by Tara Neilson
At night, Mom and Dad inadvertently contributed to Darrell’s unsettled state of mind by regaling him with bear stories. He slept on the couch (Jamie had to squish in with us in the loft), the most vulnerable place in the tiny cabin. His only comfort was that the .30-.30 rifle hung on nails pounded into the outer rafter of Mom and Dad’s loft right above where he slept.
After the kerosene lamps were blown out—not counting the lantern, turned down low, up in our loft that had to be left on for Megan—everyone settled in for the night. One evening a wild, snarling, crashing commotion broke out.
Darrell leapt off the couch and snatched the .30-.30 off its nails and worked the lever action, pulling the trigger repeatedly.
Instead of a brown bear tearing through the half-rotten walls or thin Visquine, it turned out to be a dust-up between the dogs and the cats. Fortunately, no one got shot. Mainly because Mom didn’t allow the .30-.30 to be loaded within reach of the boys. The rifle’s ammunition was kept separate from it to prevent any accidents.
• • •
The summer we lived in the cabin was when we first truly interacted with the ruins on a daily basis, when they became an integral part of our lives.
Mom went with us kids on treasure hunts, digging up the past. In new-growth forest that had sprouted up thickly on the edge of the beach on the other side of the creek from the cabin, where the fire had torched the buildings, we discovered the remains of a cook shack.
Half buried in the dimly lit brush we stumbled upon a large rusty machine that was eight feet long with three racks. Dad told us it was the oven and that it would have been able to cook dozens of pies at once or several hundred cookies. We could only dream of such an amazing device.
We dug out stacks of steel plates, pots, pans—some of them in almost mint condition. There were scads of cutlery, some of it rusted together, but others perfectly okay and perfect for playing with. There were long, flat steel spatulas and mixing spoons, roasting forks, and also knives, which Mom wouldn’t allow us to play with, but we kept some anyway.
From the debris we carefully pried out bits and pieces of pottery. Every now and then we found saucers and handleless cups that looked Asian. Mom kept the most whole and complete ones to display on a shelf. I looked at them all the time, trying to imagine who the last person was to handle them.
Megan (left) and I play with our dolls on the scorched wreckage between the pilings that formerly held up the cannery wharf.
Down on the beach, where the cannery machines had fallen and corroded, we played on and around them amidst giant piles of rusted together lids and flattened, lidless cans. There was a satisfying fascination in pulling them apart and crumbling them into red dust.
Megan and I played with our dolls on the twisted framework of the machinery that had once rolled tin, to be cut into cans. Some nameless worker had stood there for hours pushing long sheets onto the rollers that our dolls sat on. Megan and I shepherded the dolls on their adventures as we munched on Saltine crackers in the shadow of the tall wharf pilings.
• • •
A couple hundred yards below the cabin, the rocks gave way to a sandy beach that seemed to stretch forever on a minus tide. This was uncommon in Southeast Alaska, which was nothing less than an enormous drowned mountain range, its intricate maze of islands the tops of mountains. The Inside Passage with the waterways branching off from it contained a series of deep river valleys that the ocean had breached millions of years ago.
Most of the land of this vast archipelago was sheer rock bluffs. The mountains rose up from the water without a gradual buildup as in other parts of the world. The benefits of this was that in a skiff or boat it was possible (there were exceptions: occasional unexpected reefs and ancient rock mountain tops that didn’t break the surface except on the lowest tides), to hug the shoreline so close you could practically reach out and pluck the buttercups growing in the cracks of rocks as you drove past. Humpback whales could glide right alongside the forest without fear of beaching themselves.
In such a sheer mountainous world, our fine sandy beach was a unique asset. When the Fourth of July rolled around while we were staying at the cabin that summer, family and friends in Meyers Chuck descended upon us with lashings of picnic supplies and lawn furniture to take advantage of the beach.
Dad built a firepit in the rocks above the sand for grilling burgers and hot dogs. Fortunately, that early in July it was before the salmon began to run so there were no bears around yet.
Rory and Marion with LeAnn and JoDean arrived with scads of goodies and so did Grandma, who arrived in Grandpa’s fishing boat the Shawno, bringing its namesake with them to stay with us at the cabin. A girl from Meyers Chuck also came to play and go swimming with Megan and me. We couldn’t stay out of the water with that inviting, softly gradual sandy beach to swim from. The creek ran right alongside it and its mountain-chilled water brought the saltwater temperature down and made it less buoyant than we were used to from swimming on the other side, but we adapted.
It was an all-day picnic so when the tide went back out, instead of mourning our lost swimming pool, we invented a game we called Circle Tag. We drew a huge circle in the sand with ragged and erratic lines inside it, branching off and connecting unexpectedly. Then we chased each other on the lines. Anyone who fell off a line was automatically “it.” Dad, Rory, Marion, and Mom got involved and much shrieking and hilarity ensued.
• • •
Later in the summer, Rory and Dad went hunting over on the islands and Marion and the girls stayed with us at the cabin. When it rained and we were all cooped up inside the single room with two lofts, Mom and Marion had to come up with something to keep the kids occupied.
Marion cooked up a huge batch of maple bars from scratch. Her homemade rolls, that she was accustomed to cooking in an old-fashioned wood-burning cook stove, were something we kids would brag about to each other whenever we had a chance to eat them. Mom made the maple bar frosting. Afterward, when she went to wash her hands in the wash bowl, she got distracted by the ruckus we were making. She told us to settle down over her shoulder as she washed her hands and thought the consistency of the water was strange. When she looked down she found she was washing her hands in the frosting.
She almost fell over laughing, which set us kids and Marion off too.
The error of this maple bar distraction was only apparent after the sugar lit up our already over-energized systems. To stop us from bouncing off the walls and hanging from the lofts, Mom came up with the brilliant idea of a dance marathon. She told us that the flappers in the Twenties had made it a craze and that some people had died from exhaustion to win the record. She wondered aloud, how long could we go?
We embraced the idea. We pushed the table up against the front wall, pushed the couch into the kitchen, and moved the loft ladders out of the way. While we danced to Foreigner, Blondie, and Rick Springfield, Mom had the idea of putting makeup on her sister-in-law.
Marion had grown up out in the wilderness without access or much interest in more traditional feminine outlets, such as cosmetics. But she let Mom experiment on her.
We were all curious to see what would come of it, having never seen Marion wear anything except lip balm on her face. As we danced hour after hour on the red-painted floor while the rain drummed on the roof, and the music throbbed from the ceiling accompanied by the constant rumble of the creek, we watched Mom apply her brushes, eyelash curlers, powders, and lipstick to Marion’s face next to the fuzzy light of the front Visquine windows. She gave Marion a professional hairstyling as well.
When Mom unveiled the finished result, we were all surprised. We’d seen Mom work her makeup tricks on all of us and the effect had always been memorable, even transformative.
Not this time.
As it turned out, Marion had such a natural, strong beauty that adding artificial dyes and colors made her less, not more, striking. Mom shook her head and summed it up as “painting the lily.”
; • • •
One day, when we went to step out of the cabin, we were surprised to see that the ground was no longer stable and firm. Every inch of it moved with a surreal, undulating motion. Closer inspection showed that ants had invaded.
It was a plague of ants, like the night the frogs came out on the other side. Just as we never saw many frogs, ants weren’t all that common either. But now millions of them were crawling over every inch of ground.
They didn’t cause us any problems, though trying to get to the outhouse and back, or across the bridge without stepping on any of them, was impossible. But I tried not to hurt any of them. We were in awe of the mass migration, having no idea why they were on the move or where they were headed. By the next day they were all gone.
Since we were all living on top of each other and Dad was home now, the boys couldn’t harass Megan quite as much as they preferred. But in the tighter confines they got on her nerves more than usual, and one night she had something of a psychic break and went into a cleaning frenzy way past bedtime. We all hung over the loft’s edge and watched her sweeping, dusting, rearranging knickknacks, putting books away, tidying the kitchen, and sweeping some more.
Mom called from hers and Dad’s loft, “Megan, thank you for all your cleaning, but you can go to bed now, honey.”
It was obvious to all of us that Megan had finally cracked.
Shortly afterward, Dad crossed the strait to pick up groceries and supplies. When he returned and we hauled everything up to the cabin, he pulled something out of the boxes and handed it to Megan.
It was an enormous art kit with everything a budding artist could want, with sketchpad, pencils, paints, and brushes in different sizes. It was amazing that a store as small as the one in Thorne Bay had such a specialty item, so he had to have gone deliberately looking to find it.
For the most part, we felt that Dad wasn’t aware of us kids as anything more than an ever-present underfoot irritant that he had to work hard to support, or conversely an always on tap labor source. But every now and then we were surprised to learn that this wasn’t true. That he did know each of us individually, and cared when we were hurting.
Robin remembers being teased incessantly by Jamie and Shawn when he was seven years old. Dad saw him after a teasing session and, much to Robin’s surprise, noticed how unhappy he was. Dad said, “Let’s take a walk.”
They walked to the outhaul, but Dad passed it until they reached a weathered rootwad. Dad pulled a hatchet out of it. To Robin’s amazement it was brand new, and not one of the cheap rubber-handled camping hatchets—it was a leather handle, one-piece Estwing hatchet. Dad handed it to him and said, “All I ask is you don’t lose a finger. But you’re man enough to have this.” Robin never forgot it.
Chris was always more determined than the rest of us to be close to Dad. He’d follow him around and climb onto his lap, and Dad would let him. He remembers sitting on Dad’s knee while out wood logging and Dad letting Chris help him steer the outboard when he was only five years old.
One time, in the floathouse, I became upset about something, but I almost never showed when I was unhappy in front of anyone. I retreated into the back room to cry over my paper dolls while everyone else was in the front of the house laughing and enjoying themselves. The next thing I knew, Dad appeared. He rarely came into the kids’ domain. But he silently squatted down next to me and picked up one of the paper dolls, and awkwardly attempted to play with them with me.
Even Jamie had one of these moments when Dad, a couple years later, sacrificed his carefully hoarded fuel for Jamie’s benefit.
• • •
In late summer it rained heavily for days, so heavily that the creek rose higher than we’d ever seen it. We watched as a downed alder tree from somewhere upstream washed down toward the bridge. It bumped into rocks and got wedged into place just upstream from the cabin and held there for a day.
Dad paced, muttering, willing the rain to cease. It didn’t.
The alder, after holding against the pummeling creek, suddenly popped free and plunged down on the bridge. Shoved up lengthways against the bridge’s supports, whitewater foamed over the tree.
The waiting was the worst. Feeling under siege by the deluge, holding our breaths, willing the bridge to hold. The creek swirled higher and higher under the floorboards beneath our feet.
With a crack that we heard over the rain and the thunder of the rushing water, the pole supports gave way. We ran outside and saw an entire section of the bridge torn loose, tumbling and splashing into the creek.
It was soon washed away along with the tree in the roaring water. We got it, then, why the cannery owners had built their bridge on massive concrete blocks that still remained, though their corners had been rounded off from decades of exposure.
As soon as the rain and the whitewater in the creek subsided, Dad rebuilt the bridge. This time he made sure that there were supports on either side of the creek, using one of the cannery’s concrete blocks to anchor the cabin side of the bridge. It was the center of the bridge where the waters rushed the fiercest during heavy rainfall, so he supported it entirely on swifter cables. He didn’t bother roping the railings—in fact, there weren’t any railings with this version.
One other thing happened that summer. Because of Dad losing his job, for the first time the annual land lease payment to US Steel was late. It was a twenty-year renewable lease with option to buy, if US Steel ever wanted to sell, which they said they “wouldn’t ever, in the foreseeable future.”
Mom wrote to Mr. McKenzie and explained the situation, asking to be granted an extension, sharing with him the plan to sell the floathouse.
Jamie, Robin, and Chris on the bridge Dad built, holding puppies and watching as Moby confronts the cat, Creosote Bill.
Mr. McKenzie wrote back, assuring her that she had nothing to worry about, that we would never lose the lease due to a late payment.
• • •
Our brief time crammed into the cannery cabin stands out for all of us as a pocket eternity of sun-drenched summer days. We had managed to do that best of all things—go on vacation while remaining at home.
It was an entire adventure on its own. We remember it as being an entire year, a complete novel of events. It was our most favorite, fullest time at the cannery. Perhaps because we were thrown so much into each other’s company.
If we hadn’t already formed a bond that nothing in the years to come could break, we formed it during those months in the cannery cabin.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I don’t think any other man did what he did to make sure we all got our education. Four times a day in some of the worst weather in the world, and I still graduated!”
—Robin
ONLY ONE person came out to look at the floathouse thinking to buy. He flew out on a floatplane and asked whether the house was on a sled so it could be slid off the float and onto shore. It wasn’t. Plus, he didn’t think the size was right for the logging cook shack he had in mind to use it for, so he passed on it.
With no other interest being shown, we gave up on the idea of selling the floathouse. Instead, Dad thought that if we pooled our Permanent Fund Dividends (Alaska’s annual oil revenue dividend for every resident) we’d have almost enough to buy the one-man mobile sawmill he had his eye on, and he could borrow the rest.
They usually let us kids have a large part of our dividend to be used in our yearly blow-out party, as well as for buying whatever else we needed—everything from clothes to personal hygiene, but mostly music related: Walkmans, headphones, boom boxes, cassettes, batteries. Lots and lots of batteries.
We were still in the little red cabin when Mom and Dad sat the five of us kids down at the long pine table Dad had built in Montana. The creek rumbled by loudly, almost under our feet. The fuzzy light through the Visquine plastic windows was enough to set the red floor and white walls aglow.
They asked if we’d be willing to give up our dividend that year so Dad coul
d buy the sawmill. They set it all out, like we were investors at a company board meeting, all the pros and cons, and then told us kids to take our time and think seriously about it.
Mom insisted that we’d get a percentage of the profits, but we all knew that wasn’t likely to happen. Mainly because Dad would probably only make enough to keep us fed and alive, which meant our investment pretty much paid for itself. I personally thought they could have taken our dividends and used them without asking us, as any parent would have a right to do, if it meant the difference between being able to feed and clothe their kids or not.
At any rate, we didn’t hesitate or need to talk about it. We all agreed.
We moved back into the floathouse, hauling skiff-loads of our belongings around the sheer bluff, forested peninsula that separated the two sides of the cannery and reassembled everything in the freshly renovated floathouse.
It now had a delightful, tiny kitchen with wrap-around counters. The side that faced the living room had been made into a bar with five stools for us kids to eat at. The shelves between us and the kitchen were open so we could watch Mom as she worked, cooking her fabulous Spanish rice or German potato salad, as if we were at a fast food diner. Dad had varnished the top with fiberglass resin, and we quickly discovered that you didn’t want to put a hot paper plate on it—the resin leaked through the paper and into our food.
As Dad put the stereo speakers back in place, he heard a rattling inside one of them. When he dismantled it he finally discovered the reason why he’d never been able to achieve the proper, distortion-free cannon fire when booming out Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture at the cabin. The speakers were full of Mom’s rock jewelry. (Her maternal grandfather had been a rock hound in the Great Lakes area and had his own jewelry shop). For some reason, known only to themselves, the boys had stashed the beautifully cut and polished stones there.
One overcast day in the fall of 1983, while we kids were swimming on the floathouse side, Dad showed up towing Rory and Marion’s thirteen-foot Boston Whaler, a twin of Dad’s, both skiffs piled high with wooden crates. When he beached them and got out his beard was split by the biggest grin we’d ever seen.