by Tara Neilson
This sounded like the perfect person to accompany us into the wilderness, to shore up Mom’s less practical nature and provide immediate medical help should it be required. Maurice was not at all practical and had no wilderness skills, but he was friendly, genial, and intellectual. He tended to smile and nod, backing up whatever his wife decided. Where he shone was in singing folk songs and accompanying himself on guitar, like any back-to-the-lander worthy of his salt.
Muriel had traveled widely and had many hair-raising adventures to share. She found herself, she said, invariably in the position of having to stand up to abuses of power and ethical wrongdoing. “You must always stand up for what you believe in; you must be true to your convictions.”
Mom loved this because her instinct was to always stand on principle, no matter what it cost.
Everyone was pleased, thinking the two couples would be a perfect match at the isolated cannery site. But before we left Meyers Chuck, something happened.
A friend of both Mom’s and Muriel’s was the subject of controversy. When the village women got together to hash out what should be done and the conclusion was that the mutual friend should be driven out of the community, Mom stood up and said they didn’t have the right to make that choice; they were all the woman’s friends and they should act like it.
Her principled arguments, as always, were made as an emotional appeal and dismissed by the majority.
Muriel was silent on the subject. Mom asked her about it later—Muriel was at least as close to the woman as Mom was. Plus, other women would have listened to Muriel, who was so certain. Why hadn’t she stood up for her friend? “After all, you’re supposed to stand up for what you believe in,” Mom reminded her.
Muriel said it wasn’t any of her business and she preferred to keep out of it.
Right then Mom started to have doubts about heading into the wilderness with Muriel and Maurice, not to mention having Muriel teach her kids, but everyone was already committed.
• • •
For physical education (PE) we hauled firewood. Dad split it and we stacked it in rows on the wanigan’s front porch.
As it grew colder Dad had his hands full finding, sawing, and then splitting enough firewood for the floathouse, the wanigan, and the Hoffs’ cabin. Despite their back-to-the-land, sweat-andcallus aspirations, neither Muriel nor Maurice were interested in harvesting their own firewood.
They said that in exchange for his children receiving an education, Dad should provide them with firewood. So Dad would come home from a full week of hard physical labor as a scaler and bucker at the logging camp, and he’d spend the weekend splitting firewood like a machine. The only sign to us kids that he was human was the sweat pouring down his face and the steam rising from his head in the cold air.
Dad filled Maurice’s skiff full of firewood—several cords’ worth—and towed it over to Muriel and Maurice’s cabin. Dad figured it would last them a couple months at least, since the cabin was tiny and it wouldn’t take much to heat it.
The next day, the last day of Dad’s weekend before he had to go back to work, Maurice knocked on our floathouse door.
“We need firewood.”
Dad stared at him. “I just split several cords for you.”
“Unfortunately it had other plans and floated away.”
“How could it float away? Didn’t you tie the skiff to a tree above the tideline?”
Maurice offered an amused, worldly shrug. Obviously the loss of the firewood was an Act of God. What can you do?
Dad was fit to be tied. But, as Maurice indicated in his indirect, urbane way, they needed firewood, and since the agreement was that Dad would provide it in exchange for Muriel teaching his kids, it was up to Dad to supply it. And resupply it.
• • •
I recently asked Robin what he remembers about Muriel and Maurice. Though he’s four years younger than I am, he’s often my go-to source for memories because he has the kind of mind that keeps arcane details on tap.
He responded: “I hated her so much that I have no memory of her or him. I erased her from my mind.”
I understand perfectly why he feels this way.
Muriel wasn’t an easy person to like. She had a curious habit of talking to adults like they were children, and to children like they were adults. She went around braless to indicate her free-spirited feminism that unyoked her from the backward Establishment—while all the time trying to form her own Establishment that everyone else was required to support.
What none of us realized, when Mom and Dad accepted Muriel and Maurice as equal members of the plan to colonize the cannery, was that this agreement would set us on a collision course that would lead to an epic clash of wills. Not between Muriel and either of my parents. No, it was between Muriel and one of her students.
When Robin came along, the fourth child in the family, he was so cute and had so much personality that everyone adored him. He was precocious in a funny way, with an ironical take on life that was ridiculous in one so young. As a toddler he walked around with his bottle hanging out of his mouth and talked around it, like a 1920s gangster talking around his cigar. At the same time he had an infectious personality with enthusiasms that swept everyone along. Up to that point, the only fly in his ointment was when Christopher came along a year after him and knocked him out of the prestigious baby slot.
Chris, one of the happiest, most harmonious babies in history, adopted all of Robin’s mannerisms including Robin’s inability to pronounce his Ls. Chris’s failing in this area spurred Robin to take him in hand and demonstrate a correct pronunciation.
When Chris said something about Muriel and Maurice’s boat, the Lindy Lou, Robin would immediately deride, “It’s Rindy Rou—not Rindy Rou!”
Needless to say, Chris’s speech didn’t improve.
Muriel zeroed in on this fault immediately. All of her bully pulpit instincts became laser focused on fixing the problem that was Robin’s speech. The rest of us kids, self-starters who could teach ourselves for the most part, held little interest for her.
“You’re not doing it right. Touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth, press your tongue to the back of your top teeth, and make an L sound.” She demonstrated.
I did it myself, surprised to discover a skill I’d taken for granted up until then.
Robin stared at her in the wintry light creeping in through the windows. The little cabin smelled of crayons and finger paint, kerosene from the lamps, cedar firewood, and the seaweed that it rested on when the tide was out and it was no longer floating.
“Do it like this,” Muriel ordered, and demonstrated again.
He made a sound through his teeth.
“No, not through your teeth. Open your mouth and do it. No, that’s not it either. Try it again. Are you watching me? Do you see how I’m doing it? Tara, show him how to do it.”
I looked at Robin’s downcast face and uncomfortably demonstrated.
“There, that’s how you make an L sound. Do you see how easy it is? We’re all doing it. Come on, everyone, show Robin how to make an L sound.”
Muriel, Jamie, Megan, and I made L sounds while Robin stared down at his desk. I’d never imagined how taunting and belittling a prolonged L sound could be, when an entire group of people did it toward the youngest person in the group.
“Now you do it, Robin.”
Robin remained silent.
“Did you hear me, Robin? You’re not deaf, I know you can hear me. Now you’re just being obstructive. Do you want to grow up with a speech impediment? Do you want to be the butt of jokes, to look like a backward person? Do you know how that will affect your life? I know, we all know, don’t we, kids?”
I looked at Robin, and tried to explain to Muriel. “He knows the R sound he’s using instead of an L is wrong, he tries to tell Mitmer how to say it right—”
“His name is Christopher, not Mitmer. And that’s another thing. If you don’t learn your Rs,” she told Robin, “you’ll
be responsible for your younger brother’s speech problems throughout his life. Do you want to be responsible for that? Do you want to make him the butt of jokes, mocked and laughed at by people wherever he goes? It will be all your fault. Do you want to live with that?”
Robin scowled and his lower lip crept downward, revealing small kindergarten teeth clenched together.
“He tries at home, my mom works with both of them on it,” I tried again.
Her pale eyes fixed on me. “Obviously that isn’t working, is it, Tara? You’re not helping by making excuses for him, and neither is your mother. Robin, neither you nor I am going to leave here today without you learning how to pronounce at least one L correctly. That isn’t too much to ask, is it kids?”
Robin never again tried to make an L sound in school. In fact, from that point on he refused to cooperate with her in any way. And she refused to admit that she’d lost his cooperation, continuing to harangue and goad him every single day.
It’s probably a minor miracle that Robin learned to speak his Ls without a problem. Her Ahab-like quest to stab at his speech impediment to her last breath made it hard for the rest of us to concentrate on our own work, which she paid little attention to anyway. All her focus was dedicated to getting Robin to give in and submit to her authority.
Robin, five years old doing battle with a college-educated woman in her thirties, never gave in. Instead, he discovered that he could hold his own against even the most self-certain adult. There was no going back after that. His cooperation in anything was almost impossible to win from then on.
In addition to this clash that impacted everything, tensions continued to rise over Muriel’s and Maurice’s expectations that Dad labor for them and keep them supplied in firewood. Due to their inexperience with a wood stove, they treated the wood he cut wastefully. They overheated their small cabin due to their ignorance of the stove’s damper and draft and had to have the front door open to cool the place, burning through the wood Dad provided far faster than he’d calculated. When they ran out they became annoyed that he didn’t fulfill his side of the bargain instantly, leaving them with a cold cabin to live in.
Muriel was someone who needed the admiration of others and felt the bite all the more keenly when it was withdrawn, which was what happened with my parents—with Mom in particular, who had been so impressed by Muriel when they first met.
By the time Maurice was offered a job in a town to the north of us a few months after the move to the cannery, relations were awkward and strained enough for everyone to be okay with them moving back aboard the Lindy Lou and saying their goodbyes. That was the end of their back-to-the-land aspirations. They never again lived so remotely.
We were on our own.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Gee, I thought watches floated.”
—Chris, experimenting with our only timepiece, Dad’s not-waterproof watch, in a pan of water
ONE NIGHT, when the wood box that Dad had built next to the front door was empty… I climbed into it.
I could hear my family inside the house talking, laughing, and arguing. Robin’s and Chris’s voices that couldn’t pronounce Ls piped higher than everyone else’s. Their voices were muffled so I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying. They were the only human voices for miles.
It was a moonless night, with degrees of black that only the wilderness knows. Up along the wall of the house was the big bay window with a puckered bullet hole in it, not unlike the bullet scar in Dad’s back that he got in Vietnam.
Golden kerosene lamplight spilled out, lighting the railing and gravel beach. The forest stream flowing beneath the logs of our house gurgled unseen, winding down through musky seaweed to the bay. The cannery superintendent’s house had once stood not far from where our floathouse was. Oil and kerosene lamplight would have spilled out of its twelve-paned windows on the same little bay, surrounded by the same pointed silhouettes of trees that were a deeper, more impenetrable black than the sky.
I stared up at the stars and thought about time. The light from those stars, Jamie had said after reading one of the science books he was always asking Mom to buy him, was millions of years old.
I focused on a single star. That twinkling pinprick of light had been birthed in a distant part of the universe, before constantly, tirelessly traveling across great voids to reach a girl one Earth night in the Alaskan wilderness, curled up in a firewood box listening to her family. She would see it and acknowledge its existence and have her own existence, a part of the ever-changing, ever-moving universe, acknowledged in turn.
Had a cannery worker looked up and seen an earlier version of this light? If so, the light connected me to him in time. We were fellow witnesses of the light’s eternal journey to… where? When? Was it going to return from where it had come, like the spawning salmon in the cannery’s creek?
It would continue its journey, speeding in the silent vacuum of space, taking a part of me, this moment, with it. That unknown cannery worker who had looked up and seen the same light was a fellow passenger.
I always felt everywhere I went, in the woods and on the beaches, that somehow some part of the cannery workers who had lived here so long ago were still here, but in their own era, going about a life they’d already lived, but somehow present, too, in our time.
There was a sense of the place being haunted, but not in the usual sense of that word. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I did think that as long as a person was remembered at least a remnant of them lived on. What was a memory-person who could almost be seen, almost touched, almost interacted with? Was there a technology not yet invented that could free their memory-images from time’s grip?
The cedar shake walls of the wood box surrounded me as I hugged myself to keep warm and stared up into the twinkling sky.
Did time have mirages like space did? Was the Flying Dutchman, I wondered, an example of a temporal mirage?
We owned a large annotated chart book covering British Columbia and Southeast Alaska that all of us, adults and children alike, pored over and discussed. One margin note recounted a sighting of the legendary “ghost ship” in our general area as it was recorded in the logbook of the Alaska State Ferry M/V Malaspina.
Like all log entries, it gave the exact day, hour, position, weather, and barometric pressure: Sunday, 6 a.m.; February 15, 1973; sixteen miles south of Ketchikan, abeam Twin Island in Revillagigedo Channel; unlimited visibility with northeasterly winds at ten knots; temperature 28°F and barometric pressure at 29:71.
Chief mate Walter Jackinsky was standing watch on the bridge with the helmsman and lookout when “a huge vessel loomed up approximately eight miles dead ahead, broadside and dead in the water.” The appearance of it was so striking that they were careful to write down the vessel’s exact position in longitude and latitude, near the south end of Bold Island in Coho Cove, marked by Washington Monument Rock.
The log entry reports: “This vessel strongly resembled the Flying Dutchman. The color was all gray, similar to vapor or clouds. It was seen distinctly for about 10 minutes. It looked so exact, natural and real that when seen through binoculars, sailors could be seen moving about on board.”
As they watched, the ship dissolved and disappeared.
Huddled in the wood box, I wondered: Were the cannery workers a kind of mirage, recorded on the land around us, and on the ruins—the same way that spatial mirages of long-dead people and past events were mysteriously recorded and preserved on film?
I longed to know who they’d been, what they’d thought, how they’d reacted to this lonesome edge of the world. After we were gone, would we leave temporal mirages of ourselves behind, recorded on the beaches we played on, to mingle with the cannery workers?
• • •
Once we settled in, on the protected side of the cannery, we hardly ever went over to the Other Side where the burned ruins were, especially when it was just Mom and us kids. The charred wreckage lined the large salmon creek where the bears roamed
, undisturbed by the rusty skeletons of machines. It meant nothing to them that once a mechanized world hummed, pounded, and rumbled in this remote outpost.
In my mind, the Other Side came to feel a bit like the Forbidden Zone in the original Planet of the Apes where the surf washed endlessly against the remains of a destroyed civilization. Yet, though it retained its strangeness and mystery, it still felt like home. I suppose in the same way an ancient castle with a ruined wing can be a home.
Any visit to the Other Side was memorable, but none more so than when Uncle Lance came to stay with us and act as our tutor for a short while after Muriel and Maurice left.
Although technically he was another adult who could be with Mom and us kids while Dad was away during the week, Lance had only recently graduated high school and Jamie, me, and Megan had shared the same classroom with him in the one-room, all-grades bush school in Meyers Chuck.
He was born late in life to Mom’s parents—Mom was a teenager during his preschool years, and while her parents worked she raised Lance. When Jamie was born, Lance was more like an older brother to him than an uncle.
I have few memories of him teaching us, probably because we didn’t see him as a teacher since he’d only recently been a classmate. I doubt he took the position seriously himself, but being of an artistic bent he did enjoy teaching us from our art history books. One time he took us on a school field trip into the woods to find leaves and ferns to use in sponge painting and stenciling art.
He was well read with a large, picturesque vocabulary and wised us up less through direct teaching and more through incidental moments. Like the time Megan was appalled when Lance mentioned that he was going to take a “spit bath.” She let it be known that she thought anyone who would bathe in spit was just plain gross. Lance, swallowing a grin, explained that a spit bath was one that used little water.
Coming to live in Union Bay with us at the old cannery site was a boon to him—jobs were scarce, and it allowed him to get out on his own. Sporting the long-haired hippie look, he turned the wanigan into a smoky man cave where he could blast his screaming Seventies music so loud the cannery workers probably heard it after it tore a hole in the space-time continuum.