Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness

By Andrea Ross and Miriam Peskowitz

Adopted at birth, Andrea Ross grew up inhabiting two ecosystems: one was her tangible, adoptive family, the other her birth family, whose mysterious landscape was hidden from her. In this coming-of-age memoir, Ross narrates how in her early twenties, while working as a ranger in Grand Canyon National Park, she embarked on a journey to discover where she came from and, ultimately, who she was. After many missteps and dead ends, Ross uncovered her heartbreaking and inspiring origin story and began navigating the complicated turns of reuniting with her birth parents and their new families. Through backcountry travel in the American West, she also came to understand her place in the world, realizing that her true identity lay not in a choice between adopted or biological parents, but in an expansion of the concept of family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CavanKerry Press
• Release date: May 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781933880846

Book preview

sources.

Part One

Outer Space

Chapter 1

Earthquake

(Loma Mar, California)

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

—Robert Hass

A dusty scratching noise arose from the wooden planks beneath my feet. It was as if the woodrats who usually scrabbled around in the ceiling of the old staff house had suddenly shifted to a subterranean position and were desperate to escape. Then the floor began to move, undulating as the racket continued.

I struggled to stand up, guitar strapped across my chest. I had been in a few earthquakes before, but none of them had made a deafening sound like Friday night at the racetrack. I looked down at my feet, shod as usual in hiking boots. The floor rocked so violently, I was having trouble standing. The wood-paneled walls shuddered, the roof started creaking, and gritty brown ash—a century’s worth of dust and woodrat shit—showered on me from between ceiling planks. I tried to brush it from my hair, but before I could remove much, the taxidermied great horned owl we used for demonstrating night vision and silent flight took a dive from its perch and thudded, puffing apart on the floor and making me jump back with a start.

I ran outside, guitar bouncing in front of me on its strap. Once clear of the house, I turned toward it. The roofline rippled and heaved like a break-dancer I’d recently watched on the streets in San Francisco’s Mission District. I turned away so I wouldn’t have to see it fall. Instead, I watched a grove of mature live oak trees swaying cartoonishly, like punching bags being struck repeatedly by some giant fist. Acorns thundered down on me, pelting my scalp. I covered my head, but they bruised my knuckles and banged the guitar, whose strings twanged like the soundtrack of a bad horror movie. Again I ran, looking for protection. As I neared some metal picnic tables, the racket grew even louder—the din of the acorns striking them was deafening. I crawled under a table even though I was sure a tree would fall on it and crush me. The noise and the violent earth-shaking continued, so I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands, not wanting to see the destruction about to rip loose from the crust of the Earth: roots rising up like twisted hands, trunks crashing down. Things that don’t usually move at all stirred with a crunch and a crackle.

This can’t happen now, I thought. I never got the chance to meet my birth parents.

The roaring surge agitated around me. I curled into an even smaller ball beneath the picnic table.

And then it stopped.

I looked around. The trees were still standing, the house still intact. People emerged from various buildings and stood outside, frightened and confused looks on their faces.

It was my second day as a teacher of sixth grade environmental science at a week-long outdoor program near the Santa Cruz Mountains. My first job after college. I hadn’t been trained in what to do if the biggest earthquake in eighty years occurred while I was playing guitar on my afternoon break.

The kids are on the field! someone yelled. We all ran out to where our students had been writing in their science journals with their classroom teachers.

The kids cried and whimpered, huddling around their teachers. Sara, the principal, ran up with a roster of everyone in residence at the school that week, and we did a headcount. All staff and students were accounted for.

Darkness would fall soon, so we led group activities on the playing field while the maintenance staff checked all the kids’ cabins to see if they were safe to occupy for the night. We played silly, nobody-loses games of Blob Tag, Elbow Tag, and Everybody’s It, running around in the grass and pretending everything was okay. We didn’t know the extent of the damage yet, didn’t know that the Marina District in San Francisco was aflame, that people had been buried alive in Santa Cruz, that the San Francisco Bay Bridge’s upper deck had collapsed. But soon, the waves of bad news began to roll in via radio and telephone.

Teacher Joe decided we should do a Barn Boogie in the field while the building inspections continued. While he called the Patty-Cake Polka and the Virginia Reel, I heard from Sara that one cabin had fallen off its foundations and water spouted from the ground beneath. The electricity was out, so the square dance music came from a big silver boom box whose batteries were slowly but surely running out of power.

I ran back to the trailer that served as my bedroom to grab a sweater for the long evening ahead. I was sure I would find my boxy home rocked off its dubious foundation into the redwood forest behind it, but somehow the trailer hadn’t overturned in the quake.

Inside, though, my clothing, books, and teaching supplies lay strewn across the floor as if ransacked by thieves. Bug collection boxes, hand lenses, and diagrams of the redwood tree life cycle littered the floor. I noticed my heavy, hardbound poetry anthologies piled on my bed and imagined what would have happened to me had I been there during the quake. I decided to deal with the mess later, found a sweater, and headed for the camp’s office, where the only phone was located.

I wanted to try to call my parents, who lived a few hours’ drive north, in Chico. I figured they were well out of the earthquake’s range but would be worried about me. I also hoped to check in with my brothers. Brian, twenty-one, lived far away in Minneapolis, so I knew he was safe, and my youngest brother, Jason, was in his second year of college in southern California. I just wanted to talk to them, to let everyone know I was okay.

I heard Sara on the phone. The school board told us to keep the kids here.

I peeked through the office’s mullioned windows and saw her twiddling a pencil in the air nervously. The pencil looked rubbery, undulating in space.

I understand, but do you really want your child to be on a bridge right now? she asked.

I sat on the stone planter in front of the office and grabbed a stick to dig in the dirt while I waited for her call to end. I had always spent a lot of time rooting around like that. In elementary school, I hadn’t liked playing sports at recess, so I dug. One day, on the baseball field near the chain-link backstop, my friend Amy and I discovered a tiny constellation of glass shards embedded in the dried hardpan soil where the grass had been worn away by kids’ sneakers. Each piece of glass formed a tiny dome under which miniscule weeds had grown. Every little terrarium was a world within a world. I ran out to the baseball diamond during recess every day to polish the tiny vitrines and narrate adventures inside the fantasy worlds I imagined beneath the glass. I saw multitudes in those domes, other places in which I might live.

Sitting on that planter in front of Sara’s office, I was still seeking something, looking to nature for answers. And now it was my job to take care of groups of kids away from their parents for a week at a time. Every Monday morning, busloads of sixth graders arrived in a cloud of diesel fumes at our little camp beneath the redwood trees, and it was my job to guide them through The Nature, as many of them called it, until Friday afternoon, when they would be transported back to their parents. In the interim, I was their mother and father, their older sister and confidant, their teacher and guide. Of course, I felt unequipped. I was twenty-two years old and didn’t know much about taking care of anyone. I barely knew how to take care of myself.

As I dug with the stick, I wondered, What will my world be like now that the Earth seems to have cracked open?

A few days later, after all the kids at the outdoor school were safely delivered home to their parents, I met Don. He had been living in a dank trailer in the redwood forest for a year when I arrived. He worked at the environmental school across the creek from mine. He had tangled brown hair, a bushy beard, and a long skinny body with huge forearms, overmuscled from rock climbing.

He wooed me by giving me watercolor paintings he’d made of snakes and fording the dark creek late at night to visit me in my little trailer, bearing chocolate and his guitar. Our first real date was on a cold Saturday night in January. He stepped into my trailer just after dusk.

Find a winter hat and gloves, he said, his snaggletoothed smile melting me. We’re going for a night hike.

Where to? I asked, suiting up in warm clothes.

It’s a secret. A surprise.

When I finished bundling up, he grabbed my hand and we trotted into the dark forest. I pulled my headlamp from my pocket and put it on.

You don’t need that, Don said. The full moon is about to rise over the ridge.

I removed the headlamp and jammed it in his jacket pocket, pulled him close to kiss him.

We trekked along by moonlight for about an hour, Don leading the way uphill, across a ridge, stopping at an especially huge redwood tree. I marveled at its backlit form.

I call her Wanda, he said. "Because you gotta Wanda how old she is!"

I looked up at the tree, shaking my head at his corny pun. The tree was enormous, perhaps a thousand years old, and it had a large, burned-out section in its base that created a cavern large enough for both of us to fit inside. I climbed in with him.

Wow, I whispered.

This isn’t the surprise—it’s up there. He pointed above us and grabbed a hidden rope ladder. We climbed it twenty feet up to the tree’s lowest branches, then made our way up, limb by limb. Eventually we reached a small platform built among the upper branches.

How’d you do it? I asked, stepping tentatively onto the platform, legs shaking with fatigue and fear of heights.

Lars did it—he’s been carrying scrap lumber up here piece by piece for weeks. Lars was another naturalist friend, a big, burly guy who probably had plans to do his own wooing up there. Don pointed to another rope dangling a few feet away. There’s the pulley system he rigged to haul it up, he said, hopping onto the platform with me.

It’s amazing, I said, looking out at the valley shimmering below us.

We sat down and carefully lowered our backs to the platform to watch the moon quiver through the damp night air, huddling against each other, foggy breath wisping from our mouths.

I Wanda’d if I was falling in love.

The school year wore on, the earthquake damage to the camp buildings was slowly repaired, and Don introduced me to more new things. One day he drove me to a used wilderness equipment store in Berkeley and bought a pair of climbing shoes with gummy black leather soles. He handed them to me with a big smile, and I was a little stunned—I’d never had a boyfriend before who bought me such gifts.

From there, we drove directly to Split Rock, a small climbing area in a Marin County open space preserve with a gorgeous view of the San Francisco Bay and the luscious green hills of spring.

Don scrambled up the rock and set up a top rope anchor so he could teach me to climb. I sat at the bottom of the crag, loosening the laces on my new climbing shoes so I could jam my feet into them. The shoes were tight and uncomfortable. My heart raced. I grew more nervous by the second, to the point that I had trouble tying the laces.

I didn’t really understand how rock climbing worked—what was the rope for, anyway? And why would I want to climb up the face of something that I could easily walk up the back of? But I cinched up the shoes and stood. I wanted to be a badass. I wanted to like climbing. I wanted to be a cool climber-girl, windswept and rugged-looking like the ones I’d watched dancing up stone at Indian Rock in