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

driveway was filled with stacks of firewood. I surveyed the place, greedy for every detail, but I felt a little queasy too. There was a pelt of some animal hanging from a post on the drying shed. A beaver? A small bear? I couldn’t tell.
    “How many cords do you think are in there?” my dad asked me when we got out of the truck. He pointed at the stacks of wood.
    “Um . . .” I started. I knew a cord was a unit of measurement. “Five?” I hazarded.
    “No, no: eighteen!” he said. “Sold nine of ’em already.” He was in great shape, I noticed. Chopping wood for a living.
    Then I walked into my dad’s house for the first time ever, Dad leading the way, Bill following me. The front stairs into the cabin were a genuine hazard. They slouched to the left and were battered, collapsed, decomposing. In a strange hall-like room were enormous slabs of wood that I would later learn my dad was hoarding to make guitars. There was a terrible smell there in the corridor, so bad even Bill, man immune to noxious odors, covered up his nose. It was as if a skunk had gone into the slabs of wood to die and then slowly oozed out one last stink bomb.
    At the sliding door that led into Dad’s cabin proper, myheart sank. We stepped into a dark and shabby living room. Along one wall was a ratty couch with a sleeping bag rolled out on it. In the corner of the room was a woodstove, the chimney askew. His guitar was sitting out near some sheet music next to a frayed chair near the window. Weight lifting barbells lay on the scruffy particleboard floor. Dad was asking about our drive, and I made small talk, but I was taking it all in. The kitchen, off to the left, was narrow like a ship’s galley. It was a disaster. Bottles of pills lined the sink, jugs of water were wedged into the sink. Boxes of store-bought cookies lay open on the counter. There were cupboards, but nothing was put away, so the counters were lined with dishes and cups, cans of this and that. On the refrigerator I noticed my name and e-mail address under an “In Case of Emergency” note. Behind the kitchen was a back room. It seemed to be devoted to plastic bags, which were clustered on the floor, hundreds of them, making a giant plastic bag nest. There was no real bathroom—the outhouse was off to the side of the house. I later visited it. It was a bad scene, full to the brim.
    “Who built this cabin?” Bill asked.
    “Some cowboys,” Dad said, but didn’t elaborate. “Otto said there would be water,” Dad said, talking about the guy who he bought the cabin from thirteen years ago. “But he never did it.” That explained why he had to get water at the spigot from IGA.
    My eyes scanned the walls. They weren’t covered with trophy animals or meaningful pieces of nature like
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but with newspaper clippings and a couple paper printout photos of me and my sister. The clippings were an odd assortment—a photo of a high school girl with an elk she killed with a crossbow, a wedding announcement for a localcouple. Tacked on the wall, I noticed a card I had sent to my dad from college; I wanted to read it but was afraid to touch his things.
    From the family lore I had been collecting and from my experiences with him fly-fishing that one summer, I expected his cabin to exude rustic charm. Maybe he would have a taxidermied bear in a growling stance next to the fireplace? Crossbows lining the walls. Feathers and bird wings. This was not anything like Glahn’s cabin, the cabin I had been imagining him living in for all these years. He had bought this cabin thirteen years ago yet it looked like he just moved in. It wasn’t a home so much as it was a den.
    There was a flight of stairs in the cabin that led to two upstairs bedrooms, but my dad confessed that he never went up there. The local wildlife—opossums, raccoons, squirrels, bats—had taken over these rooms. After seeing the cabin, Bill and I insisted that we would be very—very—comfortable sleeping in our