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

tent outside.
    Dad helped us set up our tent underneath a giant tree. I couldn’t find the tent poles and stakes anywhere in the back of our car. “Here ya go,” he said when he saw the problem, and, taking a line of rope, strung it through the tent’s pole openings until it was tenuously set up. Tying the sides of the tent to nearby tree branches opened up the floor of the tent. Then Dad ran off to the wood-drying area to hone some wooden stakes that he pounded into the ground with a rock. Set up in this fashion, our tent looked like a hobo satellite of my dad’s dilapidated cabin. Bill and I threw our sleeping pads and bags into the tent, then joined Dad for dinner.
    After our initial catching up, Dad went on a monologue about his life, retelling stories about his time in France, the episode in Spain when he and Mom had bought the van. Allterritory that we had covered in previous encounters. Bill, bored, yawned and retired to our tent. It was getting late. Then the conversation steered toward the bizarre.
    “Now, I’ve been taught how to kill—how to kill with my bare hands,” he started. My ears perked up—is this where we start talking about stalking wildlife? And make plans for going fishing?
    “One time these two cops pulled me over,” Dad said. “Really, just harassing me. And as I stood there”—he sprang up from the hard chair he was sitting on; I was sitting on the couch where he set up his sleeping bag—“and I thought, OK, how’m I going to kill this one who was standing there—” He pointed across the room. “I could’ve done a judo chop but then his partner would’ve shot me.” The other time, he told me, was in San Mateo, CA. . . .
    As he spoke, animated, and clearly glad to have a pair of attentive ears, I got a horrible sinking feeling. Dad was crazy. He went on a twenty-minute rant about how the police were always bothering him. He looked at me in the middle of the rant, and realizing it was me, his daughter, he customized the story. Washington State cops: They were why he never came to visit me and my sister. Why he missed our graduations and State tennis matches.
    He seemed to be getting really agitated. I wanted to calm him, and didn’t want him to know that I thought he sounded insane.
    “Hmmm. Yes. Cops. Hmmm,” I said, glancing at the door. Could I just bolt? “Well Pops, it’s been a long day. A long day.” And with that I stumbled off to find Bill.
    He was in the tent munching on a banana and reading a book about a man with no legs who motorcycled around Siberia.
    “How’s it going?” Bill asked.
    I started to tell him that my dad was acting really weird but Bill has a hearing loss so I had to shout into his ear. I peeked out the tent door. The light was still on in my Dad’s cabin and I could see him moving around, still agitated. I felt a little scared. “Let’s go to the car,” I said. We crept into the car so our voices wouldn’t carry.
    “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