Excerpt: Less Wild Every Day

In her debut story collection, Megan Mayhew Bergen explores the swamps and woodlands of her native North Carolina with what we called “straightforward, elegant prose” and “a great facility for off-kilter observations.” This excerpt from her title story introduces us to an aimless 30-something, her father, and the down-and-out swamp town they live in. Birds of a Lesser Paradise will be available from Scribner on March 6.

Dad was born on the outskirts of the swamp at a time when it was desolate, hard, and flecked with ramshackle hunting cabins. His father had been into timber, and Dad was raised wild—the kind of man who could pick up a snake by its neck with the confidence I’d exhibit picking up a rubber version in a toy store. He was sentimental about his family home and the town. Anything he was used to having around he wanted to keep around. So when the town got too small to sustain a post office, he converted the blue mail drops into composting hubs in the back corner of our lot. He bought the abandoned elementary school at auction for almost nothing—no one wanted to pay the taxes on it, and looters had already taken the copper pipes and pedestal sinks. He rented it out for birthday parties, weddings, and to local artists for studio space. When a developer leveled the city park, Dad reassembled the jungle gym in our side yard near the garden and let the scuppernong vines go wild.

We lived in a dying town with a dwindling tax base. I never thought I’d come back, but the swamp was in me; if Dad was half feral, I was one-quarter. I liked the way the water tasted, the sound of birds outside my window in the morning. A few years in Raleigh studying conservation biology at the state university and I needed to find a place where I could look out my window and see nothing man-made. I missed the smell of things rotting, the sun bearing down on a wet log.

Nothing in the city seemed real to me—it was fabricated, plastic, artificial, fast. After years of biology classes, every come-on was a mating call, every bar conversation a display—a complicated modern spin on ancient rules. I didn’t believe in altruistic acts—I could find a selfish root to anything. Eventually I felt as if I was looking out at the busy world and I could see nothing but its ugly bones.

I was taught that at the heart of all people, all things, lay raw self-interest. Sure, you could dress a person up nice, put pretty words in his mouth, but underneath the silk tie and pressed shirt was an animal. A territorial, hungry animal anxious to satisfy his own needs.

At least in the swamp, there was no make-believe chivalry, no playing nice. It was eat or be eaten out there, life at its purest, and it’s where I wanted to be.

Another thing—I loved my dad. I’d never known my mother—she’d died just after giving birth to me—so he was all I’d ever had. He was honest, fun, and unapologetically himself.

I’m not asking you to come home, my dad said, when I approached him with the idea. You won’t find a husband here, he added.

I don’t want one, I’d said—and for a while, that had been the truth. Perhaps it was all the years I’d watched my father carve out a happy life alone.

Your old room is packed solid, he’d said. I disassembled a tobacco barn. Numbered the slats. You can’t move in ’til I sell it.

I’ll take the room over the garage, I said. I have some money to fix it up—I’ll put in a shower.

Aside from serving in Korea and a short stint living on a houseboat in his twenties, Dad had remained hidden from the world in the swamp, inhabiting the same house, trapping the same illegal lines, fishing the same shallow waters.

We didn’t watch the market or follow politics. That was part of the appeal, for me anyway. For centuries people had used the swamp to hide from their problems. Runaway slaves, ruthless fugitives, shell-shocked soldiers, and cheating wives—all had hidden in the swamp at one time.

When I moved from the city to the swamp, the things I could not have became special again. Cappuccino was special. Driving forty minutes to eat second-rate Indian food was special. Planning a day around the “good” grocery store—special.

You got about half fancy living out of town, Dad told me.

I was a thirty-six-year-old single woman living in a poor man’s theme park, running birding trips into the swamp. Most of my binocular-laden clients were pushing sixty and just as concerned with sunscreen and hydration as they were with spotting a pileated woodpecker. I drove them into the swamp in Dad’s pickup, left them with a map, a bagged lunch, water, a GPS device, and a phone, and picked them up at twilight in a place that seemed less wild every day.

For the most part, I was happy.