Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild (14 page)

The line at the downtown pharmacy was always slow and long. I stood there, pregnancy test in hand.

“Hey, Novella,” Mac called. Mac was one of our queer friends who wanted to be called
zhe
, not she or he.

“Oh, hey,” I said. I crossed my arms and tucked the EPT test away from sight.

“We’re having another cabaret,” Mac said. Bill and I loved going to these, Mac was a great host, and the acts were always weird and fun.

“Terrific,” I nodded.
Oh god, don’t let zher notice the pregnancy test
. We hadn’t told many people that we were trying to conceive. Mac, I was pretty sure, wouldn’t approve of this breeding thing Bill and I were up to. I felt like a sell-out, like a pirate turned merchant marine, Thunderbird-sipper turned wine snob, a hipster urban farmer turned stroller-pushing mommy.

Finally, it was my turn, and Mac flitted off, and I rushed home with the ultimate breeder purchase. In the safety of my bathroom I tore open the pregnancy test and peed onto the little stick. I watched with pure fascination as capillary action drew my urine across the marker that could sense the pregnancy hormones in my urine. First it was negative, a solid blue stripe that I had seen many times before. I let out my breath, pulled my pants up. Looked in the mirror.

I was really starting to look like my mother. She had just come to visit last month, to put the pressure on the whole getting knocked up thing. She had rented a car, and one night
drove up to Berkeley to look for her old house. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she said, embarrassed. But I understood that desire to go back in time.

In the mirror I saw that I had bags under my eyes, and my crow’s-feet fanned down across my cheeks. When my mom was thirty-eight, she had already had two kids, raised us from babies to toddlers to kids. We had gone to kindergarten, she had divorced my dad, gotten a job, moved to Washington State. I, in contrast, was just starting this process.

Then I looked down at the pregnancy test, flush with urine, and saw a plus sign had formed.

That afternoon Bill came home early. I was out in the garden, trying to catch an escaped rabbit who disappeared behind the back of the chicken coop.

“Help me, Monk,” I said.

He went to one end of the coop and waved a branch at the rabbit. I waited at the other end. She scooched toward the safe middle, and I squeezed behind the coop until I could grab her. She made little grunting noises, and I realized that she was pregnant too—that’s why she was looking for a hiding spot. I found a nesting box for the bunny, stuffed it with straw, and put her in the cage with it. After closing the door to the cage, I looked up at Bill and blurted out, “I’m pregnant.”

Bill puffed up like a rooster. “I did it!” he crowed.

Riana and Novella riding stick horses on the ranch, 1976.

W
hen I was five months pregnant, I flew to France.

My sister met me at the airport. Though we talk on the phone weekly, the high price of flights meant I hadn’t seen her since right after she had given birth to Amaya, five years ago. Her time spent raising her daughter had been good to her—she looked fit and happy. In addition to growing most of their family’s food, she collected lots of wild stuff too. Amaya was growing up on the land, running free like we had on the ranch. There was now even a name for it—free-range parenting—and my sister had embraced the philosophy.

I waddled toward Riana, trashed from the long flight. She looked glowing, vibrant, full of life, dressed in tight jeans and a pair of high boots. When she hugged me, she felt lithe and strong. I felt squishy, like ripe fruit. I had been eating like a horse, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to graze on nuts and ice cream. I was looking forward to being in France and eating as much cheese, bread, and charcuterie as possible.

Instead of buying food, though, we ended up mostly
foraging, the way we had as kids. We went clam digging and elderberry collecting, harvested figs from trees growing in the village. We even went to a pond where we collected cattails to cook and gave ourselves mud baths.

“There are all these feral vineyards,” Riana said on one of my last days there. “The grapes are so good!” She got a look in her eye that promised I wouldn’t be disappointed. So we packed the car with baskets, pulled out of the stone gate that surrounded their house, and drove into the countryside. The Opel bumped along, passing field after field of grapes. Their dog, Zach, stuck his nose out the window, all aquiver. It was September and the
vendage
was on, so workers were in every field, picking grapes by hand, placing them in lug trays, which were then poured into enormous hoppers loaded onto the back of tractors. It was a timeless process—in fact, this was the same way grapes were harvested when my parents were in France picking grapes so many years ago.

Benji turned off the paved road and we set across a bumpy dirt track that ran into the fields of grapes. He’s got dark hair and eyes, and when his DNA met my sister’s, these dominant traits were passed onto Amaya. She was gorgeous, with long dark hair and olive skin. She sat in the back with me, eyeing my bulging stomach.

“There’s a sour cherry tree there,” Riana said, and pointed toward a riverbank where lots of different trees were jumbled together. I saw it, some dried fruit still clinging to the branches.

“Nobody picks this stuff?” I asked.

“No!” Benji and Riana both yelled, as if they couldn’t believe it themselves. “It’s crazy, Novella,” Riana said, turning to look at me in the backseat with Amaya.

Suddenly, we were there. There were signs that the field had once been in production, but the wooden support beams
had rotted and crumbled so the grapes had resorted to scrambling across the ground. They were not trained against the metal wire like the grapes we had seen from the road.

“Taste one!” Riana urged.

Never one to stick a toe in, I grabbed an entire cluster and stuffed it into my mouth. I was actually really hungry. A hundred sweet explosions in my mouth went off as I chewed on the grapes. A hint of tart, but only a little. They were warm from the summer sun, and the skins were just slightly chewy. I grabbed the next closest cluster and ate more. I looked down at Amaya and she was doing the same thing.

We got out our baskets and began collecting. Walking along the fallen fence, pausing to clip the heavy fruit. The air was so clean, so crisp. The soil was chocolate brown. The leaves had just started to blush red, and the rolling hills of vines were stunning. Walking along next to my sister, I was reminded of the ranch. I also thought of my parents—not far from here they had been picking grapes together, planning a family.

A little while later, Riana and I sat in the car, waiting for Benji to take Amaya for a potty under a tree.

“God, she’s all grown up,” I said. I was surprised at how having a child had changed my sister. Right after giving birth to Amaya, my sister began living a more ecological lifestyle. She didn’t want to use disposable diapers, and so made her own diaper inserts and wipes. As Amaya got older, her fervor to save the earth grew stronger: she and Benji stopped using toilet paper; they stopped buying stuff and started dumpster diving and foraging. Some more Dad traits surfaced: Riana learned how to use a chainsaw and started channeling her psychic abilities. She had gotten into exploring her past lives and studying the moon cycles.

We watched Amaya pull up her pants, skipping along
back to the car, pausing to pick up a stick. Amaya was so perfect, so beautiful.

“You know, she saved me,” said Riana.

“Who?”

“Amaya.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I think I knew but I wanted her to explain.

After a pause, she told me something I had never heard. That she had struggled with mental illness. Suicidal tendencies.

“I thought about killing myself, even when I was pregnant with Amaya.”

I gasped, clutched my stomach. “No.”

“Yes. But then, after I had her, Novella, something in me changed. It cracked open, and the love came pouring in. She saved me. She made me.”

I grabbed her hand and we were quiet for a while, feeling all the past swirling around us.

Before I left for France, I had sent Dad an e-mail message telling him my news. He wrote back his congratulations, told me that I would be a great mom, just like Pat. Terribly wonderful, I thought, remembering his haiku.

“I wish we could have saved Dad,” I said.

“Don’t you think we did?” she asked. Then Benji and Amaya were back and we drove home. Maybe we did.

•   •   •

That night, lying in the guest bedroom upstairs, I was awoken by their little town’s church bells, which rang on the hour. The baby liked to move around at night, and busily kicked my ribs. I pulled down the covers and watched the alien movements across my stomach.

We were going to have a girl. Just before leaving for
France, I had an ultrasound appointment. The technician lubed up an ultrasound wand and stuck it against my swollen stomach. We were looking for internal organs and body parts. The heart, the kidneys. The baby bobbed around, and I loved the chance to see her instead of just feeling her nudges in my womb. The technician pointed out her brain, her lips, her stomach. We had a tough time finding the baby’s feet, and the technician wildly prodded my stomach with the ultrasound wand. I started to worry. I could feel the baby swimming around low, down near my cervix, which tickled. Then finally the fetus flipped around and we saw her foot—it was tiny, and looked like a badger’s paw. Then the other one. I was relieved. She would be able to walk. Then we looked for her hands. I had bargained with myself: If she were missing arms or hands, that would be OK. They make all these great bionic arms. . . . But then the technician found them—two perfect hands. One was making the Ozzy sign. The bones in her arms glowed white, and I could see each individual digit. That’s when I started crying. Despite our obvious genetic flaws, Bill and I had put together a healthy baby.

As I lay there in the dark French countryside, I thought of my parents, who had been here before, conceiving Riana. They had been young and hopeful, idealistic and enchanted with each other. Those days must still hold some magic for them. I know they do for me—I grew up listening to my mom’s stories about their great adventures.

My sister once told me that I always try to find the answers. Instead she tries to find the beginning of everything. I remember being annoyed and not fully understanding what she meant. It’s true that I do always look for an answer, something to explain why things are the way they are. Now I was here, where my parents had lived out the happiest part of their
relationship. I realized that their beginning was just as important, as real, as their ending. There had been a moment of great love for them. To return to their stomping grounds felt like I had made it back to the beginning.

A few days later I flew home. “Have a great labor!” Riana joked. I waved. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “I’ve been watching the goats!” And I winked.

•   •   •

Eight months into my pregnancy, a burst of progesterone coursed through my body. The hormone gave my hair lushness and bounce. My skin cleared up for the first time since third grade. Men regularly stopped me in the street, asking for my phone number, even though I was clearly knocked up. My dream state had changed too. Instead of my usual anxiety dreams about failing a test or missing a train, I experienced pleasant, almost psychedelic dreams. One that stuck with me featured a group of Civil War veterans on horseback. They wore big beards—and, in the dream, I loved them, felt tender and grateful to them. I also once dreamed of my father as a boy—we were playing a game: I would make a scary face and then he would make the same face. In the dream, at first I was scared of his bulging eyes, but then I realized it was just a game, and started laughing.

Bill and I, embracing our inner nut ball, enrolled in a mindful childbirth class, though we had a hard time taking it seriously. “I just had a mindful poop,” Bill would say, flushing the toilet. “Can you mindfully wash the dishes?” I would say, snickering. But one night, that class busted me wide open.

We were doing an exercise where we looked into each other’s eyes and repeated some things the teacher, a crone-like midwife, said. There I was, belly huge, on a bouncy ball chair,
staring into Bill’s eyes. “I am ready to have a child with you,” all the couples said in unison, looking into each other’s eyes, “and this child will hold us together for as long as we are alive.” As we said the words to each other, suddenly the enormity of the thing hit us. Bill and I both teared up. Though we weren’t going to get married, having a child would be as close to marriage as we would come.

Like my parents, when I was pregnant Billy and I bought some land together. Not 180 acres, but one-tenth of an acre, the empty lot next to our apartment that we had been squatting on for going on eight years. The owner of the land tracked us down and offered to sell it to us. The recession had lingered and they couldn’t get funding to build condos like they had once hoped. The price was right: $30,000, the same amount my parents had forked over in 1971 for their ranch.

Bill and I cashed in all our savings to buy it. After the paperwork had been processed, I wandered out to the lot and walked all forty-five hundred square feet of it with a new sense of ownership. Being a squatter, there had been no real plan. Willy-nilly I had planted vegetables and fruit trees, with no eye toward the future. Maybe I didn’t want to get attached. I was just surviving on a short-term basis, knowing one day I would be pushed off the land.

As I walked and observed, I had regrets about things I had done when I had been a squatter, like planting a plum tree too close to an apple tree or letting the Bermuda grass take over. Now was my chance to dig in, the place was truly mine.

My plan was to clear out my old mistakes and build anew. I actually hired someone to build a functional chicken coop, where I could raise my chickens and ducks. I attacked the Bermuda grass, channeling my energy toward this task.

I also got a hold of some historical maps of the area and
discovered that before the lot had been vacant, it had been an apartment building with a small grocery store on the ground floor. They sold meat and vegetables at this store. Now I grew meat and vegetables in the footprint of the building. Rhyming, not repeating.

•   •   •

Preparations for the baby began to take over. Bill spent an entire afternoon wrestling with an umbrella stroller someone had handed down to us, trying to open it. There were so many baby items that required special knowledge and skill. I knew how to milk a goat and slaughter a chicken, but installing—and adjusting—a baby car seat? Folding up a stroller? Impossible. Bill’s a handy guy, up for the challenge, so I let him fiddle with the thing. I never planned on using it—I was going to wear my baby like an indigenous woman from a third world country. But Bill has a bad back. When someone offered us a stroller, we took it.

“What do you think of the name Babette?” I asked Bill. I’d just spent an hour writing out names for our daughter on a piece of paper like a lovesick eighth grader. “I like Louise too,” I said. Bill made a face. Bill’s mom had weighed in: She liked Sarah, but this didn’t seem right. My mom was so excited she couldn’t hardly believe it. Literally. She would send me e-mails asking, “Are you still pregnant?”

I had been thinking about her former self, sitting in the A-frame in Crescent, feverishly knitting baby clothes and reading Dr. Spock. At night, when the baby was moving around the most, Bill would bend over my pregnant belly, listening to the baby move around, smoothing my belly with his gentle, callused hands. I couldn’t help but think of my dad. Maybe he did the same thing.

Suddenly Bill figured out the secret, and the stroller folded out with a satisfying popping noise. He showed me the hidden lever to pull. I bought eco-paint and painted the baby room a pale green color. I hung a mobile over the changing table. I collected cloth diapers and learned how they worked. I was nesting like the rabbits out on my front deck.

However, as much as I was nesting like a bunny, my rabbits were starting to disgust me. It must have been hormones, but I had grown to loathe them. I could barely bring myself out to the deck to feed them. It wasn’t their smell—which can be quite fragrant—it was their demeanor. Timid and meek, hiding in their nesting boxes. It used to be so cute when they humped furiously, tails pumping. But now, watching the act made me hate them. I touched my bloated stomach and felt repulsed. Maybe I had become a self-loathing breeder, but they had to go.

I put out an ad on an urban homestead listserv, and within one day the rabbits and their cages were cleared out. My mouth tightened as I watched the rabbits disappear.

I had my front deck back. I maniacally scrubbed away years of splattered rabbit pee off the walls, power washed the floor, and put down a fresh coat of paint. Then I went to a hardware store and bought a gas BBQ to put on the deck. Even as I lit my new grill and roasted some ears of corn with a sense of satisfaction, I knew I was creeping toward what I have avoided my whole life: ease, comfort. The rabbit cleanse made me wonder how exactly I was going to raise a farm and a kid.