Then I noticed a man, my dad’s neighbor, leaning against his gun, watching the whole thing unfold. He was lanky with curly gray hair; the gun was made of blond wood.
“So why are you here?” the female cop asked. “Does your dad know you are here?”
“Yeah, he knows I’m in Orofino. I just thought he might still be here. I wanted to check on him.” I started to choke up. “I’m worried about him. I think he might not be doing well. You know, he’s old,” I started rambling.
“I think I talked to you last year,” the woman cop said. She turned out to be the young officer, the one I talked to when my dad went missing.
Thank god, this cop and I practically knew each other! I’m not sure what I was worried about—that I’d be arrested for breaking and entering? That they’d tell my dad?
One of the guy cops, a mustached man in a baseball cap, walked down to the cabin to check out the door. He whispered something to her when he came back.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you guys,” I said, sniffling. “I wanted to find out why you thought he was missing.”
The neighbor with the gun, who was waiting in the wings, watching the whole thing go down, approached. “He left his guitar on the couch,” the neighbor said, “so I called the police.” The pesky neighbor suddenly seemed kind of sweet.
“Well, we knew he had his secret spots to go find logs, so we had to go everywhere looking for him,” the mustached officer said.
“You were on the manhunt?” I asked.
“Yep, your dad has a lot of secret places,” he said, with obvious pride at my seventy-four-year-old woodsman father. I grinned.
After they ran my driver’s license and I checked out without a record, the cops shook my hand. “Nice to meet you!” I said to them, relieved. I would have been busted if I hadn’t been his daughter. Of course, I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been his daughter.
The police vehicles backed up and left. I felt almost giddy, like I had gotten away with something. In Native American tradition, there is the idea of counting coup—of touching the enemy to let them know you could have done damage but were peaceful. I had just counted coup on my dad.
• • •
A few hours after breaking into Dad’s cabin, Lowell and I sat in his kitchen, eating chips and drinking beer. He had an amazing collection of beer cozies.
“So was your dad there?” Lowell asked.
“No,” I answered.
I told Lowell about breaking in, getting caught, and then the strange encounter I had with the neighbor—after the cops left, the neighbor invited me into his house for tea.
The neighbor and his wife sat and talked with me about my dad, who had been living across the road from them for the past thirteen years. Their house was beautiful. It was hand built—the beams were made of whole logs, the wooden floors gleamed golden. His wife was frosting a cake when we came in.
“This is George Carpenter’s daughter,” he told her.
“Oh—George,” she said, smiling. “We watch out for him.”
“Thank you,” I said, then immediately broke into tears.
We sat down for tea, and they told me what they knew. He had been on a routine for years. At 7:30 a.m. he leaves for town, where he goes to the post office, then plays a few games of pool, then goes to the library.
“But something’s been up,” the neighbor said. “He’s been acting weird the last year or so.” Like leaving so early for Arizona. “He usually goes late October, November.”
I said it was my fault, that I had been hounding him.
He told me that in 2001, things with my dad had gotten really bad. He started acting really weird and antisocial—he even threatened to kill their dog. Then, that summer, he disappeared for a few months.
“I think he got some medical help,” she said.
“Listen, kid, your dad’s a survivor. He’s barely holding on—he doesn’t have anything to give you,” the neighbor said, rocking in his chair. I nodded.
While I told Lowell the story, I felt a yearning sensation, I guess sympathy, for my dad. He was empty, a shell of a man. Maybe if I had made an effort to connect with him sooner, things would have been different. I realized that our last time together—our last real time—was spent on the banks of Ririe; me learning how to cast, him trying to connect. But I’d lost him, I had arrived too late.
After dinner with Lowell, I headed back to my cabin, exhausted. The mist came down as I walked the dark road. I stoked the fire in the stove and pulled out my journal. I was almost thirty-eight, and for the first time I felt like an adult. I wrote in my journal that night, “It’s so strange, I came here to find my dad but I’m finding myself instead.”
Before I went to sleep, I checked my e-mail, which had been coming in sporadically in Idaho. There was a message from my dad, sent that afternoon:
Hi sweets, returning to Idaho to regroup; saw John Garrick on my way back; keep me posted. Love papa.
I went numb in the legs with fear. He’s back from Arizona so soon? I’ll actually see him? There was no chance he wouldn’t notice the door I had kicked in, and now I wouldn’t be able to blame a bear or a marauding teenager like I had hoped. And his neighbor would no doubt tell him what I did. This was getting really fucked up.
I called Bill in a panic and told him the whole story.
“Whoa,” he said.
“And now how do I explain the break-in?”
Bill, ever the pragmatist, said, “Just tell him you needed to take a nap.”
• • •
The next day I awoke to the dark cabin. I had moved downstairs in the middle of the night in order to sleep next to the warm stove. It was raining outside and the cabin was freezing.
I drove into town, ate at the Ponderosa Café. A man sat at the counter with a nickel and a bunch of lottery tickets. “Oh, we do this every day,” he explained. Scratch cards. “Someday we’re going to win!” the waitress said. “One time we won one hundred and fifty dollars. Course we spent that on more tickets.” When I walked out of the café I worried that Dad might be at the pool hall down the street, and he would see me. I scurried toward my car.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice called. I looked up to see my dad’s neighbor’s wife on the sidewalk. “That was fun yesterday,” she said, and waved. I waved back and nodded. This town was becoming like a group therapy session.
I decided that on my last day in Orofino, I had to go up to the ranch, my childhood home. Though the house was gone, the land still held some spell over me.
It was with a mixture of fear and curiosity that I drove out there, remembering the bends in the road, the wild apple trees swaying with red fruit. Thimbleberries and ponderosa pines. I felt uneasy. I drove past Max’s house, around the pasture that he hoped to turn into a peach orchard, and onto the back one hundred acres where the Rough House had been. As I drove, I was surprised to see that street signs had sprung up. In a spot that I remembered as deep forest where we would pick sprays of Indian paintbrush in the spring, there was an official-looking blue-and-white sign and a house at the end of a paved driveway. There were power lines. Not quite the suburbs, but the land felt more populated than it had once been.
At the straightaway where the road ended, where the trailer used to be, was a rustic-looking cabin. The car rumbled over the cattle guard as I drove toward the site where the Rough House used to sit. At the gate hung a FOR SALE sign. Where the apple orchard had been, there was a new house with a large porch and a steeply pitched roof. Greenhouses and garages sat near where the Rough House had been.
The view off toward Orofino was the same—desolate rolling hills, small craggy mountains, and pine trees. I got out of the car and walked up to the new house. The woman who answered the door was doing laundry and wore a robe. “I used to live here,” I told her. “Well, I mean, not here, but on this land.” She r
aised her eyebrows, pulled the robe tighter around her body, and crossed her arms.
“Call the number on the sign,” she said and shut the door. So much for rural friendliness. Maybe she had discovered the evil spirits on this land. I wrote down the number for the real estate agent, looked around one more time, and drove off in a puff of dust.
I wanted to somehow hold on to the place, to take some of it with me, but I didn’t know how to do it.
Back at the entrance to the property, just past Max’s house, I pulled over to a glade created where a few back roads converged. One road led back to town, another was an old logging road that was a shortcut to the highway to Lewiston. I dialed the real estate agent and left a message about the house. I said I was a Californian looking to acquire a ranch in Idaho. I was clinging to anything. I wanted someone to talk to. My phone rang. It was my sister, Riana. It’s uncanny: she always knows when to call me, when I’m feeling sad or in trouble.
“Hey, Riana, guess where I am?” I asked.
“Idaho?”
“Yeah, I’m at the gate to the ranch!” I got out of the car and sat on the hood. I gave her a report about what I saw and how different the ranch looked. While I talked, I noticed the glade was full of Woods’ roses. The bushes had bloomed in May and were now bursting with orange rosehips. I fished an old plastic water bottle out of the back of the car and I started picking.
“I broke into Dad’s cabin,” I confessed.
“No way!”
I told her the whole sordid story, about what I had found there, about the cops, and the neighbor.
“Dad’s going to be pissed,” I said, and told her that he was back in Orofino. I had so violated his privacy. As I talked to her, I saw an old guy in a blue truck drive by and pull over. Distracted, I figured he was the property owner of this glade, and didn’t want me to pick the rose hips.
“Just a minute, Riana,” I said, walking toward the truck. “I think this guy wants to tell me something.”
The guy hung his head out of the truck window. He had a funny look on his face. I realized: It was Dad.
I yelled into the phone, “Riana—it’s Dad!” I handed the phone to him.
“This is like an acid trip,” Dad said into the phone. “I have just had the most unbelievable seven days,” he told her, while looking me. His eyes were clear and bright. “I’ve seen everyone and every place that I loved. And now this—little Novella here at the ranch, talking to you on the phone!” He seemed winded, like it was taking a lot out of him.
He handed me the phone. “I’ll talk to you later, OK, Riana?” I said.
Dad got out of his truck and we hugged. We walked over to where I had parked my car.
“You could write this as a film and people wouldn’t believe it,” Dad yelled. His voice echoed through the valley. He was right. The whole shit storm had come full circle to end right here at the ranch where it began.
He had already cried today, he told me, because he had been listening to a show on NPR in the truck about post-traumatic stress disorder. He thought he had it, from Korea. The war was officially over when he was there, but he still had been deployed as a gunner, dropped behind enemy lines, where he marched for miles and miles, sleeping in the snow. “It was brutal,” he whistled. “So cold, so unbearable. They say not everyone gets it,” he said. “But the ones most likely to come from families with no support structure. Like me.” I remembered his mom—ghostlike, barely alive, in her hospital bed. PTSD causes recurrent dreams of violence, social withdrawal. It makes having intimate relationships difficult.
I nodded.
He said it can spring up later, many years after the event that caused it. “We push it back, we don’t think about it. And then one day, it all comes blowing out. That’s what happened to me. I remember, I was clearing some land on the ranch—you were just a baby—and I was standing on a hill, and maybe a plane went by, and I just lost it. I went back into my mode. That was the first time.” He began to weep, and I hugged him.
“It’s OK, it’s OK,” I said, like I was comforting a child.
He pulled away and stood on an old stump. I sat on the hood of the car. I suddenly felt exhausted. Thirty-seven years later, we had collided here.
He seemed so happy to see me. I wondered why he wasn’t pissed about my trespassing. “I’m sorry that I went into your house,” I said.
“You mean the one that burned down?” he looked confused. Then I realized he hadn’t been home yet, he was literally just arriving back to Idaho.
“No, the one where you live,” I confessed.
“What are you looking for?” he asked me. His brown eyes searched mine. It was the first time he had ever asked me a question about myself.
“I want to heal myself,” I told him. “And,” I said, sobbing, “I want someone to blame.”
“I’m empty, babes,” he said, and spread his hands out, then leaned against a tree. “I’m empty.” And he wept.
“I have been so angry and unreasonable,” he said. “I’ve been a terror and a madman. But I’m not doing any harm now.” He hocked a loogie.
“In 2001, I was going to blow my brains out,” he said. “So I checked into the loony bin. Those twenty-three days in Seattle, talking it out with other soldiers, helped me.”
Then the moment was over. I walked him back to his truck, hugged him, forgiving him as I did so. He pulled away, headed back to his cabin. I sat in the glade for a while, just breathing and thinking about what happened. Little Novella. My dad still thought of me as a small child. A mythological white-haired little girl there in that glade.
The next day I would see Dad one more time. He didn’t mention our intense reunion. It seemed like he didn’t remember it at all. He also didn’t mention the mangled door to his cabin. Instead he told me a story about a guy he knew in Arizona. The man was eighty years old and he could still play tennis every day. I nodded, agreed that keeping fit was important.
A pause in the conversation came, and I cast around for how to tell him about my plan to get pregnant. I just didn’t know what to say.
“There’s an old guy in Arizona,” Dad started again. “He’s eighty, and he plays tennis every day.” I looked at him, searching his brown eyes. Did he know he was repeating himself? His eyes were bright with excitement, fresh with the tidbit he had just delivered. He wasn’t remembering things. It didn’t even matter if I told him. He was hollowed out.
• • •
That night I drove to Lewiston and returned Tom’s car. He took me to the airport. He stayed with me until my flight left. I told him about my encounter with Dad, and his fading mental state.
Tom’s eyes widened when I told him about breaking into Dad’s cabin. He probably thought that I was being a crazy bitch. And to some extent, I was. I had felt so wounded for all these years. To finally lash out, to attack, was crazy, but it felt right, it felt authentic.
As we talked, I felt a sense of accomplishment. I had done the work I had needed to do. The past I had explored and dredged up was over. Sifting through it, element by element, helped me finally let it settle.
There was also something unexpected: seeing my dad and breaking into his cabin had made me feel powerful. I didn’t share that sensation of power with Tom. He, like my dad, and like Lowell, Phil, Mom, and all the characters in my past, were growing weaker; they were diminishing and shrinking. I was the strong one left standing; I had the future to look forward to. This new knowledge made me giddy—I was the next generation—but it also made me feel a little scared too, with the responsibility it carries.
My mom’s grandkid, a young goat at Ghost Town Farm, 2010.
Eleven
When I returned to Oakland, I told the story of my reunion with Dad to everyone: to my sister, my mother, to Bill, to friends, trying to make sense of it. Riana thought it was somehow destiny, part of the prearranged path of our
relationship. My mom declared that he was faking it, that he never showed any symptoms of PTSD when they were together, and he was just trying to blame the war for his own character faults. I looked up the medications he was taking. One for high blood pressure, one for the heart, and an antipsychotic. I’ll never know if his problems stemmed from abandonment, military service, or an aberrant gene. Whatever it was that was haunting him, I had moved on.
Having a baby suddenly gave me clarity of purpose. It was Bill and my chance to create something new and fresh out of so much damage. Maybe it was reckless—knowing what I knew about my genetic makeup—but I had come to the understanding that I am a reckless person. Baby-making ensued with a reborn sense of urgency.
“What’s that big thing in Mexico?” Bill asked one morning, after a torrid night of baby-making, apropos of nothing.
“A sombrero?” I guessed.
“No,” Bill said, offering no more hints.
“A papaya?”
“Yeah! Let’s eat one of those tomorrow.” Then he wandered off, back to the bathtub, his favorite place of refuge before a long afternoon and evening wrenching cars. He hates mornings and often sleeps in a hot bath before heading to work around one. Then he takes another hot bath after work.
I padded into the kitchen, made some herbal tea, and sat down to my computer. I wondered if my ambivalence was preventing me from getting pregnant. Why was I still not knocked up? It was December 2010; we had been trying for over a year. I had started to question Bill’s fertility. “Have you ever gotten anyone pregnant,” I accused him one night over dinner. Bill had shrugged. “Not that I know of.” He wasn’t sweating it. He was enjoying his duties as procreator.
So it was finally down to this: I went to a baby website and clicked on the Tips for Getting Pregnant tab. Glancing through advice to avoid coffee and cigarettes, I thought, didn’t everyone know this already? Then I read the Get Him Ready, Too section, which I hadn’t researched yet. It said, “Men should make sure that their testes are not too hot as this can kill sperm. They should avoid hot baths, tight-fitting underwear and jeans, and using a portable computer balanced on the lap as all these things raise scrotal temperature.”
Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild Page 13
