by Tara Neilson
As for the future, I thought you had to be a little bit in the future to truly appreciate and live in the present. Like athletes who were said to be “in the zone”—I thought to myself that they were just that little bit in the future which made everything around them slow down.
And of course there was the past all around me, making its presence felt.
It was the zero time of the Moving Now that formed a bridge between space and time that I was convinced allowed for all motion and got rid of the scientific paradoxes I’d read about in our math and science books. I didn’t know how, I couldn’t explain it, but I knew it.
One evening while my family was watching movies and I was climbing the ridge toward the fire tree, listening to Bruce Springsteen on my headphones, I suddenly stopped. Standing there, my heart beating fast, I heard something over the lyrics of “Racing in the Street.” I pulled off my headphones.
Up on the mountain, I heard the wolves. They were in full hunting cry, coming down fast. On a dog-hunting raid. I ran down the ridge, finding the quickest way through a series of cliff-like drop-offs, jumping down from one to the next, judging the distance and making decisions blindly as I yelled for the dogs at the top of my voice, naming them one by one.
I had a visceral sense of the Moving Now, of the present being created moment by moment. Every decision I made had an outcome one way or the other. I was making decisions in time and when I acted on them, they became spatial—irreversible, with inevitable, concrete consequences following. If I didn’t judge the drops and my landings perfectly, I would break my legs or my neck and no one would have known where to look for me. Except the wolves.
I and all the dogs ran to the floathouse. With the generator on and the movie blaring, no one else had heard the wolves, so they were all startled when I burst into the house, dragging and urging the dogs in after me.
Dad turned the TV off and we listened, but the wolves stayed away from the rumble of the generator. To be safe, we kept the dogs inside with us and watched the rest of the movie. It was The Searchers, in which actors, some of them dead or no longer the people they were on the screen, pretended to be people from another time.
Time, and our experience of it, I was convinced, had a lot more going on than science was willing to grant.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“During those summers in Alaska, Jamie was always more like a brother to me than a cousin.”
—Shawn
OUR COUSINS were more like siblings, however infrequently we got to see them.
Rand’s son Shawn came up every summer to stay with Grandpa Frank and Grandma Pat in Meyers Chuck half of the time, and the rest of the time he spent with us. He came from the small Washington harbor town of Anacortes, where Jamie and I were born, and was our only regular contact with the urban present.
He brought with him city sensibilities and came from the world’s Moving Now of ever-changing cultural trends. His life and interests revolved around girls, TV, and hard rock or heavy metal bands. He was picky about his hair and clothes—which we thought amusing—and finicky about what he ate, which made us think he was seriously wrong in the head. In our experience, if it was edible, you ate it and counted yourself royally favored. End of story.
Like many males of all ages in the mid-Eighties, he sought to emulate Don Johnson’s Miami Vice cool in how he dressed, talked, and acted. Since he was blond and blue eyed and inherited his parents’ good looks, he came closer to pulling it off than a lot of others. Bereft of the usual town distractions, he continually claimed to be bored, which was an alien concept to us kids, and we tended to give him a hard time about it.
But he soon adapted—or was corrupted, however you want to look at it—to our way of entertaining ourselves in the wilderness. He even came up with a few refinements.
For instance, he considered a midnight snack a vital element of healthy living. The idea was a novel one to us since our food had to be carefully conserved and stretched over weeks and months. We couldn’t imagine a world where you got up in the middle of the night and helped yourself freely to a snack.
Shawn was not to be deterred, however, and made do with what he could scrounge up. On one memorable occasion, all that he could find were some dill pickles, leftover boiled potatoes, and grape jam, which he combined for his snack.
Shawn discovered that Megan and I loved to make up stories and then act them out with our dolls and my model horses while we recorded them with my tape recorder.
He was fascinated by the stories of how Megan talked in her sleep. I was able to hold conversations with her which she never remembered in the morning. One time he suggested to me that we should stay up all night with the tape recorder handy and record whatever she muttered.
This was no particular hardship for me. Shawn and I had a habit of spending entire nights talking about everything under the sun, from music to TV to science to God. Much of the conversation circled back to his various love interests, unrequited crushes, and celebrity fantasies while I listened and offered sage advice founded largely on my Louis L’Amour and Barbara Cartland reading.
When I was twelve, after a major floathouse remodel that turned Mom and Dad’s bedroom into the new kitchen, Mom and Dad moved into the back bedroom. They built a small room off the living room that became Jamie’s bedroom. Megan and I were moved to a roll-out couch in the living room. There was another couch opposite it that Shawn slept on.
He and I whispered away as everyone else in the floathouse slept.
The wooden frame of the house creaked and settled on its raft as the endless Alaskan summer night never quite darkened the front room with its enormous, bullet-pocked bay window. Although his features weren’t particularly visible, his blond hair shone even in that light as he sniffed (he seemed to be under the impression that sniffing added to his Eighties cool) and played with a rubber band.
He stiffened into alertness, breaking off mid-whisper, when Megan stirred. He stealthily pushed the record button. “This is Shawn Bifoss reporting from the Neilsons’ floathouse in Union Bay, Alaska. We’re here to observe the nighttime communications of the Neilsons’ second youngest daughter, Megan, as she talks in her sleep. Let’s listen in.”
He held the tape recorder out next to her and its mechanical whirring broke through her sleep.
“Wha—at? What are you guys doing?” she mumbled. For the most part she and Shawn maintained a fractious relationship and most of the time they squabbled. But on this night, when we explained our plan and how disappointed we were that she’d woken up, she decided to join forces with him.
“Why don’t we make up something?” I don’t remember which one of us said it, but the other two approved.
Megan was not at all averse to exercising her impromptu acting skills. Especially since we hashed out how we’d convince ever-gullible Mom into believing it was real.
We didn’t dare turn on a light to write anything down, but we tossed around some spooky suggestions and then let Megan wing it. Shawn pressed record and held it out as the three of us tried not to giggle.
Megan spoke in a far away, eerie voice. “It’s coming… something terrible is coming. I can see the darkness of it coming through the forest… At the stroke of midnight it will come for you… Run, Tara. You have to run… before the clock strikes twelve… run….”
We hadn’t planned it, but Mom had a Dutch wall clock weighted by heavy, solid brass spheres that chimed out the hour. As Megan was speaking and Shawn was recording, the clock whirred and chimed out a measured, portentous count.
We stared at each other in the darkness with our hands clapped over our mouths. It didn’t get any better than that.
We could hardly wait until morning. Shawn made a great show of being astonished and agitated by what he’d recorded in the dead of night and insisted that Mom listen to it.
She listened with riveted attention and flinched when the clock chimed. She tried to pry out of Megan what terrible thing was going to happen and why Tara wa
s supposed to run. Why Tara? Megan shook her head, wide-eyed, and said she had no idea. She didn’t remember any of it, she claimed.
Mom was so spooked that for years afterward she’d tell the eerie story to other people and have them listen to the recording, and they were all amazed. Megan and I would snicker to ourselves, until one day we told her the truth. She was flabbergasted and chagrined, a state she would continue to have a recurring acquaintance with over the years.
While Shawn and I were close and could talk about anything for hours on end, Jamie and Shawn were inseparable. They were as close as Megan and I were. They would hole up in Jamie’s castle fort perched on top of a giant red cedar stump that was accessible only by a trapdoor, with a ladder burrowed into the hollow part of the stump.
They’d sit up there hatching who knew what kind of terrible plans for world—or at least ruined cannery—domination. When Shawn was there, Jamie’s boom box blared Pat Benatar. She often belted out “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” into the remote Alaskan woods. Megan and I battled back by blaring John Cougar (Mellencamp) bellowing, “Come on, baby, make it hurt so good,” from the floathouse’s outside speakers. Benatar was Shawn’s one true love. He was obsessed with her and hated our habit of bequeathing nicknames on singers. To his disgust, we called her “Bennie.”
Megan bore the brunt of Jamie’s and Shawn’s machinations. During one of my forest strolls I came across them, with Robin and Chris happily in tow, in the process of lynching her.
Jamie, naturally, had made it his business to teach himself the nearly lost art of noose-making. We would watch him in the bedroom at night by kerosene lamplight as he crafted noose after noose until he’d perfected the skill. We were uneasy, sure that he wouldn’t be content until he’d tested a noose on one of us.
Megan had a quirk to her nature, and it was that she considered—perhaps justifiably—males as the absolute end. They were dirty, loud, and obnoxious with no refinements. I don’t think she vocalized these convictions, but they knew. Her brothers and cousin took special delight in living up to her worst suspicions at every opportunity.
When I came across them, Jamie had a length of rope that terminated in a sterling example of one of his nooses thrown over the branch of a spruce tree. He was hoisting Megan by the waist a few inches at a time as the noose tightened.
Megan wasn’t about to let the males think they had the upper hand with her as Jamie hand-over-handed the rope. Every time he pulled, the noose tightened around her waist, but pride sealed her lips against surrender.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she gasped disdainfully.
Jamie took this to mean he should try harder, and Shawn and the boys hooted at her, which made her all the more determined to give them no satisfaction.
“Still doesn’t hurt,” she managed to utter, her face turning red.
I arrived in time to spoil everyone’s fun. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“She asked for it,” Jamie said.
“You could really hurt someone doing that,” I said. “That rope is probably crushing her organs.”
“She said it doesn’t hurt,” Robin piped up, smirking.
“Does it hurt, Megan?” Jamie taunted.
“I don’t feel a thing,” she retorted, trying not to grimace.
“See?” Shawn said. “She likes it.”
“Just let her down,” I said in my weary Why don’t you grow up? tone of voice, the only one I’d found that Jamie responded to; and Shawn was civilized enough to be slightly uncomfortable. Megan maintained a stiff upper lip while she was lowered back onto her feet, waiting until Jamie and his snickering retinue disappeared into the woods before she doubled over and grabbed her side, groaning at the pain.
“Why didn’t you tell them to stop?” I asked as I helped her hobble back home.
“I couldn’t let them think they were better than me.”
Since Mom was usually buried in a book, it often fell to me to be the mother figure and the ever-irksome voice of reason. Megan mostly backed me up, but occasionally she joined with the enemy to overthrow my boring rationality. Consorting with the enemy never went well for her.
Like the time she, Shawn and I were paddling around in Jamie’s small aluminum skiff. Shawn suggested we tip the boat over. I didn’t think it was such a good idea and said so. Megan, competitive to the core, couldn’t resist the challenge, believing she could tip it over faster than Shawn. As I gripped the seat they ran from one side to the other.
The next thing we knew, the skiff rolled over and we were dropped, fully clothed, into the drink.
I swam to shore and seated myself on the floathouse’s front deck to let my clothes dry on me in the sunshine. The sun was directly overhead, gleaming blindingly off the water and the floathouse’s tin roof. It lit up the shaggy cedar, spruce, and hemlock that encircled the bay. Reflected waves rippled across their variegated green wall as bees hummed in the tall beach grass.
Many of those trees would have been there when the cannery was operational, and as I sat there wringing out my waist-length hair and my clothes, sticky with salt, I wondered what they had seen. Do trees have memories? Did they compare the activity of the long ago cannery laborers in their eternally fish-smelling clothes, with the shouts and laughter of the carefree children playing in the small inlet?
My teeth chattered lightly as my body transitioned from the shock of the Alaskan water to the summer sunshine. I sat on the edge of the front deck, my wet legs hanging over the front of the logs, the water dripping onto the gravel beach below. My arms rested on the weathered wood rail as the smell of sun-heated seaweed, beach grass, and evergreens spiced the air and I marveled at being alive in this place that seemed set aside from the world’s version of time. Shawn, I thought, had an almost visible aura of differentness, from being formed by, and coming from, the world of the Moving Now.
I looked over and saw that he’d swum to shore as well, leaving Megan to deal with the overturned skiff.
“Get out here and help me tow it to shore,” she yelled at Shawn. “You helped tip it over! You have to help.”
Shawn laughed at her naiveté and sunned himself on the beach.
She struggled against the dead weight of the overturned skiff, slapping away the dive-bombing deer flies, ducking under the water to escape them. She made zero progress. Every time she came up she yelled at Shawn, getting madder and madder. It wasn’t like she could let the rowing skiff float away. Jamie would not be happy about that. Though she almost never cried, she was on the point of frustrated tears so I jumped back in the water and helped her tow it to shore, and we slapped at the hungry deer flies the whole way.
Outside of books, music and movies, one of Mom’s pastimes was photography and she loved to dress up any kids around and take pictures. The only way she could interest Jamie and Shawn in this was to make it Western dress-up. They decked themselves out in guns, wide-brimmed hats (Dad bought Australian-style ones and oiled them to keep the rain off), cowboy boots, and bandoliers full of cartridges. To their delight, Mom used eyeliner to pencil in mustaches on their youthful faces. They loved them so much that they wore them until they were eventually smudged off.
She dressed Megan and me as dance hall girls and posed us in front of the weathered boards of the wanigan. Megan struck a haughty pose while I tried to pull off a one-sided Princess Leia hairdo. Jamie and Shawn posed with the guns and pretended to cheat and fight at a poker game while Mom snapped pictures.
It was easy in our Western attire to feel that we had slipped back in time. Aside from Mom’s modern camera, there was nothing to say we weren’t living in the 1800s. As usual, the cannery gifted us with the ability to live in any time, and all times, at once.
Naturally, with everyone else having multiple puppies, Shawn had to choose his own and named one of the excess puppies, a sturdy black one, Little Ann. He had a logical fear of bears and hoped she’d grow up to be big enough to keep the bears at bay. Once, when we were all playing in the wood
s, Mom was interrupted in her reading by Shawn racing into the floathouse by himself.
He could barely speak. “Bear!” he finally got out. “Brown bear! A big one!”
Mom thought he was kidding, trying to get a rise out of her, until she saw how pale he was under his Down South tan. He’d tried to warn us but we’d been making so much noise that we didn’t hear him.
She flung the door open and yelled, “Bear!” but we were still so busy making noise, hammering, sawing while we worked on a new fort, and shouting to each other, that we didn’t hear. She grimly grabbed the hated and feared gun and went to fetch us. To her horror she found the enormous bear prints not far from where we were playing.
Playing dress up, Old West style.
Left to right: Megan, Jamie, Shawn, and me (rocking a Princess Leia hairstyle).
We were herded back to the floathouse and made to complete the bear drill practically at gunpoint. But she couldn’t keep us in the attic for too long, so we were cooped up in the floathouse’s living room on a beautiful sunny day, peering out every window, waiting for the bear to make an appearance. We had that familiar “under siege” feeling, the same as when the wolves came down off the mountain.
We never did see Shawn’s bear; it probably went back to the cannery side where the spawning salmon struggled upstream. Shawn was never free of the fear of bears, especially at night. But then, who of us didn’t have nightmares about one of the largest land predators on earth?
Once, when Mom and Dad went to Meyers Chuck to get the mail, Megan and I had the idea of cleaning the house from top to bottom as a surprise for them. Megan locked the front door, telling me, “That way the boys won’t get in and mess it up before Mom and Dad get back to see it.”