by Tara Neilson
It was a college-level, thorough lecture, and at the end of it she asked, “So, can anyone tell me what Robert Louis Stevenson wrote?”
Robin said dryly, with a touch of bitterness, “Too much.”
• • •
There were times when we spent days and days, week after week, trapped indoors when Southeast Alaska’s inclement weather (we received about 170 inches of precipitation annually) poured an endless deluge down, pounding on the tin roof and hitting the floathouse’s deck so hard it seemed to rain upward as well as downward.
To keep us all focused and quiet, Mom sat in the rocking chair and read Anne of Green Gables all the way through from beginning to end in one day, having to raise her voice over the rain, until her voice was hoarse. It was a good choice; even the boys were entranced by the too-imaginative and easily triggered girl who got herself into trouble every time she turned around.
Robin and Chris were young enough that they forgot what the sun was. When it finally made an appearance, after weeks of overcast and rain, it didn’t go well.
Robin was sitting on the floor near the big bay window playing and listening to one of the books on tape Mom put in to save her voice (we had The Time Machine, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Wind in the Willows, The Railway Children, The Lost World, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) when a beam of golden sunlight shot down and lit up the floor next to him.
“What is it? What is it?” he yelled, scooting away in panic. To Robin it was an extraterrestrial light beamed in from outer space—which, come to think of it, was exactly what it was.
Once its harmlessness was demonstrated he adapted quickly, and we all ran outside to embrace the return of the prodigal sun.
Mom, as the only adult amidst piping young voices demanding her attention, was driven stir crazy during the sunless shut-in days.
“Do not call me Mommy!” she finally snapped. “My name is Romi. Call me Romi!”
It felt a little strange at first, but again we quickly adapted—until she decided it was too creepy to hear her name being called all day long by kid voices and she told us to stop.
That was when she’d turn the VHF marine radio to the telephone channel so that she could listen to adult voices talking about adult concerns. Back then you could hear both sides of a conversation. Later, the person making the call was beeped out while you could still hear the one responding.
We soon tuned in for weekly calls by our favorite fishermen calling home. We got to know the names of all their family members, their pets, the happenings of their family life—the ups, the downs, and the crises. They never knew we existed, but they and their lives were our entertainment.
Robin (left) and Chris (right) playing with the burned and rusting cannery machinery.
Mom felt a particular need to hear the lower timbre of men’s voices. “It was an actual craving,” she remembers. “You can get starved for that lower male register. No wonder the pioneer women in sod houses went crazy listening to nothing but high-pitched prairie winds and kid voices all day, every day.”
During those indoor days, after reading from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, she would attempt to be the conventional homemaker in the wilderness. One time she determinedly decided that she was going to sew some cloth dolls for Megan and me, the way her mother had when Mom was little, and her mother’s mother before her.
Mom doubled the piece of white cotton, drew the outline of two dolls on it, cut them out, and sewed the two pieces along their cut edges, stuffing the dolls with cotton as she went. She used pastelcolored yarn (pinks and turquoise) for the hair and drew on the faces. We were impressed that she’d managed this much, but she insisted on finishing the dolls by sewing clothes onto them. She sewed and sewed, stabbing herself repeatedly, muttering, but finally declared she had pulled it off. With a flourish of triumph she lifted the doll to show us—only to discover that she’d sewed the doll to her shirt. She collapsed into hysterical laughter.
That was her last attempt at sewing anything, I think. The dolls remained uncompleted ghosts of dolls. They were a bit eerie and we weren’t sure what to make of them, but we kept them around as backups.
She was more successful with our paper dolls. Mom was an excellent artist and loved fashion. She designed stylish ensembles for our paper dolls (from Gone With the Wind, Dolly Dingle, Barbie) and colored them, complete with strategically placed tabs. We cut them out and had stacks of clothes with which to dress our paper dolls. She also drew and colored paper furniture and wall art for us to decorate their cardboard grocery box homes.
Mom was often more like a babysitter than a parent, playing board games, jacks, pickup sticks, and putting together jigsaw puzzles with us. She also taught us a multitude of card games, which came in handy since they helped us with our math studies, our one continuing weak spot as students. Cribbage in particular was a great game for teaching us to add and multiply by five.
Often the favorite time of our days was at night. Mom always read to us from one book or another and we loved to sit around, or lie on the floor, and listen to her read in the mellow glow of the kerosene lamplight, with the wood popping and shifting every now and then in the stove. The windows were pitch black all around us, with the wilderness beyond them, but it was warm and cozy inside as her voice took us on adventures far away and sometimes a long time ago.
Or, if she didn’t feel like reading, she played music and we’d all dance, trying to be as creative as possible in our moves. Megan had, by far, the strangest set of moves I have ever seen. Experimental ballet is creatively bankrupt in comparison. That scene with Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face where she dances in the Parisian club—her kooky moves look tame in comparison.
Megan’s idea of how to get her groove on was to jump in place and spank herself with both hands. She was right on the beat, I’ll give her that.
Fleetwood Mac was always a favorite on these nights, particularly their double album Tusk. The titular song’s beat was one Jamie liked to pound out on every surface, everywhere, at all hours of the day. Another song from that album, “Not That Funny,” was somehow interpreted by one of us kids—family lore says it was Megan, me, or Chris, but no one knows for sure—as “Stop that Farting,” which became the lyrics we loved to shout when that song came on.
Sometimes we didn’t dance. Instead, Mom would blow out the lamp, and we’d listen to an album on the cassette player in the dark, like Phil Collins’s Face Value album, and talk about anything under the sun (including trying to figure out what the lyrics to “In the Air Tonight” meant).
Everything was grist for the discussion: what we’d read, what we’d discovered, what we thought, what we thought the future would be like. Mom would let us talk far into the night until our voices dragged and we fell asleep.
We never grew out of this—right into adulthood, to this day, there’s nothing any of us like more than to sit around in the dark, listen to music, and talk about everything and anything with her. Dad tolerated this pastime when he was home, and he still does.
• • •
In addition to her random appearances at school, Mom roused herself from her book reverie with conscientious effort from time to time to have a Bible study with us.
To our delight, on nice days she took us out to the big smooth rock where Megan and I had one of our forts. Around the corner, heading toward the cannery side, were the mysterious grave markers.
We’d sit on the enormous rock with a view of the spacious bay and the faraway, logged mountains of Prince of Wales Island. In all that expanse we were the only beings who could talk about what we were looking at, what we were experiencing.
As Mom studied with us, geese honked in V-formation above us while humpback whales did their bubble feeding out in the bay surrounded by shrieking sea gulls. The snorts and Darth Vader breathing of sea lions carried to us across the water. In the deep forest behind us, squirrels chattered and songbirds joyously serenaded the sunshine.
“Do you think all o
f this and our ability to enjoy it could have happened by accident?” she asked.
We looked around and breathed in the familiar, musky tidal scent wedded to the earthy aroma of the sun-heated forest. The interconnection we felt between all living things around us was too complex to be accidental, we thought.
She gave us thought experiments to consider while we interrupted her with important, clarifying questions.
“What if you were lost in the woods,” she said, “and you came across a cabin stocked with food—”
“What kind of food?”
“The best kind of food,” Mom said. “So you come across a cabin full of the best foods, and firewood—”
“Already split?”
“Yes. And—”
“Already hauled and stacked?”
“Yes. The cabin is set up perfectly for human needs. Now when we step inside and look around and see how snug and well built it is—”
“Not built by Skip so the shakes on the roof don’t blow off,” one of us quipped and was rewarded with a gust of laughter from our siblings. Poor, well-intentioned, incompetent Skip, from The Wilderness Family movies, was often the butt of our jokes.
Mom laughed too. “Right. So do you think this cabin in the wilderness, with all of its provisions, just sort of sprouted out of the ground, possibly over a really long period of time, building itself from the ground up? Ask yourselves: did it happen by accident—or did someone build it?”
We thought that was the dumbest question ever and didn’t hesitate to share this opinion with her, our youthful shouts echoing off the rocks and bay.
She waved us down. “You might think that’s an obvious answer, but do you know that many people, very educated people, think that our planet home with all of its provisions to support life, happened by accident? They don’t believe that anyone designed it or built it.”
It was the first we’d heard of it. Our Calvert’s textbooks either hadn’t stated this outright, or had glossed over it in a way that had passed us by. The concept seemed like nonsense. We wondered if Mom had gotten her facts wrong. But she insisted that there were people who believed everything we saw around us had just… happened. Over many, many, many years.
But that wasn’t how time worked. We saw that in the ruins of a past civilization all around us. Instead of anything appearing and forming out of nothing into something new and sophisticated over a long period of time, everything decayed, broke down, and disappeared.
Later, when I thought about what she’d said, it made even less sense. For one thing, what about math? I loved math, however bad I was at it, because it was the language of the universe. How could life, the planets, the universe, time, happen by accident… and have a language to describe how it was formed, to define what laws regulated all of it, perfectly designed so that humans could interact with it and create their own designs based on it? How could laws be accidental? I couldn’t make it make sense no matter how I tried.
Although Mom shared her Bible understanding with us, she made it clear that we were to come to our own conclusions, that she wasn’t forcing her beliefs on us and we should do our own search to find out what we really believed.
This was how she’d been raised as a young child. Her parents weren’t religious, but they encouraged her when she showed an interest in spiritual things, to make a search.
The only time either of her parents attempted to step in was when Mom became fascinated with the theater and ritual of Catholicism. Her father begged her, with tears in his eyes, to go anywhere but to that religion.
He’d been brought up in a traditionally Catholic household, but when he left home at the age of twelve it was partly due to the Church, though he never went into specifics about what had happened. Her stalwart, stoic, and adventurous father crying made a big impression on her, but she looked into Catholicism anyway, and in the end he didn’t stop her.
Eventually, though, she felt it wasn’t what she was looking for, and she continued searching through a variety of different religions until she was a teenager and began to study with a group that was originally known as the International Bible Students Association. Their goal was to search the scriptures to find out what was actual Bible truth and where manmade traditions had infiltrated Christianity. They were determined to discard the latter and live in accord with the former in order to worship God the way the Bible instructed. (They later adopted the name Jehovah’s Witnesses.)
Soon enough Mom was amazed and excited, she told us, to learn that some things that she’d always taken for granted, such as that Jesus died on a cross, that Jesus was God and a part of the Trinity, that a fiery hell for sinners existed … were all human traditions rooted in pagan beliefs, rather than supported by the Bible. She told her friends and cousins, “Did you know Jesus didn’t die on a cross? That the word in the Bible for what he died on means an upright stake, not a cross? That the cross was actually a pagan symbol?”
More astonishing for her was how the holidays, even those that were supposedly in celebration of Christ, were not scriptural but had been adopted—with all their child-appealing characteristics (chocolate rabbits and dyed boiled eggs to celebrate Christ’s resurrection; a jolly fat man coming down a chimney to leave presents under a decorated tree to celebrate Christ’s birth)—by early Christendom in order to win over superstitious pagans as converts.
Mom, always excited to learn, absorbed these in-depth studies. Her intellectually curious parents were intrigued as well, and before long they were studying too. In short order, the whole family was studying.
However, by the time Mom and her brothers had all grown up and everyone ended up in Alaska, Mom was the only one still studying the Bible and learning new things that contradicted manmade doctrines. These she shared with her kids out on a rock overlooking an Alaskan bay, where the humpback whales breached and bald eagles flew.
• • •
Dad had no objections to our studying the Bible. He’d been brought up Lutheran, but in his own way he’d done a search too, questioning Church traditions that contradicted or didn’t follow up on the very Scriptures the adults in charge had him learn. These adults had no specific answers for him, telling him not to ask questions and to just have faith—a response that didn’t work for him.
After Vietnam he was so deeply angry and bitter that there was no way the Church he’d grown up with and its conventional faith and lack of answers could reach him. He did study, occasionally, in Montana, with the Witnesses, and he never opposed Mom’s studies with us kids in the wilderness. In fact, there were times when he did some of the Bible reading during our studies.
Mom didn’t celebrate the holidays because of their unscriptural origins, and Dad dropped them without any resistance or interest.
Since we had no immediate neighbors and didn’t see anyone else celebrating the holidays, except in movies (which always felt somewhat mythical—not to mention a bit dumb, like when the Wilderness Family attached burning candles to the fir tree they’d dragged inside their log cabin, a disaster waiting to happen), we didn’t miss Christmas, Easter, or any of the holidays.
Mom made sure we wouldn’t feel deprived by coming up with an annual Family Presents Day. (In addition, Dad’s mother, our Grandma Helen in Montana, sent us a huge care package every winter full of goodies, books, and clothes.)
Mom would let us pore over the Sears & Roebuck catalog and pick what toys and clothes we wanted most, and over a period of months she’d order them. The boxes would pile up to the point that they had to be stored in the wanigan. We would stand on tiptoes and peer in the four-paned windows of our former school and drool over the huge pile of booty.
Mom’s plan was always to have the local kids from Meyers Chuck come over. She’d make a lot of treats, including cake, and have presents ready for us and the other kids, without obligation for them to bring any presents. And then the boxes would all be opened.
It never worked out as planned. For one reason or another Mom would inevitab
ly, out of the blue, impulsively decide that it was time to open the presents. Forget about the whole party idea. She’d send us over to the wanigan to haul back all the boxes and then we’d tear into them, shrieking and handing the right ones to each other.
Megan was more into dolls than I was, so she ended up with all sorts of Barbie doll accessories (a bright yellow RV, a red Camaro, a two-story house) and another dollhouse with a tiny doll family. I, on the other hand, scored big time with Breyer model horses, especially the ones that were accompanied by books (Misty of Chincoteague, Smoky the Cow Horse, Black Beauty). We searched the catalog for stables and corrals to buy, but couldn’t find any. As a surprise for me, Mom asked Dad to build them and he did, much better made than any we could have bought.
The boys got Fisher-Price toys: a little airport set, a train set, a bus, a school, and a barn complete with animals. They also got Hot Wheel cars, cowboy hats, toolboxes, and—the bane of all our existence—cap guns. Robin remembers also getting a toy guitar. Chris remembers a big brown teddy bear and a pocket knife with an eagle on it.
Jamie, nearly a teenager, focused on music. He was the first one to get a boom box and he wound up with an enviable library of cassette albums. He’d take the boom box up to his fort on the big cedar stump behind the floathouse and listen to it for hours, the sound of Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack weaving through the Alaskan forest.
• • •
Mom was always writing. Either in bound journals or on loose paper, like the yellow paper she wrote “The Wanigan Kids” on. She’d leave the house to write so she could concentrate without five kids (and later, half a million dogs—or so it seemed) distracting her with their nonstop cacophony.
On nice days she’d find a rock or log to perch on with a great view, or later when we lived on the cannery side, she’d find a nook somewhere next to the golden, tumbling creek, and we’d see her there writing furiously away, hardly ever looking up, and know we weren’t to interrupt her. For a wonder, we didn’t.