Gene harrumphed. “I’ll go get those guys—you oughta talk to ’em anyway.” Gene opened the door to leave and the wind charged in like a junkyard dog. Rene shouldered the door closed behind him.

As we waited, I studied a framed photo on the wall of a bronco rider with an arm outstretched and bandana flying. The cowboy had been caught midair in a packed stadium. The horse’s hooves looked six feet off the ground. “That’s Gene,” Rene volunteered. “He rode in the rodeo.” Gene Maynard had been a saddle bronc–riding champion for much of the sixties and seventies. Clearly, he, too, had balanced physical risk against emotional reward.

Gene came back with two guys around my age. They sounded Canadian.

“So, you guys rode over toward Nikolski?” I asked, engaging them in trip-sharing talk.

“Yeah. But we couldn’t make it. The river was too deep.” Their lips tightened. “You sure you want to try that with the little guy?” These cowboys were lean, fit even, but they didn’t look like the wilderness jocks who raced in the Classic and confronted crossing after crossing. Do they even know how to read rivers, how to pick a good crossing or time of day?

“Which creek was it?” I deferred, holding out my map, probing for their depth of Umnak knowledge.

“Just before Amos Bay. It’s a long ways back to here if you can’t get across. How much food you got?”

“Eight days, ten if we stretch it. Which river exactly?” The information would be valuable.

They looked at the map. One of them smeared a finger around the southeast slope of Recheshnoi where its biggest glacier fed a four-mile stream to the sea. “Here.”

A few days of incessant rain or an afternoon of sun could swell a creek like that into an uncrossable river. “Hmm. By the coast?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if we get there and it’s too high, we’ll camp. Wait for morning when it’s lower or for the rain to let up if it’s raining. The forecast calls for good weather after a couple days.”

“How old’s your boy?”

“I’m six,” Cody Roman piped up.

Now they worked him.

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s windy,” the youngster responded seriously.

The river crossing was just a proxy for their main, unspoken worry, the same as Peggy’s and the same as mine. What if something happens to me and my little boy is left on his own? How responsible is that?

Chapter 8

Space Captain

Umnak Geyser Basin camp, 1993.

Courtesy of the author

The young, newly minted Roman and I left for Nikolski. I was alone with my six-year-old on an empty Aleutian island, and doubt gnawed deeper: What if something happens to me?

Soft green tundra stretched to the base of Okmok, where clouds wrapped around black lava towers like washrags around bad plumbing. Flowers familiar from the hills above Anchorage—Indian paintbrush, monkshood, and harebells—even the swards of grass—all seemed pumped up in size, as if the Aleutian wind had inflated them.

We made camp early, before the rain soaked us, taking refuge in our roomy yellow tent. A decade of sunshine on glaciers, deserts, and tropical beaches had faded the tent fly from blue to gray. The cowboys’ questions and Scott Kerr’s story of tents torn open left the shelter looking inadequate as protection against bad weather.

Madsen’s promised storm arrived with nightfall. Its gusts came in powerful waves with unceasing rain. Three times hurricane-force blasts barreled down Okmok, rumbling like a locomotive before they hit. Each gust crashed into us, collapsing the tent and plastering wet fabric on my face. But after each blast, the tent miraculously sprang upright.

In my sleeping bag, eyes wide in the dark, terrified that a pole might break and rip the nylon fabric to leave us exposed to hypothermia, I asked myself: Why the hell did I bring him here? What kind of dad am I really?

Somehow, Roman slept through it all and the tent remained intact.

The next day, clear skies revealed a peculiar landscape of corduroy-textured green domes and coarse black cliffs. Tall grass reached to Roman’s waist and pulsed in traveling waves up and over the summits of the surrounding hills. Bundled in his one-piece Patagonia suit with its hood pulled over his hat, he marched onward, waving his red mittens in time with his steps.

We passed a herd of forty piebald reindeer milling about on a low divide, then descended to camp at Hot Springs Cove on a Bering Sea beach. Grass crept up and over dunes of black sand. Waterfalls spilled from high cliffs, but the wind blew their discharge upward against the laws of gravity.

Roman wanted a fire. It would be tough to get it going, but what kind of outdoor father would I be not to start one? With dry grass, driftwood, and persistence, we built a campfire behind the dunes, pressing ourselves together and next to its dry warmth. My boy poked at the burning driftwood with a stick, keeping the flames alive and cheery.

“What’s fire, Dad?” he asked.

I thought for a minute, searching for truth in simplicity. “Trees make wood by gluing parts of air and water together with sunshine. When the wood burns, the sunshine comes back out as fire and the water and air go up in smoke.”

He looked at my face for some hint of jest, then turned to study the coals.

“Is that why fire makes light? It’s sunshine?”

“Yep. And the water comes out as steam. That makes the smoke gray.”

The night passed calm and clear, the morning hot. We dried our gear and relaxed on the warm black sand.

By the third day of hiking, Roman didn’t complain about sore feet or tired legs. Bundled in his pile clothes and one-piece suit, he trod along, looking for strawberries, blueberries, and sweet nagoon berries to pop in his mouth. He’d pick up interesting rocks and hollow grass stems that he called straws and piped between his lips. I felt a parental profoundness in simply watching him engage so purely as a child with his creative attraction to nature.

The weather held—windy, but never cold or wet.

Climbing out of Hot Springs Cove was steep, yet Roman managed it well. Our family day hikes up gentle mountains near Anchorage had prepared him for climbs like this. As we descended the other side, we could see puffs of steam rising near Geyser Bight Creek.

“Look at that, Roman!” I called, trying out his new name.

A miniature Yellowstone, the geyser basin was sized just right for a six-year-old. Knee-high geysers gushed over limey aprons, their discharge spilling as hot little waterfalls into the creek. Fumaroles roared, mud pots plopped. Even here, five miles from either coast, we could hear the ocean waves crashing. Recheshnoi, draped in small glaciers and broad snowfields, rose above the marshy valley.

One hot spring—a deep indigo at the bottom with a pool of blue rimmed in a rainbow of green, yellow, and orange—held a pile of reindeer bones.

“What happened to the reindeer, Dad?”

“He probably got too close in the wintertime and fell in,” I guessed, thinking back to bison bones in Yellowstone.

“Why would he get close in winter? To stay warm?”

“Maybe, or maybe because the snow was deep everywhere else except here.”

I told Roman that people name hot springs and geysers. He dubbed the hot-spring “Caribou Stew,” chanting the rhyme as he tossed in a rock.

Wet meadows filled the valley between thermal features. We camped on a low spongy dome where water oozed through the tent floor, warmed by the basin’s thermal activity. “Feel this, Roman,” I offered, my hand pressed against the tent floor.

His eyes lit up. “It’s warm.”

Dry in sleep clothes, we scrunched together on our overlapping foam pads. Perched there, I read three chapters of Charlotte’s Web aloud. Roman studied Garth Williams’s illustrations and searched the text for words he recognized. We reclined on our sleeping bags and pushed ourselves close to share the book and our love.

On the fourth day, we walked hand in hand up a Roman-sized babbling brook that splashed over rough, hardened black lava. He asked questions that six-year-olds ask to make sense of their ever-expanding world. He made analogies involving Legos and reminisced more about Jazz than about Peggy. Apparently, one parent could replace the other, but a parent couldn’t replace a sibling. He talked about kids at school, like Vincent Brady, who would be a lifelong friend, and the things that they’d done together.

As we neared a pass that led back to the Pacific side, the landscape went lunar. We were both taken by the otherworldliness of the place, with its rugged black rocks, sand and gravel, the total lack of plant life. The scene ignited our imaginations and we slipped into role playing as explorers on another world.

“Captain,” I asked, inspired by the barrenness, “where are we?”

“On another planet,” he answered, jumping into the game without pause.

“Be careful, Captain,” I went on, encouraging him. “There might be monsters here.”

“Who are you?” he asked.