by Tara Neilson
The Forest Service had also been there shortly before us. They’d been surveying the area for a possible logging project. They’d built a sauna beside the foundation beams of a building that no longer existed, and laid down boards to perch their pre-fab temporary shelters on. But in the end, they left too, taking the pre-fab buildings with them but leaving the sauna and the planks behind.
US Steel, the company that had bought the property after the cannery burned, had checked for profitable ore and, finding the extraction and transportation expenses cost prohibitive, abandoned the venture. They left behind a rock pile and stacks of core sample holders in a core shack, and up on the mountain concrete pads, cable, and other debris.
The ruins had watched and waited for life to return, for people to return for real. I felt that as we wandered through the scorched and blackened remains. I felt that we were being welcomed and encouraged to stay, that the ruins wanted us there.
We accepted the invitation and made ourselves at home. We kids could not be dissuaded from stripping down and swimming in the creek, though it was so icy it burned, fed by mountain snows. Our shrieks and laughter floated out over the twisted, rusting metal on the beach, over the solid concrete blocks barren of their former buildings, over the cannery’s retort door, its giant rusty circle half-buried in beach gravel.
When I left the water behind, shivering, teeth chattering, it was to find Mom standing in the ruins beside the creek. All around her were stark foundation pilings and rusty steel frame beds, twisted into agonized shapes from the intense heat.
The forest had taken over everything, underbrush and strangling second-growth growing rampant over what had been the bunkhouse, where only rotten boards and foundation pilings remained. Yet she stood there visualizing aloud in word-pictures what our future house, almost a mansion, would look like.
“Which bedroom would you like, honey?” she asked me, as if it were already built.
I stood there looking at the overgrown apocalypse and wondered at her ability to see the same thing and not notice the practical impossibilities of what she was saying. It felt like sheer, breathtaking madness to make real her grand designs out there on the edge of nowhere with her children and husband for skills and labor.
Dad, listening silently from behind his glinting glasses and the beard he’d grown in defiance of the clean-cut conformity that had sent him off to war, noticed the obstacles. But he considered them a challenge and saw the practicalities, not the impossibilities.
• • •
The cannery’s wide-open view of Union Bay meant that it was pummeled by savage northwesterly storms—something we discovered within hours of our arrival.
At first it was cat’s paws ruffling the bay. Then little wavelets lapped at the ruins as the tide rose. The wavelets transformed into a rushing, curling crash of heavy surf as the wind thrashed the evergreens and careened through miles of forest with a rising, freight train roar.
Dad fetched the skiff from where he’d anchored it and tied it to the remains of a Forest Service outhaul: a rope and pulley system that allows skiffs to be kept out in deep water so they don’t “go dry” (beach on the ground as the tide recedes), and can be pulled in as needed.
There was no way our little thirteen-foot open skiff could battle against the expanse of white-capping rollers marching toward us as the afternoon gave way to dusk. We were stranded, marooned in the shadowy, burned ruins without food, bedding, or shelter.
• • •
I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel about being marooned beyond the last fringe of civilization, beyond help or assistance. Fear seems appropriate, or at least unease, a troubled awareness of all the ways that two adults and five children could die alone and disappear in the wilderness.
My parents set us to work on clearing the land where Mom visualized having her home built, next to the creek, since she’d always dreamed of having a home near rushing water. As Dad chopped seedlings and undergrowth, we hauled them down to the beach in a big pile, working up quite a sweat, not to mention hunger.
We tired finally, and as the wind blowing in off the bay chilled the sweat on us, we huddled together for warmth. Shivering amidst all those reminders of the destructive power of fire, that was all any of us wanted at that moment: a good, rousing blaze.
We had no matches or lighters since neither of my parents smoked, but Dad did have his .30 carbine with him. The gun was a concession to the dangers of the wilderness, a concession made despite both of my parents’ issues with guns.
Dad was reminded of the war, and Mom had never gotten over her first introduction to firing a gun when she was a teenager. She hadn’t gripped it tightly enough and the recoil had caused the gun to fly up and strike her in the forehead. The pain and shock had been magnified by the deafening report. She’d developed a terrified aversion to all guns to such an extent that she would shake when she was near one and grow sick when she had to handle one.
We watched as Dad ejected a shell and used his pocketknife to dig the bullet out. In a place protected by the wind, behind the pile of brush we’d collected, he dumped the powder onto a rock with dry sticks and moss ready to catch fire. He put the cartridge back in the chamber and fired the primer at the powder, hoping to spark it into flame. However, it blew the powder off the rock.
Eventually—almost, it seemed to us kids, inevitably, as if the elements had no choice but to yield to his angry determination—he got flames to devour his kindling. Now we had a fire to warm ourselves, though nothing to cook on it.
We slept that night in a shelter Dad put together from planks and plastic sheets scavenged from the Forest Service’s leftovers. It was cold, with the wind roaring and the trees cracking and thrashing their branches against each other. The wind switched to the south and it rained in the night. Megan and I were envious of Jamie, who had Moby lying on his feet and keeping him warm. The boys were put in the middle and slept warm and toasty. Mom cuddled the boys, wide awake, too amazed at where she was and the adventure she was living to sleep.
Dad also got little sleep, getting up to check on the skiff as it rode the waves too near the rock cliffs for comfort, the big swells coming in and dashing the small craft forward, only for it to be yanked up short by its line tied to the outhaul. He tended the fire, hunkering down near it for warmth, waiting for first light, for the ruins to come back into focus. Despite the stress of worrying about the skiff, at least he wasn’t being shot at, and the scream of incoming mortars was far away.
We returned to the fishing village the next day, but the ruins called to us.
CHAPTER TWO
“WE’RE GETTIN’ OUTTA HERE!”
—Skip Robinson in the 1975 movie The Wilderness Family
WHEN MOM explained to Linda, Uncle Rand’s girlfriend, that she and Dad still planned to homestead the old cannery in the wilderness despite their friends dropping out, Linda tried to dissuade her.
“Romi, you have to have more faith in people,” Linda said. Maybe she was thinking that it was another instance of the rapidly-becoming-a-cliché story of a Vietnam vet alienated from humanity, dragging his family off into the wilds of Alaska.
But it wasn’t like that, not entirely, Mom thought.
They trekked the bare dirt trail that circled the village under mist-laden skies. The community trail’s narrowness only allowed people to walk single file under the towering canopy of evergreens, tendrils of overcast trailing into the treetops. The air was intoxicatingly fresh.
“You can’t just go off into the wilderness like this. People aren’t the enemy,” Linda assured her.
Weathered wood-frame houses hugged the hillsides above the winding path or perched beside it on barnacle-studded pilings over the beach. Every now and then boards corduroyed a boggy spot and Linda’s and Mom’s boots clomped onto them, the mud beneath slurping loudly. Sea gulls screeched from the small harbor that glinted hard and mirrorlike through the trees and crows answered them from deep in the moss-damped forest
.
Mom kept to herself her “unworldly” reactions to the mystery and romance of the ruins. She’d long since decided that other adults, even the ones she connected with the most, never understood what she experienced. Places had personalities, they lived and breathed and either welcomed or scorned you. The ruins wanted her family.
Despite the fact that Linda had grown up in San Francisco while Mom had grown up on traplines, farms, and ranches in backroad regions, it was the city-girl Linda who was able to “do” the rural Alaskan lifestyle in a way Mom never could. Linda tackled trapping and flensing a skinned otter, steering Rand’s fishing boat, and everything else the men around her did with panache, while at the same time finding the time to crochet, sew, and design quirky, feminine crafts.
Mom wouldn’t know—and didn’t care to know—how to do what the men did, and though she wore a floppy, boiled-wool, faded-thimbleberry hat that looked like she’d knitted it herself, she’d bought it in a thrift store, allured by its wacky-cocky personality. The sewing arts were a deep, and deeply uninteresting, mystery to her and always had been.
She was not one of the millions of young people who, in the 1960s and ’70s, felt driven to spurn the materialistic world in the Back to the Land Movement. Despite her love of novelty and fashion and whatever was current on the modern scene, she, like Dad, were traditionalists and had no interest in the drug culture, free sex, or any of the other ideas of other people their age who dropped out and “went back to the land.”
According to Eleanor Agnew in her book Back from the Land, these back-to-the-landers thought that by going back to a simpler life and living close to and off the land, they could be better stewards of the world than the exploitative capitalist society that had given them the kind of privilege that allowed them to toss it all away on a fervent wave of idealism.
There were many of these free-floating idealistic types who latched onto Mom and Dad for their stability. My parents were young, but they were a married couple at a time when many young people derided the concept of marriage as being old fashioned and too restrictive.
My dad and mom, happy that they’re moving to the ruins, leaving civilization behind.
Mom was a stay-at-home wife while Dad—despite his rebellious long hair and bushy beard (he was once mistaken by a Hell’s Angel member as one of their own)—always held down a steady job. They wound up, time and again, taking care of and providing bed and board for any number of youthful wanderers existing in a liberated, drug-induced daze with no thought of jobs, responsibility, or providing for themselves.
These drifters were the children of “The Greatest Generation” that had saved the world from the Great Depression and Nazism… which was a lot to live up to. Dropping out was easier than competing, not to mention nobler—if you could spin it that way. And if you could find a steady young couple, who were in sympathy with the idealism of the times but maintained a traditional way of life, to keep yourself safe and afloat, all the better.
There were plenty of those types in rural Alaskan communities, including Meyers Chuck—“hippies” who were drawn as much to the drug culture and liberation from age-old moral standards, as they were by the validation of living a simpler life. And, at that time, Alaska stood out as a state that welcomed eccentrics, non-traditionalists, and made the private use of marijuana legal.
Neither Mom nor Dad, even in their most antiestablishment moments, had been drawn to that culture. They didn’t even smoke cigarettes, though their parents and most of their peers considered it normal to do so. And when old-fashioned crafts became a fad that young and fashionable townspeople followed—sewing or crocheting one’s own dresses had a certain cache at the time—Mom, a sucker for almost any hip fad that came along, was immune to the appeal.
She supported individualism and nonconformity, but her idealism remained restricted to the mind and heart; she spurned all labor-intensive manifestations of the zeitgeist. It didn’t matter to her that this was not a particularly practical point of view for someone who was determined to live in the remotest heart of the wilderness.
“You should have seen how happy and free the kids were,” Mom improvised to Linda.
“The kids will do fine here in the village with other kids around them and a school to attend.” Linda was so certain in her opinion that Mom had a low-level sense of panic at the thought of being forced to give up the lonesome blackened pillars and rusting remains of the old cannery.
“You don’t know what it’s like having five kids in a place this small,” Mom said. “It’s like having a target painted on you. People are always complaining about every little thing they do, and I don’t want them to grow up being squelched all the time. I want them to be free, to do whatever they want to do, be whatever they want to be.”
As if on cue, a woman from the village steamed up the path toward them. Before she reached them, glimpsing Mom’s floppy hat behind Linda, she barked, “Do you know what your kids are doing down at the dock?”
Mom didn’t get a chance to reply.
“They found a whiskey bottle on one of the boats, filled it with water, and are pretending to drink booze!” The woman huffed.
Linda turned and looked at Mom and acknowledged, “I see what you mean.”
There were no more arguments after that. Her floathouse home, Southeast Alaska’s version of the covered wagon of Oregon Trail fame, would be towed to the ruins.
• • •
When loggers arrived in Alaska and first eyed the timber-rich wilderness of the last great temperate rainforest on the planet, they were stymied by the multitude of waterways that prevented logs and people from being transported by land. They adapted by moving everything onto the water on rafts.
Logging machinery, power plants, stores, schools, and entire towns were built on rafts made of enormous logs lashed together. The floating towns and machinery were towed from one place to the next by powerful, sturdy tugboats that inched along the Inside Passage. (Later, when the logging boom ended, all these floating communities and single floathouses were moored in place and rarely ventured out onto the unprotected passages.)
When we moved to Cannery Creek, it wasn’t the first time our single-story, wood-frame house on a raft of giant logs had been towed abroad. It had been towed from Prince of Wales Island to the Ketchikan area and then to Meyers Chuck where we got it. In our keeping it had been towed twice across Clarence Strait, one of Alaska’s most unpredictable and dangerous inside waterways.
The first time had been so that Dad would have his family near his logging job, his home anchored in a small bight along the winding passage that leads to Thorne Bay, the largest logging camp in the world at the time. The second time it had been towed back to the fishing village of Meyers Chuck, where Mom’s parents and brothers lived. Now it would be towed to the old cannery site while Dad would continue to work at Thorne Bay as a scaler and bucker. The plan was for him to commute home on the weekends across Clarence Strait in the tiny skiff.
Dad had no interest in whatever seasoned arguments there might have been about the crossing being “impossible” at certain times of the year, or hearing that his family couldn’t be left without provisions or a man’s protection for weeks at a time.
I think there was some relief in not having his family around, demanding things of him he couldn’t give. Being a husband, being a father—especially being a father—were skills he didn’t possess. His own father, a World War II veteran, had been so harsh toward him that his mother had arranged for her mother to raise him while his siblings stayed at home.
The one time his father had been proud of Dad was when he signed up for the Army. His father wrote him a letter every week, though he wasn’t normally a letter writer. Yet, when Dad came back from Vietnam with a beard, his family disowned him. At a time when the mainstream was reviling the war and its veterans, the next letter his father wrote him was “anonymous” (although still in his handwriting), suggesting that it might be better if there was no Vietnam
vet in the family.
What did Dad know about being a good father, or any kind of father at all?
He could have asked the old-timers for their advice about his plans for leaving his family in the bush while he worked across the strait, but he didn’t. He probably wouldn’t have gotten much.
When they first arrived at Meyers Chuck, he and Mom attended a community “town hall” meeting where they realized from the awkward silence that fell at their arrival that they and their five kids had been under discussion. They were invited to participate, but when they spoke up they were seen as overopinionated newcomers.
Besides, even if the locals had taken Dad under their wings, the old-timers’ ever-so-reasonable and knowledgeable arguments wouldn’t have impressed him. He’d long been accustomed to thinking that, as he liked to joke-but-not-joke, “Where there’s a Gary there’s a way.” No matter how impossible something seemed to be, he could find a way to make it work.
Surviving a war with a Purple Heart Medal, which he refused to accept, had solidified his certainty in his ability to carry out what he’d decided on. He didn’t balk at the dangers or the brutal load of hard labor that would be required; holding down a physically demanding job all week and homesteading the wilderness on the weekends suited him just fine.
• • •
Although we kids didn’t know it at the time, we almost didn’t get to live at the old burned cannery because the other families got cold feet and dropped out.
Fortunately, the company that now owned the cannery, US Steel, was willing to let my parents take over the entire lease with payment due on a yearly basis. It would be easy enough to keep up with since Dad’s logging job was a well-paying one for the times.