Thirty-five of us started the race at Eureka Roadhouse, a hundred miles from Anchorage. The finish line waited 150 miles away in Talkeetna. By the end of the first day the sky threatened rain and both of us found ourselves exhausted and butt-sore. For well over fifteen hours, we had pedaled, pushed, and carried our mountain bikes across fifty miles of Alaskan backcountry and wilderness.

We set down our bikes on a tundra shelf, high in the Talkeetna Mountains, and pulled on our puffy Patagonia pullovers. After arranging our sleeping pads next to each other, we pressed ourselves together to share body heat, pushed our feet into our empty backpacks, and pulled our deflated packrafts over us like blankets against the rain. To save weight, we carried no sleeping bags, bivy sacks, tent, or even tarp. Before we settled in to bivouac a few hours, Roman reached into his food bag. “Here you go, old man,” he said, grinning as he tossed me a Cadbury bar. “I didn’t eat my full ration today and figured you’d need this to stay warm tonight.”

“Thanks, son. That’s very generous of you,” I replied, smiling back. “I’ll just stash it for later, in case you want it back.”

After cycling, pushing, and sometimes carrying our bikes for three days, pausing only long enough to shove food in our mouths or nap a few hours, we prepared to float the Talkeetna River for the final stretch of the race. We had followed well-used grizzly bear trails to portage a canyon full of burly Class IV rapids. As we inflated our rafts and assessed our progress, Roman asked, “Do you think we’ll sleep tonight, or just paddle straight through?”

“Up to you. It’s about twenty-five miles to Talkeetna. How do you feel?” We had slept maybe eight hours of the last seventy-two or so. He looked strong, although near three in the morning the previous “night” he’d dragged a bit while shoving his bike through the thick alder brush.

Roman stood up from his boat. Scratching his head with both hands, he thought for a minute, then said, “I feel pretty good.” He gave me the punchy grin of a sleep-deprived adventure racer, his shoulders broad, his back straight. “I say we go for it and get this thing done. It’ll be great to get off our feet and into our rafts. Here, Dad, let me help you get that bike on your boat.”

Ever since Dick Griffith had pulled out his “secret weapon” two decades before, packrafting had been a staple of the Classic. The Talkeetna River on this course presented the biggest whitewater challenge of any Classic to that point. Fortunately, Roman had moved to the forefront of whitewater packrafting in the previous couple of years.

At sixteen, during his first trip down a local Class IV canyon on Ship Creek—a run that most packrafters found terrifying in the early 2000s—he declared, “This is the most fun I’ve ever had!” He reveled in the amusement-park excitement of dropping off Ship’s back-to-back four-to six-foot waterfalls. My friend Brad Meiklejohn, one of those early white-knuckled packrafters, first met Roman there. Brad told me he had been blown away by how calmly Roman handled its whitewater. Photos of Roman paddling the creek pepper my book on the sport.

Over the next decade, Roman and I took our Ship Creek skills to the Appalachians, Brooks Range, Mexico, Tasmania, Bhutan, even the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, where he and I were the first paddlers ever permitted to packraft its length.

While we had passed the Talkeetna’s biggest canyon, there were still eddy lines, hydraulics, and riffles to negotiate while top-heavy with bicycles strapped to our bows. Below one canyon wall, I watched a whirlpool grab Roman’s stern. He looked startled, but in control. Leaning forward and digging hard with his paddle blades, he pulled himself free, then flashed his teeth at me in a big smile. “That one almost got me!”

After three nights, we arrived in Talkeetna in sixth place for the 2004 Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic without a single blister. Roman’s finish remains the top placement by a seventeen-year-old in the history of the race. A decade after Umnak, he wasn’t only carrying his own weight and keeping up: he was wilderness racing.

Chapter 12

Dungeons and Dragons

Hulahula River, Brooks Range, 2004.

Courtesy of the author

Roman was more than just my adventure partner and research assistant. He listened to what his mom and I said, but challenged us, too, unafraid to speak his mind. “Dad, you’re pretty smart, but Mom”—he grinned—“well, Mom’s wise.”

Even as a kid he shared Peggy’s circumspection. He shared her hairline, too: a widow’s peak. He kept his straight hair short, buzzing it himself. Sure, he had a mohawk when he was eight, but by high school he had discovered that girls went for his clean-cut, Harry Potter looks with his wire-rimmed glasses and high cheekbones like his mother’s. He not only resembled a young wizard, he was also smart enough to be authentic, sans tattoos or piercings.

While other kids watched television, Roman read books—we didn’t have a TV. He read fantasy, entomology, the dictionary, even crappy books where he’d skip every second page. At nine in Borneo, he read Tolkien’s The Hobbit in a single day, then the Lord of the Rings trilogy the next week, a binge that left a big gap in his journal. Later, he and his friends passed around Frank Herbert’s Dune series, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Mark Twain. He read so much I wondered if it was why he needed glasses.

In high school he read science, history, economics, and texts on the world of Dungeons and Dragons, a role-playing game based on imaginative narratives and magical scoring. For years, he spent each Friday evening at a friend’s immersed in DnD. Roman was a renowned dungeon master, the game-play creator, storyteller, and guide. All Peggy and I knew about it was that he left home excited to cook and share meals with a group of all ages and backgrounds. Roman cheerfully joined us for natural history and packrafting trips, but knowing that he’d developed his own identity comforted us.

Roman belonged to a creative, gregarious circle of friends who met in grade school and stayed close. At the group’s center was Roman’s best friend, Vincent Brady. Charismatic, athletic, artistic, Vince painted and drew, played music, and wrote poetry. The two met in kindergarten when Roman found Vince belly-down on a lawn pushing dandelions into his face, dusting his nose, lips, and cheeks with pollen. Roman asked what he was doing. Vince replied he was a bumblebee, pollinating flowers. In that moment, a beautiful lifelong friendship bloomed like the yellow weeds around them.

Starting in middle school, Roman threw solstice parties for this sometimes rowdy crowd, who came over, stoked a backyard bonfire, barbecued meat, and stayed up all night in the endless light of summer. A young woman from Vince’s circle once wrote that Roman was known for his storytelling of surreal adventures, his sharp wit and humor, for contributing to late-night conversations, drawing pictures, wrestling and laughing, waxing abstractions into the wee hours, and joking with everyone in cuddle puddles.

Roman could handle himself on his own, too. When he was sixteen his grandpa paid for a month of Spanish language classes in Mexico’s artsy San Miguel de Allende. Payment for the course included a driver who would meet him on his arrival in Mexico City. But Roman’s flight from L.A. was late and the driver left without him.

Roman called home. It was late in the evening.

“Dad, my flight out of L.A. was delayed, so I missed my ride in Mexico City. I bought this phone card but it’s only got five minutes. What should I do?” We had to solve the problem under the time constraint of his card.

“Hang up and call the school. Ask them what their advice is. Then call me back and tell me what they say.”

He hung up and I waited. A few minutes later the phone rang again. “Dad, they said that there’s a hotel in the airport. I wouldn’t have to leave and they’ll send the car in the morning. Or I can take a bus. There’s one more tonight and it leaves in less than an hour. It goes to another town where I get a second bus to another town and then I get a taxi. They said the whole trip is three or four hours.”

“Where do you get the bus?”

“Outside the airport. If I leave the airport, I can’t get back in for the hotel.”

“Do you have all the directions written down?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to try and catch the bus.”

“Okay, Son. Good luck. Call the school and tell them what you’re doing. And then call me back when you get there.”