by Tara Neilson
Pat (Priscilla) had been a semi-professional singer with two of her sisters, Ginny (Virginia) and Babe (Nila). They’d been the Irwin Sisters and had sung for weddings and local events, including in big hotels to keep the Eastern tourists happily entertained during the summer season. They even took second place in an Amateur Hour talent show.
Despite Pat’s bona fides as a singer, Mom, in the way of all cool-obsessed teenagers, cringed when her mother sang the songs from her Sixties rock ’n’ roll records, putting that way-back 1930s warble on them. “Now I’d probably love to hear them sung that way,” Mom says wistfully.
When Frank was briefly back home, on one unforgettable outing he took his kids to visit one of the boats he worked on. They climbed the endless ladder to get to the deck of the freighter and were shown all over the ship, including down in the engine room where the enormous engines made a lasting impression. Mom doesn’t remember which ship it was, but I like to imagine that it was the Edmund Fitzgerald.
And all the time, Mom badgered her dad, from one side of the continent to the other, to take them north to Alaska.
Her chagrin was great when he finally decided to make the move to the Last Frontier with Pat, Rory, and the newest addition to the family, Lance, in tow—by then she was married and had two kids, Jamie and me.
• • •
“Rather than waste time at the dock untying, we just cut the ropes and headed out. We [made] it around the point, but were rolling really bad… we did most of our searching from Lemly Rock to about a third of the way into Union Bay. We [had] to come back to calmer waters [because] it was really severe, but it seems to me we didn’t come back to port for 3 days… maybe we did refuel and get food, but I thought we were out there 3 days along with Bob Hunley, Rod Maddox and a few other fishermen and Search & Rescue.”
—Lance, in an e-mail about the night of February 13, 1981
• • •
Rand was married as well, to a tall, blonde young woman named Jan, not yet in her twenties, and they had a baby son, Shawn, whom Rand adored. Some of the time they lived with my parents, when they all lived in Anacortes, Washington. Jamie, Shawn, and I were born there, in that order.
Mom and Rand had grown up inseparable as children, best friends in the way siblings could be when they lived so remotely that the humans they interacted with the most consistently were family members. She and Rand did everything together, shared all the same 1950s kid adventures, shared the same imagination even.
“One time,” Mom reminisces, “when we were little, Rand and I got up early to surprise our mom by making her breakfast. We decided to jazz things up with food coloring, but…” She laughs ruefully. “Even we couldn’t eat the gray-green pancakes.”
After separations of teen years and marriage, they were still close. Their enthusiasm for music and art kept them tight, and they could talk for hours about anything and everything under the sun, sometimes agreeing, sometimes arguing, but always laughing. Their entire family had a well-developed love of the absurd.
Rand didn’t reach his full height of six feet until he was in his twenties. He grew up small and was the oldest son of a six-foot-four, larger-than-life father who personified hypermasculine adventure, a man who had run away from home at the age of twelve, rode the rails as a teenager, survived the waning days of the Wild Old West (once almost hanged, mistakenly, as a horse thief), and had a career as a boxer who had never lost a bout, before being shipped off to fight in World War II. As such, Rand always seemed to feel like he had to prove himself and went out of his way to dive into reckless, law-defying, life-endangering pastimes.
One time Rand and a friend drove Mom to a grocery store to do her shopping. She came out a little while later with her bags in her arms to hear Rand yelling at her.
“Get in the car, Romi! Get in the car now!!”
When she stopped and stared at him uncertainly, he jumped out and tossed her into the back seat. Her groceries went flying, landing on the backseat and floor of the car. She was only partly in, her legs sticking out with the door hitting them when he jumped back in and gunned it.
He and his friend laughed maniacally while she yelled at them. When she sat up and looked out the back, she saw that they’d stolen an entire tub of cabbages that had been on display in front of the store and shoved them into the trunk. The trunk door was open and the pilfered cabbages were bouncing out and rolling all down the street behind them.
“You never knew what to expect,” she says after every Rand story.
He wound up spending much of his free time hanging out in jail. The local cops adored him, as most people did, and left the jail door open for him to come and go as he needed. It was no secret that Rand was intensely loyal to his friends—some of whom did not deserve, and did not return, such loyalty—and he took the rap for whatever crimes they all got up to.
A few years after Frank moved his family to Alaska, he came back down to show Rand the way up from Anacortes. Jan and Shawn flew to Ketchikan while Rand brought up his first fishing boat, the Janet One. He and his dad made it safely, but it was a rough trip, a hint of the kind of weather Rand would be dealing with when he’d make a career for himself as an Alaskan commercial troller.
• • •
“I looked at Gary and we both just knew it was time to let go. That there was no point in continuing.”
—Mom, about the night of February 13, 1981
• • •
At the same time Frank and Rand made the trip by sea, my parents attempted to reach Alaska by land, via the Al-Can Highway (as the Alaska Highway was then called). Dad built a live-aboard van for the occasion that Mom painted in the typical garish Seventies colors of lime green, orange, gold, and brown, and christened it “the Gypsy Wagon.”
They made it as far as Boston Bar, British Columbia, when the van broke down. They had no money, but Dad was hired by a local garage owner who asked no questions about a visa until Dad had worked there for a few months. By then the garage owner knew what kind of an employee he had and was eager to keep him. He pushed Dad to get a visa and live in Canada permanently.
Mom and Dad had fallen in love with Canadians and the country, so they agreed to give up Alaska. Dad crossed the border back into the US with Mom, Jamie, and me, and visited the office that handled visas. The officious bureaucrat behind the desk had a lot on his mind, and at the sight of my Bohemian-looking parents he decided to unload it on them.
“We’re tired of all the lazy, no-account draft dodgers flooding our country,” he told them. “We don’t need any more.”
Dad said, “I’m no draft dodger. I can show you my discharge papers.”
The bureaucrat wasn’t interested. “You draft dodgers skip out on your own country. You show no loyalty to it. And you expect us to believe you’d be loyal to our country? We don’t need your kind.” He went on in this vein and ignored everything Dad had to say about his Vietnam service. Dismissed it. As if all that he’d lived and lost meant nothing. Deliberately refused to believe in it.
Until Dad lunged across the desk and grabbed him by the throat.
Mom, who had never seen, and would never again see, Dad lay hands on anyone in anger, never forgot it. The bureaucrat didn’t either. Once Dad was persuaded to let him go, the red-faced man ordered them out of Canada immediately, to leave their belongings and get back to the US where they belonged.
Mom pleaded with him—everything they owned was in the Gypsy Wagon. She wasn’t someone who cried in the face of adversity, but unbeknownst to her she was coming down with tonsillitis, and under the stress of the moment she burst into tears. The man became uncomfortable enough by her tears to relent and say that they could get their belongings, but then they had to leave Canada.
It was several years after this before they finally made it to Alaska.
In the interim, before my parents made the move, Mom periodically visited her family. I remember my first impression of Ketchikan, when Mom visited Rand and Jan and Shawn who
were already living there.
The city was like nothing I’d ever seen before.
Ketchikan, Alaska, was bathed in extreme, late northern light during an endless evening that turned everything gold. The air tasted of things I couldn’t name, but it made everything more vivid than it already was.
The streets were narrow—some of them were wooden, some went right over the water built on telephone pole stilts, and some climbed sheer, forested hillsides with barely a pause between hills. Everything was raw and wood-frame and still retained the frontier flavor. There were totem poles right in the middle of the downtown shopping area.
I felt like I was visiting a different world.
• • •
“I offered to go with him to move the boat but he said no and he would be right back…After a bit I knew in my ‘knower’ that things were not good. I mean, I really knew!”
—Linda, in an e-mail about the night of February 13, 1981
• • •
I loved Rand. I loved everything about him, especially the way he was with Shawn. I was in awe of a father who couldn’t get enough close time with his boy, who loved to hold him, ruffle his blond hair, joke with him, and get right down on the floor to play with him.
Rand had enough love to go around and delighted in spending time with his nephew and nieces. He loved children and children loved him back. In fact, I don’t know anyone who didn’t love Rand. He had the gift of moving between a child’s world and an adult’s world effortlessly, perhaps because he never entirely grew up.
In an adult setting he could be a quiet observer, or he could be a dynamic opinion giver. He had a soft, low voice, with a hint of the Deep South in it that was a source of bafflement to his family, since he’d never spent any time in the South.
Like everyone in his family, discussions that could turn into all-in arguments were a staple of life for him. He could be persuaded to a different point of view, but never bulldozed. His mom was known to try, grinding relentlessly on one opinion to the point where he felt the need to bang his head on the table and plead to her, “Just shoot me. Either stop talking, or just shoot me!”
Rand was artistically gifted, but he was modest about it. I was impressed with everything I saw of his, including a painting of a sailboat and an odd ink drawing on a conch of a Gollum-looking scholar surrounded by scrolls and books, writing on a scroll with a feather pen. It was fantasy and realism strikingly wedded, and I always longed to see more images drawn in this style.
He wasn’t without vices, typical to the time and place. He swore, smoked, and drank—I remember him with a cigarette sticking out of his dark beard and a beer in the mitt that was his left hand. In an unguarded moment, when Dad and Rand had worked in the shingle mill in Anacortes, Washington, Rand had lost all the fingers and the tip of his thumb to the saw and was rushed to the hospital. Dad looked for the missing fingers to have them sewn back on, but they couldn’t be found.
I’d never, in my childhood, known him to have fingers on both hands, so I accepted their absence as normal to him. It was a part of who he was, like his beard or his uniquely helpless laugh. And it certainly didn’t stop him from doing anything he felt like doing. He lived the remote fishing and trapping Alaskan life as fully as anyone around him.
Tolerance came in extremes for him. In a friend he could tolerate almost any behavior, no matter how much hot water it landed him in. He could accept other people’s opinions, even of himself, and he could—somewhat dryly and with satirical enjoyment—understand people’s prejudices and self-deceptions.
But there was one thing he absolutely could not tolerate, and that was boredom. Boredom was easily worse than death to him, and he needed constant amusement. Because he rewarded his entertainers with enthusiasm and his helpless, infectious laughter, people loved to entertain him.
The times I remember my dad being his most playful, laughing the most, and really enjoying himself were when Rand was there egging him on.
Like the time Rand urged Dad to get on the radio and prank everyone in Meyers Chuck. The entire area during this time communicated by CB radio. Dad’s handle was a nickname he’d picked up in the Army: “The Walrus.”
Disguising his voice, Dad keyed the mic and said he was captain of a one-hundred-foot vessel named the Sea Cucumber and he was in rough weather with engine trouble. We all provided sound effects, rattling aluminum flashing for thunder, banging on a bell to mimic the sound of a ledge marker in rough weather, not to mention throwing in a few lonely sea gull cries for color. Dad asked if there was room at the village dock for his boat.
The locals got on the radio to confer with each other and discuss which boats to move to make room for the huge Sea Cucumber.
Grandma Pat recognized Rand’s laughter in the background when Dad was talking. She got on the radio. Donning a Texan twang and calling herself “Clam Digger,” she pushed Dad to more and more ridiculous heights of fantasy. At last, the locals caught on—fortunately, before they went out into the night to move the boats around at the dock. All but the most humorless got a laugh out of it.
• • •
“I was shouting his name, but it wasn’t ‘Rand.’ I was yelling: ‘Randy, Randy, where are you?’ In my mind he’d reverted to being a little boy.”
—Mom, about the night of February 13, 1981
• • •
My parents also liked to prank Rand, like the time he and his girlfriend Linda came over for dinner and they had me greet them. My parents combed my waist-length, straight blonde hair over my face and had me stand in my boots facing the wrong way.
When I didn’t respond to their greetings, Rand shook my shoulder, then walked around me and realized what we’d done. He loved it. When music was put on, “Slow Dancing” by Johnny Rivers, he took me by the hand and slow danced with me—with my hair out of my face and my boots on right. I thought he was the most amazing man who’d ever lived.
When we moved to the cannery, Rand had been divorced from Jan for a few years and was living with Linda, who’d grown up in San Francisco.
I remember when I, along with the rest of Rand’s family, first met Linda. We were all at Grandpa Frank’s and Grandma Pat’s house in Meyers Chuck, the adults seated at the round table with its shiny yellow plywood top over a large barrel, in the captain-style wooden chairs circled around it. The tall Aladdin lamp in the center shed golden light on the shelves of books on one side and bounced off the black paned window on another side.
Cigarette smoke from my grandparents’ ashtrays floated toward the peeled log beams overhead, as did the coffee and hot chocolate steam rising from brown-and-gold mugs placed near elbows. The adults were wondering what Rand’s girlfriend was like, how to handle their sense of loyalty to Jan while respecting Rand’s right to move on, not to mention how a woman from a sophisticated city like San Francisco would take to living on a cramped fishing boat.
A few minutes later Rand pushed open the back door and strolled over the hallway’s gold and cream linoleum floor. Following him was a slender woman wearing a black turtleneck under her jacket, her long brown hair held back in a thick, shining braid. I thought she was striking, with a sense of style and a charisma that complemented Rand’s casual dynamism.
Within minutes of being introduced to Linda Miller (no relation to Rory’s wife, formerly Marion Miller), Rand’s family found out she enjoyed the same love of the absurd that they did, and once they all started laughing together at something ridiculous and self-deprecating she shared, she was a permanent member of the family.
When Mom no longer had a tutor for the five of us kids, Linda said she would take on the job, against Rand’s advice to “never work for family or friends.” But she insisted, so they moved into the cabin on the creek side. He kept his new boat the Wood Duck, a thirty-twofoot wooden trolling boat built in 1964, in a tiny bight to the north of us.
• • •
“When we found the skiff, you could see the painter had been cut with a knife…
we figured the way it was blowing and considering his only having one hand, the skiff was probably instantly snatched away.”
—Lance, in an e-mail about the night of February 13, 1981
• • •
I was the first of us kids to wake up that night when I heard my parents talking on the CB radio. The wind was roaring through the trees, pummeling the house and making the panes in the window near my bed rattle. It screamed under the eaves at a pitch that sounded like nothing earthly.
The glow of the lantern hanging from the ceiling didn’t reassure me as it usually did whenever I woke up during a storm. I crept out of bed and found my parents in the front room.
It wasn’t until I heard his voice coming through the speaker that I realized Rand was out there in the storm. He hadn’t been able to settle in for the night, thinking about his boat moored in a tiny bight a quarter mile to the north. Mom and Dad had spent the evening at the cabin with Rand and Linda, sharing beers and opinions about which version of the song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” was the best.
Mom insisted that the Hollies had the best version, but Dad was a staunch Neil Diamond fan and wouldn’t back down. Rand sided with him, as he tended to do, even if he might have agreed with Mom. He had a deep vein of sympathy for how Dad had been treated after his return from Vietnam. “You’re right, buddy,” he said, almost gently. “Diamond’s got the best version.”
As the evening wore on and the wind continued to pick up, Rand became worried about the growing storm and decided to take the Wood Duck to a different anchorage.
He didn’t get far before he ran into trouble. The seas were massive with hissing white combers on top, and the little Wood Duck was taking wave after wave over the bow. The seawater exploded so continuously against the small wheelhouse’s windows that he could barely see which way to steer to keep the bow pointed into the waves. If he was turned broadside to the waves, he was certain the boat would either swamp or capsize.