Read Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild for Free Online

Spain. They camped out along the Clearwater, my mom enormously pregnant, until they found the ranch: one hundred and eighty acres for $30,000. The locals thought this was a ludicrously high amount. “Damn city kids,” they snorted at the Ponderosa Café when they heard the price. The ranch came with a tattered trailer that Mom set up as their temporary home. They planned to stay there for only a year. By then, they would move into the big house they were going to build from scratch. They earmarked copies of
Sunset
magazine for inspiration. The house was going to be epic.
    Inspired by books they had read while traveling, like Helen and Scott Nearing’s
The Good Life
, and
Malabar Farm
, my parents set up a chicken coop, a large garden, rabbit hutches. They got married at the Orofino City Hall. My parents believed they would be like Ma and Pa Kettle, sitting on their rocking chairs on the front porch, growing old together.
    At first it was all that they had hoped. The ranch was breathtaking with its gently sloping hills and excellent fields for running cattle. The trailer that came along with the acreage was funky, but was actually a step up from how they had been living in Europe. It had a washer and dryer, and an armchair. Mom, nine months pregnant, was thrilled at these luxuries.
    In 1971, just as the Woods’ roses were in bloom, my sister, Riana, was born. Dad was happy as a lark living off the land, scraping by, playing guitar, and going fishing and duck hunting. Mom was game too, even with a newborn baby. She religiously read
Mother Earth News
while breastfeeding. Her vegetable garden flourished. They bought a milk cow andMom churned butter and made cheese while baby Riana napped.
    That winter the pump to the water cistern froze while Dad was gone on one of his elk hunting trips with his Crescent, Oregon, buddy John Garrick. Mom was snowed in, without a car, and six-month-old Riana had dreadful diarrhea. It scared Mom. She melted snow, made do. But on that winter day she realized that the simple life, the one she had so idealized before having children, might actually kind of suck.
    But Mom was an optimist, and winter passed. When Dad ordered a bunch of ginseng plants that he planned to deposit in the forest, then later dig up and sell for $300 per pound, she smiled and nodded her head. “Cool.” While the ginseng grew, in the meantime, in order to buy materials to build their house, Dad took timber thinning jobs. Mom worried when he went out into the forest. She had heard of the dangers of logging, of branches called widow makers, that could fall and crush a man.
    In April 1972 Mom discovered she was pregnant again. At first Mom was excited—lots of children were part of their plan. But by summer the washing machine broke and she had to clean Riana’s diapers in the bathtub. Her hormones were raging. Dad discovered Mom weeping against the side of the trailer, muttering, “No. No. No,” and crying. He urged her to go see her aunt in California. “With what money?” she demanded. “In what car?” He shrugged. They used to be proud to call themselves the voluntary poor. But they needed money to finish building their dream house, to pay for seed, and for vet bills if one of the cattle my dad had insisted on buying got sick.
    Mom rallied. She continued farming through her pregnancy. With Riana strapped to her back, she rototilled the vegetable garden and chopped firewood. She even took tostrapping a hubcap to her pregnant belly before milking the cow, who was a kicker.
    In December I was born, named after Novella Calligaris, an Italian who swam in the 1972 Summer Olympics, winning three medals, including a silver in the women’s four-hundred-meter freestyle. Dad began planting Scotch pines. “Christmas trees!” he explained to Mom when she asked where their little savings had gone. He had bought saplings that would become the perfect Yuletide trees. My mom just nodded her head and tightened her