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    In 1974, on the other side of the Clearwater River from my parents, a commune appeared. It was called Farm Out. Founded by a couple from the east coast, Lowell and Marcia, their goal was self-sufficiency. But unlike Mom and Dad, they weren’t on their own. They had friends from Cornell living there, and there were stragglers who showed up and stayed for years. Everyone worked together, and they knew how to party. My mom met them first at the farmer’s market in downtown Orofino, where they were selling vegetables, goat cheese, and honey. Lowell was blond and bearded, Marcia had an easy, gap-toothed smile. They were young and cool, and idealistic. Mom was intrigued, and remembered with longing her Berkeley days. Dad scoffed when Mom told him the cheese reminded her of Formentera; he wasn’t looking for friends, he preferred to be alone.
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    It wasn’t long before Mom started taking me and Riana up to Farm Out on her own. It was at Farm Out that Mom caughtwind of a new-fangled idea: Women’s Lib. At Farm Out, men baked bread and mopped floors—and they helped out with child rearing. Try as she might, though, Mom couldn’t get my Hemingway-loving father to share in childcare or household chores. Their dream house was not finished. It lumbered off in the distance, just a skeleton next to a stand of old-growth trees. By then they had started calling it the Rough House. Two years on the land, and we still lived in that damn trailer.
    Mom began to spend more time at Farm Out, and Dad grew increasingly resentful.
    By 1975, we finally moved into the Rough House. It was definitely unfinished and rough, but there was a roof. Then, one day, Dad was gone. I do remember the fight that ended everything. Dad came into the kitchen, tall and raging, and threw a glass of lemonade at my mom’s face. She fought him off, and Riana and I defended Mom. Riana grabbed a butter knife and I jumped on my dad’s leg. I was so little I only reached up to his cowboy-boot-clad shin. “Leave Mommy alone,” we yelled. “We’ll kill you if you hurt her,” my sister raved. Dad sobbed, kicked us off his legs, and ran out of the house.
    He ended up moving to a shack by the Clearwater River. By 1976 the divorce was finalized. Mom finished the Rough House with her old friend Dixie, who had moved to Orofino, and a new boyfriend named Duward who happened to be a carpenter. They ran electricity, nailed sheets of dry wall across the skeleton of wood framing, and hung doors. She salvaged wood from a defunct gymnasium in Orofino and paneled the wall behind the old-fashioned cookstove. Riana and I saw Dad for birthday parties and Christmas. But mostly he wasgone, and an uneasiness evaporated. There was no custody battle.
    With Dad gone, Farm Out became a bigger part of our lives. We loved Lowell, who reminded us of a bear, and who always gave us honey to eat. We also loved the goats, who looked at us with their weird eyes, flicking their tongues. We became fixtures on the land and at the legendary summer solstice parties. The whole town would show up for these annual parties, toting six-packs of beer, bottles of wine. I remember sitting around the bonfire until it got so hot that everyone, men and women alike, took their shirts off. Joints were passed.
    It was at one of these parties that my mom met Tom, a commune member with dark hair and a mellow pot smoker’s demeanor. He would become her long-term, but also long-distance, boyfriend.
    In 1978, when I was five and Riana seven, we moved to Washington State. Mom got a teaching job there. Mom asked Dad if he cared if we left. He said that he didn’t. We met up with Dad one last time at the Ponderosa Café. We had been living in a teepee at my mom’s boyfriend Tom’s house that summer, shaking earwigs out of our clothes every morning and gazing up at the starry sky at night. Riana and I perched at the sticky counter at the Ponderosa while my mom waited,