Raised in Ruins

by Tara Neilson

  The woman who had originated the plan, the village school teacher, felt so guilty at leaving my parents high and dry that she arranged for friends of hers, Muriel and Maurice Hoff, who had their own cabin cruiser called the Lindy Lou, to go with us.

  The Hoffs were typical back-to-the-landers who’d come from the realm of academia to live a simplified, rustic life on a boat in the Alaskan wilderness. Muriel would stand in as a teacher since Mom knew she wasn’t up to coping with our education needs.

  The Hoffs’ boat would come in handy when it came time to move the floathouse. Two of Mom’s brothers, Uncle Rand and Uncle Rory, also volunteered their commercial fishing boats to help us make the move.

  The moment it really struck me that we were leaving all of civilization behind for the foreseeable future was when I had to return the books I’d borrowed from the village “library,” a bottom shelf in the tiny, one-room general store.

  I squatted down, pushing the old clothbound books into place, and my eye was snagged by two more books that I longed to read: a Roy Rogers Western and a book about a horse and a dog going on a forest adventure. I couldn’t borrow them, Mom explained, because there was no telling when I’d be able to return them—if ever.

  That made it starkly real. I emerged from the store into the late afternoon light and stared around in awe at my last glimpse of people and houses, hearing the private generators rumble and the bells on the fishing boats’ trolling poles ring out. The red strobe light on top of the telephone tower that serviced a single community phone mounted to a tree, a light that used to lull me to sleep at night, was beaming out a hi-tech message of goodbye.

  • • •

  We left at the break of day, before it was full light, to catch the tide.

  The Velvet towing our floathouse and wanigan out of Meyers Chuck to the cannery. My dad is in his 13-foot Boston Whaler watching to make sure everything works. The Wood Duck and Lindy Lou (out of sight) push from behind.

  Not that any of us kids were awake when it happened. We were snuggled up in our bunks while the adults moved quietly around the damp decks outside, the dripping forest muffling most sounds.

  They coiled up the huge, heavy mooring hawsers that had held our home to the trees and then ran a towline out to the Velvet, Uncle Rory’s and Aunt Marion’s commercial fishing boat. (It was a black-hulled boat with a white cabin and orange-red trim. When the Velvet was decked out in longline buoys in circus balloon hues—orange, pink and blue, and yellow—it was a sight to behold on Southeast Alaska’s remote fishing grounds.) Uncle Rand in his own fishing boat, the classy little Wood Duck, and the Hoffs in their cabin cruiser Lindy Lou settled in to push the floathouse from behind.

  The photos show that it was a crisp fall day, overcast with smoke from our floathouse chimney wafting behind us as our home was towed out of the long shadows of the tidal lagoon known as the Back Chuck (situated behind the Front Chuck, Meyers Chuck’s harbor).

  The floathouse was then about twenty-five years old and used to belong to Mom’s parents, but Mom and Dad bought it from them when we first moved to Alaska three years before. It was a one-story, regular wood-frame house built in a “shotgun” trailer-house style. Half of the house was a large communal bedroom for us kids, plus the bathroom. The front half had my parents’ tiny bedroom, and beyond it was the combined kitchen and living room.

  The house was sixteen feet wide and forty feet long, with forest-green ship-lapped siding and white trim around the windows, including the huge bay window that had a bullet hole high up in one corner.

  Tied alongside our floathouse was a much smaller, ten-byfourteen-foot one-room floating cabin called “the wanigan” that my grandfather had built four years before, which Mom had since bought from him. It would serve as our schoolhouse.

  The floathouses crept along, testing the lines and what kind of strain the Velvet’s engine could take, before they settled on a steady two-knot pace. The adults calculated it would take three to four hours to tow the floathouse to the cannery site.

  When we woke up, the floathouse was already underway. The five of us kids and Moby excitedly ran around the house and—when Mom wasn’t looking—made a daring run outside to leap across the churning water between the floathouse and the wanigan. Mom had warned us against this feat, telling us horror stories of how a child could get trapped between the two moving buildings and be mangled for life, sawed in half, and/or drowned. As usual, her horror stories encouraged us to test our mettle.

  We stood there, listening to the engines of all three boats rumble, hearing the constant splash of the water against and over the logs the buildings sat on, and watched the wanigan tug on its lines like it wanted to escape the solid maturity of the big floathouse.

  Jamie, as the ringleader, was on lookout duty to make sure none of the adults were watching. When the coast was clear he’d whisper: “Now!” and one of us would take the exhilarating and frightening jump across the turbulent water to the wanigan.

  When the babies insisted on their turn, Megan and I each took a hand of a little brother and jumped them across, hushing them—and our own giggles—when they shrieked with glee. Moby ran along the floathouse deck with his tongue hanging out, his eyes bright and laughing at the death-defying sport.

  We were in our lifejackets, of course. We lived in our lifejackets. The one rule Mom was successful in establishing right from the beginning was that no child was to step out of the house without their lifejacket on. It was comforting being encased in protective gear—like a suit of armor against the Alaskan bush’s many dangers. At times we even slept in our lifejackets.

  The water was millpond smooth, though all the adults knew that the weather in this particular part of Clarence Strait was subject to change without notice every moment. It would have taken weeks of planning, listening to weather forecasts, checking the tides, calculating how long it would take to travel to the cannery site; and then the frustration of having to reschedule the trip when an unforecasted storm raged through.

  It would have been a tense time for the adults before and during the tow, looking out for any sign that the weather was about to kick up. These were dangerous waters we were traveling in—shipwrecks on the shores we passed gave silent testimony to that.

  Back inside the floathouse, Mom gave us a quick breakfast. We ate while watching the storied Inside Passage glide past our windows with Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” playing in the background. Dad was in continual contact with Rory on the Velvet, Rand in the Wood Duck, and Muriel on the Lindy Lou by Citizen Band (CB) radio.

  By a freak of bouncing radio signals, truckers from California would break through the squelch with their: “10-4, what’s your twenty?” and “Copy that. You’re coming in wall to wall and treetop tall.” An entire array of twangy CB slang periodically burst through the speaker. The rowdy rap of truckers hauling freight along America’s West Coast highways beamed into our wilderness home all the years we lived at the cannery.

  The little inlet we headed for was a hidden harbor—it couldn’t be seen from a direct approach on the cannery. It was sheltered from the northerly gales, though southeasterly storm surges were free to wreak havoc in there, as we soon discovered.

  The harbor was shallow and went dry on minus tides. In addition, there were submerged dangers everywhere, entire forests of pilings (studded with steel spikes that had held long since rotted or scavenged beams in place) that had at one time been the foundations for pre-WWII boat grids and haul-outs.

  This harbor was where the superintendent had lived and where the cannery had repaired and stored their fish barges in the off season all the years it was in operation.

  The cannery encompassed twenty-one acres of wilderness and had two sides: the “superintendent’s inlet” where our floathouse was parked, and “the Other Side,” the creek side where the cannery itself had been. They were separated by a high, stubby peninsula.

  In the superintendent’s inlet the orderly sentinel pilings, silent witness
es to the passing years, stood in marked contrast to the twisted, scorched chaos we’d found on “the Other Side.” There had also been a building that had overlooked the superintendent’s inlet that was later put on a float and towed the seven miles to Meyers Chuck. There it was put back on land where it still stands today, painted in cannery red, and known locally as “Hotel California” for the hippie inhabitants who lived there in the Seventies.

  The Velvet, Wood Duck, and Lindy Lou couldn’t maneuver inside the shallow harbor with all the underwater hazards, so they untied from the floathouse and Dad used his skiff to push the house to a central location, tying it to trees on shore and a tall piling on the wanigan side. After it was secured in position, the Lindy Lou picked its way inside and tied up to the floathouse on the other side from the wanigan.

  There’s nothing quite like being in your familiar home and glancing out the window to see not the view you’ve lived with for years but terra incognito—an unknown, unexplored landscape.

  The light shines through the windows differently, making the inside of the house seem subtly strange. There’s a continuing, pleasurable, tingling disorientation about it, a breathtaking, awe-inspiring sense of waiting discovery—an almost Alice in Wonderland sense of having fallen down the rabbit hole with all kinds of amazing experiences to live outside the familiar walls of your transported home.

  Once the house sat down on dry land, the water gradually receding and lowering us onto the ground as if our house was on a giant elevator, Mom couldn’t hold us kids back. She yelled at us to stay within sight of the house as we ran outside. The tall forest of evergreen trees encircled the small harbor, with drift logs, beach grass, and seaweed in a jumble at their heavy skirts.

  I don’t know about my brothers and sister, but I felt like a Star Trek adventurer who had landed on an unknown planet with the remnants of a long-ago civilization to explore. On this side the ruins, although less extensive, were better preserved. All the buildings and barges and anything still valuable had been moved out, so what remained were foundations, wire-wrapped wooden waterlines, and an old winch for hauling out the cannery barges.

  We found signs of ancient Native occupation in the form of a “fire tree.” The tree was a huge silo of a cedar tree burned hollow in the center. It was outside the part of the cannery that had burned in 1947, and it wasn’t a lightning-struck tree since the only burned section was the interior. It was so huge that I could walk around inside and stand in the middle without being able to touch the sides. I used to wonder at the mystery of it, why it had been deliberately burned hollow inside. Later I read that modern researchers hypothesize that the Tlingit tribe used such trees as a way to preserve their precious communal store of fire from the persistently rainy climate.

  Our greatest, most awestruck discovery was a grave. It was marked by a weathered and rotting wooden cross on the point that overlooked the bay. (Later we found another one farther back in the woods.)

  Who was buried here? What had been their stories? There was no one to ask so we were free to imagine our own stories. There was plenty of scope for a child’s imagination in the ruins that we now called home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “4th grade correspondence our 4 children school

  Outside, beyond the lapping of the water

  housing our 4 desks with the attached chairs

  Against the worm-eaten logs of the wanigan

  and open up tops and rusted 50 gallon gas barrel stove.

  I hear my father’s chainsaw We will haul wood for recess.”

  —my Fourth Grade poetry composition

  THE LINDY LOU was hauled out of the water and held upright by a wooden cradle Dad built for it near where he eventually moved our floathouse, so high on the beach that our home only floated during the highest tides of the year.

  After Dad did some repairs to it, Muriel and Maurice moved into the sole remaining, still-standing cannery building on the property, the little red cabin we’d noticed on our first visit as it stood on the edge of the creek across from the ruins.

  The Forest Service had marked a trail between the two sides of the cannery. Dad civilized it by cutting down some small trees and laying them down over boggy spots, and overall made the trail easier for the Hoffs to follow. Muriel took it every morning to teach us in the wanigan.

  The wanigan was tiny. It was one room with a small loft. It had a front and back door that slid in wooden troughs, like a boat door. There was a hand-hewn counter at the back with a sink that had no running water, and a four-paned window above it. In one corner the wood stove, made from an old fuel drum, squatted.

  The interior and exterior were all raw wood, unpainted, with visible nails and hammer dents in floor, walls, and rafters. But this was common to Southeast Alaska where the timber-loving men in the area disliked splashing paint around and strongly resisted all attempts to put anything but varnish on floors or walls.

  The small building had served as a home for my grandparents while they built a house on land, and from the first my brothers and sister and I loved playing in and on it. Mom handwrote on lined yellow paper a story called “The Wanigan Kids” and each of us, plus our cousin Shawn who came up in the summers to visit his dad (Rand), had a starring role in the story.

  It was a Wizard of Oz story, but instead of our house being whirled away by a tornado, in Mom’s version the wanigan broke its mooring lines during a high storm tide when just the six of us kids were aboard, and we floated away from adult authority. Instead of the fantastical sights and experiences of Oz, Mom asked each of us to contribute an idea to the story and we decided on adventures of coping with the real and present dangers of the Alaskan wilderness.

  She read many books to us and we loved all of them—but we loved none more than “The Wanigan Kids,” which we clamored for her to read all the time.

  The small, weathered wood floor of the wanigan was scuffed by our four desks. (Chris was too young to attend school yet.) With only three small, four-paned windows to let the light in, we had to have a kerosene lantern burning to be able to read and write, especially in the morning and in the afternoon during the long dark winter months.

  On wash nights the desks were pushed to the back to make way for a large tin washtub, oval in design. With water heated on the stove, clothes and bodies were washed. The clothes, washed first, were hung on lines strung below the roof. In the cozy yellow light of the lantern, the windows turned opaque with steam as we scrubbed and splashed below the dangling legs and arms of the clothes, each of us getting a turn. The clothes would continue to hang over our heads when we did our schoolwork.

  Dad built a long floating walkway to shore so we could get off to play at recess or go home for lunch. When school first began with Muriel as our teacher, we were given tests by the regional school district that would oversee our education by mail and floatplane visits. The tests were to see where we were at, academically. In between each segment of the testing we were allowed to run around outside for a few minutes to let off steam. The tide was high so we ran across the floating walkway, listening to the water splash under our assault.

  Megan’s watercolor painting of the wanigan, for which she won first prize in a statewide art competition.

  We’d been warned never to go far into the woods, and under no circumstances were we to use the trail that connected the two sides of the cannery. There was bear sign everywhere and my parents said that we shouldn’t go on the trail without an adult who’d carry a gun.

  At this point, Muriel announced that she didn’t believe in guns. “They’re anti-intellectual,” she said. “And they’re counterproductive. The reason that people get mauled by bears is because they take aggressive weapons into bear territory. Bears are intuitive. This is their world, their land, and the onus is on us to live by their rules and be respectful of their rights and feelings.”

  “You’re saying we shouldn’t carry guns?” Mom, as much as she disliked guns, couldn’t find it in her heart to embrace t
he idea. Not with five kids to protect.

  “There’s enough evidence out there that bears can sense the hostility of negative and aggressive thinking by humans. They’re tuned into our individual auras. Maurice and I won’t carry a gun into the woods. I advise you not to either.”

  Even I, nine years old at the time, thought this was an argument that bears would not feel compelled to honor. Dad, as usual, kept his thoughts to himself, while Mom tried to argue with Muriel despite how much she would have liked Muriel’s argument to be true.

  So my parents, to preempt anything she might teach us on the topic, told us kids that we could only go on the trail when Dad was there with a gun.

  This, under Jamie’s leadership, meant that as soon as we were let out of school on those short breaks between tests, we had to see how far we could get on the trail running as fast as we could, before we had to turn back in time to do the next test.

  The memory of racing along the dry edges of the squishy, muddy trail (so that, as Jamie pointed out, we would leave no tell-tale marks on the trail or on our boots) marked by pink and yellow surveyor’s tape, the trees looming above us, the threat of bears around every corner, is vivid in my mind. We giggled breathlessly, exultant at being free of adult supervision, at having outsmarted the adults, at surviving the daring escapade.

  Megan and I gripped Robin’s hands and raced him along behind Jamie. I was terrified of all the bear stories I’d heard, I had nightmares about them breaking into our house while we slept, but there was a laugh-in-the-face-of-danger joy about those urgent races deep into the verboten wilderness that lingers with me to this day.

  • • •

  When Mom first met Muriel in Meyers Chuck, she’d admired Muriel, in the way Mom always admired women she saw as more capable and take-charge than she was. Muriel was a registered nurse and saw herself, she said, as an Earth Mother type who wanted to live wholly off the land.