In 2022, Marcus Baram and his 13-year-old son embarked on an epic journey, traveling by train and camping from the Rockies outside Denver to a small island outside Seattle. Reminded of a journey west with his own father four decades earlier, he explores fatherhood, nature and a teen’s obsession with old-school film photography.
Struggling to catch my breath, feeling light-headed, and losing my balance on spaghetti legs, I needed to take a break. I paused on the side of the dusty trail, the sun blazing down, and glanced over at my 13-year-old son.
Roscoe stood quietly, his arms hanging limply and his cheeks flush. He looked like he was about to pass out.
We were hiking up Devils Peak, about 50 miles south of Denver, and were still about 6,00 feet from the summit. At 10,000 feet, it was just a modest peak in the Rocky Mountains. But for us, it was the highest elevation we’d ever achieved.
We live in Brooklyn and had only hiked small peaks in upstate New York and New England—hardly enough training for this kind of climb. And I wasn’t sure we could make it.
The dilemma immediately triggered a flashback of a father-son trip with my own dad about 40 years earlier. We were staying at a dude ranch deep in Montana’s Bob Marshall wilderness area and went for a hike one morning up a steep hill.
As we approached the summit, we heard what we thought was the sound of a grizzly bear coming from a grove of pine trees. My dad wanted to head back down to the safety of the ranch. I paused and shook my head. At 13, I was obsessed with climbing mountains. I had to get to the top. I took a stand and my father pushed back, eventually losing his temper. We faced off, just a few feet from a steep cliff, shouting at each other. After a heated back-and-forth, I gave in and trudged back down the mountain, humiliated and angry at myself for giving up too easily.
Parenting is all about the push and pull and the pause—when to motivate, when to command, when to just let it go. All the while hoping that whatever option you choose, you’re more connected to your child.
Those memories came flooding back as I stood there on another hill in another state, a few decades later. The last thing I wanted was to butt heads with my son, whom I’ve steamrolled in the past with my rash decisions.
But this time, I came up with an answer that was mutually satisfying. Parenting is all about the push and pull and the pause—when to motivate, when to command, when to just let it go. All the while hoping that whatever option you choose, you’re more connected to your child.
“Let’s do this—for every minute we climb, we’ll rest for a minute.” I suggested. “Let’s use your phone and we’ll set the timer.”
My son grunted—for once, not to disagree or dismiss me, but to give me his OK.
We started again up the path, diligently pausing every minute to take a break. That way, about an hour later, we made it to the summit. Our exhaustion and frustration lifted as we scrambled up the rocks to get a glorious wrap-around view of the Rockies.
It was this midpoint of a journey that bonded us in ways I’m still discovering and understanding, just as that father-son trip in 1981 connected me and my dad.
That shared experience—the joys and frustrations, the risks and challenges—made each of us develop more affection, empathy and respect for each other. Roscoe has always been mature when it comes to knowledge and responsibility, though perhaps immature in others, and his distinctive personality blends curiosity and emotional sensitivity with determination and confidence.
Since he was nine, he’s been obsessed with photography, taking photos of everything around him from a close-up of a flower to long-exposure night shots. While he can be shy, his camera became his way of engaging with the world.
But as a parent, I didn’t always see him apart from his role as my son; I didn’t see him as his own independent self. By the end of this journey, I saw him for who he really is: A strong young man, curious and courageous, tough-minded but sensitive.
It made me happy to see these wide-open vistas give him confidence. Like a blank canvas, the freedom of the open road showed him that the whole world is open to him, full of unlimited potential.
Just three days earlier, we started this week-long journey, which was Roscoe’s brainchild—to travel by train from Chicago to Denver to San Francisco and then up to Seattle, stopping along the way to camp out under the stars each night and taking plenty of photos to capture the journey.
After camping in the rain along the coast of Lake Michigan at Illinois Beach State Park, we boarded the California Zephyr, an overnight train across the Midwest, through the farms of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, eastern Colorado and beyond.
Roscoe has always been a train buff and soon, I too fell in love with riding the rails—the pace of the journey, the perfect tempo to stare out the window and absorb the views, both intoxicating and meditative.
The names of the towns didn’t matter as they flashed by—Ottumwa and Osceola and Omaha… only the landscape did. Green and yellow and chartreuse, grass and hay and scrub and basswood and sugar maples and river birches. In this part of the American West—Colorado into eastern Utah and curving north through Salt Lake City into the flats of Nevada—the land feels endless and the sky stretches to infinity.
Sitting quietly side by side, Roscoe and I bonded in ways that are hard to define. He reveled in how big the country is, letting his curiosity soak up the different landscapes and the lives of the people who live there, capturing it all on his hand-me-down Nikon F2 camera. He had no qualms about setting up shots down the aisle of the train or using different lenses and inventive angles to capture the scene. The year before, he built his own device to slide his camera along a four-foot metal track for panning shots.
And it made me happy to see these wide-open vistas give him confidence. Like a blank canvas, the freedom of the open road showed him that the whole world is open to him, full of unlimited potential.
The highlight of our trip, both scenically and emotionally, was camping on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Just a few miles from the city, but a world apart in its quiet beauty.
Roscoe and I lugged our heavy packs up a trail through junipers and pine, climbing higher and higher overlooking the harbor, the sailboats out at sea flitting by like shiny jewels against the turbulent blue water, while he took landscape photos.
Our campsite was perched on the side of a hill with a magnificent view, the faint lights of San Francisco glittering to the far left with the silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge to the right. We were blown away by the sight, even my cynical son stopping to stare in amazement, excitedly climbing giant boulders near our site to catch a better angle for his photos. We hugged each other.
Sitting on a rock to take a break, looking out over the bay, we started to talk about nature, spirituality and the meaning of life—and I had the sense to pause and listen to him. Too often, I’m in a hurry and don’t take time to just sit and talk to him, to have a real conversation.
On the last leg of our trip, our train rolled through the mountains of western Oregon, the Cascades and the wild beauty of western Washington state, passing through former logging towns like Kelso and Centralia.
The forests seemed greener and the trees taller than anywhere else on our journey. Finally, we arrived along the banks of Puget Sound and made our way to Illahee State Park, a small 82-acre park on Port Orchard Bay, where we camped for the night.
The next morning, as the ferry left the dock, and the island faded into the distance, we made our way to the front to feel the spray of the water in our faces. That’s when Roscoe realized he’d left his iPhone behind in the café where we’d had breakfast just 15 minutes earlier.
I turned and smiled at him: “It took you this long to lose that thing? Nice job!”
He paused, gazing up at me, and laughed.
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Marcus Baram has worked as a reporter at the New York Daily News and ABC News, as an editor at Capital & Main, the New York Observer, and the Wall Street Journal, and as a freelance writer for The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York magazine, and Fortune magazine. His critically-acclaimed 2014 biography of the late Gil Scott-Heron, "Pieces of a Man," was named a notable book by The New Yorker.
