Raised in Ruins

by Tara Neilson

  Roman Caesars never felt more triumphant.

  • • •

  Dad’s response to the threat of famine was to plant a vegetable garden. He marked one out in front of the school where he’d turned up some good soil. It was where the cannery had built its barge storage platforms.

  The problem was that in the intervening forty years the area had become a virtual jungle of seedlings growing close together, as always happened in any previously cleared space in the rainforest. If that wasn’t bad enough, there was plenty of vine-like, entangling salal brush and prickly, painful devil’s club.

  It looked like an impossible task. And that was before taking into account the way Dad never could bear to spread any project out over more than one weekend. When he planned to do something, he planned to get it done before he returned to work.

  Which meant that he was out there from dawn till dusk with the chainsaw and ax, cutting down every tree, seedling, and weed in the plot. Which likewise meant that we were out there from dawn till dusk, fighting off the swarms of bugs as we grabbed branches, small trees, and piles of brush, and hauled it all down the beach to be burned.

  Despite how hardened we were to physical work and play, that weekend stands out as some of the hardest work of my entire life. There were almost no rests. We were so tired we drooped over our dinner at night, barely able to chew. Crawling into bed was the best thing ever. But then I’d lie there, aching in every body part, wondering if my back was broken, wondering if I was going to die. I’d fall asleep suddenly, dreamlessly, and sleep the whole night through, only to be woken by Dad, driving us back out to work on the garden.

  He didn’t bother to pause for lunch, so Mom brought us sandwiches and we at them standing, with hands sticky from tree sap, nails clogged with dirt, clothes smelling of brush smoke. And then went right back at it. Even after the rectangle of land was cleared we weren’t done. Dad turned over the soil and we picked out every stone and root he turned up. We spent hours in a bent over position until it felt like we’d freeze that way.

  Finally we were allowed to stand (still hunched) and watch, bug bitten, muscles burning and trembling, completely exhausted, while he methodically planted the seeds in long rows. He finished off the weekend labor by building a fence made of posts and fishing net to keep out the deer and—he hoped—the two-legged predators that bore his genes.

  Some hope. After having worked that hard for the rewards, we never hesitated to help ourselves, though we had to be cautious when he was home. There was more of a thrill to it—the rutabagas tasted that much more crunchy and delicious—when we managed to snitch them right under his nose. And we didn’t even like rutabagas.

  The next day when he discovered our depredations, he’d rant and rave and we’d make ourselves scarce. Hiding in the hills, watching from the forest. Biding our time until the next nighttime veggie raid, led by our fearless, carrot-obsessed leader, Jamie.

  The following year, after realizing one garden was not going to be enough, since almost everything he planted got snitched before he could harvest it, Dad marked out a bigger garden over near the entrance to the trail that led to the cannery side.

  While we were clearing it, we found the remains of the cannery superintendent’s house and evidence that another fire had struck years after the one that destroyed the cannery. We knew this because near the new garden plot many of US Steel’s core sample holders had been scorched and melted, and the little shed that stood in the pile of broken ore was partially burned. The fire that burned the superintendent’s house had to have occurred after US Steel bought the property, and had been limited to one small area.

  Near the scorched remains of the superintendent’s house we also discovered a hill of coal. Apparently it had been used to heat the superintendent’s house.

  I loved finding it. No one used coal anymore, but it gave me a tie to Louis L’Amour’s day, and also Barbara Cartland’s. I made up stories about that hill of coal, picturing Louis L’Amour characters as cannery workers handling it, and it made the labor of clearing the garden much easier to bear. I could lose myself in a mental world while my body was left to fend for itself, a lesson that I never forgot and that made every chore and job after that much easier to endure.

  • • •

  Dad also wanted to experiment with local wild plants, but Mom saw them all as potentially deadly. “I can’t tell you not to eat them, but we’re not giving them to the kids. If anything happened, if any of those plants are poisonous, we couldn’t get them to a hospital in time.”

  The only local flora she allowed to be part of our wilderness dining experience was something called Chicken of the Woods, a bright-orange mushroom that grows on rotten trees and has a bright yellow underside.

  While it’s generally safe, some people are highly sensitive to it—and she turned out to be one of those people. Her body reacted like she’d been poisoned. That was the definitive end of her willingness to experiment with local flora.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I remember when Dad drew dog names and Junior’s name was drawn. Dad took him behind the school in the woods and tied him to a tree while he hid and waited with his rifle. I was sure Junior was going to get eaten and I was crying like a baby.”

  —Robin, remembering when he was six years old

  DURING OUR first year at the cannery we had Jamie’s dog Moby for canine companionship. He was a Sheltie (miniature Collie) with a touch of Cocker Spaniel. We all adored him. Moby was the James Bond of dogs: intensely masculine, intelligently suave, coolly courageous, casually on top of every situation… and insanely territorial.

  We found that out one day when our nearest neighbor, who lived alone on a mining claim several miles to the north of us, made a visit with his big, dumb black lab named Rascal.

  Moby, despite being only half his size, went for Rascal with teeth bared and we had to lock the incensed dog inside the floathouse—where he promptly lost his secret agent cool. He glared out the window, whining and twitching as the invader marked territory all over Moby’s domain.

  The high-pitched, anguished, enraged noises that came out of him made us laugh, though we tried to disguise it out of respect for his feelings. It was just so funny to see our always cool, calm, and collected Moby losing his mind as he raced from one window to the next, standing on the back of the couch, shivering and bristling, to watch the enemy disrespectfully get fresh with his territory.

  When the neighbor and his dog left, we let Moby outside and watched as he almost ruptured himself running around obliterating the other dog’s scent.

  When Mom and Dad decided to get me a dog, a beautiful golden Cocker Spaniel that Linda and her husband Art picked up in Ketchikan and brought out to us along with some supplies on their fishing boat, we were concerned about how Moby would react.

  Our fears proved groundless. Moby and Lady, as I named her, frolicked together, nudging each other; they couldn’t get enough of each other.

  “Look, they like each other!” we exclaimed happily.

  A few months later we quadrupled our canine count when Lady gave birth to six puppies. Moby liked her so much, in fact, that we quickly accumulated about two or three dogs per kid. We had enough to go around for visiting cousins to adopt one or two for the duration of their stay.

  We had a lot of fun naming them: Sonya, Little Anne, Bear Killer, Vicky, Junior, Cheerios, Zarkov, Peppermint, Panda, Saber, Sylvester, Butch… Each kid had a different idea of what made a good dog name. Mom chose one white-and-black puppy that she named Wee Macgregor. Dad got into the action by adopting one he named Andy.

  Mom loved to stand at the big bay window and watch us kids racing around the beaches with a stream of happy dogs barking and jumping behind us. It was such a picture of youthful freedom, she says, that she still likes to think about it to this day.

  We were too busy having fun to notice her watching. The dogs were packed with so much personality that we saw them as friends. They all had distinct personalitie
s: Junior was amiable, Bear Killer was the bad-boy troublemaker, Vicky was sweet and dainty, Little Anne was a gruff tomboy, and so on.

  The only ones who weren’t thrilled by the new arrivals were the cats. We’d arrived at the cannery with several cats including Betty, Creosote Bill, Duchess, and Linda’s cat F.u.b.a.r.

  As long as the cats maintained the high ground—strutting along the top rail on the floathouse’s front deck beyond the dogs’ reach, or climbing around the roof, their claws screeching on the tin as they slid down to jump onto the rail—there were no troubles. But once the cats got down where the dogs were, war ensued.

  Lady was obsessively loyal and couldn’t bear to be apart from me for any amount of time. My little brothers took advantage of this. Whenever we played hide-and-seek I’d have to put Lady inside the floathouse before I hid. But the boys would let her out and run behind her as she put her nose to the ground and, yipping frantically, she’d hunt me down within seconds no matter where I hid.

  She could swim underwater and climb ladders and thought nothing of fishing in the creek with Moby and chasing bears. On the other hand, she was also terrified of gloves and garbage bags. She went everywhere with me, and was a wonderful mother to her puppies. In fact, while I saw her as my baby, I think she saw me as another one of her pups that she had to keep track of and protect.

  Megan might have felt deprived at first, seeing how close Lady and I were, but it wasn’t long before she had her own dog, a pretty black female with white markings who she called Sonya. As it turned out, Sonya was a bit of a con artist. She broke her leg and after it healed she’d milk it for all the attention she could get—though she forgot which leg had been injured and would lift the wrong one, whining and looking pitiful.

  Megan adored her and went along with her scam. Sonya slept with us after her injury and Mom would come in and see her daughters hugging either side of the bed while Sonya stretched out in the middle.

  • • •

  Apparently Muriel, our first homeschool teacher, thought about us more than we did her, because a couple years later she returned on a peacemaking mission. Either that or she wanted to show off how happily her life had continued without us, to the tune of having acquired a cute baby in the interim.

  I can only imagine her feelings of having fatally miscalculated our willingness to let bygones be bygones when a friend dropped her off in his skiff on the beach at low tide and then motored away, leaving her to face a horde of snarling dogs.

  Not to mention the five of us feral kids racing after the dogs screaming at the top of our lungs, “Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!”

  The fact was, the dogs’ only regular experience of humans was the seven of us. Whenever we had a visitor they went wild, racing down the beach barking their heads off. Mom would tell us kids to chase after them and make sure they didn’t bite anyone.

  So when Muriel returned with her baby, the dogs went into their “stranger danger” attack mode. We ran after the dogs, yelling at them. Bear Killer was the ringleader so we all yelled at him, calling him by the shortened form of his name: “Killer! Kill-er!”

  When we reached Muriel, she stared at us in a strange way and seemed reluctant to hike up the beach with us to the floathouse. But the skiff that had brought her had already left, so she had no choice but to stay.

  I offered to hold the baby while she climbed the floathouse’s logs, but she sharply spurned my attempt to be helpful and hugged the baby more tightly. Once inside, the whole time that she drank the tea Mom offered her and bragged about how amazing her offspring was, she kept giving us odd looks. She seemed only too happy to leave when the friend returned to pick her up.

  It wasn’t until after Muriel left that I thought about her strange behavior and the way we’d yelled Bear Killer’s name as we ran after him and the other dogs. I said to Mom, “Do you suppose she thought we were yelling, ‘Kill her?’”

  Mom burst out laughing, but when she thought about it, she had to admit it was a definite possibility.

  Somewhere out there Muriel has probably been telling the story of those savage Neilson kids for decades.

  • • •

  I don’t know how it happened, but I was the one who wound up with the job of weaning all the puppies. When they were born sick, I’d stay up all night nursing them.

  I didn’t have a lot to work with. We discovered when we had rabbits (our parents, not knowing themselves very well, had decided to breed them for food—but neither of them had the temperament to kill cute little rabbits) that acidophilus could save lives. That worked with the puppies, but sometimes it didn’t.

  I remember one puppy I worked extremely hard to save who needed constant attention. I had to keep her warm and throughout the day and night give her the medicine I’d concocted that perked her up. But one night I fell asleep and forgot to give her the dose. When I woke up in the morning, she was dead. I buried a lot of puppies and every one broke my heart.

  It didn’t matter how hard I tried or what I did, there was no saving some of them, no matter how much love and care I gave them. This periodic trauma went on during all the years that we lived at the cannery.

  Worse than these puppy deaths was when the wolves came down off the mountains and snatched our four-legged companions to kill and eat them.

  • • •

  One evening, as the sky turned periwinkle and the endless, javelin-tipped forest began to turn black, Mom looked out at the point where the big rock was and saw a lone wolf, big, shaggy, and rawboned, standing there… looking at the floathouse and the kids and dogs playing in front of it.

  She sharply called us in from our play.

  It was the first time we’d seen a wolf right out in the open.

  The dogs didn’t have to be told that danger was near. They ran and hid under the floathouse and crouched on the logs with the floor right above their heads. We hoped that the lone wolf would go on his way.

  He didn’t.

  He stayed there, barely moving, staring at the floathouse. It was one of the creepiest things we ever experienced at the cannery. We managed to coax the dogs out from under the house so we could pull them inside before it got dark. The cats hid on the roof and didn’t stir from the ridge peak all night.

  When darkness fell we lit the kerosene lamps. Everything was silent… too silent… until the first wolf howled. It was right outside, so close that we all jumped and the dogs cowered as close to us as they could get. Some climbed onto the couches with us.

  More wolves answered until we could hear them howling in a ring around the house. We stared at each other in the yellow kerosene light that put dark shadows in the corners and blackened the windows so we couldn’t see what was outside.

  Chris (seated) with Little Mac and Robin holding Junior. Many of our beloved canine companions were stolen by wolves.

  Whenever our family was in a stressful or scary situation, we usually resorted to humor. “We need Skip to show up and shoot off his gun,” I quipped, referencing The Wilderness Family movies as we so often did. The others laughed.

  “What if it’s Scarface out there and they break the windows?” Robin asked, referring to the second movie in the series that focused on the family being terrorized by wolves, led by a terrifying black wolf named Scarface.

  “How do we make them go away?” Megan asked.

  Mom shook her head. “I don’t know.” There was no one she could call as darkness fell over the bay and forest, cutting us off from the nearest village. The lights shining out of our windows were the only lights for miles, other than the faint starshine fighting its way through dark cloud cover.

  We hugged the dogs, as much for our own comfort as theirs. Moby, who would have been scratching at the door to get out and tangle with another dog on his territory, kept far away from the door and windows, the hair raised on the back of his neck, a growl low in his throat.

  The wolves, as if trained in psychological warfare, were quiet just long enough for us to think they’
d left, just long enough for our nerves to relax—and then one howled and the others answered, revealing that we were still surrounded. The repeated relaxing and tensing could easily drive a person crazy. The dogs shivered in our arms, their heads ducked hard against us, trying to burrow right inside us.

  Were the wolves trying to get us to come out, to send the dogs out to them to eat in return for them leaving? I had the sense that this was what people in an Old West fort felt when they were under siege. I hid my face in the crazy tuft of hair on Lady’s head as she quivered against me, and the living flesh and dog smell of her imprinted permanently on my mind as I listened to the predatory howls outside.

  Time’s malleability first impressed itself on me then, the way it could slow and stretch and refuse to proceed. As I hugged Lady, a phrase that I would use to remind myself of time’s inevitable passage and reassure myself in any crisis came to mind and I whispered it to myself: “This too shall pass.”

  “I wish they would go away!” Mom exclaimed. She had recently read a pioneer woman’s diary where the woman wrote about wolves digging at the sod roof to get at her and her baby inside. Mom couldn’t get it out of her mind.

  Jamie, fearless in every other way, had a horror of wolves. When Dad worked on a farm in Washington State a decade ago, the boss’s eight-year-old daughter told preschooler Jamie bloodcurdling tales of wolves stealing and eating little kids.

  That night he felt particularly vulnerable because he’d sprained his ankle and was hobbling around with the support of a stick. As the wolves continued to howl, Jamie packed on every weapon in the house, including the ax.

  He strapped the .44 in its sheath with its belt-load of cartridges over his chest. Dad’s Bowie knife in its sheath was belted around his waist. He hung the .30-30 over one shoulder and gripped the 30.06 in his hands. He probably had more weapons tucked in less visible places as well. He looked like a protagonist from a horror movie ready for every nightmare.