Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild by Novella Carpenter Page B
Authors: Novella Carpenter
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footsteps, Novella and Bill in Mexico, 1998.
Seven
B ill and I drank some jasmine tea and dipped our feet in the Clearwater River. We were at a campground just outside of Orofino called the Pink House Hole, which, to me, sounded vaguely vaginal. The hole had been a favorite fishing spot for locals before they tore down the eponymous pink house and turned it into an official recreation site. Fourteen bucks a night. I wasn’t going to go back to my dad’s house—and I doubt I would be invited back. Bill figured it would be two days before our part arrived.
“Want to go for a walk?” Bill asked.
“Sure,” I said.
We found ourselves along some railroad tracks. Picking blackberries. “We could’ve slept here,” Bill said, pointing to a nest of brambles. Bill has always wanted to be a hobo. His aesthetic—ripped clothes, dirty T-shirts—is pure bum.
His scruffiness was one of the first things I liked about him when he got on an elevator with me in Seattle in 1998. Iwas twenty-five, working on the UW campus for Classroom Support Services. After seven on and off years of college, I had finally graduated and had lingered around campus working as an AV tech, paid small sums of money to push PLAY on VCRs for classes. In the elevator, Bill, a new employee, recently arrived from Florida, was wearing a too-small blue sweatshirt and a red mohair hat that slumped over his lush dark hair. I sported a peeling turquoise pleather jacket and horn-rimmed glasses. He seemed nervous, which I liked. Later he sent me an e-mail that said I was intriguing and he asked me out. Our first date involved meeting in a back alley to eat sardines balanced on saltine crackers we had filched from the student cafeteria. We moved in together after the second date.
Channeling my parents, our first winter together Bill and I traveled to Mexico. After some time in Oaxaca, on my insistence, we headed to San Miguel de Allende. Bill and I arrived by a Semi-Directo bus.
So this is where my parents met?
I thought, filled with emotion when the bus pulled into the ancient town, the giant cathedral curlicuing up to the blue Mexican sky.
This is where it all started.
Overcome with the weight of the past and its implications, I missed the last step off the bus and tumbled—a twenty-five-year-old gringa, giant yellow backpack strapped on like a beetle’s carapace, spinning through the air, trying to regain my footing. I landed with a thud on the cobblestones. The bus driver laughed, he couldn’t help himself. Bill tried not to do the same, and carried me to the youth hostel. I was distraught, and sat with my foot up in the hostel’s common room, immobilized. Bill went out to explore, and when he came back he said there were lots of Americans living there. It was no longer the undiscovered oasis of my parents’ youth.
We left a few days later. I limped onto the bus and we headed to the coast where I could heal up. Propped up at the beach, I felt like a failure. Not just because I hadn’t gotten to explore the town where my parents first met but because my future seemed so dingy and uninspiring compared to my parents’ younger years.
• • •
It was in that winter, 1998, just after our failed San Miguel de Allende trip, that Bill met my dad for the first time.
We were in Bill’s VW, driving through the Southwest. I had unfolded a map of Arizona, a cup of coffee between my legs; Bill was smoking a hand-rolled Drum cigarette. “Hey, we’re near Wickenburg!” I said.
“So?” Bill answered. The cactus-filled landscape seemed to go on forever.
“I think my dad’s there,” I said, remembering that he sent me a postcard mentioning that he was staying at the Purple Hills Apartments. I was learning to be a writer then, and his life seemed a proper one for an artist. I heavily romanticized his decision to never join mainstream America. I had been bragging to Bill about my cool dad, playing down the fact that we were estranged. I hadn’t
Seven
B ill and I drank some jasmine tea and dipped our feet in the Clearwater River. We were at a campground just outside of Orofino called the Pink House Hole, which, to me, sounded vaguely vaginal. The hole had been a favorite fishing spot for locals before they tore down the eponymous pink house and turned it into an official recreation site. Fourteen bucks a night. I wasn’t going to go back to my dad’s house—and I doubt I would be invited back. Bill figured it would be two days before our part arrived.
“Want to go for a walk?” Bill asked.
“Sure,” I said.
We found ourselves along some railroad tracks. Picking blackberries. “We could’ve slept here,” Bill said, pointing to a nest of brambles. Bill has always wanted to be a hobo. His aesthetic—ripped clothes, dirty T-shirts—is pure bum.
His scruffiness was one of the first things I liked about him when he got on an elevator with me in Seattle in 1998. Iwas twenty-five, working on the UW campus for Classroom Support Services. After seven on and off years of college, I had finally graduated and had lingered around campus working as an AV tech, paid small sums of money to push PLAY on VCRs for classes. In the elevator, Bill, a new employee, recently arrived from Florida, was wearing a too-small blue sweatshirt and a red mohair hat that slumped over his lush dark hair. I sported a peeling turquoise pleather jacket and horn-rimmed glasses. He seemed nervous, which I liked. Later he sent me an e-mail that said I was intriguing and he asked me out. Our first date involved meeting in a back alley to eat sardines balanced on saltine crackers we had filched from the student cafeteria. We moved in together after the second date.
Channeling my parents, our first winter together Bill and I traveled to Mexico. After some time in Oaxaca, on my insistence, we headed to San Miguel de Allende. Bill and I arrived by a Semi-Directo bus.
So this is where my parents met?
I thought, filled with emotion when the bus pulled into the ancient town, the giant cathedral curlicuing up to the blue Mexican sky.
This is where it all started.
Overcome with the weight of the past and its implications, I missed the last step off the bus and tumbled—a twenty-five-year-old gringa, giant yellow backpack strapped on like a beetle’s carapace, spinning through the air, trying to regain my footing. I landed with a thud on the cobblestones. The bus driver laughed, he couldn’t help himself. Bill tried not to do the same, and carried me to the youth hostel. I was distraught, and sat with my foot up in the hostel’s common room, immobilized. Bill went out to explore, and when he came back he said there were lots of Americans living there. It was no longer the undiscovered oasis of my parents’ youth.
We left a few days later. I limped onto the bus and we headed to the coast where I could heal up. Propped up at the beach, I felt like a failure. Not just because I hadn’t gotten to explore the town where my parents first met but because my future seemed so dingy and uninspiring compared to my parents’ younger years.
• • •
It was in that winter, 1998, just after our failed San Miguel de Allende trip, that Bill met my dad for the first time.
We were in Bill’s VW, driving through the Southwest. I had unfolded a map of Arizona, a cup of coffee between my legs; Bill was smoking a hand-rolled Drum cigarette. “Hey, we’re near Wickenburg!” I said.
“So?” Bill answered. The cactus-filled landscape seemed to go on forever.
“I think my dad’s there,” I said, remembering that he sent me a postcard mentioning that he was staying at the Purple Hills Apartments. I was learning to be a writer then, and his life seemed a proper one for an artist. I heavily romanticized his decision to never join mainstream America. I had been bragging to Bill about my cool dad, playing down the fact that we were estranged. I hadn’t
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