“What’s wrong with that?” I asked, thinking it sure beat running out of food with Chuck or bivouacking on a summit with Carl.

While I was happy to lounge around naked and sweaty all day and spoon under the covers at night, Peggy wanted more exercise. The snow in the valleys remained too sloppy for travel, but the slopes above camp froze into a walkable crust in twilight. Beneath the glow of a midnight sun behind the Brooks Range’s northern ramparts, we spent the week exploring the mountains each night. We would climb a few thousand feet to gain a gentle ridgeline, then slide down on our butts in a real-life Chutes and Ladders. We had one ice ax between us that Peggy used to control her descent on steep snow. I held long sturdy rocks for the same purpose.

One day, back in the tent after a night in the hills, Peggy woke, looked out, and cast her eyes up at the sky. It was three in the afternoon. “Yuk,” she said, “it’s still gray.” The clouds meant another warm night with snow too soft for travel. “We’re prisoners.”

“Prisoners of love,” I reminded her, pulling her back in the tent.

Chased out of the range by May’s sloppy conditions, we returned to Kuyuktuvuk Creek in July to walk and packraft for the month. Midway through the 350-mile journey, we discovered Peggy was pregnant. To ease her morning sickness with something fresh, we caught grayling, a kind of arctic trout. Peggy was nervous in water, so I took her hand when we waded creeks and rivers. She sang while I paddled us both in our packraft. Each day we kept each other company; each night we kept each other warm beneath our single sleeping bag draped like a quilt across us. We fought and worked it out. And one memorable moment, we shared a deep and primal fear as a grizzly—all the while in the sights of my shaking .30-06—charged us, stopping only yards away when it finally caught our scent. Our month in the Brooks Range pulled us closer than either of us had ever been to anyone.

Years later, Peggy and I entered the Wilderness Classic, held in the Brooks Range that year. The course would head up Kuyuktuvuk Creek. In a prerace briefing, a park ranger told all us racers that the local Nunamiut name Kuyuktuvuk meant “place to make love many times.”

Peggy smiled and glanced at me. “How did he know?”

NINE MONTHS AFTER our honeymoon on Kuyuktuvuk and the day a Fairbanks cold snap ended, Peggy went into labor just before midnight. “Roman, this is it. The baby’s coming.”

“No, it’s Braxton Hicks,” I said, citing the false contractions that don’t signal birth. “Go back to sleep.” I turned over.

She chuckled. “No, these are real. I can feel it. Let’s go!” We got up and her water broke there in the bedroom. We hurried to the Fairbanks hospital in our little red Toyota. It was February 22, 1987.

Like many first-time moms, Peggy labored all night, her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. Helpless, I could only hold her hand as she squeezed and pumped mine in rhythm with her contractions. When our newborn boy, red with blood and mucus, finally slipped out headfirst—I nearly fainted. Peggy, it was clear, was far tougher than I could ever be.

She held him and cooed, happy and exhausted like me, except I had only watched the miracle of birth: she had done its labor. I was pleased our firstborn was a son and looked forward to bonding with him as a father, and to maintaining that bond in ways my own father had not. Peggy said she wanted “another Roman,” so we made it his middle name. His first name I took from Cody Pass, the wilder Alaska beyond Usibelli I had imagined as a kid. Cody Roman, I reasoned, would be what lay beyond me.

We spent the following winter in the one-bedroom house and watched infant Cody transform into a toddler. He began by balancing against walls on two feet while looking at us with awe, feeling his legs support him. His tiny hand felt good, wrapped tightly around my index finger as I walked him around the house.

One day, he sat on the floor with me and looked up expectantly. He was ten months old in a red sweater and diapers. He’d been bracing himself against the house walls for a week. I looked at him and smiled. “Stand up,” I encouraged. “Stand up.” Puzzled, he looked back at me. “Stand up!” I repeated with enthusiasm.

And then, shockingly, in one fluid movement, he lurched forward onto all fours, pushed off with his hands, and stood up on his own. He wobbled there, smiling as I smiled back.

“Peggy!” I called out, “Peggy! Cody just stood up! On his own!”

Peggy ran out and we watched him take a few steps, walking and smiling with his newfound freedom.

Baby Cody slept well each night and toddled with determination. From early on, he displayed a long attention span and deep curiosity. Sometimes I carried him around in a backpack carrier on my bike or on foot. Sometimes I held him on my chest as we both fell asleep. Sometimes he cried and nothing I did would soothe him: not changing his cloth diaper, nor feeding him; not rocking or jostling him; not making silly faces or sounds. No one but Peggy could calm him then.

FALLING OIL PRICES crashed Alaska’s economy in spring of 1987 with “For Sale” signs on every block in Fairbanks. When a job offer teaching math in Barrow fell through, I called an old friend, Matt, who’d taken his UAF mining engineering degree to Nome to work for Alaska Gold. The biggest gold mining company in Alaska, it could offer me a job as a manual laborer. Peggy and Cody would remain in Fairbanks while I headed west to work.

Matt, an Iditarod musher as well as an engineer, offered me his “dog shack” as a place to stay in exchange for looking after his kennel. Each morning after feeding his barking white sled dogs, I rode my mountain bike to the thaw fields, where a crew of misfit laborers melted the permafrost to mine for gold. Alaska Gold operated two gold dredges, enormous 1940s-era boats that floated in the ponds they dug. At their bow, a conveyer belt of one-ton buckets slurped up the tundra and passed the diggings to giant sluice boxes that rinsed nuggets and gold dust from pay dirt. I worked ahead of Dredge #6. My job was connecting water hoses to two-inch steel pipes sunk eighty feet down into the permafrost, then jacking and twisting the pipes with heavy tools to break them free of the ice that gripped them.

I sent nearly all my earnings home, happy to make sixteen bucks an hour. But living in the dog shack so far from Peggy and baby Cody was lonely. That spring, my high school class would hold their ten-year reunion. The invitation reminded me that my science career had been sidetracked. A decade had passed, yet I worked side by side with kids who had just graduated from high school. It was time to grow up and get that Ph.D.

After a full season in Nome’s thaw fields, my visits to graduate schools on bustling campuses like Princeton and Stanford offered a contrast in cultures, and not just with Alaska’s frontier. Pretentious Princeton put me off, yet the Stanford vibe was exciting. The Bay Area’s nearby mountain bike trails, redwood forests, and rocky coastlines appealed to me—almost as much as Stanford’s outdoorsy students and eclectic faculty.

Stanford professor Jonathan Roughgarden was a tall, lanky man who wore his mop of brown hair carefully combed to the side. Brilliant, with an owlish look befitting his Harvard education, Roughgarden beamed in excitement as he used his hands to give comprehensible shape to abstract ideas. The National Science Foundation had funded his proposal to develop mathematical models of food webs based on fieldwork with Caribbean lizards. It was a project that needed a student like me, one with athletic abilities who was also competent in the quantitative arts. From my perspective, Roughgarden and the project’s fieldwork would complete my training as a modern ecologist.

It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a Ph.D. from Stanford either.

Chapter 6

Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn

Cody and Jazz, Culebra, 1991.

Courtesy of the author

The Ph.D. program started in the fall of 1988. Peggy, who was pregnant with our second child and finishing her own degree in elementary education, stayed in Alaska with eighteen-month-old Cody. Midwinter, I flew home and drove our Subaru to California. Peggy and Cody followed soon after, flying down with frozen moose and caribou meat, part of our strategy for surviving on a grad student stipend in Silicon Valley.