by Tara Neilson
Then, all at once, there she was, being chased by a huge, roaring grizzly. In one of the most traumatic instances of my entire life, I watched as the little blonde girl splashed through the creek and desperately hid in a shallow cave. The bear was on her in an instant, clawing at the roots and reaching for her as she screamed for her mother…
Mom says that my sister and I had cowered in her arms and refused to look at the screen until the bear was chased away by the faithful family hound, Crust, the only real hero of the series.
This was my introduction to bears. A few years later my family moved from the Lower 48 to Alaska, to a location eerily reminiscent of the one in The Wilderness Family. We reached it by floatplane. Everyone used a radio to communicate, like they do in the movie. My parents were talking about going farther out to homestead the wilderness.
And there were bears. Everywhere.
Not that I saw one immediately, but they were one of the most frequent topics of conversation amongst the adults. I overheard blood-chilling, hair-raising tales that brought back that terrifying image of the little blonde girl racing for her life as the monstrous beast loped after her.
I suffered nightmares about bears every night of my wilderness life, when I wasn’t hyperventilating over the possibility of spontaneously combusting. Sometimes I dreamed of both. It did cross my mind to think that it would serve right whatever bear crashed through the window and into our bedroom to snatch me out of my bunk if I spontaneously combusted in its belly like a bomb.
I’m sure Mom had her own nightmares. After all, during the weekdays while Dad was away logging, she was responsible for five kids who weren’t known for their adherence to all the rules she dreamed up to keep us safe.
The cannery site was a veritable bear magnet with its large salmon-spawning creek. And, since the site was part of the mainland, we got both black and brown bears. (In the Alexander Archipelago of Alaska, bears practice island segregation—all the brown bears on one island, all the black bears on another. The mainland was a desegregated zone, and we were right in the middle of it.)
Mom had heard all the bear horror stories too, but her fear of them warred with her more visceral terror of guns that amounted to an uncontrollable phobia. To get around this problem, she had Dad string open jugs of ammonia around the outside of the house and where we kids played.
And she taught us the conventional bear-country safety rules: make lots of noise, don’t run from a bear (a bear can run faster than you), don’t try to jump in the bay to escape it (a bear can swim faster than you), play dead if it attacks you, back slowly away and get home immediately if you smell a horrible stench, wear your bear bells, blow your bear whistle, climb thick trees with lots of limbs to impede a bear’s tree-hugging climbing abilities or its ability to push a smaller tree over…
She made bears sound like supervillains who we had no hope of escaping, with diabolical superpowers no mere human child could hope to defeat. This did not, by the way, improve the quality of my sleep.
Not content with the conventional, she got inventive. And, wisely or not, turned the stuff of our nightmares into playtime.
The bear drill, as she called it, appealed to our athleticism and our competitive instincts. That was how she framed it: “Let’s see how fast you can do the drill, from the moment I call ‘Bear!’ to the moment you’re all in the attic.”
Her plan was to get us all tucked into the cramped, dark attic of the one story floathouse if a bear ever roamed too close to the house or tried to break and enter. Though a brown bear, if it was determined enough and sniffed us out, could have torn the ceiling apart to get at us. I’m sure she thought that at least it would keep us kids from being underfoot and running loose in the event of a bear assault.
We never knew when Mom would instigate the drill. We’d be going about our business of building forts, attacking each other with bristly yellow skunk cabbage cones, swimming, rowing in the blue plastic rowboat that looked like one of the boys’ Fisher-Price toys, climbing trees, and generally living about as free and close to nature as kids could get without turning entirely feral.
When we heard, at any time of the day, “Bear!” we had to drop whatever we were doing, grab the hand of the nearest “baby,” and force ourselves to walk sedately to the floathouse before galloping up the ramp with its raised wooden stops and along the railed, narrow front deck to the front door.
On one typical bear drill we burst through the white-painted front door and Jamie jumped on the table and shoved the loosely fitted attic door (a square of plywood) to one side.
Megan grabbed Chris and tossed him to me and I handed him up to Jamie, who snatched him and threw him into the dark hole above his head. Robin came next, and he, too, was flung into the darkness. I pushed Megan onto the table and Jamie heaved her into the hole. Then he grabbed my hand and yanked me onto the table and shoved me in amongst my sweaty, giggling brothers and sister. Jamie athletically pulled himself into the attic and immediately slammed the door into place.
The five of us huddled together, panting in the hot and dusty darkness. We were supposed to wait as silently as possible, without moving, until Mom gave the all clear.
There was no light up there, and other than our breathing and the rustle of our attempts to get comfortable on the bare ceiling joists, it was quiet. It smelled dusty and mildewed with boxes full of magazines, paperback romances, eight-track cassettes, clothes from the Seventies, and other things that we couldn’t see but knew were there.
I imagined a camera with an outside view of the shining aluminum roof of the floathouse and the camera ascending, taking in the rectangular floathouse’s lengthwise perch on a small mud flat at the edge of the forest with a stream flowing out from under the house’s float logs down a gravel beach, past the old pilings down to the broad bay.
The view expanded to show the endless forest climbing ridges and mountains as far as the eye could see toward Canada. On the other side of the peninsula where the floathouse was, the remains of the cannery sprawled black and rusty in the tumbling, golden creek and on the rocky beach. Rising higher the camera took in the breadth of the bay that merged with Clarence Strait, an integral part of Alaska’s Inside Passage.
In all that space, there were no other humans. Just us.
But there were a lot of bears, some of them fishing in the salmon creek amidst the twisted cannery debris, on the other side of the peninsula from the floathouse. There were more bears than humans in this land.
Then I pictured the camera cutting back to the hot and dark attic.
“I think that was our fastest yet,” Jamie whispered.
I nodded, pushing at the hair stuck to my overheated cheeks and forehead. “I don’t think we can get any faster.”
“I wonder if Mommy was surprised?” Megan said.
“I wonder if she’ll give us a treat?” Robin speculated.
Chris responded, “I’m hungry,” and our bellies grumbled. We were always hungry.
The bears were hungry too, of course, but I never felt any sympathy for them. Not when my brothers and sister and I were potentially on their menu.
• • •
There were other things besides bears and spontaneous combustion to fear in our wilderness home.
We quickly found that the first storm we’d encountered at the cannery on our reconnaissance visit was not an uncommon event. Even inside our more protected harbor the wind could find us. And in the winter when the tides were high, blown up higher by a terrifying, roaring wind, a monster storm surge wreaked havoc on everything that floated.
The floathouse in Union Bay. Opposite it is the wanigan with pilings on either side of the bay. The white spots are our skiffs.
Firewood logs broke loose, skiffs broke loose, the walkway to the wanigan broke loose, and one night during a hurricane-force storm, our floathouse broke loose.
It was a night when Dad was home. He was the one who knew instantly when the swifter cables holding our floathouse to shore
snapped in the surge. He yelled for us all to get outside. Mom only stopped long enough to make sure we put on our lifejackets and then we scrambled out.
With only flashlights, we faced the black gale. Mom and the five of us kids, from oldest to youngest, were ordered to the back of the float where we had to grab hold of one of the broken cables to stop the floathouse from being sucked out into the larger bay. We planted our feet as best we could and our hands burned on the rusty, twisted steel strands that formed the cable. Our arms were almost yanked out of their sockets as the many tons of floathouse surged.
Dad jumped into our thirteen-foot Boston Whaler, puny looking against the sixty-foot length of the heavy float. He had all the force of the fifty-horsepower Mercury outboard at his command as he turned the throttle up and pushed against the house, trying to force it back far enough into position so that we could get a wrap of the cable around the brow log to hold it in place.
Wind whipped at our bodies, buffeting the little ones so hard it was a wonder they didn’t get blown away. Maybe only their grip on the cable kept them in place. A mix of rain and spray splattered us. The tree branches of the surrounding forest rose and fell in the gusts almost as violently as the floathouse rose and fell in the heavy, sucking surge.
For every foot Dad managed to push the floathouse up when the surge was with him, the water took back two more as soon as the surge went the other way. We kids with Mom were never able to move fast enough to get the stiff cable bent around the brow log to form a loop before the slack was yanked out of the line, almost yanking us into the turbulent bay with it.
If any of us fell in, we’d be sucked under the logs of the floathouse and crushed under it when the surge ground it onto the beach. Our lifejackets wouldn’t protect us from that.
We tried to harness the house. Again and again and again, until we were drenched and shaking and the little ones were crying.
We could hear Dad swearing over the thunderous combination of wind and waves. He was screaming at the sky, screaming at the wind, at the waves, and, without putting it into words, at Vietnam. At the futility of trying to live in this world that never gave you any quarter, that worked to destroy you every time you turned around or tried to accomplish anything.
Finally he screamed at Mom: “Get me the gun!”
She didn’t know if he meant to shoot himself or all of us, or shoot it to relieve his feelings. Whatever the case, she was done. Without a word, without looking at him, Mom flung the cable down and stomped back to the house.
We followed her.
We didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t know if our house was going to be dashed to pieces, or be sucked out into the churning storm swells and washed off the float to sink with us in it. The house shook and the windows rattled when the surge dropped us hard on the ground, and the roof sounded like it was about to be torn off in the wind. But it seemed safer inside the house than out there with the storm and Dad.
We didn’t get sucked out into the bay that night.
Dad pitted his war rage against the raging elements… and won.
I don’t know the particulars of how he managed to keep the floathouse from being torn out into the bay, except maybe by just pushing against the float with the skiff until the tide turned, but he did it.
I don’t think it surprised any of us kids. His rage was deeper, fiercer, more unforgiving than the worst storm. Nothing could stand against it.
No one sat us down and told us about Vietnam. But we all knew about it. We knew it as a bleak, ugly presence that was there whenever Dad was there.
Dad never hit us—he rarely spanked us. In fact, I can only remember one time he disciplined us with corporal punishment, when we were playing with fire. And I think Mom insisted on it so that we’d learn to never do it again.
He never hit us with his hands, but we dreaded his moods more than we dreaded bears, storms, and spontaneous human combustion. We dreaded his rages and his furious contempt. His intolerance for ineptitude, for things not working, for kids not rising to the occasion, made us avoid him whenever possible.
Maybe when he was away from us he liked us, because when he came home from work he’d have a huge, olive-drab Army backpack stuffed to the brim with Hostess treats, so excessive in their kid appeal that they seemed cartoonish: bright yellow Twinkies with an oozing white-frosting heart—plain, or with strawberry zebra stripes—pink snowballs so sweet they could give you a stomachache just looking at them, chocolate cupcakes with the white scribble of frosting on top of the chocolate frosting, Ding Dongs, half-moon pastry pies in a variety of flavors tasting of starch and shortening and sweetness. There was a mountain of cartoon treats.
But once the goodies were handed out, all of our loud kid antics and our demands on his wife’s attention got on Dad’s nerves. We took the first excuse to run outside, leaving Mom—our companion, while he was away, in kid adventures and entertainment—to deal with his moods and his unhappiness to be home with us, having to do all the things that had to be done on his weekend after a hard week of heavy labor at the logging camp.
It was backwards for Dad, I think. The weekdays were his escape, when he was happiest. Weekends with us were the slog, his duty, the real work. When the black moods reigned.
He had a sort of stand-in family across the strait in Thorne Bay, twenty miles away. At the logging camp he was teamed with Gerald Pitcher, or “Pitch” as he was known by everyone, who operated the “shovel” that picked up the logs that Dad scaled and bucked off with a chainsaw.
Pitch was a Vietnam vet too. He’d been a helicopter door gunner. Dad was a helicopter mechanic and door gunner and crew chief. They fought in different years, but it was the same war, and they understood each other and what the other man had gone through. They were, in a lot of ways, mirrors of each other, but in ways that complemented rather than antagonized. They became best friends.
Pitch had a wife and three girls, and Dad often had dinner with them as a much-loved “Uncle Gary.” I think he was able to be more comfortable and accessible with the girls, more playful and fun, as he only occasionally was with us. They didn’t demand fatherhood of him and he could relax and enjoy their company in ways he never could with his own children.
I think it was a relief for him to cross the strait back to Pitch and his other family, a family with no demands, no expectations, just affection and acceptance.
We rarely saw Pitch and his family, but I liked them. I could see why Dad was so comfortable with them. They were salt-of-the-earth people, direct, humorous, pragmatic with definite opinions—larger than life, in Pitch’s case—and the girls were instantly lovable.
They helped Dad regain a lot of his humanity and a sense of normality lost in Vietnam. They made him happy.
Thinking back, I’m surprised that he came home every weekend. But he did. Almost without fail he crossed one of the most treacherous bodies of water in all of Alaska every weekend in an open, thirteen-foot skiff. One time the crossing was so rough that one of the large Alaska Marine Highway ferries, seeing him battling the big seas in his tiny skiff, went off their route to break a trail for him through the heaving swells.
Doggedly, he drove through whatever weather was thrown at him to reach us and shower us with goodies, his wilderness skills and labor, and his war rage.
When I wandered the cannery ruins as a teenager, looking at the desolation, the twisted, scorched remains of a once smoothly, industriously functioning unit, I wondered if it was a visual representation of my dad’s inner world.
CHAPTER SIX
“If you ain’t dyin’ you ain’t livin’.”
—Rand
MOM DREAMED of moving to Alaska her whole life. Her mom, Pat, had read every James Oliver Curwood book she could get her hands on. The Far North, the word “Alaska,” resonated with romance and adventure for both of them.
Mom’s dad, Frank, was a footloose adventurer, but he had a lot of places to get to before he finally made it to Alaska. Mom and her two
brothers were perpetually the new kids at school—when they were near a school—as Frank took his kids, Romi, Randy, and Rory, and his wife, Pat, down every back road he could find.
Mom grew up following him on his remote hunting and trapping trails while her mom stayed at home, sometimes in nothing more than a tent, sewing all their clothes and making meals out of nothing. (Mom’s dad insisted on making meals out of the animals he trapped, like beaver and muskrat, that nobody but him could tolerate eating. It was hard enough smelling it.)
Barely out of her toddler years, Mom was delighted to find little piles of “raisins” on the trail left especially for her by the deer as she followed along in her dad’s big footprints. She was disillusioned when her father told her that the deer hadn’t left her edible gifts; the soft round pellets were something else entirely.
They crossed from Montana (where Mom was kissed by Dad under the bed when they were both five and she thought he’d made her pregnant) to the Great Lakes, and then back to Montana again where Mom married Dad when they were both twenty-one.
Frank worked in the US Merchant Marine on the Great Lakes whenever the family was hard up for money. He parked his wife and kids near Duluth, Minnesota, in 1957, the same year the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald was constructed, so large that it was within a foot of the maximum length allowed for passage through the almost-finished Saint Lawrence Seaway.
Later he would sail on “the big Fitz” years before she sank with all hands in a storm on Lake Superior in late 1975. I grew up singing along with Gordon Lightfoot’s ode to the disaster, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Pat tucked her children in bed and sang them an old folk song about the Titanic: “It was sad when the great ship went down / Husbands and wives and little children lost their lives / It was sad when the great ship went down.”
She had a large stock of these kinds of folk disaster songs from her own childhood. Her children thought nothing of how the lyrics might relate to their father, who was so often away on the big ships plying the stormy lakes. “I just remember a cozy feeling as I was tucked in and she sang,” Mom reminisces.