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of land, ‘our pie in the sky,’ as Jim called it. Mother was browsing through a copy of Mother Earth News when she saw a classified ad listing land for sale. She located the town, which had a population of two thousand and was marked with the tiniest speck the map allowed, and we drove up through San Francisco headed for that dot.
    We ended up buying a clapboard house in the heart of this coastal valley town, a half-acre plot that came with a stucco duplex. Later, Mother would say that you had to call the people who lived in those buildings homeless. Only two out of the four toilets worked. The ceiling plaster bloomed with stains. There were a handful of ramshackle sheds on the property and a line of rusted cars in the driveway. The yard was nothing but thistle and dry grass. They dickered with the landlord a little, and agreed to buy the place for $18,000.
    Our new address was 10,000 Main Street. Apparently the town’s founders had been anticipating an explosive growth period which never arrived. Just past our house, the only sidewalk in town ceased abruptly, the last slab jutting out toward the cow pastures and orchards down Powerhouse Road. We would hold down the end of the main drag, on about an acre of good river valley soil gone hard from neglect.
    We moved into the front apartment, formerly inhabited by an old alcoholic woodcutter named Floyd, who died in his bed shortly after we arrived. It took us a week of scrubbing to make that place fit to live in. There was standing water in the sink that the neighbor told us hadn’t been drained for six months. Mother made batik curtains for the windows, and lined the musty drawers with butcher paper. In the bedroom, the wallpaper hung in thick tatters, a yellowed flowery print laced with ribbons. We pulled that down and found a layer of cheese cloth tacked beneath it, and when that was stripped away, solid foot-wide redwood planks, rough planed from trees that must have been five hundred years old.
    I was given Floyd’s bedroom. Mother and Jim slept in the living room on a bed that doubled as a couch by day. I was not yet five, and it was summer, so I had to go to bed before the sun went down, which felt like exile from the world of light. I would press my face against the screen and watch the older neighborhood kids playing kickball in the street or straddling their bikes on the corner. One evening, not long after we had moved into the house, my mother and Jim came to tuck me in, and the two of them lingered for a moment. Mother sat on the edge of my bed and sang to me. Jim stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking out the western window at the torn-up yard, the bristle of cattails in the ditch, and the corrugated roof of Mel’s welding garage across the street, where he went every afternoon to buy glass bottles of Coke from the vending machine.
    The novelty of the two of them tucking me in together in my very own bedroom set me humming with pleasure, and I wanted to say something in honor of this, but I didn’t dare break their reverie. Even as I lay there, mute with happiness, I was conscious of the fragility of the scene—two parents, one child, pausing for a few moments together under one roof at the day’s end.

    Late in the summer of 1971, when I was nearly five, my father was released from prison. Friends of his were living on a commune in Oregon, and they had invited him to come and sort himself out.
    He came west, as soon as he was free, and gathered me from Mother’s place.
    It must have been a shock to see him again, for I have no memory of our first hours together. I know we took a Greyhound bus up to Eugene, and a friend from the commune picked us up and drove us out to the property—acres of dry grass and scrub oak. There, my memories become clearer. The commune members were roughing it—no running water, no electricity, just a few ramshackle houses at the end of a long dirt road.
    My father’s attempt to unwind in the