INTERVIEW: New memoir details Roman Dial’s search for his missing son in Costa Rica
Image courtesy of William Morrow / Provided by official site.
Roman Dial, a world-renowned adventurer and professor at Alaska Pacific University, heard frightening news in the summer of 2014. Actually he heard no news at all.
His son, Cody Roman Dial, had been hiking throughout Central America, including Mexico and Guatemala, and his last known whereabouts was by Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica. Cody Roman had emailed his father about his plans to trek into the jungle for four days, but he never made contact again. Roman, back in Alaska with his wife and daughter, became worried and knew something was wrong. He quickly booked a flight to Costa Rica and began an extensive search of the national park.
Roman’s search for his son is detailed in the new memoir The Adventurer’s Son, out now from William Morrow.
“It helped a lot for me to write that book,” Roman said in a recent phone interview before he headed out for a month-long adventure in the Brooks Range of Alaska. “I wrote it for myself to kind of get everything down and figure out what had happened. … When you take information in with your eyes and your ears, and then you pass it through your head, and then you bring it out through your fingers when you write something, you just have a much better understanding of it. And you’ve processed it, so that was really important to me. And then I wanted my family and my friends to know what had really gone on.”
Roman also wanted the public, some of whom may have caught the TV program Missing Dial about the search, to have some news about what eventually transpired in the jungles of Costa Rica. In some ways, the adventurer wanted to present the story — the ultimately sad story — in his own words and not with the cameras of a reality show in tow.
“There were definitely some points that I wanted to convey to other people,” Roman said. “Like one point that I really wanted to convey was that in the world today there’s a lot of recreation that is actually really risky, and people die doing it. There’s wing-suiting, and there’s mountain climbing, and there’s whitewater boating, and I participated in those things for 40 years or more, 50 even. … And I’m embarrassed to actually admit this, but I had never really thought through that if we die, or when we die, the people that love us most, they’re the ones that are going to be hurt the most from that.”
Throughout the life-changing experience of losing his son and searching for his remains in Costa Rica, Roman came to the realization that his life of risky activities can have consequences, and without realizing those consequences, one can become selfish.
“If I were to die doing it, and I was just ‘having fun’ recreating, my daughter and my wife and my parents they’d be really crushed, as I was just imagining that my son was dead,” he said. “So for some young people and not-so-young people I wanted to make that point. … [Right now] I’m in the car with my daughter, Jazz, and she just told me a few minutes ago she doesn’t like to hike because it’s boring. But I feel like I have a good relationship with her, and I feel like a lot of that relationship comes from time we’ve spent in nature. And so that was another point that I wanted to get across. I think it’s important that families spend time in nature with their kids.”
The Adventurer’s Son is a cautionary tale, for sure, but it’s not meant to dissuade readers from enjoying life to the fullest and experiencing nature and adventure. Roman is simply trying to suggest that there are human consequences for these risky activities, and respecting those consequences will likely lead to more fulfilling experiences.
Some of his own nature journeys with his family are detailed in the memoir, including trips to Australia, Puerto Rico and Borneo. Roman and his wife would bring their two children with them as they traveled around the globe, living off the land, taking in sunrises and sunsets, eating local meals, meeting different communities of caring people.
“Even my daughter, Jazzy, who probably felt it was uncomfortable to go to Borneo and have all those bugs and the humidity and all that, but it made her more confident,” Roman said. “She can shrug off discomfort because she grew up with it. … Those are things that we still talk about as part of our family lore. Absolutely, I do think about those things frequently.”
The Adventurer’s Son also goes into the psychology of losing a child, especially a child who has followed in his father’s footsteps. Roman has some guilt when thinking about Cody Roman’s journeys in the world. It was obvious he was fashioning some of these travels after his father’s own adventuring.
“As far as the guilt goes, now that’s something that probably I do feel every day,” he said. “Like we have a dog now, and she’s a super-cute little dog. And I sometimes think, wow, I wonder if we had just gotten a family dog sooner if maybe my son would be alive today. There’s always little things that I think of that maybe if I had done something it would be different now. It happens all the time, but you know it’s not really guilt because you can’t ever know what’s going to happen in the future. It’s more like I wonder if. I will always feel a little bit of guilt like I think any father whose children follow in his footsteps.”
During the investigation into finding Cody Roman — an investigation that switched from rescue to recovery — Roman and his family had to uproot their entire lives. He spent a long time in Costa Rica, dealing with local business owners, law enforcement and conspiracy theories about what may have happened (the book details a drug theory involving a local criminal in the area). Throughout all of these interactions Roman kept to one thought: He knew his son, and his son wouldn’t be involved in some criminal enterprise or drug deal gone bad.
“It’s a terrible loss to lose a family member, but it’s also a horrible insult to have people tell you he died or he disappeared or something happened not exactly because it was his fault but because of the lifestyle that he had chosen or an activity that he was participating in that he wasn’t,” he said. “It felt horribly insulting to have that piled on top of our loss.”
The Adventurer’s Son does describe Roman finding answers — answers that were a long time coming — which give him some closure and also prove his central theory right. He knew who his son was (and who his son wasn’t).
Since the events described at the end of the memoir, Roman hasn’t been back to Costa Rica, but he hopes to get back to the country one day. “I would like to go,” he said. “We haven’t been traveling much. I mean, nobody’s traveling much, but once I came back from Costa Rica, I kind of went around back to the Brooks Range and traveled around Alaska to heal, if you will. But I haven’t gone back to Costa Rica. I’d like to go.”
He added: “I’m 59, and my risk tolerance has been declining over the last few years, even before this happened I’d say. And also my reflexes are slowing. I’m just getting older, and so as we all get older we take fewer risks. But I’ve also been very conscious of the fact that I don’t really want to risk. I don’t want to do anything super dangerous, even if it is exciting and exhilarating because I don’t want to risk my family losing me, and so I have really throttled back. And, to be honest, I’m more interested in nature. I’m going to the Brooks Range, but we’re just going to go backpacking and hiking. It’s more like a big long nature walk that you might do in your backyard when you were a little kid, but now I’ve got more money and time. And I can go out for a month instead of just an afternoon, so I’m kind of throwing back to the kid that I kind of described in the beginning of the book, when I was 9 years old going to Alaska. Life is sort of like a big arc. We kind of go up and reach the peak, and then we’re over the hill, and then we’re heading back to where we started.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Adventurer’s Son by Roman Dial is now available from William Morrow. Click here for more information.
