Raised in Ruins

by Tara Neilson

  RAISED IN RUINS

  A Memoir

  TARA NEILSON

  Text and images © 2020 by Tara Neilson

  Cover photograph by Romi Neilson; photograph on page 263 courtesy of Kizamu Tsutakawa; photograph on page 269 courtesy of Ove Korsnes.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Neilson, Tara, author.

  Title: Raised in ruins: a memoir / Tara Neilson.

  Description: Berkeley, CA: West Margin Press, [2020] | Summary: “A personal memoir of Tara Neilson’s unconventional childhood growing up in the burnt remains of an old cannery in remote Southeast Alaska”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019047777 (print) | LCCN 2019047778 (ebook) | ISBN 9781513262635 (paperback) | ISBN 9781513262864 (hardback) | ISBN 9781513262871 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Neilson, Tara—Childhood and youth. | Frontier and pioneer life—Alaska, Southeast. | Union Bay Cannery. | Houseboats—Alaska, Southeast. | Alaska, Southeast—Biography.

  Classification: LCC F910.7.N45 A3 2020 (print) | LCC F910.7.N45 (ebook) | DDC 979/3.8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047777

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047778

  Published by Alaska Northwest Books®

  an imprint of

  WestMarginPress.com

  WEST MARGIN PRESS

  Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens

  Marketing Manager: Angela Zbornik

  Editor: Olivia Ngai

  Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger

  For the Neilsons of Cannery Creek:

  Gary, Romi, Jamie, Tara, Megan, Robin, and Chris.

  And the cannery workers who went before us.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THREE UNION BAY CANNERY WORKERS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  ONE DAY when it was just my mom and us kids alone in the New House we’d built in the wilderness with our own labor, with lumber our dad milled himself, a huge brown bear paced back and forth in front of the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows in our game room where we spent most of our time.

  Back and forth, back and forth, it paced agitatedly, disturbed by our presence next to the salmon-choked creek. Our mom was terrified of guns, but she got down the .22-250, which she probably couldn’t have shot if she tried, and told us kids to go upstairs. We ignored her.

  We figured if the bear broke in we’d all scatter and the bear might get one or two of us, but he wouldn’t get us all. Our tension escalated as the huge mound of fur, teeth, and claws continued its angry pacing. Finally he rounded the house, going around the kitchen to the front where our temporary door was made of thin pieces of wood and plastic. If it just sneezed, the bear could break through it.

  We followed it from room to room, our hearts beating uncomfortably hard. Finally, we saw it head down to the creek. With the gun in hand, Mom stepped outside to make sure it kept going. She told us to stay inside, but, again, we ignored her.

  Suddenly my youngest brother, Chris, took off after the bear.

  “What are you doing? Get back here!” Mom whisper-yelled, afraid of alerting the bear. She gripped the gun helplessly. “Christopher Michael! Get back here, right now!”

  Chris kept running, gaining on the bear.

  The rest of kids stared after him, shocked. When no one moved, I sprinted after him. In front of us the huge bear lumbered toward the shining creek filled with salmon fins and sea gulls. This is crazy, this is crazy, I thought as I ran toward the bear.

  I collared Chris, and dragged him back. He fought me every inch of the way. I cast glances over my shoulder, sure the bear would come after us and shred us to pieces in front of our family. The bear turned at the noise and raised itself onto its hind legs, sniffing the air and peering at us.

  Fortunately, we all escaped a mauling that day.

  • • •

  There are many, many more stories like this that I couldn’t include in this memoir due to lack of space. I had to leave out almost all of our adventures we had with the kids in the village of Meyers Chuck, and at the all-grades bush school we attended there for several years. (Note: some of the names have been changed of the people I do write about.)

  I wish I could have spent more time on one of my favorite people in the entire world, my Grandma Pat who lived in the village, a woman who had lived a life of constant adventure, who had a wonderful sense of the absurd and chuckled when we dubbed her “Grambo.” I wish I could tell you more about my Uncle Rory and Aunt Marion, who were an influential, wonderful part of my childhood. Or Steve and Cassie Peavey, Alaskans to their core, and owners of the floathouse before my grandparents had it and sold it to us. There are so many important and beloved family members and friends I couldn’t include.

  The only way I could let those essential people and stories go was to promise myself I’d write a second book, which I hope to do.

  • • •

  To this day I don’t know why Chris ran after the bear. I haven’t had a chance to ask him. I think I’ve worn out my family asking them to comment on cannery experiences for this memoir. You will find that family members sometimes comment in the present tense in these pages, because our experiences in the ruins imprinted so deeply on us that they are still a part of our present and continue to shape who we are.

  The past felt just a step away for us as my brothers and sister and I played on the scorched, rusting remains of machinery that had operated in a different era, a different world. The former workers always seemed to be present in a benign, welcoming way that made me want to cross over between my time and theirs so I could get to know them.

  Because the past and present were melded together it was easy for me to include the future as well, and acknowledge the moment-by-moment passage of time that created my personal experience of life and shaped my personality.

  Ever since I was young I have visualized my personal time as flowing from the future to my Moving Now, like the snow-fed headwaters of cannery creek rushing down to meet me as I played in it and as the salmon, according to their own inexorable sense of time, swam beside me, pointed toward their ancient spawning beds.

  Whatever the current brought I needed to decide how to react to it, and when I did there were consequences that became my present and then my past, creating who I was and who I would become.

  When friend and author Bjorn Dihle suggested I write a memoir, I hesitated. I didn’t think I could capture what it felt like to grow up in the ruins, what it had been like to experience and be shaped by the mystery and richness of Time. But I decided to attempt it.

  I soon realized that I couldn’t write my memoir in the linear, chronological way most of the memoirs I’d read were written, so I decided that I’d show as well as tell my personal experience of time. This meant structuring it in a way that might be alien to others who were shaped by an urban view of time, but felt organi
c to me.

  It has given me a sense of closure, because at the age of seventeen I went to live for a year in the world and was shocked and alienated by how time was viewed and used in the city. Writing this memoir and reading theoretical physicist Lee Smolin’s 2006 book The Trouble with Physics has helped me to reconcile and understand my reaction.

  Smolin wrote that one of the fundamental problems with physics today that was preventing forward progress to be made was scientists’ understanding of time. He traced the problem back to the beginning of the seventeenth century when Descartes and Galileo graphed space and time, making time a single dimension of space. Essentially spatializing time, stopping its motion and freezing its elusiveness, so that scientists could to some extent comfortably regulate and measure it like they did space.

  But when time is spatialized, it becomes static and unchanging. This, of course, doesn’t reflect our lived experience of ever-changing, ever-flowing time. Smolin called this “the scene of the crime.” He believed it was imperative that science find a way to unfreeze time.

  Straight out of the ruins, during my year in the city, I saw the spatialization of time firsthand, the frozen quality that Smolin would later point to as a crime. Clocks were everywhere: in school, the library, restaurants, and stores. Time was expected to behave itself so that people could use it to schedule and organize every moment of their lives. With chaotic elements frequently dominating every other aspect of their lives, they wanted no part of time that wasn’t straightjacketed and fixed in place.

  I felt smothered and took long walks into whatever part of the wilderness the town hadn’t covered with asphalt, trying to coax the real, wild and unrestricted time out of wherever it was hiding. Later I would return to the wilderness and embrace time in all of its fullness with a sense of relief.

  I realize that the way this book is written might feel jarring at times, and uncomfortable for readers who expect a memoir to be linear rather than having the future making unexpected appearances to comment on the present action of the past.

  I do apologize. I know how hard it was for me to accept the way most people have lived time: neatly ordered and well behaved, trained to subjugate itself to society’s needs in order to make stressed people feel comfortable and in control.

  But in an era that celebrates diversity and encourages all of us to expand and free ourselves from our frozen biases, maybe it’s time to unfreeze society’s interpretation of Time and allow it to be all that it can be.

  Please come with me on a temporal adventure as I show you what it was like to be raised in ruins.

  MAP OF UNION BAY

  1. Small red cannery cabin

  2. Bridge

  3. Concrete block in creek

  4. Concrete block in creek

  5. Trail connecting floathouse side to red cabin

  6. New House

  7. Japanese garden

  8. Path to beach from New House

  9. Workshop

  10. Cannery retort door

  11. Generator shed

  12. Duke the alder tree

  13. Huge cannery fuel drum

  14. Waterline to New House

  15. Antenna platform

  16. Boardwalk

  17. Woodshed

  18. Remains of cannery cookshack

  19. Sauna

  20. Sawdust trail

  21. Foundation of a burned building with steps

  22. Huge cannery fuel drum

  23. Fire tree

  24. Gravemarker

  25. Dock

  26. Wanigan

  27. Core shack

  28. Sawmill deck

  29. Garden

  30. Jamie’s fort on a stump

  31. Floathouse

  32. Generator shed

  33. Garden

  34. School

  35. Swing set

  36. Waterline to floathouse

  37. Dam

  The small circles are cannery pilings. The wavy lines are the creek and stream. The scribbles on the New House side are the rusted and scorched cannery machinery. The X at the mouth of the creek is where the photo for the cover of Raised in Ruins was taken.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”

  —slogan on T-shirts sold at the Meyers Chuck store

  EVERY DAY as a child was an adventure for me and my four siblings as we lived in the burned ruins of a remote Alaskan cannery. Some days had more adventure in them than others. Mail day was a day that promised parent-free adventure.

  Our mail arrived at a nearby fishing village by floatplane once a week, weather permitting. We lived only seven miles of water away from the village—there were no roads, or trails—but the route was hazardous, even deadly, because of the mercurial nature of our weather. What had been glassy water an hour before as we made the trip in a thirteen-foot open Boston Whaler could turn into a maelstrom of seething white water an hour later to catch us on the return trip.

  Tides, weather forecasts, and local signs had to be carefully calculated before the trip could be made. So it sometimes happened that we would miss several mail days in a row and get three weeks’ worth of mail at once. My parents usually made the trip by themselves, since freight and groceries would fill the skiff, leaving us kids behind in our floathouse home.

  Our sense of adventure, always present since our family comprised the entire population of humans for miles in any direction, quadrupled as we waved goodbye to them. We watched them turn into a speck out on the broad bay with the mountain ranges of vast Prince of Wales Island providing a breathtaking backdrop for them.

  Then we cut loose. We ran around the beaches, jumping into piles of salt-sticky seaweed and yelling at the top of our lungs, the dogs chasing us and barking joyously. We tended to do this every day, but it was different on mail days. We lived in an untamed wilderness that could kill full-grown adults in a multitude of ways, and we children had it all to ourselves.

  At our backs was the mysterious forest that climbed to a 3,000-foot-high mountain that looked like a man lying on his back staring up at the sky. We called it “The Old Man.” In front of us was the expanse of unpredictable water with no traffic on it, except for the humpback whales, sea lions, and water fowl.

  As we scattered, my littlest brother, Chris, wound up with me in our twelve-foot aluminum rowing skiff. I was twelve and he was seven, and we were buckled up in our protective bright-orange lifejackets that we never went anywhere without.

  “Where shall we go, Sir Christopher?” I donned a faux British voice as I sat in the middle seat with an oar on either side of me. “Your wish is my command.”

  He sat in the stern seat and chortled. Whereas I was blonde and blue eyed, he had almost black hair and green-flecked brown eyes. Despite the surface differences, we had a lot in common, being the most accommodating and easygoing ones in our family. Chris was always smiling and I was always reading. We usually let others take the lead, but this time we would make our own adventure.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

  I looked around. The floathouse sat above a small stream below the forest, its float logs that made up its raft dry, since the tide was halfway out. Opposite it was a smaller floathouse that we used to go to school in, before our dad built a school for us on land.

  The small, sheltered cove suddenly felt restrictive since it was the only part of the old cannery we saw on a regular basis, and there wasn’t much of the old cannery to see, just some pilings sticking half out of the water.

  “Let’s go to the ruins,” I said.

  He gazed at me raptly. The main cannery site had been built next to the large salmon creek and sat on the other side of a high-ridged peninsula from the little bay our floathouse was in. We rarely got to visit it because the salmon creek was where the bears roamed. But we would be safe in the skiff, I told him.

  Chris bounced on his seat and nodded excitedly.

  I dug the oa
rs into the silky green water and we headed for the big rock that partially protected our little cove from the storm-prone bay. Mom had made it a law that we were never to get out of sight of the floathouse, but Mom wasn’t there.

  I dipped the oars into unexplored waters, rowing past the weathered grave marker of some unknown cannery resident. Tall black bluffs loomed up at the same time a swell rocked us. There was nowhere to beach the skiff now, if we needed to… we were committed to continue.

  Chris gripped the aluminum seat and stared at me, silently asking if we were really going to do this. I nodded.

  Each pull of the oars took us farther away from the homey familiarity of the floathouse and its confined bay. We were exposed to the full effect of the wilderness now, the enormous sky above, impermeable, towering bluffs washed by waves to our left, and the endless waterways of Southeast Alaska on our right.

  My back was to the view ahead of us as I rowed. I was getting tired, but I didn’t want to admit it to my little brother.

  Chris sat up straight on his seat and pointed. “Look!”

  I turned my head. Up on the rocky bluffs ahead of us was a huge steel cylinder with a peaked roof. Its original, unpainted gray could be seen through the rust of untended decades. It had sat sentinel there, below the tall mountain, with few humans visiting it or seeing it since the cannery burned shortly after World War II.

  Awed, we stared at it, and then I turned to the oars with renewed energy. I kept throwing glances over my shoulder. I didn’t want to miss the first glimpse of the ruins.

  And then there it was, the old cannery site.

  A forest of fire-scorched pilings, one with a stunted tree growing on it, stood between the forest and the bay. The blackened timbers of a building’s foundations remained below the evergreens’ skirts and giant concrete blocks stood out whitely above the rust-colored beach. Amidst the pilings were strange, rusty skeletons of former machinery. The creek rumbled past all of it.

  The ruins.

  “It looks like it was bombed,” Chris said. “Like an atom bomb was dropped on it!”