by Tara Neilson
It struck us both at the same time—we’d forgotten to call in!
Dad was coming to see if we were alive in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t have been able to get to us until the tide came in, and at night the trip up the winding creek with unpredictable sand bars on all sides would have been treacherous and stressful.
We looked at each other, imagining what Dad’s state of mind would be. Jamie suggested we take off for the hills and live off the land for the rest of our lives. But when Dad got there and found out we’d forgotten to call in and we were okay, he didn’t say all that much. Apparently he was glad to find us alive.
• • •
The wolves were still a part of our lives.
And one year, the inevitable happened. They got Lady.
Mom was on a brief trip with Linda to San Francisco, one of the few times Mom got to get away from the wilderness. While she was away I spent hours trimming all the burrs and cutting out the matted fur Lady managed to accumulate with her super-fine, Cocker Spaniel hair. I wanted to impress Mom with how cleaned up I’d gotten Lady.
The day after I gave her dog show grooming, she disappeared.
We spent hours calling and looking. Dad took me down the beach in the skiff, letting me get out and call Lady’s name for hours. I kept calling and looking, but I knew she was gone. I knew the wolves had gotten her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mom: Did you feel that the ruins at the cannery were alive, that they welcomed us? I mean, did you ever think about the workers who used to live there?
Dad: No. I just thought about needing to clear all the rusty junk out of the way so I could build.
CLEARING THE land for the two gardens was as nothing compared to the job of clearing Mom’s chosen site for the New House, as we called it. Four years earlier, on our reconnaissance trip to the cannery, she’d picked out where she wanted her dream house to be, right next to the creek, set back in the woods a short way from the beach.
She couldn’t be dissuaded despite the fact that the spot was overgrown with new growth after the fire and the brush was so thick you couldn’t walk through it. We knew bunkhouses had been there previously because the brush and saplings had grown right up through twisted and burned steel beds—dozens of them. Many of the beds had become welded together from the intense heat, creating strange, abstract shapes.
Dad brooded about it, inspecting the seemingly insurmountable challenge for a while. Then he got his chainsaw and went to work. The five of us kids and Mom hauled small trees down to the beach (spruce trees and their limbs were the worst because they were so prickly and dripped sap), slapping at the swarm of bloodthirsty bugs as we worked. We hauled for hours, tossing the brush onto a crackling bonfire. I thought how strange it was that the brush we hauled down had been born from fire and was being returned to fire.
Dad chopped through the twisted metal with a sharp ax and we hauled it down to the beach as well, to let it make the acquaintance of its cannery brethren, already washed by decades of tides. Mom had insisted that all of us get tetanus booster shots from a district nurse who flew out to the Chuck every year, which was probably a good idea.
As we trudged repeatedly down the trail Dad had blazed, dragging brush and metal behind us, the creek rumbled. The bears ambled through the golden water amidst the steady fins. Sea gulls shrieked and fought over spawned corpses and pecked the eyes out of the living salmon. The stench made us glad to breathe in the fresh, sharp scent of burning hemlock and crackling spruce branches. The bugs weren’t as bad down by the roaring bonfire either.
Every day we cleared. There were times when I inspected my sap-covered, scratched hands that I thought we’d never get it done. We were beat, but Dad was relentless. Like always, when he had a goal he was like a machine, a Terminator that nothing could stop. Quitting was not an option for any of us. That lesson helped us get through a lot of things later in life.
It wasn’t all drudgery. There were high spots, like when we uncovered the remains of what Mom delightedly said was a Japanese garden. Although it had become wildly overgrown like everything else, it had escaped the fire and as we cleared it, the harmonious design became clear. Mom said that one day we’d route water from the creek to it and put a pond in to fill with fish. She wondered if it had originally been that way. I wondered who the imaginative person was who had designed the ornamental garden in the middle of the wilderness.
We also found another grave, and a low, square concrete pad with a raised lip which even Dad found puzzling.
Finally the cutting and hauling and burning was done. The cleared area was impressively large, but Dad didn’t stand around admiring it. The next thing we knew he was digging innumerable holes and putting in foundation pilings. He anchored one part of the house on the concrete pad.
Mom’s design for the New House was spectacularly impractical, considering Dad would have to mill every board for it and the only labor available were two adults and five kids, most of them not in their teens yet.
The house was to be two full stories high and two different buildings arranged perpendicular to each other, but under one joined roof. The side of the house that ran parallel to the creek would be about the size of our grandparents’ house in Meyers Chuck, but with a much higher ceiling. The loft would have the master bedroom, while beneath and in front of it would be a single vast living room, with a soaring cathedral ceiling and huge windows stacked up on the front facing the beach, and a bay window with a view of the creek.
The other side of the house, accessible by a door at the bottom of the master bedroom’s stairs, would have an entry hall with stairs to five second-floor bedrooms and a landing. Below, a commodious kitchen with an attached walk-in pantry would be built. On the side of these rooms there’d be a room lined with windows that faced the forest and ridge where access to the bridge was. It was a long rectangle of a room that Mom called the game room. Mom completely forgot to design bathrooms, so one had to be added later in the living room.
The house was designed to encompass nearly 3,000 square feet. In short, it was a wilderness mansion. How it would get from Mom’s fantasy design on paper and take three-dimensional shape in our brutally real world was a mystery. As it turned out, Dad’s engineering brain and sheer inability to admit defeat contained the necessary alchemy to effect the miracle. Oh, and our labor. Lots of labor.
The real work began when Dad stacked and bound bundles of lumber he’d milled from the Big Log and towed them over to the cannery side. We kids and Mom hauled board after board up the beach, skirting the giant cannery retort door half buried in rustcolored rocks, past some lonesome, outlying pilings, and into the shade of the woods using the trail we’d blazed while clearing brush.
It felt like we were passing the ghosts of our former selves, the innocent kids who’d thought the hard part would be over once they lugged the prickly branches down to the fire. I felt like saluting that naïve child as we sweated over the heavy, ungainly boards. Even with two kids to a board we couldn’t keep up with Dad’s impatient strides. He lifted several boards at once onto a shoulder and passed us like we were standing still.
When that bundle was neatly stacked near the Japanese garden, stickered and covered with a tarp to dry, he returned to the sawmill to create another bundle and repeat the process—again and again and again.
Dad standing at one end of the Big Log that would one day build the New House.
There were also the long, massive beams that would be necessary to support the second story, and one beam that Mom had thrown in for purely decorative purposes. Dad slid short pieces of rope with loops at either end under these beams, stuck a two-by-two through the loops, and we kids were arranged on either side with our hands on the two-by-twos while Mom and Dad each took an end. With burning muscles and much halting, jerking, and dropping, we managed to get the heavy beams to where Dad wanted them.
Slowly but surely the house began to take shape. First, the fifty-four-by-thirty-four-foot foundat
ion floor that the two sides of the house would sit on was laid out, with Dad sawing and nailing every board into place.
Then the first-floor walls went up. Dad needed us kids to lift and then hold the walls in place while he nailed them together where they joined at the corners. Next he put the stairs in. We loved the stairs and we would race up and down them all day long and then sit on the framing, or chase each other across the tops of it when Mom wasn’t looking. The dogs loved the stairs too and chased us, yipping, as we ran up and down them. Sometimes we’d just sit on the stairs staring out at the bay from our unusually high vantage point.
One time Rory and Marion arrived, showing us a soccer ball that they’d found floating in the bay. We all, kids and adults, promptly played a game of kickball, dodging in and out of the wall framing and bouncing the ball off rolls of tarpaper.
It was a sad day when Dad put down the second-story floor and made it more of a house than a jungle gym. Then came the logistics of pulling the second floor’s end wall into place. It spanned the entire width of the house and had a high, peaked top. We pulled it into place using rope and tackle with Mom and us kids straining on the ropes while Dad maneuvered it into place. We held on, sweating and scared we’d let go and it would fall. Dad squared it up, and nailed it in place.
Eleanor Agnew, in the book Back to the Land, described how the entire community she was a part of banded together to help raise walls for a modest home under construction. She said that about a dozen friends showed up and discussed strategy. Then a row of men and women pushed the wall up from inside while another row of men and women pulled on ropes from the outside. Agnew wrote: “Voices groaned… as the wall frame rose high and strong, among curses and yells. Sweat dripped and arms trembled as the wall at last stood upright.”
It was a good thing we never knew that a dozen full-grown adults found wall raisings taxing.
But the wall raising was nothing compared to the six-by-twelveinch beam, twenty feet long, that had to be raised above the living room floor to complete Mom’s open beam design. (Dad put up the slightly smaller beams on the other side of the house that supported the second-story floor by himself while we were at school.)
Mom later wrote to a friend: “The huge living room beams went up as a joint effort, the kids and I pulling the rope as Gary maneuvered them into place. I recall on the biggest beam, we were all in a row, stair stepping oldest to youngest and all straining like crazy pulling that rope, pulling that huge beam up, inch by inch and we were all screaming “Dad!” “Gary!” “She’s not gonna hold!” “Hurry!” “We’re losing her!” We were almost laid back flat pulling that beam! With block and tackle of course. But she went up. You can imagine that we’d have cheered had we energy.”
As we worked alongside Dad, hauling boards and bringing him nails, we mordantly sang the Wilderness Family’s song that, in the first movie, played over a montage of them gaily building their cabin: “We work together, cut, trim, nail those boards / We’ll build a home forevermore / This is the life that loves and keeps us free / That’s why we are a wilderness family.”
Dad worked on the house with or without us kids all year round: during winter when snow covered the floors and after he skiffed us to school, and during the heat of summer in between milling lumber and hauling it to Meyers Chuck to pay the bills and buy more building supplies.
In addition, while he was building the house, he’d acquired a thirty-two-foot boat that needed extensive repairs. He took turns building the house, building other people’s structures, helping put in a community waterline in the Chuck, and working on the boat. After building a cradle for it, he stripped the boat right down to the hull, replacing rotten boards and building a new deck and cabin on it.
Out of respect for Megan’s artistic talent, Dad asked her to paint the hull blue, and she did so with her boom box playing Billy Idol’s Whiplash Smile album on repeat (the stereo had been removed from the floathouse, with its outdoor speakers, over to the New House). Mom and I chipped in by painting the cabin white.
He named it the Sea Cucumber as a salute to the memorable night when Rand had prodded him into pranking Meyers Chuck on the CB radio with the account of a hundred-foot boat named the Sea Cucumber needing space at the state dock.
• • •
We moved into the New House before it was finished, when I fourteen. There was a roof on it (Dad hated the dormers Mom had designed but put them up anyway, using up additional roofing that had to be skiffed over from Thorne Bay and then packed up the beach like everything else), but all of the windows had Visquine in them, except the huge floor-to-ceiling ones that lined the game room wall.
The New House with old cannery pilings out front.
They were sliding glass doors and it was a massive, swearing production under Dad’s direction to get them up from the beach. He dismantled them and then used the separate pieces of glass to slot in place, all without breaking any of them. The front door had Visquine in it and the walls had the silver backing of insulation showing. We hauled the new wood-burning Earth Stove into the game room below my room. It was huge and heavy but we used the tried-andtrue method we’d used to haul the living room beams up to move it.
Guarding the front door was a massive old alder tree we named Duke which came to feel like a part of the family, though Dad probably disliked leaving it standing where it could drop its branches (something alders were known to do) on the house, which he’d then have to repair. But despite his practical concerns, he let the tree stand when we all voted unanimously to keep Duke.
In addition to building a workshop on one of the concrete foundation blocks that sat on the edge of the beach, Dad also built a generator shed, a woodshed, and a 150-foot-long boardwalk that led up from the beach to the back door, where the game room was.
He also built an antenna platform thirty feet up a tree. He had us help him haul a forty-foot pole up to the platform. I climbed the tree to stand with him on the platform and help him fasten it in place. Attached to the pole were three antennas—TV, CB, and VHF. Unfortunately, though it should have been high enough to pick up a signal from Meyers Chuck, we never were able to get television on the cannery side.
The size of the pantry fascinated us kids. You could walk in there and be surrounded on all sides by shelves and barrels and buckets of food. It proved an irresistible temptation to the boys. They would sneak in and molest the food supply every chance they got, despite Mom explaining to them that there was no way to replace the food quickly and we had to make it last. It got so that Dad had to put a chain and padlock on the louvered doors he’d built for it. But the boys still got in, infiltrating under cover of darkness, slipping through the cracks in the stairs that ran alongside the pantry. Dad boarded up the backs of the stairs.
But they still got in. “How are they doing it?” Dad muttered in frustration.
Chris was the one who had figured it out. One day he saw Dad look at a line of DIY books in the game room. They had numbers on their spines and he noticed that once Dad looked at them, he went and unlocked the pantry to let Mom get out what she needed for dinner.
Lightbulb! Chris told Robin that all they had to do was look at the books Dad had looked at and the numbers on them would be the numbers on the combination lock. It proved to be true, and they were able to open every box in the case of Frosted Flakes cereal and dig out the prize—a package of M&Ms. Little did they care at the time that the entire case of cereal went stale because of their depredations.
For the first time in our lives, all five of us kids had our own bedrooms, and Mom and Dad had their own as well, over the living room, in the section alongside the creek that was like a separate house.
It was, perhaps, a little too much space for all of us after living in the cramped floathouse and the small cabin across the creek.
Chris pretty much moved in with Robin (though his bedroom was the only one that had paneling—gorgeous red cedar—since it was the smallest and took the least amount of lumber a
nd work to plane and sand it). And Megan, for a while, stayed in my room until a second mattress could be found for her. She had a stack of cottonwood paneling that Dad had milled from a drift log which took up most of the space in her room, so she spent a lot of her time in my room even after she slept in her own. In fact, my room wound up being the happening place to be, probably because I’d worked hard to decorate it.
From our home school on the floathouse side, I laboriously packed a desk, chair, and the filing cabinet across the beach. Then I piled them in the wheelbarrow and pushed them over the long sawdust trail. When I reached the end of it, I hauled them across the beach on the cannery side and up to the house. In my bedroom, I arranged a writing area for myself, complete with kerosene lamp and an old manual typewriter that Grandma had bought for me from a Meyers Chuck resident.
I put a shelf up in the long window along the back wall to put my knickknacks on and pinned up sketches of horses I’d drawn and pages of heartthrobs with high-coiffed hair from a variety of teen magazines, like any Eighties girl. I devoted much space to Bruce Springsteen.
I didn’t have a crush on him (Megan, to my disgust, kissed a photo of him seated on the side of a car—we both later got T-shirts with that photo on it), but I felt he was my alter ego and understood how I saw the world. I talked about him so much that my family came to think of him as a member of the family.
I also asked Mom for the blue-and-gold tapestry rug that had been in the floathouse. When I rolled it out with Megan’s help, it covered nearly all the tarpaper flooring in my room.
My room was also the only bedroom, other than Mom and Dad’s, that wound up having a door. Dad built it out of a slab of beachcombed redwood that he’d milled, though he used the best pieces from it for a redwood worktable Mom designed for the kitchen. I thumbtacked to my new door a long poster of Bruce with a guitar striding in front of stage lights.