You know how this is going to end before it begins. Not good. A son went missing in the wilds of Costa Rica. But there’s more. A long family lineage of adventure, ecology, biology, travel, and knowledge. The author Roman Dial is a well-known adventurer, as the title suggests, and this son was well on his way to following in dad’s footsteps until things went wrong in a major way.
The Adventurer’s Son was heartbreaking but the side stories of family, region, and adventure were what kept me powering through. I myself have ventured to some of the places the book mentions but never took things as far as the Dial family. There is a sense of nobility in adventure, but the sense all runs damn close to folly at times. Things like risk vs reward continually play out in the screenplay in your head.
I feel utterly bad for the entire family but at least there was closure. And for the son Roman, he lived and died as a message to the rest of us. What that message depends on you and how you want to see the world.
Comments 2
Will have to read this. With you and Krakauer recommending it, that’s enough for me. My adventure in Costa Rica didn’t include a lot of roughing it. A walk through a national park, an embarrassingly bad surfing lesson (me, not the instructor), and too many beers. Loved it, though, I need to go back. But man, there’s this well known bridge that overlooks a river teeming with crocs. Or alligators. I can never remember the difference. Stuff of nightmares for me. Never looking over that bridge again.
Author
Scott,
That would have to be top ten worse ways to go. The jaws of a dinosaur.