Death of a son
Memoir explores a dark and forbidding world
Roman Dial, a professor of biology and mathematics, is also a legendary Alaskan explorer. In 2014, Dial’s son Cody went missing while travelling in the jungles of Central America. “Shock washed over me. Then guilt,” Dial writes in his memoir, The Adventurer’s Son. “Guilt ... that I hadn’t given him the attention he deserved. That, maybe, like Peggy pointed out in nearly every argument, I spent too much time on my own trips, on my own interests.”
The day after reading what turned out to be his son’s final email, Dial landed in Costa Rica to search for him and, hopefully, save him. The Adventurer’s Son is his gripping, honest, raw account of that search. Dial’s writing is clear, straightforward, stolid. Adventuring, after all, requires a cool head and steady heartbeat.
He encountered bureaucratic stonewalling, indifferent police and a persistent rumour that Roman had fallen in with an unsavoury character named Pata Lora. “’He’s a really bad guy. A thief. Into drugs,’” Dial is told. The government of Costa Rica refused to grant Dial permission to enter Corcovado National Park, where access is heavily limited.
Shirking the local police, Dial ventured into the park to conduct his own search. His guide was a local farmer suspected of murdering an American woman, but he knows the mountains of Corcovado better than anyone. Still, Dial did not find his son. A National Geographic documentary, Missing Dial, aired in the spring of 2016, positing the idea — floated by Roman Dial himself — that Cody was murdered.
Cody Dial’s remains were discovered in May 2016; he had been killed by a falling tree in the jungle. Dial’s response to the confirmation of Cody’s death was mixed. He was torn, he writes, “between pain and relief. Relief, because it seemed the ordeal of searching without knowing might be over. Pain, because it would mean, once and for all, that our son was dead.”
Despite the dark revelations at the end of the book, its early sections are a celebration of outdoor life. Most beguiling is Chapter 8, which details how Dial took Cody, then six, on his first backcountry adventure, a trek across a remote island in Alaska’s Aleutian chain. “Maybe we should have limited ourselves as parents to team sports, Chuck E. Cheeses, the local cineplex,” Dial writes. Later he adds: “I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything I had done with him in the wild had all been a mistake ... I might not have hurt the six-year-old boy then, but the suffering of a 27-year-old man lost and broken in the jungle now felt like my fault.”
I wish he wouldn’t judge himself too harshly. There’s the small (but empty) consolation Cody died doing what he loved. But what Dial and his son had, for 27 years, was a lifetime of thrilling shared experiences — enough to fill a beautiful and tender book.