poses more about her father than she could have ever wanted to know. In it, Dwayne reveals the soul-shattering experiences from which he has shielded his family. Sam sees for the first time her father’s fear, hatred, confusion, ignorance; his companions, his smoking, drinking, and cursing, and she finds it disturbing (pp. 201-205). This is not the man her grandparents remember: the one who was so thoughtful and who never took a drink and never smoked (p.196). Nor is he the heroic icon of her imagination. In fact, his diary disgusts her. She is ashamed of him and even tells Emmett that she hates him (p. 221). She is shocked to find that the lost and frustrated voice from the diary is the voice of her father. When Sam discovers that her hero-father gives way to a frightened country boy, she recoils at what she thought she had been seeking. Unable to believe in the father that had seemed to promise her security and certainty, she feels spiritually and emotionally on her own.As a result of this revelation, however, Sam now must consciously become her own authority. She will validate her father’s words by living it out in the real world. She decides that the only way to truly know her father is, in Pete’s words, to “hump the boonies” (p. 136). She heads to Cawood’s Pond to live the life portrayed in the diary. In an attempt to affirm the voice of her father, she tries to follow in his footsteps. She tries to understand through an encounter with what is real to her. Sam camps out in the swamp to find her own reality. In one sense, she finally recognizes her own experience as a useful standard of personal truth – the only truth there is.What does Sam learn from her experiences in the swamp? She learns that she will never really know her father – never really learn from him. The things that happened to her in the swamp, while being real to her, were not what happened in Vietnam, ...
