My Wild Father's Wild Daughter

My Wild Father’s Wild Daughter

I have been described by one of my sisters as “especially feral” and I do not mind that at all. I never felt like I fit into a box but always took pride in the typical black sheep mentality; a rebel with a cause. I was a scrappy little kid raised wild out in the country near Mt. Rainier. It is no wonder, since where I grew up was once a lot of forest land my dad bought for his dog to have space to run around. He eventually chopped down trees on that same plot of land and built a small log cabin. As the youngest of three girls, luckily I don’t remember the “out house” days too well. Plumbing existed when my memories really kicked in. That is where I was raised. He eventually built pastures, barns and a shop for his woodworking. As a child I would explain my dad, who by no means fit into any normal society as “the last true mountain man.”

We raised a lot of livestock on the property over the years. I remember the horses but not as engrained and deeply as the llamas. See my dad wanted to spend long periods of time in the mountains. He didn’t like normal trails where he would see other people. He bushwacked his own and we would travel deep into the mountains in the PNW and spend lengthy amounts of time. That is where the llamas came in. We raised them and trained them to be pack animals and haul a lot of gear up to our camp.

I know this camp so well. I can see the twists and turns of the trail only we knew about. I can see the giant rock with moss along the right front side that told me we were probably about a mile out. I can see camp with the steep ravine up we would take to get to what we named moon meadows to tether and water the llamas.  How long did we stay out there? Long enough to build a water siphon system from a cold high creek down to camp. Long enough to chop down some small trees and build a corral for the llamas to stay in. Long enough to keep our tents and goods stored away when we would leave. Sometimes I hated it. When it was cold, when the hikes were hard, when the packs were heavy. When I was scared – a cougar screamed and my sister and I one time when we were taking the llamas to moon meadows. But sometimes it was quite literally simple magic. When I’d find a patch of sun between trees on a mossy bed and my little imagination would run wild. When my sisters and I would go to sit on a boulder field next to camp we named “Pika Rock” to quietly observe and count Pikas as they’d pop up in the morning. To me, a Pika looks like a squirrel sized Koala Bear.

I didn’t know how abnormal my childhood was because it was the only normal I knew. It became more obvious as I grew older. My youth was filled with the presence of my father and the loss of my mother. I was only four years old when she passed away and it was up to this very wild man to raise three little girls. For fun sometimes, I would go “flint knap” with him. That means that we would take the obsidian that we had purposely went and gathered and we would hit the obsidian with a specific technique, chipping away at it in the same way Native Americans would have to make arrow heads. He would then take the arrowheads and make arrows from other gathered goods. He would also make Long Bows out of gathered wood.

If I felt like spending time with my dad it might look like going to sit in his tack room as he skinned animals or it might smell like trying to handle the stench of being around when he would brain tan. Sometimes it was more artistic and we would weave porcupine quills into little leather satchels we made. He wanted to do everything himself from scratch. This included living off the land be it livestock, gardens or crafting from what the land provided. If I had to give my dad a religion he lived by it is definitely even to this day as he approaches 80 years old: work. He respects work, work ethic and believes that if you stop working that your body and mind will stop working too.

He was a hard man at times, but also funny, smart and surprising. I remember this red and white truck we would always see around our neck of the woods with “NEED WORK” roughly painted along the side and I remember the day I saw that truck parked in our driveway because my dad hired him to paint pasture fences. I remember that incredibly difficult time after my mom died when he would commute an hour away to the Naval Shipyard where he worked as an engineer. He’d come home and cook us something like slop gew or stew and he would play monopoly with us and read us Lord of the Rings. Those are great memories. We did not have access to television my entire upbringing though we had a TV and could sometimes watch a VHS. My love of books and writing comes from that parental choice.

My love of nature and need for the outdoors comes from my upbringing as well. My respect for people that work hard and persevere through hardships also comes from my dad’s example. I often talk about my love of my mother, the devastation of that loss and how it has taught me to seize the day and not take a single one for granted. But this story is about the wild man who raised me.

I know that you do not need fancy things to go far in life. I have a shoe box full of offers from colleges in storage for basketball and pole vaulting. I grew up shooting on a dirt path to a hoop drilled onto a tree and windmill pitching into a tire hanging from a pasture fence. But I still played four varsity sports every year of high school and went to state every year for basketball and pole vaulting for a 4A Highschool in Washington State (that we traveled 45 minutes to get to). And though it’s been broken since, I broke the school record for pole vaulting the first year I tried it and made first team all league my senior year of high school for my all time favorite sport: basketball. I also had the most fouls and steals in the league (super scrappy).

I was raised a dirty savage mountain girl and I was taught that material things don’t stand for much, but your word, your honor, your respect and especially your work ethic do. I was taught by a seriously rough around the edges dad who desperately wanted a boy but instead had to raise three girls on his own that girls can do anything boys can. I was taught to stand up for myself, speak up for myself and never give up. Like any story there are so many other sides to this one. Nothing is black and white and I am nothing if not multi-faceted.

But this is a segment of my story that I haven’t shared deeply yet. This is a bio that you can’t google on me. And it is the root and core of who I am. As much as I hated this story in its making, I wouldn’t trade it for any other story out there. It is unique, it is rare and it is truly wild. Just like me – especially feral.