Free Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild by Novella Carpenter

didn’t hear me. I walked toward him, suddenly self-conscious. My hair was short and punky, standing up on all ends as it does after a few days of driving. I was wearing my black cowboy boots and Levi’s—standard dress code for me—but it suddenly seemed too masculine.
    I hadn’t seen my dad since our fly-fishing trip four years before. He was wearing black jeans with cowboy boots and a tucked-in, dark blue polo shirt. A baseball hat. He looked even skinnier than last time. He was rummaging in the back of his truck as I approached, then he saw me. “Kiddo!!” He let out a whistle and we hugged.
    “You’ve gotten taller or I’ve gotten shorter,” he said. We were the same height—five eight—but I know he had been taller, at least five eleven. Age shrinks you. But his arms were muscular. Bill stood behind me. “Hey, guy,” Dad said and they shook hands.
    “Are you hungry?” he asked us and we shook our heads no.
    “OK, well, let me get some more water and then we’ll go up to my place.”
    He reached into the back of the truck and pulled out the rest of his empty water bottles. The plastic jugs were so old they had long ago lost their labels and had turned a yellowish color. There were twelve or more so it took a while. I noticed that he tossed them carelessly into the truck bed, so the water jugs went sailing into the air and landed on chunks of wood bark, near a big orange chainsaw.
    “I don’t have water at my place,” he explained. I wasn’t surprised—I had imagined that his cabin was off the grid. While using this term does sound cool, the reality of it meansfilling water jugs at IGA. While he filled jugs, I expected someone to come out and yell at us but no one did.
    “Follow my truck?” Dad said.
    “Bill, you follow, I’m going to ride with Dad,” I said.
    I climbed into the truck. The cab was scattered with candy bar wrappers and two shotguns, haphazardly arranged. It reminded me of the trashed car I drove during my summer reporting in Idaho Falls. With that car, you had to open the door with a screwdriver. The passenger seat was always cluttered with water bottles and apple cores.
    I kicked a gun out of the way and sat down on the cratered truck seat that was missing a whole section of foam. My butt dipped in at an awkward angle, but I felt right at home in this discomfort. Like father, like daughter.

Mountain man: Dad tanning a deer hide on the ranch, hounds looking on. The town of Orofino in the distance below, 1973.

Six
    D ad pulled his truck out of the IGA parking lot and cruised past Main Street to give me the “ten-cent tour.” Downtown Orofino looked like the old western town that it was. There was a real estate office housed in an old brick building, the Ponderosa Café, the neon sign for the Clearwater Club Bar. “I play pool there,” Dad said, pointing at the bar.
Ah, yes, in the morning
, I remembered the cop describing his daily routine.
    Then we drove out of town, winding through a road dotted with houses and trees. After passing an old railroad trestle, it became sparsely populated, thick with trees. Dad whistled while he drove. I rolled down the window and tried not to think about whether the guns next to me were loaded. After ten miles or so, Dad pointed at a sign on the road. “Grangemont Road,” he said. Later I found out locals called the area “Strangemont.” Then we turned onto Rudo Road, which I recognized from the police report. Making sure hewas following, I looked back at Bill driving Rosie and waved. He waved back. Rudo Road was narrow, dense with trees along both sides. After a few miles of this forested road, we pulled into Dad’s steep gravel driveway.
    The air was cold for August. Must have been the forest, which soared around us, smelling piney. Bill pulled up behind us, the wheels crunching in the gravel. From the outside, Dad’s cabin looked rustic. It was a wooden structure covered with cedar shakes. A drying shed off to the side of the