Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild

by Novella Carpenter

  “My studio,” he said as I handed him the mug, and grinned. After breakfast, we headed out to the river.

  It wasn’t a good year for fishing. The drought had dried up all but the biggest rivers, but we wanted to try anyway, and the outdoors reporter at the newspaper told us of a spot.

  “You get a reel and I’ll get a pole,” Dad sang on the way to the river, “and we’ll head on down to the fishing hole . . .” He was like a little bird, chirping and whistling, not talking about anything important, just being.

  The spot was called Ririe. There was an impressive stand of cottonwood trees along the river that cast a refreshing shade. The river was wide but shallow, rippling across flat river rocks. I was no fly-fishing expert, but it looked pretty perfect to me. We parked in a gravel parking lot and carried our gear down a steep path to the river. It was hot, and grasshoppers dodged our feet. A slow canal ran along the path. There was another fisherman there, throwing his line in, when we arrived. Dad barely looked at him and started setting up nearby.

  “This’ll be tender as an old maid’s first kiss,” he said, choosing a fly from his tackle box, then tying it to the end of the line. He is a master of the colorful metaphor. A few of his best sayings: It was raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock, or It’s as cold as an Eskimo fart.

  The fly in his hand was a commercial fly called a Rooster Tail. I was a little disappointed that he didn’t tie his own like Paul in A River Runs Through It. He showed me how to attach the fly to the line, and the hidden hook that would get lodged in the trout’s mouth. I didn’t know about fishing etiquette, so I wasn’t sure we should be so close to another fisherman, but my dad seemed unfazed and showed me how to cast. The rod had a cork handle.

  “It’s not your wrist,” he instructed. “You use your whole arm, so it’s an extension.” He cast to show me. The line swirled in the air, once, twice, and then softly landed, like a real insect might, in the middle of the shallow river. He started reeling in, pulling gently so the fly danced across the top of the water. I liked the motion of fly-fishing, and the idea that we were trying to fool a fish. Dad was wearing a white sweater and a baseball cap; he looked nothing like the man next to us, with his official-seeming fly-fishing khakis and multi-pocketed vest.

  We were fishing for trout—rainbows, cutthroat, or browns. Dad showed me how to cast a few times, whistling and casting, then pulling the line in slowly. He watched the current of the river and aimed for the quiet spots. He was relaxed and spry, utterly in his element. The uneasy feeling I had from the night before disappeared. The man next to us stopped fishing and watched Dad. His athletic casting was a thing of beauty. My heart swelled with pride—he was like Paul in A River Runs Through It!

  We had only one pole, so after half an hour of instruction, I had my chance to cast. He had made it look easy—but my first cast sent the line into the reeds along the river. Startled, I pulled too hard, and the line snapped. The fly was lost. I felt horrible.

  “It’s OK, babes,” he said when he saw my stricken expression. Looking for a better spot, we picked our way to the edge of the canal. He tied on another fly. He pointed out ripples on the surface of the water and I cast. And cast again. And cast again. I was getting the hang of it but I sensed Dad was bored with my amateur attempts. So I handed him the rod, sat on the grass, and admired Dad in his element.

  The day had gotten hot, so he had taken off his sweater and stood there in a gray T-shirt. He didn’t have a belly like most older men: His stomach was flat, his arms were tanned, and when he pulled the fishing rod back, his biceps bulged. He was wearing Levi’s, and like mine they sagged in the butt. Apparently having no ass is hereditary. His dark eyes were narrowed in concentration, scanning the water for the perfect spot. Every once in a while he would stroke his nose, which had flaring, Napoleonic nostrils. He paced along the river bank with the bandy stance of a cowboy, making cast after cast.

  Dad told me that he had learned to fish in Hillsboro, Oregon, when he was a young boy. When he was three years old, his father, Fred, had packed the family station wagon, drove south, and never came back. Word came that Fred had started a new family in California. Then, a few months later, he died in a fiery car accident. Dad’s mom, my grandmother Jeanne, never quite recovered. She tried to get work as a realtor, but mostly took up drinking and smoking. She foisted her sons—Dad and his older brother—onto her dad, a man everyone called Big George.

  Big George was a drinker himself, and a stern taskmaster. He made the boys sleep on stiff cots to build character. It was a kindly neighbor who took my dad and his older brother, Fred Jr., under his wing and showed them how to fish. Seeking escape from their strict grandpa and the ache of their absent parents, the boys would spend whole weekends in the forest near their house exploring, building forts, and pulling crawdads and fish out of a stream that ran through the woods. Years later, Dad’s brother went to work for NASA, but died of a heart attack when he was only forty. Dad blamed it on stress, on the rat race.

  I watched Dad fish for an hour. His every action had a boyish air, a spryness. It was like I had watched him transform from a craggy mountain hermit into a young man. He didn’t catch a trout that day at Ririe but we were happy to have been out in the water, and had built up an appetite.

  That night we made dinner at my apartment. We practiced speaking Spanish, which I was learning from a local kid in town. After dinner, I persuaded Dad to play some guitar into my digital recorder. “For Riana, for the new baby,” I explained. My sister was pregnant back then with Amaya, due in February.

  He went down to his car and fished out his guitar, then carefully set up a chair in the middle of the room while I fiddled with the digital recorder. I hadn’t used it very many times, so I was worried it wouldn’t record. He began without warning. It was Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” the piece I had remembered him practicing when I was a kid. While he played, I noticed his hands were gnarled from his hard life and age, but the music sounded hauntingly beautiful. I kept checking the red light of the recorder, to make sure it was working—that it was capturing the sounds of my past, of my missing father. I recorded a little over three minutes of him playing. I felt triumphant, as if I had bottled a ghost.

  He left the next day, leaving me his fishing rod and line, a couple Rooster Tails, and fifty bucks. We had spent almost forty-eight hours together, the biggest chunk of time since I was a little girl. As he drove away, pangs of loneliness welled up in my stomach. Abandoned again.

  • • •

  I had used the rod only one other time. On my last weekend in Idaho Falls I had gone back, alone, to Ririe, where Dad and I had gone fishing. I waded into the cool, shallow water and got a few hard nibbles that were electrifying. That night, I camped out by myself on the rocks high above Ririe. I could see the town’s lights twinkling far away. I felt proud of my Idaho summer. I had gone foraging, camping, and tried fly-fishing. I promised myself I would start going on regular fishing trips, that I would finally catch a trout. And I would keep in touch with Dad, build on what we had experienced together. But when I returned to Oakland, back to Bill, back to our farm, I threw the rod in the back room. Eventually, it got covered with garden stuff—floating row cover and old burlap bags—until I could only see the tip of the pole. That brief connection I had with Dad shriveled up and settled into a forgotten corner of my life too.

  Now he had reappeared, and it felt like a reminder, a tap on the shoulder. In times past, I probably would have shrugged my shoulders about Dad’s close call and his dwindling number of second chances. But this time felt different.

  I knew that our chance to have a relationship where he was a caregiver, a nurturer, was long gone. I wondered if there was still an opportunity for something. Maybe friendship. I didn’t want to wait until it was too late to reach out to him again. It was time to reckon with the past. Especially now that I was thinking of having a child of my own.
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br />   I walked upstairs, sat down at my computer, and crafted an e-mail to my dad, knowing that it might be our last chance.

  This whole missing person thing made me realize how much I would regret it if we don’t have some meaningful time together. I would love to stay with you and learn some mountain man skills, or just go fly-fishing. I love you dad and love your spirit, I know it flows in me.

  Mom holding Novella; Dad with Riana. Bernard, the steer and chickens in the background, 1974. Dad calls this era the Good Years.

  Three

  Mom never responded to the e-mail I forwarded from Dad. Whether she was relieved or disappointed that Dad had turned up alive after the missing person scare, she never told me. My parents had a complicated relationship that ended with outright hostility.

  Of course it didn’t start like that.

  My parents met in Mexico in the spring of 1969, in the gorgeous town of San Miguel de Allende. Dad had hitchhiked there in search of a guitar maestro, bringing with him only a small leather backpack and his guitar. He set up in a little room in the Quinto Loreto, a cheap crash pad that offered three meals a day and had a tree-lined courtyard where he could play guitar.

  After high school, itching to leave Oregon—and his bossy grandfather, who wanted him to work at the family grocery store—my dad joined the army. When he finished his service in 1959 he went to France to learn how to speak French. He was a hungry, disciplined student with an interest in philosophy, especially Sartre. After France, in 1961, he moved to Oakland and enrolled at UC Berkeley. Between classes, he hiked into the Berkeley hills and read books about Native American life. He had a girlfriend who had a guitar hanging on the wall of her living room. One night, he took it down, strummed it—and became enchanted. There was a group of classical and Spanish guitar players in Berkeley at the time, and he gravitated toward them. He learned to play with a devotion that my mom would later call obsessive. Like any good philosophy major, he dropped out of college. He ended up in Central Oregon where he learned how to log and hunt, periodically taking trips like the one to San Miguel de Allende where he met my mom.

  Mom graduated from Cal in 1965 with a degree in political science. She had grown up in southern California, in the conservative, wealthy beach town of Corona del Mar. Upon hitting Berkeley, her insular world cracked open. Her professors were activists and were outspoken about the Free Speech Movement on campus. It was a heady time: She went to Vietnam War protests and talked late into the night about the politics of power with her friends. After graduating she stuck around Berkeley to work and continue her political activism. She also traveled: going to Europe, then hitchhiking solo through North Africa. By 1968, after three years of hippie agitating and wanderlust, Mom’s spirits were low. Her heroes, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., were both killed that year. The whole scene was being co-opted too, with tour buses driving through San Francisco’s Haight district so tourists could get a look at a real, live hippie. Junkies and freeloaders had shown up, looking for a little bit of free love without the good vibes. So in early 1969, when Mom’s friend Dixie invited her to drive to Mexico, Mom didn’t hesitate. She jumped into Dixie’s VW and they headed south.

  Dixie and Mom spent a few weeks driving down the coast before heading inland to the hippie oasis of San Miguel de Allende. Mom fell in love with the colonial town, with its cobblestone streets and bougainvillea growing everywhere. Leather-sandaled hippies strolled through the town’s streets, and the smell of patchouli comingled with the smell of frying tortillas and open sewers.

  After inquiring about lodging at various posadas around town, Mom and Dixie settled in at the Quinto Loreto. Every evening in the Quinto’s courtyard, a dark-haired man practiced his guitar. Though he looked like a hippie—long-haired, bearded—he wasn’t one. He was older, thirty-three, and he didn’t like two signature hippie activities: listening to rock ’n’ roll or doing drugs. He preferred classical music and weight lifting. They didn’t have barbells in Mexico, so most mornings he could be found bench-pressing large rocks in the courtyard. His body was lean and muscular, and he liked feeling strong. His name was George Carpenter. Dad.

  One night, fleeing the heat of his room, his shirt off, Dad sat in the courtyard of the Quinto playing a new Spanish song he was trying to master: “Estudious.” He held the guitar high and proud; his boot-clad feet tapped out the tempo. As he played, his eyes grew a little teary. Dixie and Mom, wearing peasant skirts and no bras, listened to him play while they smoked cigarettes. When he finished, my mom, long-limbed and blond; and Dixie, dark-haired and worldly, crept closer to him.

  The ladies lit up another round. Dad didn’t smoke. They talked about their travels. They were headed farther south, probably to the Yucatan. They were letting fate guide them. Mom was waiting for word from various graduate schools. She was almost twenty-seven years old and was feeling the siren call of adventure.

  That night in the courtyard Dad told them terrific stories about his travels in France and his new passion: working in the forest. When Dad stood up to tell a story about some Gypsies he met in Europe, he strutted around like a Shakespearean actor, his face animated and flushed. Mom felt herself becoming enchanted. She had never met a man like him before. He could speak French and was well traveled. And he could fell a tree. Her previous boyfriends had been intellectuals with not much life experience. And then there was the music. His love, splayed out for the guitar: that was sexy as hell.

  It is a romantic story, and when my mom tells it, she casts the night as a competition between her and Dixie: who would get to claim this handsome guitar player? Knowing that I wouldn’t exist if Dad favored Dixie, I always find myself cheering for my mom and her feminine wiles. As it turned out, Dixie gave up first, yawning, and walked back up the stone steps to the room. Dad and Mom’s fate—and mine—was sealed. They spent the night together. Soon they were a couple, waving good-bye to Dixie and her VW bus.

  • • •

  The adventures continued: After hitchhiking through Mexico, they returned to the USA and ended up in Crescent, Oregon, where my father had worked for the Forest Service. There, they lived on the cheap. They rented an A-frame with no plumbing, and my dad returned to his old post, saving up money so they could travel to Europe. In early 1970 they boarded a freighter ship with their newly acquired dog, Zachary, bound for Spain. Mom had been accepted to a graduate program in educational psychology at San Francisco State University, but she opted to travel with Dad instead.

  Docking in Alicante, they bought a van and set off to live like Gypsies. They stayed on the island of Formentera and became inspired by the small farms they saw there. After six months of island life, they drove to the South of France, traveling from vineyard to vineyard, picking grapes. Mom was a slow picker, but Dad made up for it—he was tremendously strong, able to pick up crates of grapes without effort. The foremen loved him, this mustachioed American with excellent French. As pickers, they were paid daily with a small sum of money, a loaf of crusty bread, and two bottles of wine. Dad was happy to be back in France, and wanted to stay as long as possible.

  But then Mom got word that her mom was dying of bone cancer. She felt horrible, pausing to retch into the vines as she picked. She was pregnant. She flew to Southern California to take care of her mom, while Dad stayed behind to sell the van in Spain before flying back. My grandmother, Mary Virginia, met Riana only as a bump in Mom’s belly.

  • • •

  With my mom’s inheritance, they began scoping out land to buy. They wanted a big ranch where they could have a farm with cattle. My dad wanted to be far away from town and other neighbors. Headquartered again at the A-frame in Crescent, they looked at properties in Oregon and Idaho before they stumbled across the town of Orofino. The location was ideal, on a big river, and the rolling hills reminded them of Spain. They camped out along the Clearwater, my mom enormously pregnant, until they found the ranch: one hundred and eighty acres for
$30,000. The locals thought this was a ludicrously high amount. “Damn city kids,” they snorted at the Ponderosa Café when they heard the price. The ranch came with a tattered trailer that Mom set up as their temporary home. They planned to stay there for only a year. By then, they would move into the big house they were going to build from scratch. They earmarked copies of Sunset magazine for inspiration. The house was going to be epic.

  Inspired by books they had read while traveling, like Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Good Life, and Malabar Farm, my parents set up a chicken coop, a large garden, rabbit hutches. They got married at the Orofino City Hall. My parents believed they would be like Ma and Pa Kettle, sitting on their rocking chairs on the front porch, growing old together.

  At first it was all that they had hoped. The ranch was breathtaking with its gently sloping hills and excellent fields for running cattle. The trailer that came along with the acreage was funky, but was actually a step up from how they had been living in Europe. It had a washer and dryer, and an armchair. Mom, nine months pregnant, was thrilled at these luxuries.

  In 1971, just as the Woods’ roses were in bloom, my sister, Riana, was born. Dad was happy as a lark living off the land, scraping by, playing guitar, and going fishing and duck hunting. Mom was game too, even with a newborn baby. She religiously read Mother Earth News while breastfeeding. Her vegetable garden flourished. They bought a milk cow and Mom churned butter and made cheese while baby Riana napped.

  That winter the pump to the water cistern froze while Dad was gone on one of his elk hunting trips with his Crescent, Oregon, buddy John Garrick. Mom was snowed in, without a car, and six-month-old Riana had dreadful diarrhea. It scared Mom. She melted snow, made do. But on that winter day she realized that the simple life, the one she had so idealized before having children, might actually kind of suck.