Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild

by Novella Carpenter

  He hadn’t changed that much since the last time I had seen him, almost a decade before. He still had dark hair and a mustache. He was thin and bandy, his face angular and haggard. He wore a down vest—it was chilly, even in Arizona, during the winter.

  “Dad, it’s Novella,” I called, wondering if he would recognize me. I’d sent him photos, of course, but I wasn’t sure he would make the connection. He let out a whistle and I walked over to give him a hug.

  In my dad’s apartment we drank some screw-top Gallo wine that my dad pulled out of the mini-fridge. After catching up on things, we got on the topic of the existence of aliens. Dad had gotten into listening to a radio show hosted by Art Bell, who often talked about paranormal activities and pseudoscience. When Dad went to the bathroom, I snuck a peek into his bedroom. He had lined the windows with aluminum foil and had a spartan bed covered with an old sleeping bag. There was a shortwave radio for entertainment, but other than that, it seemed a monkish existence.

  Bill and I were just getting together, and I had taken it as a good sign that he had wanted to meet my dad. It wasn’t the usual dad-meets-beau scenario, all uncomfortable in the living room with the father finally asking, “What are your intentions with my daughter, son?” No, it was aliens and bad wine. Bill and I stayed only a few hours—we had more adventures ahead of us that we were eager to get to.

  As we pulled away, waving, I asked Bill: “What did you think of him?” I was actually wondering what I thought of him myself. At the time I harbored no hard feelings about his absence from my life—I was twenty-five, resilient, haphazard, self-absorbed.

  “He’s weird but cool,” Bill said in his raspy voice. I nodded in agreement. Later, I would make a photo album of Bill and my trip, and my dad makes an appearance in it. Under a shot of him I scrawled, “This is George Elliott Carpenter. He uses an old sock for an oven mitt and a stove rack for an antennae for his radio.”

  Back then, I saw Dad as an example of living simply, in voluntary poverty. He was still part of the sixties counterculture that I had grown up admiring. The hippie movement, celebrated in PBS specials and in my mom’s stories, seemed heroic to me. My generation—Gen X? Slackers? The MTV generation?—didn’t even have a name that stuck. We listened to indie rock and went to rallies to ban plastic water bottles. But these actions piddled out, never blossomed into a full-fledged student uprising like they had in the sixties. Maybe there just weren’t enough of us. Born in the shadow of that era, I always felt like my formative years were a collection of little side projects that didn’t add up to a fully realized movement that could match up to my mom’s glory days in Berkeley, or Mom and Dad’s foreign adventures.

  • • •

  While Bill and I walked along the tracks in Orofino, stuck now for who knows how long, I thought about how we had been inspired by how Dad was living back then. His shabby room at the Purple Hills struck me as artistic, heroic to me as a young person. The way he was balancing his life as a mountain man in Idaho with his time in Arizona struck me as particularly genius. Since then, he hadn’t changed much—but I had.

  My phone rang. A 208 area code, an Idaho number.

  “Hello?” I answered, worried it might be my dad.

  “Hey, it’s Lowell. Are you on the railroad tracks?” Lowell, from Farm Out, said in his deep rumbly voice. Someone—my mom?—had gotten word to him that we were in town and had given him my phone number.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m in the truck right behind you.”

  I laughed and looked over and saw a grizzled old guy sitting behind the wheel of a big white pickup truck. I hadn’t seen Lowell in years.

  “We’re broken down,” I told him when we got to his truck. Lowell looked like how I remembered him from the Farm Out days, healthy and fit. His eyes, which are almost Asian in shape, still twinkled mischievously, he just had some more wrinkles around the edges. The beard was gone, as were the flowing long blond locks. He was wearing a baseball cap. I remembered how, at Farm Out, he and Tom used to take off their shirts and wrestle. They also bopped bellies. Running toward each other, they would jump into the air, belly flesh bumping into belly flesh, followed by roars of laughter. My sister and I, sheltered on the ranch as we were, watched them in awe. I had never seen men act like that, playing, having fun, like children.

  “Wanna come up and see my place?” he asked.

  We said sure and before long we were driving along the windy road up to Farm Out. As we drove, Lowell pointed out attractions along the mullein-lined road. There was the massive Dworshak Dam and a bar called The Woodlot. Lowell, unlike many of the hippies, had really got to know the Orofino locals. He would ask them for planting advice, livestock tips. He was the only Farm Out hippie left—maybe because he had made those connections.

  It took twenty minutes of concentrated driving—dodging potholes, taking sharp hairpin turns—before we got up to the gravel road of the Farm Out property. “I must’ve done this drive ten thousand times,” Lowell said.

  “You still having those solstice parties?” I asked. Thinking of the fires and the naked people, the belly-bopping.

  “Oh, no,” he grumbled. “They got too big. The whole damn town would show up, and my new wife put an end to that.”

  “That was the first house we all lived in,” he said, pointing to a two-story clapboard house. When the commune first started, Lowell, Marcia, Phil, and Tom all lived together in the main house. It was painted red and looked homey. Acres of grass spilled out behind it. There were a few outbuildings and homemade-looking structures that were built when the happy hippies realized they needed more space, especially as the commune grew and stragglers showed up.

  “I ended up selling it after our divorce,” he said. Lowell and Marcia, his first wife, had split around the same time as my mom and my dad.

  “Now it’s some survivalist types living there. They came for Y2K, then when nothing happened, they just stayed.” Some dogs came by and chased the tires of the truck at a flat stretch along the road.

  “Where did you guys keep the goats?” I asked. The place didn’t look exactly as I had remembered it.

  “Over there in that field,” Lowell pointed to a shrubby golden field.

  On the left, underneath a stand of ponderosa pine, was a rustic-looking shack. It was more in keeping with what I thought my dad’s place would be like, how Glahn’s cabin would look.

  “What’s that?” Bill asked.

  “That’s Phil’s cabin,” Lowell said and smiled. “We were all living in that house, and you know, after a while we all realized we needed some privacy so we could have sex or do whatever, so Phil built that cabin.” Phil’s a college professor now—English, at the University of Idaho. He comes to Orofino regularly, though, to hang out with Lowell.

  Phil, like Tom, Marcia, and the other happy hippies, had realized in their own ways that they couldn’t last on this remote piece of land. Winters were especially brutal up there. Sometimes they had to snowshoe into town for supplies, and no one had four-by-four trucks back in that time. The only airline out of town, Cascade Airlines, was in Lewiston but had been dubbed Crashcades. There was no way out for the duration of the winter, which was long in Idaho. For some reason Lowell stayed. He worked in the woods, lumberjacking, then started a construction business. To supplement his income, he drove a school bus. During the summer he helped lead whitewater rafting trips on the Clearwater and other nearby tributaries. He wasn’t rich, but he had found a way to live off the land and pay the bills.

  We continued down the gravel road until Lowell said, “And that is my house.”

  He parked the truck outside of a beautiful, three-story log cabin. We went inside. It had huge blond beams and picture windows with views of the mountains. We went up to the top floor, into a big open kitchen. It was like being in a giant tree house. Over the years Lowell had devoted himself to building this enormo
us homestead. Spread out below was the rest of his farm—the horse stalls and other outbuildings, several pigs and chickens, hutches for his daughter’s pet rabbits, and a giant vegetable garden. Surveying it all, I suddenly felt a wave of sadness: this was what the Rough House was supposed to have been.

  “This is Maya and Jasmen,” Lowell said when two curly-haired teenagers came upstairs. They went to Orofino High. The Maniacs, their high school mascot, they explained when I brought it up, had nothing to do with the insane asylum next door. I nodded; maybe I had gotten that story wrong.

  Lowell had always been adamant about not wanting to have children during his Farm Out days. He even had a vasectomy when he was with Marcia. But then, in his fifties, he met a younger woman who wanted children. He reversed the vasectomy and against the odds, sired two daughters. Maya had his twinkly eyes.

  “So what brings you to Orofino?” Lowell asked.

  I told him about my disastrous visit with my dad.

  “I see your dad around town sometimes,” Lowell said. “He’s always been cordial. But then again, I don’t know if he recognizes me. He is a real character,” Lowell said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Right. He could have found work, and led a normal life—but he never did.”

  “Never compromised,” I sighed. “For what that’s worth.”

  “I think for him,” Lowell said, “that’s worth a lot.”

  After lunch we took a walk around the farm. We saw the bricks where the kiln had been, the area where the fire pit had burned for the solstice parties. It all seemed vaguely familiar.

  “Where are the bees?” I asked. I remembered Lowell’s hives dotting the Farm Out property, and that he often smelled like honey and wax after a day of tending to his hives. His father had been a commercial beekeeper in upstate New York, and he carried the skill with him to Idaho.

  “Got foulbrood,” he said and shook his wooly head. American foulbrood is a contagious bacterial infection that germinates in the bee larvae, eventually dooming the hive. There is no cure. “Had to burn all my hives.” He paused, laughing at the memory, “So of course I had a party, a bonfire. You can’t believe the colors those hives let off. Must’ve been the different kinds of pollen, but it was like Fourth of July.”

  He looked sad, but it wasn’t because of the bees: He and his second wife were getting a divorce. Things had just not worked out. He was fighting for custody of his daughters.

  “They seem sweet,” I said. They looked so different from the Oakland teens with their tight skirts and giant dangling earrings. And from me and my sister as teenagers in the 1980s, when we were into clothes and had big hair.

  I remembered that at that age I was especially embarrassed about our house, which looked nothing like the mansion of my dreams. It was more of a hippie den. Mom’s boyfriend Tom sent artifacts from his soil science research trips to Mali and Indonesia: batik fabrics, carved wooden statues, and masks of African faces. Mom hung the masks from the wall and covered the stairwells with the fabric. She made us listen to world music too, when all we wanted to hear was Duran Duran.

  Wearing her Jesse Jackson for President T-shirt, digging around in her garden, Mom regarded our mall-rat behavior with concern. She didn’t know it, but I had taken up drinking by the time I was fourteen. Peach-flavored California Coolers were my poison, provided by friends’ older brothers. Remembering my big hair and California Cooler days in Shelton, I wondered what teenagers in rural areas were into these days.

  “They are good kids,” Lowell nodded. “And if I have to pay for them, I want to actually see them.”

  I felt a pang of envy. My dad hadn’t wanted to do either—pay for us, or see us. Child support was a big battle between my mom and dad. He only started making regular child support payments while I was in high school—from 1986 to 1991. The height of my materialist years. I never thought about where the money came from that my dad sent, I just deposited the folded bills into my bank account and looked forward to going shopping. But now I knew: cord-wood money, scrapped and gleaned, sweat-soaked bills.

  Every once in a while my mom would mutter something about how my sister and I were too materialistic, but we would roll our eyes. My sister and I had her outnumbered. My mom’s hippie era of free love and student protests had fallen away, replaced by the greed-is-good eighties. She held out, though, kind of like Lowell had, in her own way. She put up solar water-heating panels on the house, grew a vegetable garden on the side of the house. It was all about small gestures of rebellion.

  “Hey, Lowell,” I said after the tour was over. “Is this going to be Sunset Acres?” My mom and her hippie friends had had a retirement scheme: as they grew older, they would buy land together and hire a nurse to take care of everyone until they kicked the bucket. This plan was hatched while they were still too young and healthy to really know what it would be like later on in their lives—the cancers and the pain, the operations and the general decay of their once healthy bodies. It seemed like a joke back then, growing old.

  Driving back to town, Lowell took a different route. He paused at one particularly scenic point. Somehow there was a wheat field high up in the Orofino hills. “It’s the last of the Palouse,” he said, pointing west. The Palouse is the huge wheat growing area that covers eastern Washington and creeps into Idaho. It doesn’t get far into Idaho though, because it becomes too mountainous, too wild for cultivating wheat.

  I looked at Lowell and remembered something his friend Phil had told me about what it had been like to be young and living in the woods at Farm Out. They felt invincible, he said, free and big, and they made good money and got roaring drunk and smoked cigs and arm wrestled and people respected them because they worked in the woods. Now Lowell was driving the school bus and slowing down.

  “The last of the Palouse,” Lowell said and sighed, and drove us back to our campground.

  • • •

  Bill’s and my first night at Pink House Hole Campground was pleasant. We discovered, from the drunken campground host, that the site may have been where Lewis and Clark had spent a long cold winter. The Nez Percé Indians helped the poor guys build five canoes and redirected them westward. After Lewis and Clark came the miners, then the homesteaders, and then the hippies. In fact, my parents had camped right along these shores forty years ago, when they were looking to buy property in Orofino.

  The closer I looked at my parents’ past, the better I was able to see the parallels in my own life. It was starting to freak me out.

  In 2001, Bill and I were living in Seattle. We both had good jobs—I worked for a travel-book publishing company, he had become an auto mechanic and worked on taxicabs. Then 9/11 hit; I lost my job a few days after the Twin Towers fell. A week later, Bill came home with all his tools: No one was taking cabs anymore, and they laid him off. We had money saved, and I had a severance, so we decided to go to Europe. Remembering my parents and their good times in Formentera, we bought plane tickets to Spain.

  Thinking we could make more of a connection to Spanish culture, we signed up as WOOFers—Willing Workers on Organic Farms. The deal was we would work on a farm for four hours a day, and the farm would give us a place to stay and feed us. I hoped I could learn something about farming—we had been dabbling with beekeeping and had chickens and a vegetable garden in our Seattle backyard—and I wanted to learn more. Instead of learning how to farm, though, we ended up washing dishes at a “farmer’s” restaurant. At another “farm” we were employed by British expats to clean up a house that had been infested with rats while the owner was on vacation. Poison had been put out; our job was to clean up the resulting carnage. We found dead rats in drawers, kitchen cabinets, in the knitting basket. We burned everything. Not really farming, I thought, throwing another rat corpse in the burn barrel.

  We ended up buying bicycles and biked along the Spanish coast. Some areas were beautiful: We would pull over n
ext to the perfectly blue Mediterranean and go skinny dipping. We bought homebrewed wine from gnarled old guys and put the bottles in our bikes’ water bottle holders. We had fun but I kept comparing Spain in the early aughts to the Spain of 1970, of my parents’ experience. Instead of rustic, cheap living, we kept running up against touristy paella restaurants and Flamenco dancer postcards. The island of Formentera, once pristine, had become a high-end tourist destination.

  After Spain, our next plan involved moving to the Bay Area. We were sick of the rain, and all our friends were settling down, buying houses, and having kids. We still wanted to have some adventures. Oakland seemed like the perfect place to do that. It was relatively cheap and had a funky sensibility that made me feel at home. We packed our van full of our possessions—mostly vinyl records and our cat, Sparkles—and drove south. In Oakland we eventually rented a falling-down duplex off of Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Only later I realized that my mom had, in her Berkeley days, lived on MLK back when it was called Grove Street, and Dad had lived in West Oakland, by the port, with some other musicians—making my apartment roughly halfway between their former houses. A few years later, I would attend UC Berkeley: just like my parents had.

  Sometimes when I look back on past events like these, I recognize certain characteristics that seem to resurface from my parents’ past to my own. We share wanderlust, a DIY spirit, and a tendency for romanticizing poverty. Characters reappear too. Some of my close friends remind me of the people I met as a kid at Farm Out. The longer I’m alive, the present starts to look like an anagram of the past. It’s a different pattern using the same elements. There’s a Mark Twain quote that captures the same idea: “The past doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.”

  Bill and I snuggled up in the tent, a vicious wind blowing in up the river. What a day. Back then, when my parents had camped along this very river, poised to buy the ranch, my mom had been pregnant with Riana. Would I get pregnant here in Orofino, like my mom got pregnant with me, setting in motion the next generation? I wondered if the salmon ever felt like this when they returned from the ocean, snuffling around the river rocks, smelling around for home, looking for a place to lay their eggs. Was I capable of reproducing? I was beginning to wonder.