by Tara Neilson
Still, he had a knack for knowing what music suited other people’s tastes.
Every now and then Lance would cross the beach in the evening, his boots crunching on gravel, seeing by the moon, starshine, and the lamplight falling out of the wanigan’s windows on one side of the beach and the floathouse’s lit windows on the other side. He’d burst in on us while we were playing board games with Mom (Chinese Checkers, Sorry!, Yahtzee, Monopoly, Risk), or when she was reading a book to us before bed (Down the Long Hills, Little House on the Prairie, Five Little Peppers, The Hobbit, “The Wanigan Kids”).
Lance attended the same one room school as we did in Meyers Chuck and was more like an older brother than an uncle.
Without so much as a greeting, Lance would insist, “You have to hear this!” He’d go straight to the car stereo that Dad had rigged inside the floathouse to a marine battery and shove a cassette in.
We’d sit at attention for the entire album, completely absorbed by the music in the yellow lamplight: Kim Carnes with her broken, rusty voice sang “Bette Davis Eyes,” or Shot in the Dark’s inspired guitar/flute duet on “Playing with Lightning” chimed out. We immediately fell in love with and played these albums, and others he introduced us to, on endless repeat until they became the soundtrack to our wilderness life.
During the daytime he and Mom had lengthy discussions about the books they were reading. Though in Lance’s case, it wasn’t exactly a discussion. He’d give a blow-by-blow account of his book. He’d follow Mom around the house, describing every scene with photographic clarity, following her down to the bathroom, despite her laughing protests, where he’d continue his rant outside the door. There was no escape.
Or he’d come over to share a long-winded, off-color joke that Mom would do her best, to no avail, to head off at the pass. Or he’d entertain us kids by producing the sound of flatulence with nothing more than his hand in his armpit, working his arm industriously. The boys were deeply impressed. Another time he came over to bedazzle Mom with an illusion where he turned his back to her, wrapped his arms around himself, and managed to conjure a woman madly in love with him.
He and Mom also loved playing “Name That Tune.” While we watched, they took turns putting a cassette in and allowed a song to play only a snatch of music. They were both good at recognizing who the artist was from the barest riff, but Lance usually won in the end. He was merciless with his disgust and disillusionment when Mom missed one, though she just laughed.
After he left the wilderness to live in the city of Ketchikan, he never forgot us and sent out mixtapes with the latest hits: “The Breakup Song” and “Jeopardy” by Greg Kihn, “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, “Seven Year Ache” by Rosanne Cash, “Morning Train” by Sheena Easton, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee, and so on.
He also recorded directly off the radio, particularly channels that offered a “blast from the past” line-up of hits from Mom and Dad’s youth. Through these albums of Fifties and Sixties songs, our parents’ era also became a part of ours. We heard these songs at least as often as the modern Eighties ones.
The most memorable recording that Lance sent out to us was Jeff Wayne’s rock opera of HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds, brilliantly narrated by Richard Burton. We never tired of listening to it. We sang the songs from it while we played in the woods and on the beach. Megan and I, with doubtful harmony, crooned “No, Nathaniel, no, there must be more to life” at the drop of a hat as we rode pretend horses around the beaches and built our forts in the woods.
And, with ghoulish relish, all of us intoned the eerie Martian war cry: “Ulaaaa!” It rang off the fortress-like wall of trees and the shore-lapping bay at all hours. We loved to do it at least in part because Mom hated it; she tried to ban it, with zero success. Creeping her out added to the entertainment value.
The story of Earth being taken over by aliens, torching civilization with their death ray, resonated with us almost as much as it had terrorized the victims of Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio play. While his audience believed it to be a real, live program and panicked, racing away into the night in a mad scramble for survival or stuffing rags in the cracks of doors and windows to escape the fumes of the Martians’ deadly poison gas, the five of us kids listening to a recorded rock version of that show nearly half a century later could have easily been convinced that it was true.
My parents could have told us that the world had been destroyed by an alien race or nuclear warfare, with only a few pockets of humanity surviving on Earth, and we would have believed it—because we saw nothing around us to disprove it, and plenty to suggest it was true.
The Other Side seemed to confirm it.
• • •
While Lance was staying with us, he and Mom cooked up an expedition to the ruins.
Unlike our practical, work-oriented father, Mom and Lance were fascinated in a purely aesthetic sense by the atmosphere of the ruins. Their excitement about the illicit trip into ceded bear territory infected us kids. Though they were both adults, Dad’s influence tended to dampen risky, arty whims even when he wasn’t there. The sense that we were on a covert trek only added to the thrill of it.
We set out into the forest. The narrow dirt trail was marked here and there by giant moss-covered, rotting stumps. At some point in the past the cannery superintendents had fallen massive spruce and cedar trees surprisingly deep in the woods, but for what purpose it wasn’t clear. Had they milled their own lumber to build the boardwalk? Or had they somehow hauled the enormous trees down to the water to be used in making fish traps?
Because these large trees had been cut down in the middle of the peninsula that separated the two sides of the cannery, and many trees had been cleared to put in the wide boardwalk connecting both sides, oddly enough the deeper we went into the woods, the more open and airy and bright it became. There was a strangeness to it, as if we were stepping into a zone where the natural laws of the temperate rainforest ceased to exist.
Porcupines clambered clumsily up slim, young trees that had sprouted in the absence of the big trees’ shadows. Moby barked at the prickly, comical beasts, but after having one dropped on him when Lance shook it out of a tree, Moby learned that he wasn’t interested in a closer acquaintance.
Mom made no effort to stifle our young, high-pitched chatter, believing that human noise warned away bears. She’d attached bells to our life jackets for that purpose and told us to talk loudly, whistle, and generally make a lot of noise whenever we were in the woods. This was one of the mandates of hers that we zestfully obeyed.
The forest was brilliant with every shade of green, the moss a spongy verdant ocean that waved over fallen trees, rocks, and hills. Far below the canopy, giant-leafed, almost tropical, stands of banana-yellow skunk cabbage colonized boggy areas, and shyly curled fiddlehead ferns lined the trail and windfalls in thick profusion.
When we broke out of the woods, we went from comforting color and life to a scene of black-and-white desolation.
Under a leaden sky the ruins were stark. The creek, hidden by the trees, rumbled monotonously. The tide was way out, probably a minus tide, and the blackened pilings stretched in broken rows down yard after yard of rocky beach. Amidst them, the frames of the cannery’s machinery lay where they had fallen decades ago when the floors, decks, and pier were engulfed in flames.
We picked our way through the debris field, like divers exploring a deep sea wreck. The minus tide added to the strangeness. I imagined old-fashioned wooden freighters tied to the pier these pilings had supported, floating far above my head as they took onboard tons of canned salmon.
The abundance of metal in odd shapes appealed to both Mom’s and Lance’s creative natures and they enthusiastically fitted them together into modern art steel sculptures right there on the spot. We kids were encouraged to follow suit, as an ad hoc school fieldtrip.
Back in Meyers Chuck when Lance was fourteen, he and his friend Norman Miller (one of my Aunt
Marion’s five brothers) used to act as city architects on the beach building entire metropolises, beginning with a rusted-out starter they found as a town power plant. Inspired by these memories, when Lance investigated the ruins that day with us and saw a rusty bedframe complete with bedsprings and a headboard, all concretized together, he knew that he had to build a car.
He used it as his platform and Mom and the five of us kids pounced on tortured rusty shapes, calling out “car parts” and dragging them to him. We watched in delight as the junk turned into a jalopy, as Mom called it. Lance positioned four huge gears on both sides as wheels, and a wheel valve attached to a long steel pipe as a steering wheel. He built up seats, the hood of the car, and a trunk.
When he was finally satisfied, his collaborators were sweaty and grungy, covered in rust, but elated with the results of their labors and Lance’s vision. Mom lamented not having film in her camera to capture the junk jalopy as it rested on the rocks, far from any road, with the expanse of the bay and the distant mountains of Prince of Wales Island on the horizon beyond it.
Nevertheless, we posed on it, riding in the back seats as Lance drove and Mom took pictures with squared fingers held up to her eye.
“Where should we go?” Lance asked, jauntily honking an invisible horn.
Each of us kids got to shout out a destination and Lance made engine noises. We leaned when he leaned, taking sharp corners around precipitous drop-offs, laughing as the jalopy careened into one imaginary story after another.
The jalopy remained on the beach long after Lance left, eventually scattered by heavy storm surges. It remains in my memory, ready for us to climb aboard and drive off into adventure amidst the cannery ruins.
CHAPTER FIVE
A friend: What’s the song that spoke most to you as a child?
Me: “I’m So Afraid” by Fleetwood Mac.
THERE WAS a lot to fear where we lived, and while all of us kids were afraid of bears and storms, each of us had specific things we worried about. Megan and the boys were afraid of the dark. Jamie was afraid of wolves. And I was afraid of burning to death in my bed.
My fear emerged as a result of Jamie’s interest in science.
As a teenager Jamie became obsessed with fantasy, but during his preteen years when we first moved to the cannery the only books he was interested in were scientific ones. “Don’t give me anything that isn’t true. I want fact books,” he insisted to Mom.
Jamie, regrettably, misused his wide-ranging collection of scientific facts.
Like the night Jamie, Megan, and I were playing in the back bedroom by the glow of the kerosene Coleman lantern hanging from the ceiling with a round soot spot above it. Megan was subject to night terrors and had to have the light on all night, though when everyone was in bed my parents turned it down to a mellow glimmer. The long, eight-paned window that faced the forest was black with night, reflecting back an image of the room with us in it.
To stop Robin and Chris from bothering us older kids, they were restricted to one walled-off corner of the large room. Because Mom was softhearted and she didn’t want them to feel left out, she had Dad not panel the wall to their room so they could look out on us older kids as we played.
The unintended result was that the boys looked like they were zoo animals in a wooden cage or enclosure. They loved to scamper up the framework of the open walls and perch at the space at the top, peering down at us, heckling and jeering at us, and throwing their toys at us, like feral monkeys.
This particular night Jamie, Megan, and I were playing Jamie’s own special version of poker in which the rules—forever after immortalized as “Jamie Rules”—were complicated and subject to change without notice. And, let it be noted, always resulted in him winning. Years later I saw the original Star Trek episode “A Piece of the Action” and recognized Captain Kirk’s “Fizz-bin” as Jamie’s version of poker.
As Jamie was explaining to me why I couldn’t make the exact same discard he’d made moments earlier (a spade could never be discarded when a club was turned up, unless a heart had been discarded three turns previously; or if it was a Friday night), he paused and stared at me without blinking.
I shifted uneasily, dreading the appearance of one of his disturbing smiles.
The smile didn’t appear. Instead, his stare became more and more clinical. I did not find this a reassuring development.
“Interesting,” he said. “Did you know that the way some people store fat on their body can be evidence of a lethal combination of chemicals in the stomach? Hold out your arm.”
Warily, I looked at my arm.
He picked it up, squeezing it experimentally. “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. You have the thick-skinned subcutaneous fat layer profile of the type of person who is scientifically most likely to suffer from spontaneous human combustion.”
I looked at Megan. She stared back at me wide eyed. She looked glad that she didn’t have a thick-skinned subcutaneous fat layer profile.
“What, you ask, is spontaneous human combustion?” he continued in a professorial tone as he shuffled the cards. “It begins with a steady increase in temperature due to self-heating reactions caused by chemical processes in the stomach, followed by thermal runaway. This self-heating accelerates to higher and higher temperatures until finally… auto-ignition.” He dropped the cards and shoved his hands widely apart, miming a conflagration. He added sound effects of a fire burning.
I knew it was better not to understand what he was talking about. I always regretted asking him to explain. “You haven’t dealt out yet. Mom’s going to tell us to go to bed pretty soon.”
He picked the deck back up and dealt the cards out with slow deliberation as he kept his eyes fixed on me. “That means you ignite and burn hotter than a furnace. People who spontaneously combust burn so hot that there’s nothing left of them but their hands and feet. The furniture they’re on barely smolders, but the person burns up completely.”
I pictured Megan waking up one morning, in the bottom bunk we shared, with my hands and feet lying beside her. At least she’d barely be singed.
“What can I do about it?” I picked up my cards, trying to keep it casual. Fear was like blood in the water to Jamie.
He consulted his science books. After a while, as I waited with outward composure, he slapped the book shut. “Nothing. There’s nothing that can be done. You’re one of the rare subsets of humans born with the body type that leads to spontaneous combustion. Science has no cure.” He stared at me for another long, clinically interested moment, then shrugged. “So, how many cards do you want?”
I lay in bed that night, staring at the glowing lantern and the shadows in the corners of the room, listening to the even breathing of my brothers and sister. The window, so close to the woods, always unnerved me at night. It seemed an unnecessary, open invitation to every bear in Alaska to come in and enjoy a midnight snack.
Many a night I’d lie there and hear a deliberate, crunching sound, like footsteps in hardened snow, and I’d try to convince myself that it was my heartbeat, not a bear prowling around, sniffing out its next meal.
That night I heard the rhythmic sound go faster and faster. It was my heartbeat all right, and it was laboring so fast and hard that it seemed to shake me in the bunk next to Megan. Was this the first sign of spontaneous combustion? Sweat popped out on my brow and
I went rigidly still. There was no question now: I was getting hotter.
And hotter.
The more I thought about it and tried not to get hotter, the more heated my body became.
I stared in fascinated horror at the flame burning at the end of the wick in the lantern. My subcutaneous fat layer would make me burn like that wick. I’d char to crusty blackness right next to Megan as she slept obliviously.
Why me? What had I done to deserve a subcutaneous fat layer? Tears leaked out of my eyes as the heat built upward, right into a ball in my throat.
The silence of the house, of the wilderness out
side, turned an indifferent eye toward my sufferings as the furnace inside heated to the point of inescapable ignition. I think I passed out from terror.
The next morning Jamie leaned down from the top bunk to do an inspection.
“Oh. You’re still here. I thought you might have spontaneously combusted and I wanted to make a record of it. For science.” He considered. “Oh, well, there’s always tonight.”
He smiled. That smile.
• • •
I was about four or five when my parents took us three older kids—the babies not being born yet—to the theater to watch The Wilderness Family (as it was originally titled when it was released in 1975), during the height of the Back to the Land Movement.
It’s the story of a family that leaves smoggy Los Angeles to homestead remote mountain territory beside an alpine lake, reachable by floatplane. There’s the dad, Skip, a denim-clad construction worker who can’t hammer a nail in to save his life; Pat, a long-haired, too-glamorous-for-my-gingham-skirt former beauty pageant runner-up as the mother; Jenny, the earnest, asthmatic blonde girl who needs to escape the smog to survive and should have won an Oscar for her performance; and Toby, the giggling little boy who gets into generic mischief and has to be surreptitiously elbowed to remember his lines.
The movie is low budget, with endless images of innocent wilderness play set to saccharine songs and back-to-back montages of DIY cabin building and homesteading to save on paying a scriptwriter. Half the dialogue sounds adlibbed on the spot.
The little girl looked like a cross between my sister and me. I promptly identified with her to the full of my preschool heart. There she was on the enormous screen, playing with the wildlife, running joyfully through wildflower-strewn fields in her Seventies bellbottoms, wearing the exact same ribbed tank top I owned, her long blonde hair waving behind her.