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

become a cult classic for the back-to-nature crowd of my parents’ generation. When he gave me the book he told me that he and Mom had used it as a guide to prepare wild food on their ranch. They made flour out of cattails that grew in the duck pond, and steeped a tea of pine boughs to keep warm in the winter.
    Remembering these stories, I had thrown
Stalking
in the trunk of my car and took it with me to Idaho Falls. There,after work most nights, I followed the book’s directions to forage things like crab apples and wild mustard greens. I hunted young milkweed pods in an abandoned field. I steamed them with butter, and they tasted better than any domesticated vegetable I had ever eaten.
    Dad gave me
Stalking the Wild Asparagus
with one caveat, though. Euell had eventually become a spokesman for a breakfast cereal company. “Goddamn Grape Nuts,” Dad moaned. A warning to never sell out.
    On one of my few weekends off from the
Post Register
, I embarked on my first solo backpacking trip. Even though I consider myself an environmentalist, I always thought the best way to save the wild was to leave it alone. I packed a gallon of water, some sardines, and a loaf of rye bread, and tried to channel my father by hiking ten miles up a mountain. Dad, I imagined, would have easily hiked up the steep trail, and probably would have trapped a small mammal to spit roast on an open fire.
    I, on the other hand, became immediately breathless and sweaty once I started hiking. Halfway up the trail, I was completely spent and couldn’t make it to the campsite. Instead, I slept under a ponderosa pine. Gazing up at the cloudy night sky, I felt peaceful, proud of myself even, but also so lonely. In the middle of the night a storm rolled in, so I built a little shelter out of branches to block the rain.
    The next morning I woke up with a sticky resin glommed to the side of my face and pieces of bark snagged in my hair. My entire body ached. The hike down was thrillingly beautiful, though: the blue lupine flowers were pebbled with moisture, and Queen Anne’s lace majestically rose up along the trail, sending out a carroty, bitter smell. It was August, and the beauty all around me did lift my heart. As I hiked, I sang songsto myself to stave off the loneliness and the terrible feeling of the summer being over and sensing it was a time for change, but not knowing what the hell I was doing with my life.
    I returned to my Idaho Falls apartment and my job. Then, finally, I got an e-mail from Dad. He wrote that he was coming and would be there the next day. And he was bringing his fly-fishing gear.
    “Novella, you have a visitor,” Peggy, the front desk lady, called to tell me over the phone, though the office was small enough that I could hear her without amplification. I was working on an important story about the city’s new dog-poop ordinance.
    I came out from my cubicle and there he was. He was lean and wore a dirty beige cowboy hat, a worn pair of Levi’s, and a Pendleton wool shirt I had sent him for Christmas ten years before.
    “Hey, sweets!” he yelled. He gave me a hug and a kiss. He had an elfin expression on his face, brown eyes shining, pointy chin pointing. He looked fit as a fiddle.
    “This is quite a place,” he said, surveying my ratty office. “This is big time! I’ll be damned.” I guessed that he hadn’t been to many offices before. I wasn’t sure what he was impressed by—the flimsy press board desks? The ancient computers? He let out a hoot and gave me another hug.
    That night we went to Fred Meyer and bought fishing licenses, then split the prime rib special meal at a restaurant called Fish and Steak. I told him about my summer, what I liked about Idaho, how the farm in Oakland was progressing. I felt a little uneasy being with him. I hadn’t seen him in five years, since the quick, hour-long visit when I was living in Seattle and he had come to town for some reason. I was glad we had an