by Tara Neilson
Mom took pictures of him as he stood with his hands on his waist, beaming with happiness and pride, in front of the unassembled sawmill. I was deeply impressed. I hadn’t known he could be that joyful. And maybe it was the first time he’d felt that way since Vietnam.
Dad at his happiest, the day he brought his one-man mobile sawmill home to the cannery.
He was like a kid as he swiftly took the crates apart with a crowbar and put the orange-painted sawmill together. We marveled over the long, intricately braced track, the enormous circular saw and its carriage with giant wheels. It was the only thing with wheels in our life. The whole assemblage looked alien.
From then on the purr and shriek of the sawmill became the background of our days, in combination with the music Dad liked to boom from the floathouse’s outside speakers to listen to in between slicing off another board. We were commanded never to run or play in front of the track when the sawmill was in operation because we could get hit by flying debris.
After assembling the mill, the first thing Dad did was build a platform for it with ways to haul logs up. Because the platform would be underwater on the higher tides (making it easy to put the bigger logs on it), he had to weight it.
As part of the design he built wooden boxes between the platform’s supports that we filled with rocks. Jamie, Megan, and I hauled the bigger rocks while Robin and Chris filled in the cracks with smaller stones. It took a backbreaking amount of labor to do it, even with Dad helping out—he wanted to have a part in every bit, no matter how menial, of creating his sawmill operation—but we did a good job. The deck never budged even in the worst storms and biggest surges.
He had a logging winch which he anchored by running a cable around a deeply rooted tree and attaching it to the winch. In order to get the logs lined up where he needed them, he used gravity and the tide as his assistants, especially if the tide he needed was at night when he’d be sleeping.
He’d tie a line to a log and then throw the free end over a tree branch. He would then tie it to a five-gallon bucket full of rocks and tighten the line on the log end, lifting the bucket until it was several feet off the ground. As the tide rose, the weight of the bucket would pull the log up the beach. When he’d wake up the next morning it would be where he needed it.
For a long time, before the sawmill arrived in our lives, before we moved to the cannery, Dad had an insanely huge log that we all called “the Big Log.” It was 110 feet long and 40 inches in diameter on the small end, and over 6 feet tall on the big end. It had been one of the logs in the sled under the massive donkey that lifted log bundles at the logging camp where Dad had worked. It was found to have rot on the top side and had to be discarded, so Dad promptly spoke up, asking if he could have it and those in charge agreed.
It had always been the plan that one day our wilderness home would come out of that log.
But in the meantime he needed to make a living by selling lumber to the locals, as well as hiring himself out for his carpentry skills. Some fine wood came out of his mill because he loved every moment of it and took great pride in figuring out how to get the best product out of a log.
He didn’t charge nearly as much as his labor was worth—in addition to sawing the lumber, he’d also make bundles of it and then tow it to whoever had bought it, undo the bundle, carry it up the beach, and stack it. We sometimes helped in all of this, but most of the time he did it while we were in school.
He was hired to use the lumber he milled to replace rotten wood in people’s homes, replace their decking or build new decks, docks, and entire houses. There was hardly a household in the area that didn’t have some of his lumber and/or labor in it.
Our days soon became dedicated to beachcombing for saw logs. The whole family participated, putting our shoulders to logs and rolling them down rocky beaches to the water. When Dad saw a log he wanted, he’d beach the skiff and climb up with his chainsaw and “buck off” whatever section he didn’t want, such as when it was a “rootwad,” a log that still had a portion of the roots attached.
He would stand in dangerous places, sometimes on top of the log as he ran the saw, and I’d cringe, waiting for some horrible accident to happen. But, like in everything mechanical, he had complete mastery over the saw and understood the forces in play. He never had an accident with it. Though, every now and then, he had problems with a saw not working.
His always on tap war rage could be counted on to be triggered by frustration. Once, when a balky saw absolutely refused to cooperate, no matter what he tried, he swore at it and flung it into the bay. Satisfied that he’d made his point, he waded out and fished it out of the water. Then he dismantled it on a log, cleaned all of its parts, put it back together, and to no one’s surprise the chastened saw did its job.
The scariest part of logging with Dad was his “hack the mission” focus. He lost complete awareness of the human element in his equations and calculations. Once when he was pulling a log off the beach with the skiff, the line went tight against Mom, who sat next to him on the back seat by the outboard.
All his attention was on the log and he didn’t notice or hear her attempts to get his attention as he revved the outboard. The more he pulled on the log, the more the line pressed against her, pushing her until she almost went over head first into the water. Our yells finally clued him in, and he slacked up the line before Mom went overboard.
We learned to keep a sharp eye out for ourselves and be ready for anything that came our way. Snapped lines were what I was always tensely anticipating. They could whiplash back and strike you if you weren’t careful. Or you could fall off your seat when the outboard was revved up high against the weight of a log, only to shoot forward when a line snapped. Over time, Dad’s reflexes became so honed that he could instantly turn the throttle down so that we only lurched when a line snapped.
If a log fell into a cradle of rocks, we’d all clamber back out and Dad would pack the heavy Peavey, a logging tool made of thick steel pipe with a pointed end and a big, hinged hook, up to the log. And while bald eagles stared piercingly from the tops of a spruce tree at the only humans in their domain, and humpback whales blew streamers of steam into the air out on the bay, Dad would hook the log and use the pipe as a lever to roll it up out of the rocks.
We kids would be quick to hold the log with drift poles, the weight digging into our shoulders as we breathed in deep the seaweed and musky mink scents of the beach, so Dad could sink another bite into it. We’d do it again if necessary until it was freed, despite the fact that all of us, except Jamie, were not yet teenagers.
When Dad was logging he’d get so deep into the logistics that I don’t think he saw us as human, or even alive. We were tools, mechanical parts: handy, mobile extensions to be used by his engineering brain as needed. (He’d loosen up once the logs were under tow and let Chris—who was too small to have much part in any of the action—sit on his leg and steer the outboard.)
He also had logging jacks that came with the sawmill, and we’d use those on the beaches to liberate the logs he had his heart set on. I always dreaded having to be the one who worked the pipe, afraid I’d do something that would knock the jack over and drop the log on someone. But Dad, again, always knew exactly what he was doing and no one ever got hurt.
Like most things in our wilderness life, logging was heavy, sweaty labor.
• • •
A sawmill, we soon learned, generates a tremendous amount of sawdust. At first Dad shoveled the sawdust into a deep, wooden wheelbarrow that he’d built himself, complete with a wooden wheel, and dumped it in a wide circle in a cleared part of the forest above the sawmill platform. (It was right next to the quarry of broken rock and core samples that US Steel had left behind after they surveyed the cannery for profitable ore. The stacks of five-foot-long aluminum and steel core sample holders were what we used in constructing our forts.)
When a big tide threatened, Dad would put the mill on its wheeled carriage and drag it up to the
sawdust clearing and park it under some trees with a tarp over it to protect the engine from the elements. The sawdust kept coming, however, so he decided that we’d make a trail with it to connect both sides of the property.
The cannery managers had done that before us, with a wide, raised boardwalk set on pilings. It was mostly rotten and caved in when we got there, with rusty nails sticking out of it, so Mom told us never to play around it.
I liked to roam alongside it and wonder who had strolled the boardwalk back when the cannery boomed. What had they thought about under the cooling dimness of the forest canopy way up overhead? Where had they come from? Once they went home to their part of the world, did they long to return to the mystery and beauty of the Alaskan rainforest next to the sea?
Mom suggested that Jamie and Shawn be paid to tear the wreckage of the old boardwalk down. So all of one summer they dragged the heavy, crumbling boards aside. Jamie, of course, had to get some fun out of it and swung his homemade machete at it, hacking and chopping an imaginary enemy with many a “hi-yah” and Conan the Barbarian–type grunts. Shawn followed suit with either the ax or sledgehammer. They got their entertainment’s worth out of the destruction, and got paid in the bargain.
Dad did a lot of the sawdust hauling, pushing a heaped wheelbarrow to dump where the boardwalk had been, but so did Megan and I. Sometimes we had to do it late into the day, when the shadows gathered in dark density under the trees, in order to get the sawdust off the deck before the tide came in.
Mom was still worried about the bears and also the wolves later in the year, so Megan and I had to pack Dad’s .44 revolver in its hip holster, the belt heavy with cartridges as we shoveled sawdust into the wheelbarrow and then pushed it up the hill and down the first part of the trail to dump it and then stamp it down.
Megan, with her night terrors and fear of the dark, did not count these among her favorite moments, though with my love of Westerns I liked the frontier adventure of it, emphasized by the presence of the gun.
Robin and Chris, inspired by watching one of their favorite movies, Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson, decided to dig a “tiger pit” like the boys in that movie did, in the sawdust trail. Their plan was for either Megan or me to push the wheelbarrow into it while they chortled on the sidelines. They laid live hemlock branches over the hole, interweaving them so that the sawdust would stay on top of them and look like a solid part of the trail.
Then they hunkered down out of sight and waited, exchanging anticipatory glances and readying their high fives.
However, when the person pushing the wheelbarrow hove into view, they saw it was Dad. They froze, forgetting to breathe as they watched him push the load of sawdust with his usual fast, impatient stride along the already built trail. All at once the wheelbarrow dropped into the hole and he crashed into it.
They ducked down, staring at each other with their hands over their mouths as Dad roared curses and threats of what he’d do to whoever had pulled that trick. They found that retreat was the better part of valor and scrambled away as silently as possible. Dad probably had his suspicions about who did it, but since he couldn’t prove it all he could do was brood and glare and make it clear that if it ever happened again, life wouldn’t be worth living for any of us.
• • •
We didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy the changes to the floathouse. That fall Mom realized that the boys were not taking their schoolwork seriously enough with her as their teacher, and she was afraid they’d fall too far behind to ever catch up.
She and Dad talked it over and the upshot was that Mom, Robin, Chris, Megan, and I would move back to Meyers Chuck so we kids could attend the school there while living in the wanigan. Jamie would stay with Dad to keep the place going in Union Bay, doing his correspondence lessons like usual.
Mom fixed up the tiny wanigan and Dad towed it to the Chuck with us aboard, including Lady, who had separation anxiety whenever she was apart from me. He towed us into the Back Chuck (the small lagoon behind the front harbor), where our floathouse used to be before we moved to the cannery.
We were delighted to find that Linda would once again be our next-door neighbor. She and her husband Art had built a floathouse of their own and it was moored in the Back Chuck. They’d had a baby, a happy, friendly little guy named Noah.
The brand-new state-built school in Meyers Chuck had won an award for its architectural design and had been built with half a million in oil-revenue dollars. It was a startlingly modern structure in a roadless, tiny fishing village. It had its own generator and, alien to us, a furnace room that provided central heating. Even more alien were the boys and girls restrooms, including a modern shower. The entire front of the school was made of windows and it had a lofty cathedral ceiling.
Every aspect of the school was impractical, but it did manage to create a kind of bridge between the modern world and our rustic lives. Especially with its Apple computers (on which we happily played The Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? for hours on end) and gigantic TV dish.
It was strange being around other people again, but it helped that many of them were related to us—by then Rory and Marion had returned to the Chuck from Saltery Cove and were building a log cabin. We also got to see a lot more of our grandparents, especially Grandma Pat, who was the teacher’s aide. With four of her grandchildren calling her Grandma, it wasn’t long before all the other school kids, and the teacher too, wound up calling her Grandma too.
The school district got state money for every kid they had in one of their schools, so once the school year was over and we moved back to the cannery, they offered to buy Dad a new outboard motor and pay for his fuel if he’d agree to skiff all five of us kids to school every day. Dad agreed.
This meant that he had to make the trip on open, mercurial waters four times a day—taking us over and then going back to the cannery to work with the sawmill, then back to the Chuck to pick us up and take us home. Including crossing the strait every weekend in the thirteen-foot Boston Whaler for two years, he logged an impressive amount of hours in an open skiff.
One of the first things Dad did was build a sturdy, sixteen-foot wooden skiff, the design of which impressed the local men. The little Whaler was getting too small to ferry five growing kids on unpredictable waters. He’d previously built a shallow, twelve-foot dory. This time he built the frame of the skiff much deeper. He didn’t put any seats in, since he planned to use it for hauling freight and lumber. We sat on the duck boards and leaned against the sides.
When we got in rough weather, a fairly common occurrence since we had to round one of the most treacherous points in Alaska to get to school, the skiff would take water over the bow and cascade down on us. We didn’t have raingear, so Mom cut holes in fifty-gallon garbage bags and we put them on over our lifejackets. Our backpacks got drenched and we had water-stained, swollen textbooks and smeared homework.
There were days when it blew so hard that we couldn’t go to school at all, so the teacher called us on the CB radio and gave us our lessons that way. For math she’d give us the answer key for the even-numbered problems and we’d have to show our work for the odd-numbered problems. I wound up figuring out algebra on my own by trial and error; it was an amazing epiphany when it all came together.
Dad listened to the forecast every night and we got in the habit of choosing to do our homework or not according to what the weatherman reported. If he said it was going to blow, I’d put my homework aside in favor of reading a Western.
To our dismay, we learned that the weatherman was not to be trusted. Sometimes we’d wake up to not the forecasted storm but a gloriously calm day, and Dad would skiff us to school without our homework done. This constant betrayal bred in me a deep and abiding distrust for all weather forecasters.
We missed almost as many days of school we made. Which the teachers hated, so it’s surprising that Jamie and I were allowed to take a month off to work Grandpa’s trapline in Bear Creek, about
two miles from the cannery.
Dad skiffing us to school in the wooden skiff he built himself to haul lumber.
I was fourteen, Jamie was sixteen, and we were completely on our own in the wilderness. (Grandpa later wrote an article about our experience, interviewing each of us. He wrote of me: “At fourteen, Tara is a tall girl, with loose blonde hair; her luminous blue eyes darken when she is serious, but usually sparkle with gaiety. They have a trick of looking directly into yours, not boldly, but with assurance and self-possession. She has a wide mouth grin that illuminates her whole face and a sharp mind that made it easy for her to become an ‘A’ student.”)
We had to promise Mom that we’d take the walkie-talkie with us wherever we went and call in every night. We loved being on our own, cooking our own meals, reading books in our bunks in the cozy cabin, playing cards, and rhyming entire conversations. The only part I didn’t like was the actual trapline. Jamie knew my softheartedness and, without mocking me for it, allowed me to go off while he dispatched the animals.
(In the same article by Grandpa, Jamie was also described: “Jamie, at sixteen is a six-footer with large hands and feet that seem to promise he will be a big man when he fills out. He too has a quick mind… he could survey the options and quickly decide where to make a set.”)
When I was away from the cabin for a few days to allow an infected finger to heal, Jamie shot a wolf when a pack came down off the mountain and prowled on the creek bank opposite him. He was quietly proud of overcoming his fears and later sold the hide during a school fieldtrip.
One night we woke up to hear a low growl. We shot up in our bunks, listening hard, asking each other if it was a bear. To our horror we realized it was something a lot worse. It was Dad in the skiff.