Carpenter - Gone feral: tracking my dad through the wild

Praise for Novella Carpenters Gone Feral

A Library Journal Best Book of 2014

A Northern California Book Award Nominee for Best Creative Nonfiction of 2014

Riveting... A mission to reconcile the romantic image she has conjured of her absent father with the troubled man he truly is... Author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer and coauthor of The Essential Urban Farmer, Carpenter captures her scrappy, resourceful life with vivid detail and candor. We see her riding her bike in a fake-fur hat to find leafy branches for her Nigerian Dwarf goats to eat; we see the sticky bee frames piled in the corner of her living room; we see her and her partner Bill wrestle with their longing to bring a child into their unconventional life. Carpenter brings the reader so close, we can smell the chevre-like scent of her goat Milky Ways head, can feel the hot knife she presses to her skin after a bad breakup in her younger years.... Carpenter reminds us that sometimes the self is the thorniest wilderness of all.

San Francisco Chronicle

Spurred on by a desire to raise a family of her own and decipher the genetic code for either survival or destruction that she might be passing on, Carpenter performs a wild pas de deux with the cantankerous George, approaching him as one would a wild animal with no trust in humanity. Carpenter chronicles her daring quest for understanding and familial continuity in this sincere and remarkably uninhibited memoir.

Booklist

Im so glad Novella Carpenter has written this book. Its gratifying to see a woman take on the question that has pulled at male authors for so longnamely, What am I to make of my old man? In her efforts to answer that question (and to reconsider and reconcile her own complicated family history) Carpenter goes on nothing less than a vision quest, in search of answers from a particularly reticent and strange father. The resulting journey is both brave and honest. There is much to be learned here for all daughtersabout acceptance, about redemption, about the distances we must go at times to find our own deepest familial truths.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things and Eat, Pray, Love

Novella Carpenter couldnt be more fun to hang out with on the page. Gone Feral is full of scruffiness and wit, melancholy and compassion. Its an extraordinary portrait of a father and daughter doing their best to be family.

Jon Mooallem, author of Wild Ones

Novella Carpenter is a delightful storyteller, and Gone Feral reads like a fable, full of wild and unknown things, including a trickster father, whose mountain man fantasies and failed dreams lead the author on her own sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking journey of discovery.

Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness and In the Kingdom of Men

PENGUIN BOOKS

GONE FERAL

Novella Carpenter is the author of the bestselling Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer and is the coauthor of The Essential Urban Farmer. She lives and farms in Oakland, California, with her partner, Billy, and their daughter, Francis.

A LSO BY N OVELLA C ARPENTER

Farm City

The Essential Urban Farmer

with Willow Rosenthal

PENGUIN BOOKS

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2014

Published in Penguin Books 2015

Copyright 2014 by Novella Carpenter

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Carpenter, Novella, 1972

Gone feral: tracking my dad through the wild / Novella Carpenter

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-698-16378-2

1. Fathers and daughtersIdaho. 2. Interpersonal relationsIdaho. 3. Missing personsIdaho. I. Title.

HQ755.85C3597 2014 2013039981

306.8742dc23

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

One of the names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individual involved.

Cover design: Janet Hansen

Cover photograph: Courtesy of the author

Version_2

For my sister, Riana, who always seems to know

Dad holding one-year-old baby Novella on the ranch in Idaho. The funky trailer in the background was home sweet home, 1973.

One

M y dad officially went missing on October 17, 2009.

The morning I found out, I woke up to the hum of traffic from Interstate 980 harmonizing with the nickering of milk goats at my back stairs. I made a cup of Lapsang souchong tea and got ready for a morning of manure shoveling out in my Oakland farm. I threw on my jeans and a stained T-shirt worn the day before and sat down to put on a pair of cowgirl boots that I had bought years ago at a feed store in Texas. The salesgirl promised the boots would give me superior stirrup control. I bought them without mentioning that I was an urban cowgirl, and that the only horse I ever rode was a bicycle. As I pulled on the boots, I noticed my phone on the kitchen table, blinking with a message.

Hi, Novella, this is your mom, and youre probably on your way someplace, she started, cautious. Her voice sounded flittery and nervous, not her usual upbeat tone. Listening, I could just see her, sitting in her favorite old leather chair, a Guatemalan pillow propped behind her back, her long blond-gray hair pulled back in a side ponytaila holdover from her hippie days.

But I justBarb just called me. Barb, one of my moms friends from back in her Idaho homesteading years. She said there was an article in the Orofino paper saying... ah... local man reported missing andthere was a dramatic pauseits your dad.

My heart shrank as she went on. Its very peculiar, it said he was last seen on the seventeenth. Give me a call or e-mail. Weird, huh? OK, talk to you later.

It was October 23. He had been missing for six days. I punched in my moms phone number. It rang once. Twice. Three times. Four. She has multiple sclerosis and walks with a cane, so it takes her awhile to get to the phone.

Hello? she answered finally.

Hi, Mom, its Novella, I said. Dads missing?