The Adventurer's Son

by Roman Dial

Trial and error, Failure and terror, The truth of the matter at hand. Death in a whisper Is so much to weather For the life of a wife And her man.

That trip holds warm memories of my dad and we bonded then. Later I would learn that bonds need maintenance to endure.

I had learned that if a relationship is weak to begin with—like mine had been with Dieter—then it will only get worse when stressed. Most important, companions matter more than goals and objectives.

Intense outdoor experiences either strengthen or extinguish bonds between partners.

“Amazing,” he wrote. Guatemala, Roman surmised, was “a legitimate Third World country,” recalling how Indonesia, rural Malaysia, and Bhutan had felt, sounded, and smelled. Stories of robbery and murder, he said in an email, gave Guatemala an edgy feel.

An out-date is the day that we adventurers request a loved one, friend, or some other responsible person to initiate a search to find us, should they not have heard from us by then.

“Birth is the leading cause of death,” my friend Brad Meiklejohn likes to point out. Still, the cliché “At least he died doing what he loved” is wrong, Brad says. “I most admire those who have done what they love their whole lives and died peacefully in bed at a ripe old age.”

Follow intuition. It often leads in the right direction, if not directly to the destination.

I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; ’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

I would hold it as a truth that the bonds we form in nature with others are the truest bonds between us.

But a lifetime of risk had taught me that a calm mind works better than an excited one.

The stark lesson masked by decades of selfishness was this: when I die, I am dead. I no longer feel anything. It’s those I leave behind who feel the lasting pain: the more love, the more pain.

Trial and error, Failure and terror, The truth of the matter at hand. Death in a whisper Is so much to weather For the life of a wife And her man.

SLEEPING IN THE FOREST I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.