I turned to the others. “What do you think, Roman?” I asked.

He looked cool as a cucumber. But I knew my taciturn son could hold back his emotions. Roman had watched Todd pull Ganey from the water trap. “I don’t know—that drop looks pretty hairy,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “It’s why we’re all putting in below it, right?” Unlike me, he had never been accused of being an adrenaline junkie.

“What’s it like downstream?” I asked Todd. Ganey’s near miss had been on a short, five-foot drop on a big creek. Twenty-foot waterfalls, impossible to portage, waited below.

“Oh, it gets better. Much better. This is the chossiest drop on the whole run. It cleans up.”

“Are you sure?” I wanted to know.

In adventurer’s slang, Todd denied he was downplaying the river’s challenges: “I wouldn’t sandbag you, Roman.”

I turned to my son to read past his composure. We had packrafted whitewater together for over a decade. He knew when to say no. He knew when to walk. I had made it a point never to force anything on him that he didn’t want to do. He would let me know. While he was often quiet, he was never shy. He was his mother’s son, as much as my own: risk-aware, vigilant, never hesitant to tell me what he thought.

“Well, Rome?”

“I say we go for it, Dad.”

“Okay, then, I guess that’s settled.” I looked at the others. “Todd, you want to lead? Ganey can you bring up the rear and run sweep?” They nodded and we got into our colorful little boats.

“Let’s go.”

We slid into green water that flowed smoothly over dark rock as canyon walls rose overhead and closed in all around us. Broadleaf crowns of contorted jungle trees dangled from the rim above as we followed the twisting, crystalline creek. Sometimes we shot over rocky underwater ledges where we paddled aggressively off powerful pour-offs. Other times we performed aquatic pirouettes as we maneuvered through tumbling cascades, stabbing our paddles into the current to turn us abruptly and dodge the obstacles. We enjoyed the Alseseca’s challenging rapids and welcomed walking around its dangerous ones. I felt parental pride watching Roman, back to his old whitewater form, negotiate drops with skillful strokes of his paddle.

Midway down, the Alseseca River rushed through a narrow gorge to plunge off a twenty-foot waterfall that was impossible to portage. We surrendered to the drop, whooping as we launched off its edge, falling with the water into the warm, clear pool that yanked us all from our little boats with the force of our entry.

Roman and I clambered back into our packrafts. After catching our breath and soaking in the endorphins, we laid back and looked up. The pool was set deep in an overhung alcove, a natural amphitheater. There was no way out but down. The next drop, while falling a vertical twenty feet, was nowhere near as violent: we’d slide down it, not plummet like we just had.

“That was something, huh, Roman?”

“Yea! That was crazy! There was no way I could stay in my boat,” Roman said. “When I hit, the current just ripped the boat right off me and my thigh straps. It felt like someone forcibly pulling off my pants!” He laughed at the recollection, exhilarated by the thrill. “I was really nervous going off, not being able to see where we were landing. And it was a long fall! But WOW! A twenty-footer!” He shook his head with a look that said he felt vibrantly alive.

Despite my concerns at the put-in, the Big Banana turned out to be a fitting end to our two weeks together. Exhilarating but safe, the run felt like an amusement park ride, albeit with consequences, like Ship Creek only far, far bigger.

WHEN I HEADED home to Alaska, Roman came to the airport to see me off. He grabbed my black duffel full of boating gear from the rental car’s trunk, threw it on his shoulders, and hauled it to the terminal. As we made our way to the check-in counter, he told me about his plans to head overland to Brazil. He would start with a trip into Mexico’s Sierra Madre to see millions of butterflies roosting in tall pine trees—nearly the entire population of monarchs overwintering at the end of their migration. There were guided tours available, but, he said, “I’m going to find the monarchs on my own.”

That a boy—chip off the old block, I thought, grinning. He’d been raised on trips of independent discovery where we used our wits, knowledge, and experience to explore the natural world. It was good to see him continuing those kinds of adventures on his own.

He set my bag down at the check-in counter and spoke to the attendant in Spanish. He turned toward me and I told him, “Good luck, Roman. Have fun. Be safe and stay in touch. Mom and me will want to hear about those butterflies and everything else.”

“I will.”

I pulled him in for a hug. “I love you, Son.”

“I love you, too, Dad.” He smiled and I turned for the gate to head home, happy to have spent this time with him in wild nature and looking forward to what his next adventures would be.

Part II

El Petén

Triangles are mountains, squares are regions, bullets are locations, the diamond symbol is a beach, and the white line is the Patuca River.

Courtesy of the author

The M-shaped route. Bullets indicate place names in the text.

Courtesy of the author

Chapter 14

Mexico

Dry forest, Guatemala, April 2014.

Courtesy of the author

After we said good-bye at the Veracruz airport, Roman stayed in Mexico. He climbed its highest peak—Orizaba—the first week in February, then searched out the overwintering monarch butterflies in the Sierra Madre soon after. Peggy and I didn’t hear from him for a couple of weeks, until Todd posted a YouTube video of our trip. Roman replied-all with one word: “Bitchin.” He lamented sending his boat home with me.

I really miss my boat. Theres been a bunch of stuff that would have been great with a packraft, and Guatemala and Honduras are full of rivers. Costa Rica and Colombia, too. Should have sent the tent back with you and kept the raft. I met a German who was traveling around with his parapent. Hes up in Michoacan flying right now.

As Roman traveled farther south, he emailed us more frequently, apologizing for the typos and absence of apostrophes in emails written on Spanish keyboards. I was teaching full-time, writing research reports, and working on a remodel and insulation project in our attic. Hearing from him brightened my busy days as he described the places he went, the people he met, and the foods he enjoyed.

The night before Roman’s twenty-seventh birthday, on the west coast of Mexico at an off-beat beach town in Chiapas, a thief stole his iPhone, buried beneath dirty laundry and toiletries in his blue Kelty tent. Because texts and international calls were too expensive, he rarely used the phone except for Internet, music, and occasional photos. He didn’t notice it was missing until morning. He emailed me immediately to cancel his account before any charges were made. I cringed knowing a thief had robbed him on his birthday. Roman would not replace his phone.

Roman had bought a pack to replace the one stolen in Veracruz and returned Brad Meiklejohn’s to him by mail. Roman complained that his new Mexican pack—stuffed with his tent, cookpot, Jetboil stove, cold-weather gear for climbing, and a yellow waffle-surfaced sleeping pad strapped to the back—made him a mark for hucksters. As he traveled south, he would use it for storage at hostels when he went off to climb volcanoes and canyons. On those excursions, he carried a small yellow duffel bag over his shoulder bike-messenger-style. Our friend Forrest McCarthy had marked the bag with his name and Jackson Hole address and given it to us years before.

Roman was disappointed with camping in Mexico. It was overpopulated, polluted, and dusty. He had enjoyed clean drinkable water in wilderness all of his life. But in Mexico, he wrote, “the water needs to be treated, and everything is downstream of something you dont want on you.” Between the thieves and the “cow shit everywhere,” he’d had enough of Mexico.

“What’s next?” I wrote back, curious and excited to keep track of his adventures. He said he planned to continue overland through Latin America, maybe as far as Brazil for the World Cup in July. There would be volcanos and jungles in Guatemala, the Blue Hole in Belize. Then, on to Honduras, cheap, but also one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America. He planned to surf Nicaragua’s Pacific waves, visit Corcovado in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Peru. His itinerary sounded adventurous, but I worried for him, too, in countries known for their desperate conditions and crime. He closed his email with Love you guys, thanks for teaching me important life skills. It was the kind of admission all parents yearn to hear from their offspring.