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

fairy hair to me, waving in the gentle waves. My sister and I had never tasted salt water before.
    Everything was different, compared to Idaho. Instead of morel mushrooms, there were golden chanterelles. These grew on the steep hillside next to the cabin, glowing as they emerged from the moss-covered forest floor. The Clearwater River was replaced by the murky Skokomish River. Instead of the red-winged blackbirds who nested in the duck pond at the ranch, there were seagulls with their yellow beaks and beggar’s nature. There weren’t soft, dusty thimbleberry bushes, just the aggressive blackberry brambles. Chinook salmon, not rainbow trout, were sold by the Skok tribe, wood-smoked until they were orange and drenched with the taste of alder.
    The cabin Mom rented was really meant to be a summer cabin—it had no insulation. But it came with furniture and it was cheap. Her new job was teaching fourth grade. She was thirty-seven and this was her first professional job. She shopped for schoolteacher clothes like corduroy skirts and cardigans and got a perm. Riana and I cried in terror when she came home from the hair salon, her long straight hair gone.
    My sister and I dove into the new landscape and searched for what it had to offer. The ocean became our larder. Riana and I walked down the beach, carrying our oyster knife withus. We shucked the oysters right there on the rocky shore, gulping them down, brine and all. Eric, a towheaded kid who lived a few docks down and was as feral as we were—but in a maritime way—recognized us as allies, and taught us some of his tricks. He motored us around the canal in his dingy and showed us how to catch Dungeness crab. The secret was rotten chicken backs. We tossed the rotted flesh into crab pots, sunk the trap into the water, and waited. It took only a few hours before the cage became full of writhing crabs. Eric showed us how to tell which ones were the males by the marks on their bellies, and those were the legal ones to take. We pulled blue-black mussels from the dock pilings and steamed them until their tender orange flesh was revealed.
    We weren’t living on the ranch anymore, but life was still wild. A few weeks after my sixth birthday I walked down the pier and encountered a sea lion. He had been slumbering peacefully as I approached. He was covered with short brown hair and reeked of salty rot. As I stood next to him he opened his eyes and considered me. We contemplated each other for a while, then I reached out and patted his rump. His fur felt stiff yet soft. He made no move. Mom spotted me from the kitchen and let out a yell. Sea lions are known to be aggressive, knocking people into the water. Gouging them. Not my guy. He gently slipped into the water with a backward look, almost apologetic.
    In 1980, Mount Saint Helens erupted. Though the mountain was 140 miles away, plumes of fine gray powder shrouded the sky. The devastation was epic: the blast was four hundred times stronger than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb; one hundred and fifty square miles of old-growth forest were destroyed.
    As an eight-year-old, I was hopeful about the blast. MaybeI wouldn’t have to go to school? I dreaded the classroom. One of my grade school teachers wrote the following evaluation about me: “Novella, as you know, is not a normal child, and never will be.”
    •   •   •
    When I was in second grade we moved again. It was so cold in the winter, and the landlords wanted to raise the rent on the cabin. We relocated away from the shores of the Hood Canal and into Shelton, a logging town ten miles from the canal. I learned to replace the beach’s larder with Mickey’s Deli, just across the alley from our new house. I had never had such immediate and direct access to candy before. I became a regular, slurping up Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups instead of oysters. I quickly forgot about wild things. By then, Dad was almost completely forgotten.
    Sometimes someone from school would ask