Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild

by Novella Carpenter

  That’s when I knew the goats weren’t going to last. There could only be one lactating animal on my farm, and that was me. And it wasn’t just the milking: it was the challenge of cleaning out the goat pens, trimming their hooves, or throwing bales of alfalfa around—all while carrying around a little baby.

  Instead of taxing myself to the limit like my parents had, I let it slip. Unlike my mom, who had depended on the farm for her survival, I had the choice.

  The goat diaspora began. A prize doeling named Gretel went to a friend in East Oakland. Milky Way went to a delightful gay hairdresser from Hollister. Bebe went to live in a farm near Sacramento. While I watched Bebe get loaded up and disappear, I thought how I had once thought of the goats like my children. They taught me about how to care for them, how to love. My goats had been like those stuffed animals I used to bring to elementary school. They made the world feel safe; they showed me how to be human.

  • • •

  Six weeks after the birth, Bill and I were like zombies. Frannie wouldn’t sleep through the night. We had taken to going on long walks with her in a sling at odd hours, hoping that might lull her back into a deep slumber. One night, walking out on the main drag near our house near two in the morning, we passed by a bus stop. A man with a shopping cart was stretched out on the bench there. We scurried by him, me carrying baby Frannie in a sling. He called out to us. “Hey,” he said. We shuffled along faster, ignoring him, thinking he was going to ask for spare change. “You got get that baby on a schedule!” he admonished. “How?” I said, stopping in my tracks. For several minutes, the man went on a point-by-point description of how to better accommodate the child’s napping needs during the day, and advised us to let her cry it out at night. We nodded, grateful for any advice, even from the homeless.

  The next morning, I was nursing the baby and talking to Bill when I noticed he looked like he was about to cry.

  “What is it, babe?” I asked him. Frannie had fallen asleep, a trickle of milk drooled out of the corner of her mouth. She was tiny, still larval, snuggled into a swaddling blanket.

  “Do you love Frannie more than me?” he said after a moment.

  “Yes,” I said, without hesitation.

  “Good, because that’s how I feel too,” Bill said. Bill looked exhausted but glowing. I felt the same. Tired, but happy to change her dirty diapers, which always held a strange green goo. Must have been the hormones, which must have soaked into Bill’s bloodstream too. We smiled at each other.

  • • •

  After I sent Dad word of Frannie’s arrival, and a photo of her in the goat manger, Dad had sent me a gift. It was a transistor radio, carefully wrapped in a blanket that reeked of wood smoke. There was no note. I called him to share how parenthood was going. He was surprisingly lucid. I asked him what I had been like as a baby. “You were so carefree and easygoing,” he said, and I heard him sniffing. “The love of my life.”

  If Dad could be so swept away by a zucchini blossom, my mind reeled at how he must have reacted to a baby. He must have loved our translucent eye lids. The rosebud lips. The strange, gray eyes of a newborn. The fingers, so perfect. I thought, for the first time, about how hard it must have been for him when we left. The memory of holding us in his arms, which were now empty, must have been a torture. But maybe those remembrances of us kept him alive, like my sister had said. That we had saved him, maybe even carried him through those times when he was barely holding on.

  Grandpa George and Frannie, 2013.

  Fourteen

  When Frannie was almost a year and a half, Riana and I took her to Orofino to meet her grandpa. We bought the airline tickets to Idaho on a whim when Riana came for a visit. I hadn’t been back since the time I had broken into my dad’s cabin, three years before.

  Instead of telling Dad we would be in town—remembering that he might flee if we told him we were coming—we dropped in for a sneak visit. Orofino had spiffed up in the three years since I had last been there. New businesses had sprung up and a scruffiness had vanished. Riana and I had a plan to track Dad down. We knew his pattern: a few games of pool in the morning, then the library. We figured we would cruise Main Street, pull over when we saw him, and introduce him to his newest granddaughter.

  Unfortunately, there happened to be a logger conference in town that weekend. Every hotel was booked. The sidewalks were filled with men who looked just like our dad. We drove around in our rented Prius. “Is that him?” I said, slowing down to point at a craggy old guy wearing a Stihl hat.

  “No, no. Too tall,” Riana said. When trying to pick Dad out from the throng of loggers, all of them wearing flannels and dirty Levi’s, didn’t work, we resorted to e-mailing him from the library. We sent him word that we were in town and he should meet us at the park. Then we went there and waited.

  • • •

  That morning we had gone back up to the land. The thimbleberry bushes hadn’t leafed out yet but the huckleberries had. Waterfalls tumbled off of sheer rock and wildflowers popped out of every crevice. We had passed Max’s house, and I noticed that he hadn’t planted those peach trees after all.

  “Stop the car!” my sister yelled. I slammed on the brakes.

  “What?” I said.

  “I feel something,” she said. I rolled my eyes. I looked around. Just forest, the same forest we had been driving through for miles. She got out of the car, left the door open. A plastic bottle filled with river water that she had insisted we collect for our trip up to the ranch sloshed on the dash.

  The car shut off. I checked on Frannie, who was blissfully asleep, in a car seat in the back. So much had changed in my life since her birth. I had become an absolute baby lover, stopping mothers in the street so I could hold their little ones, noting their plump little wrists and diving in to smell their heads. Bill changed too. One day, holding Frannie, he said: “I love the smell of diapers!” and grinned at how idiotic that was.

  I watched Riana jump over a barbed-wire fence. She was still thin and healthy looking. She was wearing a pair of suede boots and tight lowrider jeans. She tiptoed across the forest into a glade.

  Even though she was otherwise healthy, she had been having strange episodes of vertigo every few months. The French doctors assured her it wasn’t MS—which we are both scared we’ll inherit from Mom. When the vertigo hit, my sister would have visions. Visions of a Native American spirit guide. He told her she could cleanse the ranch of the evil. I laughed uneasily when she told me that story. How can a scientist explain such things, such premonitions? I just nodded, thinking of Satanic chipmunks and wondering if magical thinking might be hereditary too. While I was dubious of healing the ranch, I was curious to see the place again, and especially with my sister for the first time in twenty-three years.

  From the driver’s seat I scanned the forest, looking for Riana. There she was: holding her hand up to a big pine tree. Then she hugged the tree. “Frannie, your aunt is crazy,” I muttered. She just snored away. Then I heard a shout and Riana ran toward me. She was clutching something in her hands. I got out of the car and met her in the middle of the road. She held up two enormous morel mushrooms.

  “Oh my god,” I said.

  “The forest told me these were here,” she said. I grabbed one of the mushrooms and took a deep breath of the fungi. Just as I remembered: meaty, oaky, forest.

  “And I got a rose too.” she held up a Woods’ rose, Rosa woodsii, the wild rose that was in bloom when she was born, that I had picked rosehips from when Dad and I had our reunion near the ranch.

  “OK,” I said, “let’s go.” We drove until we got to the spot where our mom used to stop when the road got too rough and there was snow on the ground. I strapped Frannie into a front pack, Riana loaded up the bottle of Clearwater River water and the rose, and we hiked in.

  We didn’t talk much as we hiked uphill. It was warm and the gravel road crunched under our
feet, the river water sloshed. A few of the wild apple trees that grew along the road looked dead, but the ponderosa pines looked fine, letting out a low whistle as the wind rippled through their branches.

  Our early childhood had been so idyllic. I couldn’t help compare it to how I was raising Frannie. In Oakland, she picked fruit from the trees, yanked up carrots. She dodged broken glass and danced a little jig when a lowrider with a thumping sound system cruised by. She couldn’t run free like Riana and I had, but she was as feral as you can get while living in a city.

  Having a kid made me think of time differently. I had planted an orchard of fruit trees: espaliered apples, peaches, and plums. I planted grape vines, long-term crops like asparagus, and a hedge of citrus trees. It would take about eight years for the fruit trees to start bearing a good crop. By then, I would be forty-seven years old, Bill would be fifty-one, and Frannie would be in fourth grade.

  Becoming a property owner, I understood how my father must have felt when he lost the ranch—even though it was through his own failings. That emptiness, that hope dashed, all that potential, gone. What are you after you’ve lost everything you loved? I didn’t want to ever imagine that. I clung to the people whom I loved—Bill, Frannie, my sister, my mom, my friends.

  • • •

  Riana and I crested the hill, where the trailer had been, and beyond, the old site of the Rough House. The last time I had come to the ranch, I didn’t get to look around the property much. There had been that woman in the house and she seemed skeptical of me. I told Riana that this might happen, that people aren’t necessarily open to strangers, even if the strangers grew up on this land. It wasn’t ours anymore.

  “The pond!” Riana said, pointing at the reedy water. Two ducks spooked and took flight.

  No one was around. In fact, the whole property felt abandoned. A shed next to the new house was open and empty. There were no cars, just a parked RV. We scurried toward the spot where the Rough House had been. We could see a concrete slab where the foundation had been. It was still scorched black, because the new owners were using the site as a burn pile area.

  Riana, channeling her spirit guide, disappeared into the woods over a hill. I worried about people appearing, perhaps carrying shotguns. Frannie woke up and I sat under a tree, nursed her. On the ground, the spiky leaves of wild iris were coming up. Beyond them was the apple orchard, where Riana and I had picked that bumper crop of morels with Dad. I took a deep breath. The land smelled exactly as I remembered. The warm sweet pine needle smell mixed with the pond water and hot granite rocks.

  Frannie saw a red-winged blackbird, pointed. “Doh.” She called every animal she saw “doh”— dog, cat, bird.

  In the span of a year, I had watched her learn how to smile, crawl, laugh, ask for help, walk, babble, climb up and down stairs. All on her own accord. It was instinct, desires encoded into her DNA, that led her to do these things.

  In the next few years, she would learn how to talk in complete sentences, to jump and skip, to share, to learn from the animals. These are all human impulses, and though it seems like a miracle, all that learning, it’s natural. Watching her grow, I realized that as we all age, we are always learning and changing, and that there are stages in our development, even after we have reached adulthood.

  Looking back on my struggle to find my father, I began to understand my quest as part of a bigger human drive. My journey was triggered by my desire to have children, but whether we reproduce or not, the need to understand where we come from is universal. It’s just part of the human process, like learning to talk, or to jump. We have an instinct to tell the story of our past, to understand what came before, to try to make sense of it.

  For me, the answers weren’t clear cut, and there are still mysteries that will never be recovered. But having come full circle—becoming a parent myself—I had a new lens to look through. Being here, back on the ranch, I could better imagine what my parents had been up to. Their struggles and the challenges that children bring—but also the fun. I imagined myself visiting them, as a friend now. I don’t feel that hot anger of youth, where everything is supposed to be ideal. People do their best, and that’s what my parents were doing. I also am preparing myself for the day when Frannie will ask me these same questions. She might wonder why I chose such a wild life for her.

  After a few minutes, Riana came back to the clearing where the house had been.

  “I did it,” she reported. “Planted the rose, gave it some river water. Then I found this,” she held up an enormous morel mushroom. This one was fresher than the other ones she found. It was a light mousey color, like it had fruited just that morning. Frannie leaned in to smell the mushroom. Then our work was done. We hiked back to the car, and drove back to civilization.

  • • •

  At the Orofino park, I pushed Fran on the swings while Riana went to look at a yard sale being held in the park. I talked to Bill on the phone, then when I looked up I saw an old man, wearing a pair of baggy jeans, and two layers of shirts even though it was hot outside. He was looking for something. Dad.

  “George,” I yelled. Then I grabbed Frannie and walked toward him. “George! Dad!!”

  He turned around. He had grown out his moustache so it was long and white.

  “Stay back,” he said, and held out his hand. “I’m sick, don’t come within three feet of me.” I stopped. I didn’t want Frannie to get sick. “This is your granddaughter,” I said. She pointed at him with a chubby finger.

  “Gorgeous,” he said. And he looked like he was about to faint. As we stood there, three feet apart from each other, I realized that I was the last of the Carpenters. Riana had taken Benji’s name. My daughter had Bill’s last name. Dad and I were the last Carpenters standing.

  “Those eyes are intense, whoa!” Dad hooted. Frannie was staring him down with her gold-brown eyes. She pointed at him again.

  “Let me go find Riana,” I said and went to get her. I found her at a booth at the rummage sale, talking to a woman about past lives and how the universe is inside each and every one of us.

  “Dad’s here,” I said.

  “I thought I sensed him,” she said and went outside to reunite with him. She hadn’t seen him in five years. We hadn’t seen him together since the 1980s and punishment summer.

  “Stay back, I’m just coming out of some god-awful siege for six days,” he said again to her. But my sister just laughed at that. “I’m immune, Dad. I’m immune.” And she hugged him and I saw tears spring to his eyes as he held her. As Dad hugged her, and I kept Frannie at a safe distance, it was like watching him hug me. I felt proud of my sister—and later, myself. For going back to the source of so much pain, a place of discomfort. She was brave in her willingness to throw herself into the center of the fire, heart open.

  We all sat down at a picnic table and my sister caught Dad up on all her happenings. Instead of talking, I chased after Frannie, who was not one to sit still for long. I wandered in and out of their conversation. At one point I heard my dad talking about that Beelzebub that was on the ranch. “We came all the way from Oregon, only to meet Satan.” Riana explained that she had cleared him away; that she had a spirit guide who told her what had happened. Dad was speechless. She matched his craziness and raised him two.

  “Dad, I just wanted to tell you that you weren’t in my life, but that’s OK,” Riana said. “That’s why I turned out how I did, and I’m proud of who I am. You’ve given us a crazy genius, and I want to thank you.”

  “It’s not what I wanted,” Dad mumbled.

  Then it was time to go back to Lewiston and catch our plane. Dad ambled off to his truck. Riana and I crossed through the park together one last time. “We did it,” I said, Frannie cradled on my hip. My sister and I hugged each other, the sun strobing through the trees. We were finally done searching, and could say good-bye to Dad, to Orofino, unsure when we would see either a
gain.

  Novella and Dad, the old ranch property in the background, 2010.

  Epilogue

  It has been over four years since my dad went missing. He told me in an e-mail recently that he’s stopped chopping wood. It’s too hard on my body, he explained. He’s become less and less lucid—sending several e-mails sometimes with basically the same message, as if he didn’t remember writing them. The e-mails say that he tries to leave Idaho because the winters get so cold but when he gets on the road, he has a mental breakdown, and has to abort the trip.

  On the rare occasions when we talk on the phone, he often repeats himself over and over again. I worry he is getting Alzheimer’s or dementia. That one day, he will go completely feral, unable to take care of himself. For now, I’ve taken to sending him money—enough to shack up somewhere in town for the duration of the winter. When Riana hasn’t heard from Dad in a while, she starts to worry. Then she calls the library in Orofino. The librarians there are exceedingly kind, and are happy to give her the Dad report. Sending money, getting updates from afar, it’s all we can do. I now recognize that it’s all he could do for us too.

  • • •

  On the way back from Idaho, the last time we saw Dad, my sister and I stopped off to see Mom. After a meal of Hood Canal shrimp and smoked salmon, Mom put us to work. We helped weed her garden, which she has been improving for over thirty years. Her work shows: She has a small orchard and berry patch, in addition to perennial beds of uncommon lushness and color.

  Mom is still in touch with the Farm Out crowd, and friends from her days teaching school at Hood Canal. She has thrived, despite adversity, because of these friendships.