Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild

by Novella Carpenter

“Things are not going well,” I said, and sighed. “Look at this shit hole! But that’s not the problem.”

  “What’s wrong?” Bill asked.

  “I think my dad is crazy,” I said.

  “Think?” Bill said, and laughed. “Why don’t we just leave tomorrow?” His voice broke a little.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, sitting straight up.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Oh, I thought you were going to cry,” I said.

  “No, I was just burping.”

  OK, I thought, only Dad is losing it. After the update, Bill and I wandered back out to our tent in the field to go to sleep. I still was holding out hope that Dad and I would go fishing together, and this would pull him out of crazy mode. Maybe it would take him a little time to adjust to having guests, and then we could re-create our time spent fly-fishing in Idaho Falls. Once we were both feeling relaxed, I could reveal to him my plan to get pregnant, find out a little more family history—to really connect.

  • • •

  At daybreak, I awoke and lay in my sleeping bag feeling sorry for myself. Then I heard the sound of a gun firing. I thought it might be my dad, getting ready to give me some shooting lessons. I hurriedly dressed, suddenly filled with hope again.

  “Novella!” my dad called from the porch with a touch of hysteria to his voice, “Riana’s on the phone!” The shooter turned out to be a neighbor who’d set up a target range on his property and liked to begin his day with a practice session.

  I trudged up the jankity stairs and my dad handed me the rotary phone to talk to my sister.

  “How’s Idaho?” Riana asked.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Are you staying in the cabin—what’s it like?” she asked.

  “Weird,” I whispered, watching Dad out on the porch. I’d have to wait and tell her the full story later. He got out his guitar and started playing a classical version of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday” on the porch. He was all atwitter with excitement but couldn’t seem to channel it toward us. It was the first time I had heard him play in years—the notes sounded clear and hopeful.

  “Did you go up to the ranch?” Riana asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Today.”

  It would be my first time back at the ranch since Riana and I visited together in 1990. Riana had been in her second year of college then, and I was a high school senior. Riana had stopped smoking pot, and had become interested in physics and chemistry. I’d straightened up too; sports had distracted me from my tendency toward drinking and smoking. I was the captain of the tennis team. We drove Riana’s Datsun 510 back across Washington State and into Idaho, planning to meet up with Dad.

  By then we had long forgotten the awkwardness of punishment summer, and despite the fact that he had missed my sister’s high school graduation, we were excited to see him. Riana was eager to tell him about her impressions of college; I wanted to show him that I was almost an adult. We both hoped the visit would start a new phase of our relationship. But when we got closer to Orofino and called him, he canceled, telling us he was too sick to have visitors, even his daughters.

  Disappointed, we decided we would go up to the ranch—we’re so close, why not? We hadn’t seen the place since 1984. By 1988, Dad’s girlfriend broke up with him and he lost the property with the house on it—again. It reverted back to Mom, who let Dad stay there until she could find a new buyer, which she did in 1990.

  Back then, the road up to the ranch was as I remembered it—lined with thimbleberries, potholed, wild. We passed the duck pond and the trailer where we had lived and squealed in recognition. But something was wrong: the Rough House was not there, lumbering in the distance. We drove up to the site and saw a pile of burned beams, the golden grass scarred black. We heard the story of the fire later: The new owner had only lived in the house a few weeks before one night he fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. The place had gone up like a tinderbox. The cedar shakes, the old gymnasium floor walls, all that work, destroyed.

  My sister and I sifted around the rubble, looking for artifacts from our childhood, but came up with nothing. I was devastated. My mom portrayed our time on the ranch as our good years, when we had been an intact family—it was only later that I pieced together their hardship. The place was utterly gone. I felt like I had been robbed of a special childhood toy. I longed for Mom to be there with us, to witness the destruction, to buffer me against the harsh realities that later I would learn are part of being alive.

  After sifting around the land for a while, we drove away from the ruins of the ranch and eased our pain by smoking clove cigarettes and listening to the Cure’s The Head on the Door on the long drive back.

  Back then I had blamed Dad for the destruction, that he had let that happen to the ranch. I felt disgusted. I started to keep score after seeing the destruction of the Rough House. A few months later, Dad failed to pay Riana’s tuition as he had promised, and so she had started taking out student loans and working full-time. Another promise broken.

  • • •

  After talking to Riana on Dad’s phone, I hung up and told Dad that I wanted to go out and see the old ranch property again. He handed me a coffee, ready to make a plan for the day. Bill wandered in and sat on the chair.

  “Oh, babes,” Dad said, “I can’t go up there.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “That property is possessed,” he declared.

  Bill and I looked at each other. Oh, no, I thought. I didn’t want to hear more, but Dad launched in on a winding narrative of how he had seen Satan up there. Satan resembled a giant chipmunk with slanty goat eyes, he told us. And this giant chipmunk lived up there, haunting the place, making it unlivable for anyone who dared. He listed all the people who had lived on the property—and been cursed with divorce, fire, and death.

  In the end, he compromised by agreeing to go see old Max. Dad had gotten ninety acres of the ranch after the divorce. But what with it being haunted, he sold this half of the ranch to Max. Max had built a cabin, which lay right at the edge of the property line of the old ranch.

  Dad, Bill, and I drove up the Gilbert Grade and followed the road to the ranch. Max was waiting for us. He turned out to be a sweet man of eighty-four. He tottered outside his hand-hewn cabin built onto a bluff overlooking the field my dad used to plant with alfalfa for the cattle back in his ranching days.

  “George,” he called out warmly, as we walked up the hill to his house.

  “This is my daughter, Novella,” Dad said proudly. Max and I shook hands.

  Max was withered and slender but he was spry. He had an enormous vegetable garden, which was spilling over with red raspberries, carrots, strawberries.

  “You tilled the alfalfa field,” my dad said, pointing.

  I could tell Dad was having a hard time being there. He seemed uneasy, a little out of breath. Later he told me Max might have some special powers that thwarted the evil spirits that he knew lived on the ranch. I had known my dad was eccentric, but not this kind of eccentric.

  “Yep,” Max drawled. “Gonna plant me a peach orchard out there.” Peaches. My mom had thought she would grow peaches on the ranch too. But according to her it was too cold; the peach trees she planted had died. Forty years later, what with global climate change, maybe those peaches would be possible. The field is a two-acre, circular expanse, and would hold about two hundred trees. I marveled at Max’s optimism. If he was very lucky, he’d harvest his first real crop at the age of ninety-two.

  Max beckoned us to walk up the ridge with him. We wandered farther up a bluff that was filled with pine trees.

  “Wow, this field is growing back,” Dad gasped. There were quite a few large-sized pine trees. He had logged this property twenty years ago. My mom had complained that he had cut down most of the trees on the ranch.

  “Yep, and a dead one,” Max s
aid and pointed at one that had gone red in the needles. I was out of breath from the steep climb up the hill and marveled that old Max had made it at all. In fact, he seemed unfazed. Maybe he did have special powers.

  “Want me to take care of that for ya?” my dad asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Max said.

  And then Dad flashed into action. He ran down the rocky hill, jumped in his truck, and spun wheels getting up to where we were. He pulled the orange chainsaw out of the truck bed, strapped on a pair of earmuffs, and stepped toward the dead tree. The chainsaw gunned to life and the faint smell of gasoline drifted toward us. For a few minutes he worked on one side of the tree, wood chips flying, then he made some cuts on the back. The tree, maybe twenty feet tall, crashed and splintered to the ground. It was dry and landed with a soft hushing, not a thud like I had expected. Then my dad jumped on top of the fallen tree like it was a balance beam. Crouched down, he lightly touched the bottom branches of the tree with the chainsaw, then moved up to the next branches and the next until they were all removed. Then he cut the trunk into big chunks, starting at the top, and making five incisions. The tree lay there, dissected.

  When he finished felling Max’s tree, Dad clambered back toward us and onto the road, dusting chips of wood off his shirt. I was glad to get a glimpse of him doing his work—a mini take-your-daughter-to-work day. Watching him work had reminded me of a story my mom’s Farm Out friend Phil told me about my dad. It was the early eighties and Phil had wandered into the local dive bar, the Clearwater Club, where he saw my dad seated at the bar, bleeding profusely from a giant cut in his leg.

  “‘George, you ought to have someone look at that,’” Phil remarked after ordering a beer.

  “‘Nope, gotta finish this job—I’m way behind and if I don’t come in on time, I don’t get paid,’” Dad told him. Phil offered to help. The next day they drove out to the site together. It was a hot summer that year, even in the thick of the forest. The task was to mitigate forest fire by clearing out brush and lumber left over from a big logging company’s recent clear-cut. Dad set to work clearing brush, and working at a speed that Phil, a seasoned logger himself, found alarming. “He was like a force of nature,” Phil told me, “branches were flying everywhere, his chainsaw moved so fast it was scary. He was like a man possessed. And that was on an injured leg.” Phil refused to help the next day—too dangerous—but my dad did manage to get the job done in time and got paid.

  Now that I had seen him in action, it dawned on me how dangerous the work he did actually was. Maybe that was why the Orofino police had staged a manhunt, thinking he was dead or injured from his work in the woods. Even felling this small tree on Max’s property took an enormous amount of skill and care, and some level of recklessness too.

  I looked at the trees around us. I usually look at trees like a goat would—scanning for low, edible branches. But now I could see how Dad saw them. How many cords of firewood a tree would make, how it was leaning, which way it’d fall if you took a chainsaw to it. I wanted to learn something from my dad, to make up for our lost years. I wondered if he would teach me how to fell a tree.

  “Well, thank you George, that was real kind of you,” Max said. Dad shrugged and threw the chainsaw into the truck bed. It landed with a thud. He promised Max that he would come back for the wood in a few days. We left shortly after, never venturing any farther into the ranch property. I longingly looked down the road that led to the former Rough House—it was dappled with shade and thimbleberry brambles grew thickly along the edges.

  Sitting next to me in the truck, Dad smelled like the forest. I felt proud of him, but also pity. Clearly this was the work he wanted to do, but the number of years he could do this work were waning. He was seventy-four years old. Old age was like that bloody gash he had had—it would slow him down, make everything more dangerous. I wondered what would happen when one day he no longer had a place in the forest.

  • • •

  That night I got an earful about Satan again and another example about how the woods up on the ranch were possessed.

  “I was clearing trees out there with my girlfriend,” he told me. I was seated on the couch/bed again. Not his high school sweetheart, another girlfriend who was Native American. My dad claimed she could sense when a herd of elk was moving through an area. She and Dad didn’t last either: Dad, like my mom, never remarried. “And I was finishing one of the trees on an uphill incline and my girlfriend yelled, ‘George! Look out!’” He paused for effect. “Goddamn tree was flying straight up the hill, coming right for me! I did a forward somersault, and barely got out of the way in time. Whoever heard of a tree flying up a hill?”

  Exhausted from listening, and still feeling no connection to my dad, I kissed his forehead goodnight.

  “I love you, babes,” my dad said.

  “I love you too,” I recited. But saying “I love you” felt fake. I didn’t even know him.

  I wandered out to my tent. I saw Dad turn off his light, settle into the sleeping bag on the couch to sleep. I wanted to share stories with my dad, not listen to a monologue. Bill was in the tent, wearing a headlamp, reading his book.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I answered. Bill was so calm, so grounded compared to my dad—and me. My mind was racing. Our idea had been to stay with my dad for a week, then drive to West Virginia. At the family reunion I was planning on checking out Bill’s genetic lines. But now that I had seen my dad, I was seriously starting to question my own genes.

  “Are we still going to have a kid?” Bill asked, as if he read my mind.

  I sighed. “I wonder if we can even get pregnant,” I said.

  I had come all this way to my dad’s house hoping that we would have made a connection. I had hoped that I would find the perfect moment to tell him that Bill and I were going to become parents, and that even though he hadn’t been part of my life, I wanted him to be a good grandfather. But I hadn’t gotten closer to him; in fact, I felt repulsed. Still, I clung to the idea that we could connect by going fly-fishing.

  The next day I reminded him about the time we went fly-fishing in Idaho Falls. He didn’t seem keen on the concept, and only halfheartedly rooted around the house looking for hooks and flies. We went out to the wood-drying shed to look for his fishing rod. I asked about the furry pelt hanging from the shed door.

  There’s a classic photo of Dad tanning an elk hide on the ranch, the hunting dogs watching him. I figured he was up to some hide tanning at his cabin. “Is that a beaver?” I asked, pointing to the fur. He looked surprised, and looked at the pelt. “What? Oh, I don’t remember. Someone put it there.”

  Then he resumed rustling around, searching through an odd assortment of books and supplies. Finally, he turned to me and fessed up: “I don’t have my fishing license anymore.”

  He had turned in his Idaho driver’s license in exchange for an Arizona one. Out-of-state fishing licenses were expensive, so he hadn’t bought a new one. It was then that I remembered the rod and reel from our fishing expedition in Idaho Falls years earlier. Had that been his one and only rod? I hadn’t brought it with me. I hadn’t even considered that he might need it back.

  Instead of going fishing, we resolved to visit the Clearwater River. My dad tossed a green plastic contraption into the back of the truck, then a pair of orange swim trunks, and we loaded into his truck.

  The Clearwater is the river of my childhood. It is the marker by which I judge every river I encounter. It is green and cold, and tastes vegetal, like willow water. It is also filled with fish, and as a child I landed my first (and last, as it happens) rainbow trout on its white sandy shores. Out of the white sand grows a species of willow from which we would, as children, harvest branches with pupating caterpillars attached. At home we would put the branches in jars and watch chrysalises form over a series of agonizing days for us. “When will it hatch?” my sister and I would ask
my mom over and over again. Eventually, it would, and out would flap a brilliant orange butterfly—a monarch. We would release it from the porch of the Rough House, and the butterfly would have a long journey back to the river.

  We drove toward Zan’s, a public swimming area along the Clearwater with a wide sandy beach. As we approached, there were dozens of cars parked along the side of the road and at the impromptu parking lot.

  “Too crowded, babes,” my dad said and flipped a U-turn.

  I looked back at the beach with longing. It wasn’t that crowded. Instead we went to the other side of town, to a flat spot along the railroad tracks. Disgruntled, I waded out into the river. It turned out that the green plastic thing my dad had brought along was for panning for gold. The town, Orofino, is named for the flakes of gold in the Clearwater River. But most of it is just fool’s gold.

  Dad gave Bill a demonstration, and Bill unenthusiastically panned for a while. Nothing. Dad seemed nervous and just watched us; he didn’t go in the water at all. He paced around by the road we parked next to. Eventually he came back with a frown-faced woman who told us we were on private property. We packed into the truck and went home, skunked, again. I was starting to see a pattern—every attempt to engage with my dad was leading to a discouraging dead end.

  Back at the cabin, Dad and I took a walk. He showed me the almost-ripe huckleberries and we ate a few. We rounded a corner and came across a logging road, which we wandered down. Before long, we encountered the mangled scene of a modern logging operation. There was a pile of dead wood stacked up tall, strips of bark unfurling off the stack. Clods of clay clung to everything. It was like a big monster had come in and devastated this piece of forest.

  My dad fell to his knees at this sight, though he must have seen this clear-cut before. “This is a desecration!” he shouted. I looked at the destruction. It was fearsome. Whole trees were stacked on top of each other, creating a twisted, ten-foot wall of gnarled roots and branches. The rest of the area was completely void of vegetation, just reddish brown soil, rippled with bulldozer tracks.