological world today, it's one of the few places left where there, where we elders have something to offer to, to young people, you know, like, like you will accumulate a lot of experience, um, like dealing with bears or crossing rivers or, or dealing with grief of people who, you know, who've died doing these things, um, that we can kind of, that we are able to pass on to younger people.
00:44:56
Speaker
Um, and it's, I know that I had mentors when I was young. I didn't know what, I didn't call them mentors and I didn't call them elders. I just knew that these were older people that I learned from. You know, I learned like, wow, there's game trails out here. I didn't know those were here. Or, oh, you can read a river like a book. I didn't know you could read a river like a book or what, carry a little pack raft? That's amazing. Or what, you can pack a trail by, you know, you can climb really soft snow by, you know, punching punching holes in the snow in just the right way or walking across crevasse. I learned a lot.
00:45:27
Speaker
not from you know reading, but from experiences with older people. um And I know that in the skilled trades and crafts, there's a lot of that going on.
00:45:38
Speaker
But I think... um A lot of what we've learned, especially if you go to college and um in graduate school, you're learning from books, basically. You're not like learning from people with experience necessarily. And I feel that's one of the real values of being outdoors in the wilderness as an old guy with young people um is this sort of social interaction that you're you're talking about. I think you're right. I mean, like when when did kind of apprentice culture fall apart? I mean, probably good point to centuries ago when that fell apart.
00:46:13
Speaker
but um and And just screen culture, there's just far fewer of those opportunities for for mentorship. But kind of what I took away from some of those interactions that you described in the story was just the gentle...
00:46:26
Speaker
hand use because here's these crazy young men with really stupid stupid ideas coming out here. But these older men that you and David came across...
00:46:41
Speaker
They didn't say, you know, you're a complete idiot. I think they maybe kind of recognized themselves in what you and David were doing at the times. And we're just ah able to use that gentle head to to guide them somewhere else, somewhere better.
00:46:57
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I could do that with these young climbers, you know, like climbing. You're just sure what to, what to say, huh? Well, yeah, I don't know what, like, I because you don't want to ruin their dreams.
00:47:09
Speaker
I guess not. Yeah. I don't, I don't want to, like, I would feel like a hypocrite, you know, like for me, um, there was a moment, uh, a near death experience. I'm like, holy, I'm, I'm done. You know, like I'm, I could die here and I can, I thought I was going to die. I was falling thinking I'm going to,
00:47:27
Speaker
I'm either going to get all broken up or I'm going to die. And I even prayed to God. I said, dear God, and I'm not a religious guy. I, I pray when I need to, I guess. And I prayed to God. I said, look, you know, um, if you got to kill me, but don't, don't break me up. You know, don't, I don't want broken bones and be dangling at the other end of a rope, you know, 3000 feet up off of a glacier. Um, I'd rather be dead.
00:47:53
Speaker
And, uh, And then after I survived and I didn't get broken, um I was like, yeah, I'm done with this. i'm not going to I'm not going to do this kind of climbing anymore. It's not worth it. you know like I kind of went – I wasn't getting the – whatever – I think my brain took over. Like the thinking part, you know the human brain was like, whoa, you could have died right there.
00:48:14
Speaker
And that overwhelmed whatever hormone was saying, hey, you've survived. I mean I was feeling pretty good surviving. But I think that – you know, the the conscious part of my my body said, this this is enough.
Writing and Processing Grief
00:48:29
Speaker
Get out of here. So all I can do is hope that this kid, you know,
00:48:33
Speaker
gets out of it before it's too late. I sympathize with your tornness because, um and I think I understand why you're torn, because you know first time I said I wanna go up to Alaska, or I wanna go climb, I wanna go hike up this mountain, or I wanna become a park ranger in the gates, or I wanna go hitchhiking 5,000 miles across North America,
00:49:01
Speaker
The response I would typically get was, that's stupid, you're going to get yourself killed, why would you do that? So there's kind of very few voices of of support.
00:49:13
Speaker
And i think what you get is just a lot of young people who are just really dissuaded from doing something that could have been transformative.
00:49:23
Speaker
and i think maybe that's what what you're not trying to do is dissuade them from having these amazing transformational things and not kind of squelch that that inner drive and those inner voices that are trying to guide you somewhere exceptional
00:49:42
Speaker
yeah i think you've got it i think you've got it yeah it's just i'd And then, you know, then i'm I'm paralyzed. I can't, I don't say anything. I don't say attaboy. I don't say slow down. You know, I just, I just, I kind of ghost the, I ghost them.
00:49:58
Speaker
Maybe that's, maybe that's the right thing to do. I don't know. um Do you, do you mind talking a little bit about the adventurous son? I'm sure it's difficult to talk about.
00:50:11
Speaker
oh I can do it. I mean, I had to do it. Like, I'm sure you've done it hundreds of times already. Well, here's the, yeah, that's a great, a great question. So when he went missing, um you know, I didn't, I didn't, I thought he was hurt, you know, or lost in the jungle and I was going to go find him.
00:50:29
Speaker
And, and so I raced down to Costa Rica and then I had to tell the story over and over about what had happened. And, you know, later, Six weeks went by and I was still sure he was alive somewhere. and you know, several months went by and I was still looking for him.
00:50:46
Speaker
So, no, I'm, you know I'm pretty, I'm pretty good at recounting, recounting that. it was it It's an exceptional book um and an amazing, harrowing, tragic story, but extremely well-written and well-crafted, I thought.
00:51:05
Speaker
And if I'm putting myself in your position when it comes to like, should I write this book or not? And I can't put myself in my position, but if I imagine it as best as I could,
00:51:18
Speaker
um i i think i would have like a tension in me and one would be like writing can be therapeutic in some way i could kind of get this whole story down i can understand it that would kind of be one half of it and the other half would be like would i be like dwelling in this tragedy for you know for too long and too immersively Were you having kind of an internal dialogue, anything like that when you were deciding whether you should write this book or not?
00:51:51
Speaker
um Yeah. Yeah. First, thanks a lot for those really kind words. Cause I, I really, i like your writing and you're, you're like a real writer, whereas I'm just sort of somebody who writes when I feel moved.
00:52:05
Speaker
And I, and I did, I had to write that book, you know, I had to write the book and, and I was, you know, I was listening to something ah on the radio last night about grief and, you know, um there were, there was a panel of people talking about grief and, you know,
00:52:21
Speaker
and and how to get over the loss of somebody or something. um And a lot of it kind of comes down to not bottling it up, you know, not like holding it inside and choking on it, but to kind of let it out.
00:52:37
Speaker
And for me, um writing the book, I began as sort of me ah taking notes in a notebook about phone numbers and people to talk to and places to go to look for him and then to sort of interpreting what people said. And then before long, I was writing my thoughts about what had happened and then my feelings were coming along. So I kind of was keeping these notebooks and that turned into journals or diaries.
00:53:06
Speaker
um and then And then I revisited those in this book. And and i I appreciate your kind words about the book. and A lot of people don't like the book. but um But the book for me was sort of a way to revisit um the life that led to the end of his do you know what i mean like like i wanted to look and see well what what what did i do here like like how was this my fault you know did i did i bring him to that point um and so i had to like figure out what had happened in the i like the the proximate thing that happened to him like how did he die and how did he get where he was there and why was he there in the first place and i just worked my way back
00:53:52
Speaker
So it was very, you know, I guess you use the word therapeutic. Yeah, it was. ah Other people have used the word cathartic. And for me, it was absolutely a way of like processing everything. Like all this stuff had come into my head and it was sitting in my head.
00:54:09
Speaker
And then by writing it, it came out my fingers. and in some way I could make sense of it. kind of like i don't I like photography and I used to take a lot of pictures, but on my walls at home I i hang art because art is is where another human has taken in the environment and passed it through their head and their hormones, if you will, and then it comes out through their fingers. and i So I appreciate art more than photography because
00:54:40
Speaker
It's been interpreted by another human. And so for me, writing that book was a way to interpret what had happened and make sense of it. And, you know, I didn't write the book for money. You know, i didn't. um I wrote the book for me and my friends and my family so that they would know what had actually happened.
00:55:01
Speaker
who's Who's on your wall? Who's who's an artist do you really like? ah Well, you might not have heard of them. They're all they're Alaskan artists. um You know, like there's one guy, his name is Bill Brody.
00:55:15
Speaker
And Bill Brody was a... a ah art professor at the university of Alaska Fairbanks for like 30 years. And I really fell in love with his art when he was doing these really big plain air oils. Like he would go out into the wilderness and he developed like all these techniques to roll up his, um,
00:55:37
Speaker
his canvases, and then um he he had a frame that kind of fit into a tube. He could take the frame apart. And then he had a meant ah like a like a protege along with him named Clara Mache, who's also from Fairbanks, and she got up closer to the mountains and she painted one and and I bought one of those from her.
00:55:56
Speaker
ah i really miss the Brooks. I haven't been back there since 2015. It's been over 10 years now. How long when you left Alaska? I mean, it seems like you stayed here for a while. i came there every summer from about 2005 to about 2015. I worked at Coldfoot Camp um up there for a couple years, and then I got a job.
00:56:20
Speaker
for Gates of the Arctic. So I would come back there. And once I had a girlfriend in Ferry, which is right next to Healy. So I was just kind of coming back every every summer. ah My last season there late did that 2017.
00:56:35
Speaker
I was living alone
00:56:39
Speaker
but i was living alone in ah and a cabin next to Silver Salmon Creek, which was just like an amazing place. I was catching like these monsters every day and eating so much wonderful salmon.
00:56:52
Speaker
But I kind of, i was like in my mid thirties and I just kind of like looked at my life and I was just like, what am I doing? like I felt like I kept going back to Alaska because of what had driven me up to Alaska in my early 20s, which was looking for adventure and nature and something more real than suburban consumeristic society ah that I grew up in.
00:57:18
Speaker
So I was looking for transformation and solitude and testing myself physically, but I didn't need those things when I was in my mid thirties. I had already done them. So I felt like I was kind of going in circles and having that much solitude for four months living by myself and being kind of terrified of all these grizzly bears. I would see like 30 grizzly bears every single day. And although they were accustomed to humans, you still get scared when you're around them. And that was that was kind of my enlightenment. Like you had an enlightenment when you...
00:57:51
Speaker
fell off that mountain and almost died. I had mine when I was just like, I need to start like dating and finding a partner and thinking about community and, and stuff like that. So that's why I left. And my wife, we got pregnant, my girlfriend, we got pregnant soon after, and we had a job lined up at Lake Clark. Again, we were going to go back to silver salmon Creek, but she was going to be like six months pregnant when, um, we were going to go. And we had like a big debate about that. I was just like, we need to be like an adventurous couple. Let's throw caution to the wind. And she had the much more kind of conservative and wiser approach. She's like, no, like we got to...
00:58:36
Speaker
think about this kid and the nutrition it's going to get and and all of that. So that was kind of like a a big turning point for my life when I kind of said goodbye to adventure for for quite a bit. and it wasn't until this past summer when I went to Montana. That's like been my biggest adventure in six years or so. so So that was that.
00:58:56
Speaker
um But to go back to the adventurer's son, I'm wondering... so you So you kind of start talking about yourself, then you talk about being a parent, and then you kind of just really get into Cody Roman's journey for a long time. And you bring and an amazing attention to detail. This was like Krakauer-esque. It was like almost like investigative reporting where you're kind of like following his every move for a series of years, especially when when he gets to Central America. And I'm wondering what that was like. What was it like
00:59:37
Speaker
Being so immersed in in his life, and I don't know what you're reading, his journals, emails, whatever, talking to his friends. What was that like?
00:59:48
Speaker
Wow. Yeah, that was, um, yeah, that was really satisfying in many ways, but I also felt like, wow, I wish I'd, I'd been paying closer attention to a lot of this beforehand, but you know, some of it, you know, did come from his journals that, you know, I hadn't seen before.
01:00:06
Speaker
Um, And, you know, I'd read, um you know, he'd send me these emails along the way when he was in Costa Rica. um So I'd had been keeping up with him. But to go revisit that just gave me like so much more respect for what he'd done. And I, i was just, I was so much more impressed with him when I went back and read everything that he was doing in detail.
01:00:32
Speaker
Then when he was doing it, um probably because when he was doing it, you know, he was sending me stuff along the way. And I was busy with all of my, you know, own my own life and stuff that was going on. And I didn't take the time to really digest what he'd said. You know, I wish I wish that I had, you know, like, yeah.
01:00:55
Speaker
I wish that I had. And I think, again, part of it for me is I i need to i need it to kind of go into my head and then come back out. do you know what I mean? I had to, by reading it and then writing it, then i really i really had it figured out, you know? um Like I was, when I... um When I work on co-authoring science papers, sometimes when there's a difficult section and I'm not sure you know what my co-author is saying, because we as co-authors, we pass our manuscripts around to get comments.
01:01:28
Speaker
And so often if it's something I don't quite really get, I'll rewrite it. you know And and and by rewriting it you or edit it, By editing it, I get a better handle on it And i I think it's just part of, you know, it's one of my deficiencies is you know, I might not pick up on things the first go round. I have to like internalize them, you know, bring them into my head and then spin them back out my fingers.
01:01:51
Speaker
Hmm.
01:01:54
Speaker
And what was it like to end? it It ends on a very kind of melancholic note when it almost sounds like it was it was it was nice kind of dwelling inside these memories. what What was it like kind of putting that final period and that last edit and kind of closing this chapter? Did it feel like a loss or did it feel like you were unleashing this book like a ah dove into the sky?
01:02:23
Speaker
Well, how did it feel? Well, first of all, you know, like a lot of it i I had, I did, you know, I guess I'm not embarrassed to say i I did. I cried over that damn thing. You know, like, I mean, literally tears came down my face.
01:02:36
Speaker
Um, and they still do, you know, like, I don't know, not as often as they used to, but usually music makes it happen. you know I can, especially music that he liked, like radio head, you know, and some other kind of, uh,
01:02:52
Speaker
I don't know what they call like indie, indie pop from the twenty s from the early 2000s and ah music that he'd turned me on to. So, yeah, it was really like an emotional thing, but also a release.
01:03:04
Speaker
And it just, you know, for a long time, um, for many you know months, I guess. you know i i would Even after the book came out, I would reread the last few um sections. don't know.
01:03:20
Speaker
i don't know to say. I'm embarrassed. at it I'm not really embarrassed, ah but I'd read it because it would... bring emotions out of me, you know, like it kind of, it was like I could flush things from my system almost like, um, my wife and I were in a big earthquake in San Francisco in 1989. We were like, not in San Francisco. We were like in mountain view or actually I was at Stanford campus when the thing went off and it was a big earthquake, you know, I don't know, like ah seven, five or something. And, um,
01:03:52
Speaker
And forever after that, like we weren't terrified when that earthquake happened, the big one, but every every um aftershock was like terrifying. you know yeah It was like all this fear was pent up inside of us. It's sort of like...
01:04:08
Speaker
Like as a survival mechanism, your body doesn't let you be terrified in the moment. you know You want to be the most scared. But then any little memory of that fearsome thing kind of releases that pent up fear.
01:04:20
Speaker
And so I feel like the grief that I'd kind of had pent up inside of me while I was looking for him, you know, I couldn't really, i couldn't really, like i I, you know, I'm not even sure if i I bring it up in the book. I think I got sick in the book.
01:04:37
Speaker
And I never really said why I got sick. I didn't know why I got sick, but I had this really horrible like sinus infection. And and and what it was, was I almost every night I would start to cry and I would just fight back the tears and it just built up into like a sinus infection.
01:04:54
Speaker
And, and I think, you know, like that's a physical manifestation of like bottling up the grief to kind of get this job done. You know, it was important to find him at that point, you know, like, he could have still been alive. I thought he was still alive.
01:05:09
Speaker
um And so I think that's kind of an example of how when you you have you're forced to bottle up your grief, um you know it it needs to come out. And so what I'm trying to say is, how did I feel? You asked me, how did I feel when I finished the book? Well, it was fantastic to finish it.
01:05:29
Speaker
um And I worked really hard on it. i didn't It was like the most important thing I ever did besides
Relationship Reflections and Cultural Interests
01:05:34
Speaker
go look for him. You know what I mean? like um I don't know, the three most important things I've done are like raise kids as best I could, look for my son when he went missing, and then tell the real story of what had happened. yeah and And so I felt like I was able to get a lot of the emotions that I felt down. And i when I reread them, I could kind of bring up those those emotions that were bottled up and I could get them out.
01:06:00
Speaker
I'm just, I'm wondering if if you've changed from these tragic experiences and the writing of this book in any way kind of emotionally, like are you ah you more more open with kind of expressing emotion or displaying emotion um at all because of this?
01:06:20
Speaker
Yes, yes, yes. And no, there's some people I still am unable to like confront, if you will, you know, like like they will, make me angry, but I can't like tell them why i'm why I'm angry.
01:06:35
Speaker
Um, but on the other hand, oh yeah, I mean, um, I feel like as we age as men, as we age, you know, our testosterone starts to run down, I guess, or we don't produce it as much.
01:06:49
Speaker
And, and that tends to change our, our emotional state and our behaviors. Um, but yeah, there was a quick acceleration in that kind of, um, sort of empathy and sympathy for others, um, that writing that book made me kind of face up to what was going on and made me feel, um, you know, not exactly sorry, isn't the right word, but, you know, definitely when people, um,
01:07:21
Speaker
hurt, you know, I could understand more about how they hurt and why. It seemed like you guys were sharing a lot on kind of like a like a fun level, like, yeah, I want to go hike this volcano or whatever, but also on a practical. He was like, dad, can you find me some maps and stuff like that? And it seems like you guys were able to really bond over that.
01:07:45
Speaker
He did. He asked me for advice. You know, i thought we had we I love my son a lot, you know, and I i put a lot of um effort into into developing a good relationship with him, you know. um And i you know, looking back, I wish I'd put more into the relationship with my daughter, you know, but, but my wife and my daughter had a really good thing going on and I didn't want to interfere with that. And, um, and you know, I think, you know, my wife had family issues too, and I didn't want to dive into my wife's issues deeply in the book. Cause that's her, that's her story, not mine. You know what i mean? Like I get criticism that I didn't talk about,
01:08:27
Speaker
my daughter and my wife, you know, like, because every woman who's reading the book wants to hear all the dirt in my life. I wasn't going to write about my daughter and my wife because I respect them too much. You know what i mean? I don't, because what people want to hear is they want to hear the dirt and the pain the pain and the suffering. And I didn't want to cover that on them. You know, it was a story about, you know, me and my son, you know, and, uh,
01:08:52
Speaker
And so, um but anyway, yeah, I worked hard to be a good father to him. And I didn't have a lot of, um I didn't have a lot to work with going into it. You know, like I didn't have good dad training.
01:09:05
Speaker
And so I don't, I don't know, you know, I still don't know if I did a good job, um but I tried. Yeah, I tried. Hard for me to say, but it sounds like you did a really good job. He sounds like he was a wonderful person. I wish I had a chance to to meet him.
01:09:24
Speaker
um I had a whole bunch of questions about your science, but maybe we'll just save that for podcast next year or something, yeah if that's okay, for Roman.
01:09:36
Speaker
This was great. I like talking. you know You're an awesome podcaster. you Thank you very much. I usually ask my guests at the end of the podcast if they're enjoying anything culturally, anything you're really enjoying right now, Roman.
01:09:53
Speaker
Sure. Well, I am, i think I tried to admit earlier that I don't read as much as I'd like, but I'm reading a book about George Schaller right now. um The title, I can't quite, it it escapes me. So does the author. It hasn't come out yet. It's coming out in April, um but it's like this big, thick biography of George Schaller, who was sort of like, you know, a wildlife um conservation biologist. you know, he's, you know, Peter Matheson,
01:10:20
Speaker
wrote the snow leopard about him. Um, and you know, he came to Alaska, you know, like you and me, and he got his start, so to speak in Alaska. I don't know if I can claim that you got your start in Alaska, but in some ways I feel like you, you kind of did.
01:10:36
Speaker
And, um, and he, he George Schaller came to Alaska and he didn't be, he went to school here, undergraduate school, and studied wildlife um and started working up on the Arctic slope when he was like in his early twenties, kind of like you going to the gates of the Arctic.
01:10:54
Speaker
And that completely changed his his career. And then he, a couple years later, he went up to the Arctic national wildlife refuge with the the Murray's and some other early conservationists as they kind of,
01:11:07
Speaker
um imagined and framed this idea of preserving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And then he went on to study, you know, gorillas in Africa and lions and tigers and bears, you know, and all the rest of it. And so I'm reading this book and I wish I could tell you um the title and the author, but it's coming out in the show notes. well we'll We'll figure it out and I'll get it on on the the podcast page. um But that sounds terrific. Yeah. The Muries, I haven't heard their names in a long time. Marty Murie, she wrote a wonderful book called, I think, Two in the Far North. um I feel like she's due for a little bit of revival outside of Alaska.
01:11:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think Alaska plays a really important role in America, you know, um for a lot
Podcast Conclusion
01:11:56
Speaker
of different reasons. And um yeah. And the people who come here, um you know, it's a small state, but people who come here tend to to be, you know, bigger than life, you know, i have big personalities and and a lot of them get changed by Alaska and go back and make big changes, you know, like Bob Marshall, for example.
01:12:17
Speaker
Murray's and others. I have bunch of questions about Barb Marshall and the the northward march of the boreal forest, but again, we'll save those for another day. ah Roman Dial, it's been an absolute honor talking with you.
01:12:34
Speaker
Thank you so much for coming on. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you, Ken.
01:12:56
Speaker
This was the Out of the Wild podcast, original music by Duncan Barrett. For more episodes, subscribe to my sub stack.