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2.

On the day that everything began to change, I woke up to the sound of cursing men. Someone was pounding on the door of our cabin, the side of their fist a dull thud against the rough-hewn planks. I sat up with a jolt, already anticipating my father’s command, ready to run.

Instead, from the kitchen, on the other side of my bedroom door, I could hear my father whistling as he cooked up bacon for breakfast. He’d burned it again; I could smell it from there. My father never quite understood when to turn off the heat.

The pounding stopped. There was one more massive bang—it sounded like a steel-tipped boot against the door—and then a voice yelled hoarsely, “Asshole, we know it was you.” This was followed by the sound of footsteps squelching through the mud in the driveway; more murmured conversation; a truck starting, wheels spinning against gravel.

The calendar on the wall across from me read November 12, 1996. I was seventeen years old.

Happy birthday to me, I thought. I’m almost an adult now .

It was an abstract idea for me, being an adult, probably because I had never particularly felt like a child in the first place. My father had always taken pride in treating me like an equal: giving me the same responsibilities, the same reading material, the same daily and weekly chores that he would do. As if we were partners, not father and child. The only things he didn’t let me do were drive his truck alone or fire his gun without him by my side. Things that might, you know, precipitate my untimely demise or get me arrested. Otherwise, everything that he did, I did, too: cooking, cleaning, chopping firewood, proofreading his essays, debating the tenets of post-Kantian philosophy.

Growing up, I was aware that in other homes, kids were treated like delicate creatures, pampered and taken on beach vacations, and showered with toys and clothes that mostly ended up in the landfill. They read books with dragons and princesses on the covers rather than books authored by dead Russian thinkers. There was no point in longing for this, though; the few times I’d asked my father for something frivolous, like a dress or a doll, he’d gotten an expression on his face like I had just asked him to arm-wrestle with a ferret. And even if he later showed up with a gift vaguely along the lines of what I’d requested—a pink T-shirt with sequins on the front, picked up at the thrift store in Livingston, or a moldering stuffy shaped like a turtle—it wasn’t ever quite right, and so eventually I’d learned not to ask. It was easier just to want the things that he wanted, too, because then I might actually get them.

Because it was my birthday I gave myself the luxury of an extra five minutes in bed, and then made my way to the kitchen.

The kitchen was warm and hazy with smoke from the bacon. My father, standing at the sink, was staring out at the muddy lane, looking inordinately pleased with himself. He turned to see me standing in the doorway.

“Happy birthday, squirrel.” My father pointed at the table, where he’d placed a small rectangular gift wrapped in newspaper and yarn next to my plate. The table was set with pancakes and hot coffee and the carbonized nubs of bacon. Three out-of-date newspapers—today it was The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today —sat in a stack, part of my daily political science lesson.

I slid into my chair, ignoring the gift. I figured that it was going to be something intrinsically practical and utilitarian—a new pair of gloves, or a utility knife, or maybe a German-English dictionary so I could translate Heidegger myself. I poured maple syrup over my pancakes and took a big, sugary bite. “What was that?”

He pasted a studied blankness across his face. “What do you mean?”

“At the door, Dad. The men pounding at the door. Not the feds, I take it?”

“Ah,” he said. He scratched his beard. “No. Hmmm. I think they were just the men who were working on the power lines up the road.”

All week long, bulldozers had been busy clear-cutting a path through the forest, just a mile away from our cabin. You could hear the buzz saws from our property, a brutal cacophony that echoed off the hills. Some new variety of power lines was going in, something to do with the explosion in dial-up internet, and the gash in the forest stretched as far as you could see in either direction. Dad and I had walked up a few days earlier to assess the damage, watched the bright yellow machinery swarming through the cut. Felled pines lay scattered on the ground like beached whales, waiting to be dragged off and transformed into paper napkins and salad bowls and two-by-fours.

“This is what happens when people get addicted to technology, their television sets and computer monitors. They lose all perspective of what’s important,” my father muttered.

“ Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it, ” I said.

My father smiled and inclined his chin in approval, which sent warmth all the way down to my toes in their thrice-darned socks. And then he shook his head. “Frankly, I’d have to disagree with Thoreau about that. Not all men are better alive than dead, considering.”

A bulldozer drove past, and the man behind the wheel smiled and waved at us, believing us curious gawkers. In response, my father raised two fists to the sky and unfolded his middle fingers. The driver dropped the smile and flipped him the bird right back.

“So why didn’t you open the door?” I asked now, even though I already suspected I knew the answer. There was, I had already noted, a suspicious silence coming from the cut today, even though it was already 8:00 a.m ., well past the time when the machinery usually startedup.

“Didn’t think there was much that needed to be said to them, didI?”

“Dad. Did you do something?”

“What something might you mean?” He was trying not to smirk, and failing. “Like, say, sabotaging their equipment by putting sugar in the gas tanks? I suppose someone might have done that. I heard the interlopers rumbling about something along those lines as they tracked their mud on our porch and splintered our door with their boots. But is there evidence that it was me who did such a something ? Absolutely not. No evidence at all.” He picked up a black strip of bacon and crunched it, then winked.

The wink delighted me; there was nothing I wanted more than to be his confidante and keeper of secrets. “Way to show them, Dad,” I said.

I sat and grabbed the closest paper—a two-weeks-out-of-date New York Times —and pulled out the Arts section, where there was a review of a film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that I knew I would never get to see. When I looked up, my father was watching me read with an opaque expression on his face. “That’s the garbage section. Read the National Report first. And aren’t you going to open your present?”

Preparing myself for disappointment, I picked up his gift. I untied the knot and tore off the paper, revealing a box of colored pastels. Not at all what I had expected. It stunned me silent. My old set of drawing pencils were cheap Crayola crayons, worn to stubs; these were fancy, professional-like. Who knew where he’d even gotten them, or how he’d afforded them, or why he’d felt compelled to buy me such a frivolous gift.

“I didn’t get the right kind?” he asked, breaking the silence. When I looked at him, I was surprised by the naked neediness in his face. He didn’t usually seem this concerned about whether I liked something.

I lined the pastels up neatly against the edge of the table. “No. They’re perfect. I’m just surprised.”

“I thought you deserved something nice. You’re getting so…” He didn’t finish this sentence, and I was left wondering how it was going to end. Instead, he stood behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders. He squeezed them, gripping me so hard that it felt like he was trying to pin me in place forever. Then he let me go, but not before I received his silent message, the one that he’d never been very good at articulating out loud. I love you . This is for you. We are a team.

—

After breakfast I took a blanket out to the ancient recliner on our porch—leaking stuffing, water-stained, the shape of our rears permanently dented in its fabric—and sat there, testing out my new pastels. The air smelled like woodsmoke and damp pine needles, rich and organic. The meadow below our cabin was frosted with dew; I could see the silvery tracks of the deer that had passed by before dawn.

Thanks to my vantage point, I had a perfect view of the wolf as he emerged from the tree line to lope through the clearing toward a thicket just beyond the meadow. He had been living in a den somewhere near our property since the previous spring; a lone silver-haired wolf, stiff with age and a little bedraggled. My father thought he’d been expelled from his pack by a younger alpha male; but the old wolf was stubborn and refused to die. Too slow to hunt deer, he’d instead been dining on the rabbits in our meadow or seeing what he could pick off from the farms beyond the woods. I’d wanted to name him— Samson, I was thinking—but my father said that would be infantilizing to a wild animal who was indifferent to human existence, and probably not long for this world anyway. So I kept the name I’d picked to myself.

I sketched Samson’s matted fur, the lean muscles in his flanks; tore it up, tried again. My father emerged from the cabin with a cup of coffee in his hand. He handed it to me and we shared it in silence as the sun lifted above the trees and lit up the dew like a million tiny prisms. You’d think I’d have been used to the view after living my whole life in that cabin, but it never got old. It’s a cliché, I know, but every damn day felt new.

I studied my father as he gazed out over his domain. He had a face that looked like it belonged on Mount Rushmore, all angles and crevasses. His eyes, as bright and black as a raven’s, were set deep in his face; and his nose had a prominent bump on it from when he’d broken it in a childhood bike accident. His skin was tanned and leathery, with deep lines from all the time he spent squinting in the sun. He trimmed his beard only a few times a year—he couldn’t be bothered to think about it until it started to catch in the buttons of his shirt, and then he’d hack it all off and start from scratch. He might have been handsome had he been interested in taking care of himself, but that was something only lesser men cared about.

I never drew him, because I knew I couldn’t do him justice.

“So what do you want to do today?” he asked. “Walk out to Coyote Rock to check on our dam? Get the pickles going? Tackle the Spanish Civil War?”

It was a Tuesday, so technically a school day. But my father had let go of those kinds of formalities long ago. Officially, I was a homeschooled high school junior. Unofficially, I had been haphazardly taught some subjects (science, languages) and given college-level instruction in others (philosophy, mathematics, history) and missed others altogether (health and music). Every year he dutifully sent in the form testifying that I was being properly educated and received, in exchange, a packet of instructional materials that we used to start the fire in the woodstove. My father wasn’t big on being told what to do with his own kid. That’s why he’d moved us to a cabin in the woods in the most libertarian state in the nation when I was just four years old.

“What if we drive into Bozeman?” I asked. “We could go to the bookstore.”

My father’s face twitched. He did not particularly like going into Bozeman, where you could eat sushi that had been flown in from the coasts or buy lamps made from deer antlers or drink at a bar that had an entire wall of TV screens broadcasting different sports games . The place gave him hives. But Bozeman did have a great bookstore, whose manager saved him all the old newspapers; and several useful thrift stores; and the best farm supply store in a hundred miles. And so he toughed it out every few weeks and drove usin.

When I mentioned the bookstore, he glanced over his shoulder to regard the stack of zines that was sitting just inside the door, just as I knew he would. We’d been tripping over them every time we came in and out of the cabin: Libertaire, issue 8, twenty-four pages of essays and think pieces penned entirely by Saul Williams, most with titles like “The New Technological World Order” and “Power to the SHEEPLE” and “Dismantling the Autocratic Financial System.” The stack by the door held exactly one hundred copies of Libertaire, printed out at the Kinko’s in Bozeman and cut and stapled together by one Jane Williams, Saul’s trusty copy editor and production assistant and occasional typist. Not that I was listed on the masthead.

“Sure,” my father said, brightening. “I’ve been meaning to drop off the new issue.”