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

activity—fly-fishing—to focus on.
    Though I had a perfectly good couch, when we got back to my apartment that night he settled into my closet to sleep. There he made a nest of couch pillows and a sleeping bag. In the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of some rustling: it was Dad getting up to go to the bathroom. I heard him quietly muttering, “Jesus, Jesus,” as he peed. The next morning, when I woke up, his sleeping bag was still in the closet, but he was nowhere to be found.
    “Dad?” I called and looked in the kitchen. Nobody in there. I prepared myself for the inevitable—he had left, it had been too intense seeing me, and, as usual, he’d bailed.
    Then I heard it: music, slightly muffled. I looked out the window of my apartment, through the vibrant green leaves of the plane trees. I saw Dad sitting in the passenger seat of his dingy blue Geo Metro. The door was ajar. One cowboy-boot-clad foot rested on the curb. He was playing his guitar.
    Seeing him there made me think, suddenly, of my first memory of him. I must have been about three. I woke up next to my sister in the low bed we shared upstairs in the half-finished, wholly unpermitted house my parents had been building for years on their ranch in Idaho. An enormous half-circle window of the sort that was popular in certain hippie circles in the 1970s let in the dawn light. I reached for my copy of Dr. Seuss’s
The Foot Book.
Someone had left the book in the root cellar one winter, and the pages were spotted with mold. I couldn’t read yet, but I had memorized it, and was starting to see a pattern with the words. “Wet foot/Dry foot,” I said to myself.
    My young ears heard a chair scrape across the tile floor. Dad coughed once, and then a deep bass of a guitar chord resonated through the half-empty house. The music was haunting and slow. Dad stopped playing and did sometuning, then resumed. I crept out of my bed onto the rough plywood floor, and peered through a jagged cut-out in the drywall that was one day going to be a heater vent. Down in the living room, Dad was seated in a beam of sunlight. He was perched near the picture windows filled with the scrubby golden hills of northern Idaho. He was cradling his guitar in his arms. A cup of coffee sat beside his foot, a curl of smoke rising from it. His eyes closed as he started playing Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” I went back to my bed to read but I heard him occasionally stop to replay notes, back up, and start over again. Then the guitar stopped, the front door opened and closed, and he was gone, out to work in the woods cruising timber.
    •   •   •
    So many years had passed—could it really be over thirty?—and there I was, standing in my Idaho Falls apartment, my toes in the orange shag carpet, listening to him again. I unwound the stove-top espresso maker, packed it with coffee, and turned on the flame. When it was ready, I brought some coffee down to the car.
    “My studio,” he said as I handed him the mug, and grinned. After breakfast, we headed out to the river.
    It wasn’t a good year for fishing. The drought had dried up all but the biggest rivers, but we wanted to try anyway, and the outdoors reporter at the newspaper told us of a spot.
    “You get a reel and I’ll get a pole,” Dad sang on the way to the river, “and we’ll head on down to the fishing hole . . .” He was like a little bird, chirping and whistling, not talking about anything important, just being.
    The spot was called Ririe. There was an impressive stand of cottonwood trees along the river that cast a refreshingshade. The river was wide but shallow, rippling across flat river rocks. I was no fly-fishing expert, but it looked pretty perfect to me. We parked in a gravel parking lot and carried our gear down a steep path to the river. It was hot, and grasshoppers dodged our feet. A slow canal ran along the path. There was another fisherman there, throwing his line in, when we