by Tara Neilson
To make up for Mom’s distress, Captain Hanson threw a nice-sized king salmon into the Whaler and explained his and his crew’s concerns about finding the boys apparently abandoned in the wilderness.
Mutual good feelings resulted and Mom allowed Robin to write to Captain Hanson, who wrote back several times. The next year the Memento’s crew picked up the boys, with parental permission this time, and fed them on junk food again. When they came home they were—to our envy—loaded down with candy bars, but what they treasured most was the lasting memories of the Memento and her crew.
• • •
The outdoor speakers on the floathouse provided us with a soundtrack for everything we did and accompanied innumerable unforgettable moments.
Mom told us about a day the rain fog hung low in the trees, turning the world black and white, the way some of us kids thought the world used to be back when black-and-white movies were made and historical photos were taken.
Stevie Nicks was on the stereo, this time her second solo album The Wild Heart. As Mom stood on the front deck soaking in the misty atmosphere, Nicks’s haunting song “Beauty and the Beast” came on and a great blue heron swooped down and landed with delicate ungainliness on the shore. It picked its way into the mirror-still bay in awkwardly elegant slow motion, searching for sculpins and bullheads, its reflection pecking back at itself.
With the beautiful piano and sweeping chords of the song echoing in the mist, the moment etched itself onto Mom’s heart, as if she’d become a part of a piece of living art.
On the other end of the spectrum, Dad liked upbeat, catchy music to come out of the outdoor speakers. After Dad had his sawmill set up on a deck he built above the tideline near the bigger garden, I watched him and a local fisherman chat and then haul freshly cut lumber to the fisherman’s skiff, accompanied by Cyndi Lauper’s song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Dad liked music with a jaunty beat to help him work, and Lauper’s 1983 breakout album, She’s So Unusual, fit the bill perfectly.
Dad was oblivious to the incongruity, though the fisherman had a grin on his face when he asked me about the choice in music. I couldn’t help wondering how Lauper would react if she could see to what use her song about girl freedom was being put.
Every weekend, Casey Kasem counted down the American Top 40 hits. The Eighties songs boomed out from the speakers mounted on the exterior wall of the floathouse, and one time Megan and I gathered her Barbie Doll RV, red Barbie Camaro, and all of my model horses for an Oregon Trail–type migration. We arranged it on the trail Dad was building with sawdust from his sawmill. As Casey Kasem urged us to keep our feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars, we set our caravan in motion.
The sunlight filtered down through the trees, glowing on the reddish orange sawdust with its fresh, carroty cedar scent as we had our Barbie and Ken dolls venture deep into the wilderness enjoying various adventures along the way, barely noticing when Prince won the top spot with “Raspberry Beret.”
Actually, I had a bone to pick with Prince.
One day we were chasing each other over Dad’s corral of floating logs, playing log tag. This was something Mom had forbidden us to do, telling us horror stories about kids falling between rolling logs and drowning. As we tried to roll each other into the water, Casey Kasem counted down the hits, adding in little bits of trivia here and there. All at once, I heard something that stopped me in my tracks and nearly made me suffer the fate Mom had warned us about.
I jumped off the rolling logs and swam to shore and sat on a weathered drift log almost buried in tall beach grass above the outhaul. Overhead, puffy clouds trudged across a brilliant blue sky, intermittently crossing the sun and darkening the day, as if the sky had a giant dimmer switch someone was playing with. I sat there perfectly still, entranced as a man sang about dancing in the dark.
Thus began my obsession with Bruce Springsteen’s music, and my deep disapproval of Prince who kept “Dancing in the Dark” out of the number one spot with “When Doves Cry.”
One of the things I’d gotten, in one of Mom’s epic Family Presents Day parties, was a Walkman. I loved it because it meant when Dad or Mom was playing whatever they wanted on the outside speakers, I could make up my own soundtrack on a cassette to listen to on headphones as I went on solitary rambles and hikes through the woods and ruins.
Bruce Springsteen was my constant companion on these wilderness explorations. I got every one of his albums up to Born in the U.S.A. and loved all of them, but my favorite was his Darkness on the Edge of Town LP that he recorded when I was seven years old. It was the one I listened to the most as I climbed the forested ridges and emerged out on the rocks to stare across the endless bay to where the sun set on the ocean at the distance-blued northern tip of Prince of Wales Island.
There was something about the album that fit with the always-present past. It made me think of all the stories that would never be told about all the men and women who had worked and lived at the cannery. Ordinary lives, full of ordinary emotions; people with everyday thoughts and experiences that were, nevertheless, unique and important to them.
I yearned to know those stories, to know those people who had roamed where I now roamed, and in a way it felt like Bruce Springsteen was singing those stories to me because he sang about humble, destined-to-be-forgotten working men and women.
• • •
Music was such a huge part of our childhood. Dad’s favorite performers were Bertie Higgins, Neil Diamond, ABBA, and Blondie. Mom loved almost every kind of music there was and exposed us kids to all of it: Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, Gershwin, the classics, 1930s and 1940s music. We loved to sing “Stone Cold Dead in the Market,” copying the Latin accent, or echo Cab Calloway as he belted out “Minnie the Moocher.” We warbled along to “Old Rocking Chair’s Got Me.” Mom had a rocking chair and she’d laugh about it getting her one day.
We knew Sam Cooke’s songs by heart because of her love for him. Dire Straits, Carole King, Rickie Lee Jones, and Van Morrison were there for when she was in an easy-listening mood. She was obsessed with Eric Clapton’s “Layla,” telling us it was one of the greatest rock songs of all time. Donovan, with his “Sunshine Superman,” was there for her quirky moods. But her all-time favorite song was Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.”
She bought all the modern hit albums, so we missed out on nothing of the Eighties as far as synthesizers, saxophones, and drum machine music were concerned. She also became infatuated with Herbie Hancock for a while.
Dad’s tastes were mostly rock and pop hits from the 1950s onward, but he did like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. He had other unexpected likes too, and talked about buying the soundtrack to My Fair Lady when he was sixteen and how he played it repeatedly until he almost wore the record out.
• • •
Dad bought a Montgomery Wards VHS player and recorder for his house in Thorne Bay when he worked as a logger on Prince of Wales. He bought it to record movies off the TV, which he brought home to us on the weekends. We watched them once a week, on the Friday when he got home to run the generator to recharge the battery for the radios and stereo. Mom called it “Friday Night at the Movies.”
Almost as much as the movies, we loved the HBO opening where it zoomed in on some city’s suburbs, which were alien to us. Everything came to Alaska late, no up-to-date movies, though there were some early CNN broadcasts (CNN’s first broadcast was June 1, 1980, four months before we moved to the cannery), HBO concerts, Solid Gold Countdown, and Video Jukebox, a precursor to MTV.
A couple of young guys who worked as fish counters at a weir on the big salmon-spawning creek to the south of us, about midway to Meyers Chuck, made a habit of showing up for Friday Night at the Movies once they learned about it. After all, it was the only social event in the wilderness.
Dad set the living room up like a tiny stadium. In Montana he’d built a dining room table for his large family reminiscent of a picnic table, complete with benches. For movie night he set u
p the benches and table as bleachers. We all perched around the glowing box, for once ignoring the wolves when they howled outside, glued to the fictitious adventures taking place on the screen.
When Luke Skywalker stood on that sand dune, his Seventies long blond hair blowing in the hot wind, gazing at the dual suns setting, I was there. I was transported to that galaxy so far away, so long ago, completely forgetting the grease-stained brown paper bag Dad had filled full of buttery popcorn for us kids to dip into, or the hard bench I was perched on, or the faces around me lit by neon TV tubes.
The cannery ruins slumbered all around us in the darkness outside, the broad Alaskan bay lapping at the beach, but I was on Tatooine meeting Han Solo in the cantina and then on to the Death Star to rescue Princess Leia.
Whatever we watched, we immediately acted out. In the summertime when the days lasted forever, we’d have time to run outside right after the movie to play before bedtime. After watching The Man from Snowy River, we ran out and grabbed bull kelp to make bullwhips out of and then tried to round the dogs up like they were Australian brumbies.
After watching The Dark Crystal, we took up positions on the beach as the sun set and acted out the scene with the elders all deeply intoning, “Aaaaaaah.” We tried to imitate the ululating cry of the Arabs in Lion of the Desert. A day didn’t go by when a line from The Wrath of Khan or McLintock! or My Fair Lady or The Ten Commandments or The Empire Strikes Back or Coal Miner’s Daughter or Mommie Dearest or Hawmps! or Seems Like Old Times wasn’t quoted.
One evening, after watching Cannery Row and laughing uproariously for the umpteenth time at the frog round-up scene, we stepped outside to find the beaches teeming with frogs. They were everywhere, a veritable plague of them, which was amazing considering how scarce they were ordinarily, let alone right after watching the round-up scene.
We always watched every movie to its last end credit and note of music. None of us wanted to leave our immersion in that other world’s existence. Then Dad would head out into the Alaskan night. In the winter, the only lights outside were the stars and the yellow lampshine from our windows. The silence was always sudden and intense when he turned off the generator.
Everyone was allowed to have a Friday when they got to pick the movie. We all had to suffer through Mom picking Sophie’s Choice (Stingo was from Jamie’s favorite movie, Dragonslayer—later, we would meet Peter MacNicol on a school fieldtrip when he was with a touring company playing in Tartuffe). Mom’s other choices were Tess of the D’urbervilles, The Man Who Would Be King, Terms of Endearment, On Golden Pond, Chariots of Fire, The Far Pavilions, Camelot, and other high-class fare that I was surprised Dad bothered to record. Although we did like some of her picks, like Das Boot. It was a gripping war movie for kids who were impacted by a veteran’s trauma, just as impactful as Big Red One was. (With excellent acting by Mark Hamill: Luke Skywalker as a coward!)
It has to be said that we were in part delighted when Das Boot was chosen because Dad had recorded some Looney Tunes cartoons right after it and Mom and Dad always let us watch them, even if it meant letting the generator run a little longer than usual. Dad named one of the dogs after one of the cartoons, calling him “Hansel” and pronouncing it the way a double-taking Bugs Bunny does in 1,001 Rabbit Tales.
These movies, concerts, cartoons and music videos were watched and rewatched, week in and week out, as the seasons changed. One of the Fridays when Dad didn’t make it home, Jamie started the generator a little early and Mom allowed us to watch more TV than we would have been allowed to on Dad’s more practical watch (he knew the limits to how much gasoline he could stock up).
Mom, who came of age in the tumultuous Sixties, was concerned that we knew nothing about race relations. She got her hands on documentaries and movies about desegregating schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Having never been exposed to racism, we didn’t understand what we were watching.
“What did the kids do wrong?” we asked Mom. You couldn’t tell from the film why the kids were being yelled at and attacked. They were just trying to get to school. We were convinced the filmmakers had left out something important.
“They didn’t do anything wrong,” she said.
“Well, they had to have done something wrong to be treated like that!” we insisted.
“They’re being treated like that because they’re black.” We hooted at her, shouted her down, and pretty much let it be known that she obviously didn’t know what she was talking about. Why would anyone care what their skin color was? We were used to Mom, off in her daydreams or books, not getting the real picture of what was going on around her, so it didn’t surprise us that she’d come up with such a farfetched reason for what we were seeing.
On the other hand, we never were able to come up with an alternative, logical reason for why the kids were being attacked—and needed police escorts—for trying to go to school. It was a stranger world out there than even our vivid imaginations could conceive.
Later, Meyers Chuck got a huge satellite dish installed, ostensibly for the school’s use, but the entire village was tuned in to the state-sponsored channel. It was memorably named RAT-Net, standing for Rural Alaska Television Network. I didn’t know it was an acronym and, trying to make it make sense, thought it was some kind of tongue-in-cheek nickname for the rat race’s entertainment offerings.
Someone mounted a repeater antenna on a tree high enough that we, way out in the wilderness, were able to sometimes, usually in the evenings, pick up a fuzzy black-and-white version. Mom would stay up all night watching whatever movies the programmers put on it. Earlier in the evening, we’d catch episodes of Airwolf, Simon & Simon, Magnum P.I., Miami Vice (many of the TV shows seemed to be about glamorized Vietnam vets), Dynasty, The Facts of Life, The Cosby Show, and many more.
When we stayed at our grandparents’ home in Meyers Chuck, we saw the shows more clearly in all their color and vibrancy. Miami Vice, in particular, was riveting. The contrast between the bearded men in checked flannel and boiled wool and the sunny glamor of men in sunglasses and pastel Italian fashion in Miami’s heat was striking and indelible. (The show made such an impression on Megan that as an adult she moved to Miami and lives there now.)
After the show, I’d step out of Grandma’s house and hike over the rocks, my boots crunching on barnacles and making sticky seawater squirt out of the popweed. As the night deepened I’d walk out to the entrance marker on its concrete pad, listening to my Miami Vice soundtrack. I’d stand there looking out over the strait and soak in the wilderness scene as Jan Hammer played in my headphones.
We girls made occasional stabs at being modern, like the time Megan and I and one of the girls in Meyers Chuck bought red leather high-top sneakers similar to ones we saw someone on TV wearing. They were completely impractical: they dyed our socks and fell apart almost immediately from exposure to the saltwater all around us. But while we wore them we knew we were as cool as anyone else in the Eighties.
When it snowed, the uptilted giant saucer of the dish, its huge knob pointed toward outer space to receive signals at the speed of light, would fill with snow and we’d hear people in Meyers Chuck get on the CB radio and ask whose turn it was to head out into the night with a flashlight, get in their skiff, and cross the harbor to the school to sweep off the dish. It seemed like the school’s long-time custodian, Terry Johnson, was the one to do it more often than anyone else.
What struck me was how modern these TV shows assumed the world to be. They took it for granted that people lived with basic modern conveniences. That outhouses, for instance, were a thing of the remote past, and that hot running water inevitably emerged from the tap.
I was fascinated by the divide between our reality and the TV’s reality. There was a whole world out there in the 1980s while we watched them from what felt like the 1880s. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say we were caught in a limbo between the two worlds, a place where time was different.
During a visit to town, on a school f
ield trip, we saw Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home on the big screen. It felt like we’d come from the past to watch a movie set in the future, where the characters travel to their past that was our world’s present (the Eighties)—it all seemed futuristic to us.
There was always a transition to be made between our world in the ruins and the world racing by outside.
• • •
In the long summer days, when the rest of my family watched life captured by film on movie night, I’d head outside. With them riveted to the screen, I had all of Union Bay, the cannery, the ruins, all of time, to myself.
While the generator rumbled in the background, I imagined the far greater mechanical sounds of the busy cannery. Back when the salmon ran in vaster numbers than they did in my present, the cannery workers would have worked long hours, late into the evening and early in the morning, laboring to turn what had been leaping in the bay hours before, into canned food.
All that activity was silent now, only hinted at in the twisted wreckage beneath scorched pilings, washed by sunset tides.
I was enamored of time. Its mystery, its fullness, its ability to be changeable and steadfast at exactly the same… time. I bonded with time in those long, lonesome walks I took by myself.
I wondered why it wasn’t a subject covered in school. We learned quite a bit about space and its dimensions, and how things operated in space, but there was little about time. We were told there were three dimensions of space, but only one rather mundane, if useful, dimension of time.
That never made sense to me. Time was at least as rich and full and stacked with dimensions as space. I knew there were distinctly different kinds of time, such as the Moving Now of instant change, a sort of zero time that was constantly emerging and creating our experience of life.
I’m sitting on the rocks a few yards down from the red cabin, watching the creek and thinking about Time.
The present time of childhood seemed to stretch forever. Those days at the cannery—each day was a full year, and each season a cosmos. Day by day, hour by hour, I experienced the sensual nature of living in the present, where scents, sounds, colors, tastes, textures were more vibrant, than any other dimension of time.