by Tara Neilson
He kept on growing, and growing beyond me, and away from me, but I always liked him as much as anyone I ever met, and more than most.
We would still meet and talk sometimes and we’d tell each other that we loved each other. We’d argue sometimes and he’d tell me not to worry.
His family meant a lot to him,—everything, I think. I was his past. His memories. I stored them for him so that he could say: “remember when?”… And have it all vividly come back in a second. Something we remembered together (which always came back in those conversations) was about a time on the road (moving again, “new kid” again) when we stopped at a gas station.
There was a group of kids our age there, on bikes, they’d known each other since birth, you could just tell. They got soda pops out of a cooler and laughed and joked with the old man there fixing a tire. Small town life. We always remembered them together, and the old man fixing that tire. And we both felt it so odd that they meant something to us when they never even noticed us.
Memories that only he and I shared. I could say to someone else… “once I saw a group of kids on bikes drinking pop and an old man fixing a tire.” What would it mean? Nothing. Only he knew what it was—that feeling.
And he was loyal. So loyal. He would have died for us or killed for us. No question. I believe that.
He did die, when he was still young. More than twice his age when he died is what I am now. He always said … “don’t worry”…
I don’t have to now. He’s safe—forever.
• • •
For myself, I can’t help but think of how strange the world is, how terrible it can be.
I think of Rand as a brown-haired, blue-eyed little boy, feeling safe, warm, and cozy in a lamplit bedroom as his mom tucked him and his siblings in while she sang, “How sad it was when that great ship went down, how sad it was….”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I stood in front of it and my whole childhood emerged in front of my eyes.”
—Megan, about her first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gazing at a Goya painting
THERE’S A scene in The Wilderness Family where the Robinsons are working at building their log cabin home next to an alpine lake when they hear a plane.
The Robinsons drop everything to run toward the shoreline as the plane drops something in the lake. Skip paddles out in the canoe and picks it up while the kids and Pat hop with excitement on shore. They call out to him, asking who it’s from.
As he paddles back, Skip tells them it’s from the school board.
“Oh, no,” Toby groans.
“How’d they ever find us out here?” Jenny mourns.
Skip smirks so hard it almost flips the canoe. “I squealed.”
“Oh, Dad!”
My siblings and I never understood it. When our huge boxes of school supplies arrived through a Southeast Islands School District (SISD) homeschooling program, all of it belonging to no one but us kids—separate packages for each kid, categorized by grade—we were beyond thrilled.
We’d rip the boxes open and gloat over the tablets, pencils, loose paper, drawing paper, construction paper, file folders, rulers, clay, crayons, finger paint, pipe cleaners, glue, tape, stapler and staples—even the paper clips filled us with possessive awe. It was all ours!
But, best of all, for kids whose mother had instilled in them a love for the printed and bound word, there were entire boxes filled with nothing but books.
We sat down on the floor at the open boxes and started reading. The course was put together by Calvert’s Correspondence School with books that had been written for my parents’ generation. They were old fashioned with an emphasis on the classics and on history, but we didn’t care.
We read everything. No, we devoured it. Four-hundred-page history books, illustrated world architecture books, workbooks. I read the math books, hunting through the pages to find the word problems.
I always disliked them as math problems, but I loved reading about the kids in the broader world doing exotic things like boarding trains at different times to go to different locations. I liked imagining a world where you could travel by land over great distances and meet people wherever you went. And I loved it when Mary, Pete, or Bill would drive to the grocery store to help their mom buy varying amounts of oranges, bananas, and apples. We, by contrast, got our fruit once a month from the Fruit Boat that stopped in Meyers Chuck (it also sold shoes, and various other items).
I could picture these strange things because I’d once lived in that world before I was six, but my little brothers could not. When problems or stories involved farms, for instance, they were clueless. When asked where milk came from, they insisted that it wasn’t from some weird, fat-deer animal they’d never seen before, and it certainly did not come in liquid form! That was laughable. It came in a box, all nice and dry, and you added water to it to make it liquid, according to taste. A much more humane arrangement than squeezing it out of some poor animal.
I scoured the science textbooks for each grade searching for the cure, or at least a management program, for Human Spontaneous Combustion. And was always dejected when I failed to find it. I couldn’t help feeling that whoever had written these science books were asking all the wrong questions, never getting to the really important things in life.
There were fiction classics like Robinson Crusoe, whose titular character I found it easy to relate to, having no problem picturing a shipwrecked person being forced to live all alone off the land. And then there was Lorna Doone with its dialect-heavy, seventeenth-century derring-do on the dark moors of England. I loved to sneak it out from under my covers where I’d hidden it and read by the dim glow of the lantern when everyone was sleeping.
On these nights, it felt as if the cannery workers, existing in a shadowy, temporal mirage, were reading over my shoulder. By some curious alchemy, the arbitrary markings on white paper transmuted in my brain into a country on the other side of the continent and an entire ocean, filled with people as alive as I was, engaged in remarkable adventures that I was allowed to ride along with.
Another book that took us to faraway places and times in a particularly visual way was a textbook on art history that was accompanied by a packet of cards with famous paintings on them by artists such as Da Vinci, Goya, and Van Gogh, among many, many others.
We pored over these paintings, swept away into history, meeting people from long ago who’d lived in silks, velvets, and lace, imagining their inner and outer worlds by any little clue in colors and brushstrokes. Megan, in particular, who had a deep love for anything art related, lost herself in these photographs of the works of great masters.
She’d sit at the new school’s table, her chair resting on the brown braided rug on top of the black tarpaper floor, and go through them slowly. The barrel stove crackled behind her and to the right the plexiglass windows provided a view of the raw wilderness, the unbroken forest, and the bay beyond where sea lions snorted and whales spouted. Inside her mind, she was touring Gauguin’s Tahiti and Goya’s sixteenth-century Spain.
We read all the books within weeks of getting them, and then read each other’s, and then reread our favorites. When it came time to send in reports, workbook pages, and tests, nothing could have been simpler. We knew all the answers (excluding the dreaded subject Arithmetic).
For a while, before Rand was lost, we continued to do school in the wanigan with Linda teaching us. We loved her way of teaching. She had such infectious enthusiasm for everything, and could be counted on to laugh at our every wisecrack, no matter how lame.
She made allowances for our fluid wilderness idea of time to a certain extent, not being too strict about how long each class ran. She was flexible and allowed us, if a particular lesson was exciting, to go past the allotted time with it, figuring to make up on the next lesson the next day. For the most part, she had eager, compliant students.
There was one exception: Robin. After his experiences with Muriel, his attitude toward school was
, to say the least, skeptical. He made a point of letting everyone know he’d learn on his own terms or not at all. While everyone else managed more often than not to get to the wanigan on time for school, he was always late.
Linda came up with the inspiration of promising a cupcake to anyone who made it to school on time.
Despite his deep reverence for all things frosted, Robin was not to be bribed out of his hard-won ascendancy over adult rule.
While us older kids got there on time and munched on our cupcakes, the kindergartner strolled in pointedly well after school was scheduled to begin. Linda took one look at Robin as he sat at his desk glooming at the frosting mustaches on his sibling’s faces and caved.
“How,” she recalls, “could we all eat cupcakes in front of him?” She excuses her weakness by saying, “He was so darn cute!”
He was never on time for school, so far as I know, and ensured that the rest of us were tardy in later years.
• • •
One weekend we watched Dad use a mallet and froe to cut a huge pile of red cedar shakes. The next weekend he came home from his logging job with the skiff full of lumber, rolls of tarpaper, rectangles of plexiglass, boxes of different-sized nails, and other building supplies, with Lance seated on top of it all.
We kids and Mom helped haul the lumber and other supplies up to the building site above the beach to the right of the floathouse: a row of foundation pilings that once supported a platform where the old cannery barges used to winter over. We did minor fetching and carrying, but for the most part we stood by and watched as, with businesslike efficiency, Dad and Lance put up our new schoolhouse in two days.
A short flight of stairs near the floathouse went up to the deck, and the floor went down quickly on top of it. The wall frames made of two-by-fours were nailed briskly together and pushed up, and then the low ceiling joists and rafters went up, held together by a sixteen-foot long ridge beam. Once the sturdy skeleton was in place, the floor and walls were wrapped with tarpaper, the thud of the staple gun ringing out throughout the afternoon.
When Dad took on any task, he became a machine. I felt a sneaking pity for Lance, though jobs were scarce and he was getting paid. I knew from experience how hard it was keeping up with Dad, who gave no quarter to youngsters of any age. He seemed unaware that his bruising pace would be difficult for other experienced men his age to keep up with, let alone a teenager or five under-teens. His dark impatience with any “slackness” was something to be avoided at all costs.
The next day the roof and walls were sided with the shakes, and the plexiglass was fitted into the holes left for the windows. Dad had brought home with him several large sheets of thick white cardboard with silvery backing that he nailed up for a ceiling.
We struggled with a large, oval braided rug, lugging it awkwardly up the new steps, and laid it down on the tarpaper floor in the center of the open, sixteen-by-sixteen-foot room. On top of the rug we settled a veneer-over-particleboard oval table. Against the windowless back wall that faced the forest we hung the chalkboard and bulletin board that SISD had sent out to us. They’d also sent out a teacher’s desk and a filing cabinet. Both of those were fitted in at the back wall, near the door.
The wall opposite the door, with a single window in it, had a long, waist-high bookcase painted white. Jamie’s desk, a “skookum-built” desk that Dad had crafted when he was sixteen, was set against the front wall, near one end of the bookcase.
The most massive piece of furniture that took much angst and effort to move out of the floathouse and up into the woods, up the stairs and maneuvered through the door into the school, was the old wooden counter that had come with the floathouse and that Mom no longer wanted to have in there, since it took up so much space.
We finally fitted it against the front wall, with the sink—which was never hooked up to running water after it left the floathouse—under the two plexiglass windows that had a view of our fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel for the generator and beyond that the beach and bay.
We’re standing in front of the homeschool Dad and Lance built. Left to right: Chris, Linda, Robin, Megan, me, and Jamie.
Mom painted “Boomin’ Union Bay School” in rainbow-hued letters on a white-painted board and hung it outside beneath the front windows. It was an ironic salute to the original idea of several families moving to the Union Bay cannery site and making it “boom.”
Instead of a bustling community filled with children, there were the five of us kids, and Linda as our teacher.
• • •
Since she didn’t want to live all alone by herself in the ruins, on the other side of the property from us in the old cabin, it was decided that Linda would move her belongings into the wanigan and live across from us in the small inlet.
The new school felt much more official than the wanigan, since it had been built for the specific purpose of being a school. However, it was still heated by a barrel wood stove—the plexiglass windows fogged up fiercely when the fire was first started on cold winter mornings—so we continued to haul and stack firewood for PE.
Since we older kids had already done most of the year’s work before the first day of school began, Linda felt free to include wilderness skills in her curriculum. This reached Robin’s heart immediately. She’d worked a trapline with Rand and taught Robin how to set the smallest trap, bait it, and catch a mink, and then how to skin it and dry the skin.
Meanwhile, she taught Megan and me—Jamie picked it up as well—how to crochet potholders, hats, and purses. Mom was in firm retreat from all the sewing arts (Dad had taught us how to sew with a thread and needle, a skill he’d learned in the Army), so if it hadn’t been for Linda we wouldn’t have learned the skill of turning yarn into useful, decorative objects.
She had a wonderful, wholehearted laugh that made her bend over in helpless hilarity and there was nothing we loved more than to trigger it. One morning, relying on her sense of the absurd that was not untouched by a twisted appreciation for the macabre, Jamie set the school up to look like a horrific massacre had occurred.
Using a liberal hand with a bottle of ketchup and putting to ghoulish use his skills in weapon making and noose tying, he arranged for his siblings to sprawl in various death poses, oozing ketchup onto table and desks and counter.
We were giggling under our breath and trying to maintain our grotesque poses when we heard Linda’s footsteps up the stairs and across the deck. Holding our collective breath, we heard the door open.
There was a brief pause as she took in the scene in front of her. Then she doubled over and there was that laugh.
One of the things that amused her the most was our reaction to the sound of a floatplane. It was, without fail, SISD’s plane with Tom Aubertine on board, the man who visited all the remote-lying areas under the school district’s oversight. It was his job to keep track of everyone’s progress and troubleshoot any problems.
We’d become more than a little feral by then, rarely bothering to brush our hair, tidy our communal mess of a bedroom (which Linda took to calling the Baaack Room in spectral tones), or do any other chores around the house. Mom, after Rand’s loss, didn’t enforce any of these things, relying on the threat of Dad’s weekend visits to have the place somewhat decent looking when he came home.
But when we heard that distinct airplane engine sound different from a boat, we’d yell “Plane!” and rush around getting the place in shape for a Town Visitor. We looked on it as a variation of the bear drill—there was at least as much terror and exhilaration involved. Maybe more, because unlike the bear drill when we never really had a furry monster bearing down on us, Tom Aubertine was going to make an appearance.
Within the first moment of hearing the distant plane to when its pontoons splashed down in our little bay, we’d tear around the house shoving everything out of sight. Dirty dishes went in the oven, clothes and books under the couch, toys flung into the growing pile on the Baaack Room’s floor with the door heaved against and
pounded on until it could be closed.
Mom would tame our wild locks, scrub our hands and faces, and shove us into the cleanest clothes available so that we’d meet Tom Aubertine with innocent, shining faces and studious eyes when he’d finally climb out of the plane and up the beach to the floathouse.
He was the only regular visitor we had, and I remember him as being self-contained and encouraging in a low-key, observant way. He certainly never put any pressure on us kids, maybe because we were eager students and it was obvious we could easily handle the workload.
Tom Aubertine insisted at the end of every visit that if we had any problems we were to let him know and he’d see what he could do to resolve the issue. But the one thing he couldn’t help us with was the content of the textbooks.
These books were written for a post-WWII world, so perhaps it was understandable that they propagandized war as noble, if it was being fought for freedom, which all “good wars” were. One book quoted the poem “War Song” by Thomas Moore (1779–1852):
No, Freedom! Whose smile we shall never resign,
Go, tell our invaders, the Danes, ‘Tis sweeter to bleed for an age at thy shrine, Than to sleep but a moment in chains.
But I wasn’t buying it. Not with the specter of Vietnam hanging around my dad. I had constant post-traumatic proof of what war did to men and got passed along to their families. Dad was in chains to it for more than a moment, as were all of us with him.
One book of legends promoted the tales of knights and chivalry of old. Linda gave me a book report to do on one of the chapters, on sports that knights played. She gave me the assignment verbally rather than wrote it down, and didn’t indicate that it was from this book.