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parked outside in the car, stuff packed for Washington, chain smoking Salems. We didn’t know it then, but she was terrified of Dad, what he might do. His tempers were epic.
    At the café Dad descended upon us with kisses and hugs, smelling of wood smoke and tree sap, professing his love with a force that scared us. We hadn’t seen him much since thedivorce, and he was starting to fade from my reality. He ordered us Dr Peppers and burgers. While we ate, he stroked our hair, and seemed to jump out of the stool with his frenetic, cagey energy. Then he was gone, driving a different truck from the last time we saw him. Then it was our turn to disappear.

Feral sisters: Riana and Novella on Hood Canal, about to go oyster hunting, 1978.

Four
    A fter sending Dad my request to see him, I didn’t have to wait long for his reply. The next day he wrote that the huckleberries would be ripe in August, and that would be a good time to visit.
    The same day that I got his e-mail, I also got my period. I looked at the blush of blood, like a squashed thimbleberry. For the first time in my life, I regretted getting my period. I didn’t know then that this would happen to me nine more times before it was time to set off for Idaho to reunite with my father. Becoming a mother would be more difficult than I had thought.
    When I first got his e-mail invitation I was thrilled. I grew dizzy with the things we would do together: We would go foraging! Maybe bow hunting! The missing years would knit together. We could fill each other in on what had happened, what mistakes had been made, and what we had learned from our long absences. I imagined the lostwoodlands of my childhood, the lush forest of Idaho, the sleepy town of Orofino with its sweet, clear river.
    I could romanticize all this, as I left Idaho, and pretty much my dad, for good when I was five.
    When we left, Mom portrayed the move away from Idaho as a big adventure. “There is a big ocean and giant mountains,” she told us while she drove away from Orofino headed to Washington State, “and salmon.” My sister and I were game. Of the many teaching jobs Mom applied for, she had gotten only one job offer: Hood Canal school, a K–8 on the Skokomish Indian reservation. The rez was on the Olympic Peninsula, on what’s often called the wet side of Washington State. Idaho rubs up against Washington’s eastern border, which is known as the dry side.
    We drove for miles through the Palouse—the golden hills of wheat that roll through Idaho and eastern Washington. Then over the pass that marks the separation of the dry side from the maritime side of Washington State. Our things were packed into milk crates, which rattled against the back windshield. Our two house cats came along with us, panting in fear, crouched under the backseat.
    The final miles of the journey brought us to the road to our soon to be home near Union, WA. The road was called the Purdy Cutoff. It was carved out of a lush forest of cedar and Douglas pine, hillsides thick with ferns and the constantly thriving blackberry vines. Even in the height of summer, the hills were blanketed by green moss. The August sun strobed through the leaves and hit the windshield. “It’s like
The Hobbit
!” we gasped. Mom’s boyfriend Tom told us that we had hobbit feet—tough and calloused from walking around the ranch barefooted. Mom had read us JRR Tolkien’s book, priming us for the journey. Tom had left Farm Out bythen. He was getting his PhD in soil science at the University of Idaho in Moscow, and so stayed in Idaho with the promise he would eventually join us in Washington.
    Our car heaved up on the gravel parking spot next to the cabin, which lay along the shoreline of the Hood Canal. The rental house—our new home—was tiny, painted green; it lay at the foot of some treacherous stairs. There was a small lawn, and a pier with a dock that gently rocked in the briny water. The fine green algae that grew on the dock looked like