by Tara Neilson
Rory and Marion were living the real romance, and everyone knew it. Marion was the only girl in a family with five boys so it’s probably no surprise she turned out to be a bit of tomboy. But she was also a natural beauty, with long, rippling dark hair, dark eyes, and patrician features. All of the Alaskan guys were immediately smitten, but she chose Rory.
Rory, a self-sufficient six-footer, had his own admirers. Mom told us how, when her family lived Down South, teenage girls would try to make friends with her because she was Rory’s sister in hopes that she would introduce them to him.
Rory and Marion were married in Meyers Chuck after Marion’s mother, Joann, picked up a wedding dress in Ketchikan. Joann had arrived at the floatplane base with the wedding dress over one arm and a new firewood ax in her other hand.
The thing that always stuck out to anyone who met them was how perfect Rory and Marion were for each other. No one ever saw them argue, they were casually (as if it was common) at ease with each other, and while they didn’t have exactly the same tastes in everything, they were able to share many of each other’s enthusiasms. They had a harmony about them, something that always set them apart from other couples, that made everyone like and respect them and secretly—or not so secretly—wish they could have something similar.
When the Velvet arrived in Ketchikan, we weren’t overwhelmed by the influx of people and speeding traffic as you might expect children from the wilderness to be. I think it was because Rory and Marion were so stable and of the time—they always lived in the current stream of culture in a low-key, mostly conventional way (adapted to a wilderness lifestyle). Since we were with them, we felt like we belonged.
After docking in Thomas Basin we strode past the rows of fishing boats and up past the fisherman’s bar, the Potlatch, that stood on a street made of warped wooden planks. Everyone knew Rory and Marion and greeted them with delight.
“Our first stop is the Pink Store,” Marion told us as we walked on the unfamiliar flatness and hardness of the sidewalk. “That’s what the girls call the candy store,” she explained.
It was a little building up the street painted a Pepto-Bismol pink. Inside, Megan and I were stunned by the lavish display of every kind of candy and treat there was. In fact, we were too stunned by the abundance to do more than stare. Meanwhile, LeAnn and JoDean immediately found their favorite treats.
Marion paid for them and for a few treats for Megan and me, and then we all headed for a long store set on an enormous pier that was attached to the street. Rory and Marion called it Tongass, an Alaska Native name that belonged to the narrows Ketchikan was built alongside, the highway that ran the full length of the city, and the millions of acres of rainforest that covered most of Southeast Alaska.
“Keep an eye on the girls while we buy fishing gear,” Marion told Megan and me. The moment she was out of sight, the girls—hopped up on sugar—lost their usual good manners. While the downstairs area was devoted to fishing gear and hardware, the upstairs area was full of furniture. The girls chased each other around lamps, over chairs, and bounced on beds with Megan and me blushing and racing after them.
We lost them at one point until a store employee marched them up to us. “Are you responsible for these children?”
Megan and I were mortified.
But worse was to come. Rory and Marion had to unload and sell their fish to the cannery, so they dropped us off at the small library with totem poles in the parking lot and a salmon spawning creek running past it.
Marion took us past the museum and down the stairs to the children’s department, and made sure we were set up with some books. Megan and I would have been happy to immerse ourselves in the bookish atmosphere. I found an entire row of Nancy Drew books I hadn’t read and wanted to delve into every one.
But the moment Marion left, LeAnn and JoDean turned into candy-fueled terrors again. The librarian kept giving us reproving looks and shushing us as the girls tore around, threw books, and jumped off the chairs onto bean bags.
By the time Rory and Marion picked us up, Megan and I were completely frazzled. But we perked up when they took us to Ben Franklin’s store that smelled of popcorn and new rubber dolls and carried everything anyone could possibly want. While Marion chose bolts of cloth in the back, Megan and I cruised the Barbie Doll aisle. After that they took us to the Pizza Mill, a small diner-like restaurant that overlooked another boat harbor called City Float.
The strong afternoon light flooded through the front plate glass windows and lit up the modest room with its booths and bench seats smelling of pepperoni, cheese, Italian seasoning, and tomato sauce. Megan and I felt like normal, modern people for those few days in town with Rory and Marion.
I was glad to head back to the ruins of the cannery, but I think it was then that the yearning for a different life was planted in Megan’s heart.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“When we lived in the old cabin across the bridge, I remember finding all the old treasures from the cannery… and Dad catching trout for breakfast out of the creek.”
—Chris
EVERYTHING CHANGED in 1983, the year I turned twelve, when Dad lost his logging job on Prince of Wales Island as a result of a strike. For the first time, he lived at the cannery with us fulltime. The problem was he had no way to make a living. The plan he and Mom came up with was for Dad to get a one-man mobile sawmill. He could cut and sell lumber, and also cut enough to build Mom’s dream house.
To raise enough money to buy a sawmill they decided to sell the floathouse. They figured they’d fix it up as much as they could while all seven of us moved to the cannery side into the tiny red cabin, perched right on the edge of the creek, that our neighbors had stayed in. It was one open room, about 320 square feet, and had a small, kiosk-like front porch lined with shelves that Mom converted into a pantry. The front door was white, to match the trim, and had a glass window in it.
Dad set about getting the cabin in shape to take all of us. He’d already laid green roofing on top of the aged shingle roof, but now he punched out the front wall and put down a new section of floor that jutted over the creek where the salmon swam. After a heavy rainfall the creek level would rise until it came within inches of the floorboards. There was no glass around for windows, so he put opaque plastic (Visquine) up. It let fuzzy light in, but didn’t let us see anything but blurry images outside.
There was one loft at the back of the house above the kitchen that all of us kids, except Jamie, would be stuffed into like canned sardines. We kept our belongings in cardboard boxes on shelves at the back of the loft and along the sides. Jamie would sleep on the couch in the middle of the cabin. On the other side of the couch, in the new section, was the large dining room table with the benches on either side for us kids.
Dad laid down new boards on the open rafters, above the part he’d added on at the front, for him and Mom to sleep in. The front of the house bumped up against an alder tree that had grown up since the cannery burned. When Mom lay in bed with the window open she could look through tree branches and easily imagine herself in a treehouse. (In fact, there was an actual treehouse next to the cabin that Dave and Sheila’s kids had built.)
There was no indoor plumbing. Just an outhouse up on the hill several yards down from the cabin, and a sink without a faucet in the cabin that drained into a five-gallon bucket that had to be emptied. The counter was unpainted, raw wood.
Mom jazzed up the place as much as she could, despite having room for only the couch, a rocking chair, and the table with its benches. She added bookcases and shelves wherever she could squeeze them in. She hung curtains along the front of the rough counter to conceal the drain bucket and dishes and cardboard boxes that acted as drawers. Behind the round barrel stove next to the door, she put up a coat rack. But her most inspired idea was painting the entire floor of the cabin cannery red, like the exterior. When the sun filtered through the Visquine windows, the whole house filled with a rosy glow.
Dad’s contribut
ion to the décor was to add two large stereo speakers mounted to the slanting ceiling. As with every sound system he ever installed, he tested the speakers with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. He cranked the volume up so loud that when the cannons boomed and the bells rang, the fragile walls of the old cabin shook and the Visquine windows wheezed.
Typically he was satisfied only when there was no distortion, but his time, no matter what he did, no matter how many times the cannons boomed, he couldn’t get the sound right. I couldn’t help wondering what the bears and the fish thought of the cannons and bells.
All seven of us standing in front of the only intact cannery building, the little red cabin, across the creek from the ruins. Left to right: Jamie, Chris, Dad, Robin, me, Mom, and Megan.
The creek was anywhere from one hundred to two hundred feet wide at the mouth, where it met the bay, depending on rains and snowmelt. Up at the cabin it was boxed in by rock walls and was only about thirty feet wide. It rumbled noisily through the cabin’s thin walls and plastic windows all day and night.
Black and brown bears hunting salmon passed within a few feet of the front of the house. I remember watching a giant brown bear plod purposefully past us as we sat at the table. Because there were no details through the fuzzy plastic, it looked like a big brown hill had detached itself from the forest to travel upstream. If it had wanted, one sideswipe of its long claws would have granted it entrance to our home.
There was no shelter on this side of the cannery from the gales, so Dad kept the skiff on the floathouse side. Getting across the creek to the trail that led to the other side of the cannery, jumping from slick, smooth rock to rock, was a hassle on a daily basis and impossible when there was a deluge that raised the creek level. So he built a thirty-foot-long, fifteen-foot-high bridge out of poles, planks, and cable that spanned the entire width of the creek, from a hill on the other side to rocks in front of the cabin, with steps down from it.
Our dogs and cats soon learned to cross over the creek on the bridge and got into stare-downs on it as they approached from opposite sides. The bears, on the other hand, were indifferent to the sudden advent of the bridge.
On the floathouse side where we rarely saw bears—mainly just saw evidence that they had been around—we’d been scared of them. On the cannery side, where we lived right on the creek with the salmon fins flashing in the sunlight from one side to the other for the entire length of the creek, bears roamed constantly.
They were focused on the salmon to the exclusion of everything else. Their attention was centered on eating their daily intake—which was prodigious. We found out how focused they were when the dogs ran at the bears. At first we were appalled, thinking it would be the wolves all over again. But the bears were oblivious to the snarling, snapping, barking dogs. Moby and Lady bit the huge, lumbering beasts all day long and the bears showed no reaction.
At least, they didn’t react until late in the day, after they were gorged on salmon and became aware of their surroundings again. Without fail, and it was funny to see it, the bears would be startled by the dogs and crash into the creek, splashing madly to get away. Moby and Lady would tear after them, biting at their hind legs. It was absurd to see such frightening and deadly creatures running from a golden Cocker Spaniel and a Sheltie.
One morning when I let Lady outside I saw Megan heading for the outhouse. She had her head down and was watching where she stepped on the rocky bank of the creek. I was startled to see a burly black bear headed straight for her. He had his head down, sniffing the rocks as he trudged over them. In a few more moments they’d walk into each other.
“Megan!” I called. “Look out! Bear!”
She and the bear looked up, straight at each other.
It would be hard to say who was more horrified. They tore off in opposite directions in complete disarray and full-on panic.
Not all of our bear encounters were quite so comical, however. Once, while we were on the other side, getting the floathouse in shape to sell, Mom asked me to return to the cabin to pick up part of our lunch she’d forgotten to pack.
She would never have dreamed of doing that before, but being around the hyper-focused bears all the time had made us less concerned about them. I crossed the lonesome trail with its expansive moss clearings and finally reached the top of the bridge.
I loved it; the bridge was pure adventure, like something out of Swiss Family Robinson. It had rope railings and you could see the creek between the boards as you stepped. The lofty, panoramic view of the bay and the mountain ranges on Prince of Wales Island on the horizon couldn’t be beat. I felt like I was living in a wilderness adventure movie every time I crossed the bridge.
Once in the cabin I grabbed the tinfoil-covered bowl of potato salad Mom had left on the counter and then headed back across the bridge. I was about a quarter of the way across the planks when something in the creek below caught my attention.
A massive brown bear stood there, the sunlight glinting off the fur that bristled on his hump.
Unlike all the other bears, he wasn’t fishing. He was watching me.
The golden creek eddied around the pillars of his legs, creating whitewater rapids. The salmon swam all around him, their fins breaking the surface of the water. He ignored them, his black eyes fixed on me.
I froze. My heart thumped heavily in my ears, louder than the rumble of the creek. I didn’t try to move, afraid to trigger any of his aggressive, predator instincts.
He wasn’t fooled by my sudden lack of motion. With a smooth heave, he raised his enormous weight up onto his hind legs. The bridge remained above him, but I was stunned at how much his standing up narrowed the distance.
I stared at him and wondered what I could do if he decided to charge. Brown bears could knock over rooted trees. I didn’t think the bridge could withstand a determined brown bear attack. I prayed he wouldn’t charge, that he’d lose interest.
How long it would be before Mom wondered where I was with the food? Probably not long, because the boys would be bugging her for lunch. Maybe she’d send Dad after me and he’d have the gun. But would he get here in time to find that instead of getting lunch—I’d become lunch?
The only thing I had for protection was potato salad. Would throwing it at the big bruin distract him long enough for me to reach the cover of the woods? Out of his sight, I could run all the way to the other side. On the other hand, would he see the flying potato salad as an insult?
To my leg-weakening relief he dropped back down with a splash and slapped at a salmon, hooking it in his lengthy black claws. He munched on it, stripping the skin off its struggling, wriggling body.
I waited until my legs steadied and then eased over the boards, making for the other side. I’d only taken a couple steps when he stopped eating. He lifted his enormous head and pinned me with his weirdly prehistoric stare. I had the sense that I was being studied by something from the dinosaur age, from a predator line that had survived from long before man reached these salmon-rich shores.
When I remained still, he turned back to shredding the salmon.
I made it a few more steps. We kept up the back and forth, the halt and stare, eat and step, until I made it to the shade of the forest. I forced myself to continue to move slowly even after I was pretty sure I was out of his sight. Only when I’d passed the two-story steel fuel cylinder—one of the few things that had survived the cannery fire—and the rotten, collapsed structure that had been attached to it, did I run.
• • •
When Shawn stayed with us at the cabin, he was horrified by the bears right there on our doorstep. Riveted, he listened to my story of the face-off with the brown bear and then that night, as he was squeezed into the already full loft with the rest of us, he poked me and whispered, “Do you have anything I can use for a weapon in case the bears try to get in?”
I sleepily tried to think of something. “All I have is this Zane Grey hardback,” I said.
He took it gratefully. West of th
e Pecos was better than nothing.
Another cousin named Darrell, whom we hadn’t met before, came up to stay with us at the cabin. (Grandpa Frank had two daughters from a previous marriage, Shirley and Eileen. Darrell was Shirley’s youngest child.) Darrell had inherited Grandpa’s height and was well over six feet tall. He had sandy-colored hair and blue eyes and his father’s slow, Southern accent. He was eighteen, which meant that we saw him neither as one of us kids nor as one of the adults. He was, to Jamie’s speculative eyes, a fresh subject for torture.
To get away from us in the cabin, Darrell would sequester himself in the treehouse next to the cabin. It was accessible only through a rope and pulley system that went through a trapdoor. It was easy to keep us at bay… he thought.
After some calculation, Jamie decided that since Darrell had found a way to escape physical torment, he would be subjected to psychological torture instead. This turned out to be the repeated playing of the song “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.” As soon as Mom and Dad left to get mail in Meyers Chuck, leaving Darrell at our mercy—I mean, leaving him to watch us—the cassette with the song went in the stereo and the sound was cranked up and the door of the cabin left open.
It wasn’t long before Darrell snapped. He yelled down from inside the treehouse for us to play something, anything, different. Naturally, this only made it inevitable that “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” would fight their aerial dogfight again at a louder volume. Again and again. And… again.
Driven down from the treehouse, Darrell would slip and lurch over the rocks in his slick-bottomed cowboy boots to escape us. Whenever he returned, “Snoopy” would go back in the stereo.