“Yep! Good find, Rome! I’ve never seen one of those before!”

On one trip to a nearby waterfall, Roman found another unique frog called a rock skipper. A Bornean specialty, this frog clings to slimy overhangs after skipping across moving water like a flat stone thrown across a quiet pond. Somehow the boy caught one. With excitement in his eyes, he showed me the rock skipper’s emerald green skin and azure blue toe pads. Afterward Roman scrambled down to a lower plunge pool and I followed.

Above a short waterfall, he moved deliberately across slick rocks. I knew his exhilaration, but also feared for his safety. A fall could break a limb or lead to scrapes, cuts, and a nasty tropical infection. I wanted to call out and warn him, “Be careful!” Instead I praised him for his good rock-climbing moves. Every parent knows this vacillation between apprehension and pride as a child reaches for independence.

Six-year-old Jazzy showed herself a natural athlete with common sense about risk. A joy to behold, this tiny towheaded girl would spring gracefully from boulder to boulder. If we offered help, she’d say, “I don’t really need it, but just in case,” and put her little hand in ours for slimy crossings above steep, rooted drops.

The hazards of nature—bears in the woods, tree fall in jungles, avalanches in snow country, rapids in whitewater—worry all parents who share the outdoors with their children. We were no exception. On one hike, we witnessed a huge tree limb fall from high above and strike the ground with a crash. The sight, sound, and damage were terrifying. We inspected the one-foot-diameter branch covered in orchids and ferns. It seemed best to wait out future downpours next to big buttressed tree trunks, the way we’d each crouch beneath a doorjamb in an earthquake.

Rainfall dictated our routine. Back in camp following our mornings of sweaty exploration, we would change into dry clothes. If it rained all afternoon, we would read while the kids wrote in their journals and sharpened their arithmetic playing Yahtzee. If it was sunny, we would spend the hottest part of the day at the creek. The kids dug holding ponds in the warm sand to more closely observe the fish they called needle-nose—caught on the surface—and “toe-nibblers”—caught on the bottom—in small hand nets.

“Daddy!” Jazz shrieked in joy, “come see the fish! The water’s not that deep, only up to here!” Roman snorkeled around his “obstacle course” of sunken logs and sandbars. Beneath the backdrop of wild diversity, Peggy and I watched our kids at play in sunny, cool water. It felt like paradise.

At night, we holed up in our bug nets. While we were safe from malaria and dengue in the wilderness, the diversity of biting bugs equaled that of every other kind of creature and plant. Most nights we enjoyed meeting our “dinner guests”: strange, wonderful, and often giant bugs that would fly at night into the dinner hut, attracted by its single electric light. Roman found a moth that looked like a scorpion when threatened, recording in his journal:

I saw a moth during a huge rain storm. When I bothered him he would open his wings and lift up his abdomen, pretending it was a stinger. Cones on his head would bulge out. Fur on his legs would stick out. He was cool!

Once, I brought a glow-in-the-dark bracket fungus to Peggy and the kids to entice them into the night. We turned off our headlamps, closed our eyes, and let our pupils expand. Eyes ready, we opened them to see phosphorescent fungi glowing green in the dark. I recorded Roman’s poetic description in my journal: “They look like puddles of water reflecting the night sky, except you can pick the puddle up, then turn on your light and see you’re holding a rotting leaf with a little mushroom growing on it.”

Cabang Panti’s main building served as the pantry, kitchen, dining hall, and gathering place. A half-dozen shelves held a moderate-sized library of reference books, field guides, and Xeroxed scientific papers in binders. As in all the huts, the library was open to the humid forest air, without air-conditioning, walls, or even screening. Book pages felt damp, soft, and moldy. At night a bewildering variety of colorful cockroaches swarmed across book bindings. Some of the thicker volumes had been tunneled by termites. I pored over the mildewed texts undeterred and scribed notes in my journal to share what I learned with Peggy and the kids. It was exciting and rewarding to see such a wonderful and novel place firsthand while learning from books and articles on site.

Each day we’d walk the network of trails that crisscrossed the research area to explore the peat swamps and granite creeks. One day, we climbed to the top of Batu Tinggi: GP’s summit of giant boulders covered in bright green sphagnum, serpentine nepenthes, and violet-colored flowers. The cloud forest, dripping in soggy moss and lichen, was strangely silent of birdsong and surprisingly chilly. Unfortunately, it was still full of the ubiquitous leeches eager to suck our blood.

Past Batu Tinggi, I went on to recover a compass left by a GP researcher. Peggy and the kids descended without me. When I caught up with them in a pounding rain, Roman was leading. We were excited to be reunited, even if separated for only an hour or so. “Roman’s been doing a great job. He’s so brave, breaking all the spider webs for me and keeping a good pace. Sometimes the trail’s been pretty faint, but he’s kept us on track,” Peggy reported.

Roman, then eight years old, continued to lead for another hour in the rain. He only occasionally lost the trail when a fallen tree crossed it. I asked him what he liked best, what he thought was neatest about the jungle.

“The neatest thing? The neatest thing is everything!” Roman expressed the strong, innate interest in nature that nearly all young children seem to have. “I like how the jungle is never quiet. There’s always some living thing making noise.”

If Puerto Rico had initiated young Roman’s fascination with the tropics, then the four trips that he would make to Borneo as a child, teen, and young man cemented that fascination in place. A dozen other trips to tropical and subtropical Australia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Hawaii, and Bhutan would send him eventually—perhaps inevitably—to Central America for his greatest adventure of all.

Chapter 11

Jungles and Ice

Roman and Jazz, Harding Icefield, 2001.

Courtesy of the author

Most parents want to raise independent, capable offspring who still want to spend time with their family. The real test of parenting comes during adolescence, when offspring act like two-year-old toddlers in adult-sized bodies. They turn secretive, exploring nonfamily relationships that run deeper than playground friendships. Roman was typical in this regard, but fortunately he still found time for me. By his teens, our trips together had established attitudes, morals, and skills that shaped him into a useful research assistant and a competent adventure partner.

As a freshman in high school, he helped me during two months at Danum Valley Field Center in Borneo. Between three feet and two hundred feet above the ground, I dangled from ropes while handling a twenty-pound chemical “fogger” that knocked thousands of insects into collecting trays. Meanwhile, Roman learned to identify these insects from a Cambridge University graduate student named Ed Turner. Together in Danum’s air-conditioned lab, with Radiohead playing on speakers plugged into an iPod, they peered into microscopes and separated Ed’s bug samples into groups like Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and others.

Back in Anchorage, Roman assisted me with my 14,000 bugs as he had helped Ed with his. We set up dissecting microscopes across from each other on the dining room table. While hunched over scopes and our data sheets one Saturday afternoon, he said, “Looking at all these bugs and seeing all this diversity is like being back in the rainforest. Check out this praying mantis ant-mimic. It looks just like an ant!”

A few years later when the research was published, Roman would find his name in the acknowledgments of a Biotropica paper entitled “Arthropod abundance, canopy structure, and microclimate in a Bornean lowland tropical rain forest” by Ed Turner, two other Cambridge colleagues, and me. Roman and Jazz would be acknowledged in “Spatial distribution and abundance of red snow algae on the Harding Icefield, Alaska, derived from a satellite image” in Geophysical Research Letters.