Raised in Ruins

by Tara Neilson

  From behind my desk I acted as a radio DJ, recording at BUB (Boomin’ Union Bay) Studio all the latest local hits—my own favorites—Whitesnake, Baltimora, Don Johnson, Crowded House, Cory Hart, Cyndi Lauper, Heart, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, and Bruce Springsteen and more Springsteen (taking from his entire available catalog) played in between interviews with my brothers and sister about the latest goings-on in their spheres of influence. Usually with puppies barking in the background.

  When Springsteen’s remake of “War” was released, the family gathered in the game room to listen to American Top 40 to hear where his powerful version of the anti-war anthem would place, rooting for it to reach the top ten.

  We lived primarily in the kitchen and game room. One day Chris recorded a typical conversation as we all sat around the table playing cards. On it, all seven voices are talking at once, telling their stories, what they’d seen and done, dogs barking in the background.

  Dad talks about “running into the bear on the way down to the beach.” Megan “found a neat old bottle with an inscription no one’s ever heard of.” Mom says “Dad got a new job, building a deck and we can all get new socks!” I’m “writing a new story.” Robin’s “fed up with crab, can’t we have hamburgers?” and Jamie wants to “go off alone on my own trapline.” In the background The Eurythmics are playing and Chris wants to know if they’re “singing about cannibals.” Then he yells at me for stealing his pickle.

  Somehow, though we’re all talking at once over each other, we hear and understand what everyone else says to be able to comment.

  • • •

  Jamie’s room was the least finished and didn’t have a window—it was supposed to have either a skylight or a window into the living room, but neither had been put in yet. It was in the middle of the house between Megan’s room and the stairs. When he didn’t have his lamp burning in his room, it was hard to tell if he was in there or not.

  The boys used to creep past Jamie’s room, crouched like they were a Special Ops team on a dangerous mission. Their fears were realized when, with a low growl, Jamie’s hand would lunge out, snag one of them, and drag them screaming, kicking, and clawing into his dark lair. They always lived to sneak past his room another day.

  Besides his books, Jamie became obsessed with video games. Instead of a movie when it was his turn to pick on movie night, he’d choose to play a couple hours of The Legend of Zelda. The music from it became the soundtrack to the Westerns I wrote by lamplight in my room right above the game room where the TV was situated.

  It took him months, but he finally made it to the final level.

  “Tara, get down here!” I heard everyone calling up to me. Usually they didn’t bother to try to talk me into watching movies with them; they knew I preferred books. “Jamie’s on the final level!” they yelled excitedly.

  I felt compelled to join them, to share in bearing witness to this significant moment. The problem was Jamie only got partway through the level when it became time for the generator to be turned off. Dad was miserly with movie night’s gas allowance and a stickler for not going over the allotted time, since it was so hard to rebuild our gas supply.

  We all groaned, knowing Jamie was going to be hugely disappointed to have to leave the game so close to the end. To our surprise, Dad gave in and said Jamie could keep going—he let the generator run late into the night. Finally, Jamie conquered the game, accompanied by much jubilation from all of us, and won the quest.

  It was the winter after we moved into the New House that we nearly lost Jamie. He’d worked the previous summer fishing on Rory’s boat and with his earnings wound up with a brand-new, fourteen-foot riveted aluminum skiff called a Lund. He and a friend from Meyers Chuck named Bret (he was my age but was the only boy around close to Jamie’s age) took it out one crisply cold day and tried to haul a crab pot. The pot turned out to be too heavy and it pulled the side of the skiff underwater. In minutes the skiff was swamped and sank under their feet, leaving them a long way from shore in fatally cold waters.

  Bret later told me that he thought he was dead, there was no way they’d make it. He said Jamie saved his life because Jamie refused to give up. They had a buoy to hang onto and kicked off their rubber boots when they filled with icy water and tried to drag them down. In fact, Jamie and Bret had to ditch all their heavy, water-soaked outerwear. They kicked and kicked, and when Bret got tired and said he was done, Jamie told him to hang on because they were going to keep on kicking until they either made it or died.

  When they reached shore they were still a long way from home and hypothermic. They knew, from classes taught in school about water survival, that they didn’t have a chance of surviving if they didn’t get their body temperature back up. They pulled brush out of the woods and lay down under it until their combined body heat warmed them enough for them to get moving.

  They were barefoot and in skimpy, wet clothing, shivering and stumbling over the rocks. They had to stagger along some of Alaska’s most remote and rugged shoreline without any hope of being saved—they had to save themselves. It must have seemed like an impossible feat to Bret, but Jamie grew up around Dad who didn’t have that word in his vocabulary.

  When they finally limped into the warm house, they told Mom what had happened.

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, used to them pranking her every time they opened their mouths.

  She didn’t believe them until Jamie showed her Bret’s feet. Jamie’s were fine because all of us kids spent half the year running around barefoot. Bret’s were raw and bloody.

  We didn’t get to have Jamie with us in the New House for long. He became severely ill one winter and got so far behind in school that he decided not to graduate, taking his GED instead and leaving home to go fishing when he was sixteen. He wrote us occasional, long letters about what his life was like in Sitka and other places where he fished.

  It was the six of us now, living in the ruins.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “All of our kids are very independent. And they all feel self-sufficient. Each of them has said that they feel capable of dealing with anything. That they know they can survive. Because they have.”

  —Mom, in a letter to a friend

  AFTER JAMIE left Dad continued to skiff us to school until I turned sixteen. He handed over skiffing-to-school duties to me so that he could get more work done, especially in cutting the lumber that paid the bills.

  It was nearly a half-hour ride and I sat on an overturned five-gallon bucket to steer. My left arm would grow tired gripping the ridged throttle on the tiller arm. The heavy wood skiff wanted to veer left and I’d have to pull it towards myself without letting up, until my arm, wrist, and fingers cramped. I had to grip the side of the skiff with my right hand to anchor myself against the pull of the outboard.

  Megan, Robin, and Chris sat on the duck boards, leaning against the sides of the skiff. Dad hadn’t put any seats in because he’d built it to be a work skiff to haul lumber in.

  When I was one of the kids sitting down on the duckboards with the others, I’d look back at Dad steering with his farseeing stare, looking for drift and which way the waves were coming, and I’d feel safe. Through every kind of weather—rain, wind, hail, snow, high-latitude sunshine—coming and going, he faced into it while we could duck our faces into the hot-breath comfort of our lifejackets.

  His beard would freeze in winter from the salt spray and Megan and I would grimace at each other, wondering if our faces would stay that way. On the return trip we’d all race to get to the house to stick our numb hands in the canner full of hot water on the wood stove to thaw them out. On the way to school our hands would get so cold that when we got there we couldn’t grip a pencil. I’d go into the girl’s bathroom and run hot water over them to loosen them up.

  When I was sixteen I took over the job of steering my brothers and sister to school.

  It was far worse when I was the one steering. Dad gave me all kinds of pointers, telling me exactly
where to steer, how to respond to different types of waves, how to look not at what’s right in front of the bow but beyond it so you had time to plan your response. He told me where every rock and reef was, and how much of them appeared at what tides.

  But he didn’t tell me, perhaps because he took it for granted, what a heavy burden it was to feel you were responsible for the lives of three other people, two of them little kids. What it felt like to turn the corner of the long peninsula that separated us from Meyers Chuck and face a wall of whitewater.

  When icy waves crashed over the bow and dumped gallons on my sister and brothers, there was nothing I could do about it except pray, even when the boys were scared and always-smiling-and-singing Chris would cry. Megan would meet my eye and say nothing, just start bailing the water out of the bilge.

  It was up to me to remember everything Dad had told me. If I forgot something or did it wrong, if I panicked, I’d sink the skiff and dump my siblings in bone-chilling, heavy seas, the only shore steep, harsh rock. I had constant nightmares about the skiff swamping and being the only one to survive.

  There was no escaping the knowledge of what these waters could do. Every day we skiffed over where Rand went down. My legs were often so shaky I could barely walk from adrenaline overload when we got to the dock. I felt like I was in shock for the first part of the school day, but finally my stomach would settle down and I’d be able to concentrate.

  On the nice days there was nothing more delightful than feeling the power of the outboard’s throttle in my left hand, the wind in my face, and the way the skiff skimmed the water as bald eagles wheeled overhead and porpoises joyfully played alongside us. I’d slow down so the porpoises could keep up and they’d mischievously drench us when they dived under the bow. We would all laugh together then and love being in an open skiff on our way to school.

  Dad took us to school on the days when the forecast was marginal, or when we could see the bay was choppy. We’d have to get up extra early because he’d take us in the Sea Cucumber, which could handle heavier weather than the skiff, but took longer.

  He’d skiff us to the dark little cove completely ringed with black rocks and towering trees where he’d securely anchored a log to moor the boat to. We’d climb onto the deck with our heavy backpacks full of seawater-exploded textbooks while he started the engine and warmed it up. We’d try to avoid the puff of black soot that always shot out of the stack when the engine was started with its familiar, chesty grumble.

  Once he had the diesel boat stove going we got to climb into the warmth of the little cabin, which felt like an absolute luxury. We took turns sitting in the shotgun seat across from Dad’s in front of the steering wheel. It had the only good view over the bow.

  The Sea Cucumber, the boat Dad rebuilt, loaded with groceries, fuel, and an entire pallet of fifty-pound bags of dog food.

  Dad had, of course, installed a car stereo, complete with outdoor speakers, and we listened to The Eurythmics, or the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack, or Katrina and the Waves. And on one memorable occasion, Fleetwood Mac saved our lives.

  We got into some bad seas and even with the stabies out (anchors attached to lowered trolling poles to stabilize the motion of the boat), we got hammered.

  The seas were so confused, coming from every direction with a tidal current swirling beneath them, that Dad couldn’t find a way to counter or navigate through them. We got tossed around, futilely trying to brace our legs and backs wherever we could, but the motion of the boat was so severe that we got knocked loose repeatedly and had to scramble for purchase.

  We could hear things crashing throughout the length of the boat. Every other moment we were suspended, weightless, with an alien sense of zero gravity, before we smashed down into the trough and slid askew with Dad reefing on the wheel one way and then the other. Wind screamed through the rigging and wave after wave engulfed the bow and slammed the windows.

  Dad had pegged the side windows shut, but water managed to squeeze through and stain the walls. I’m sure we all felt the same sick, shivery fear in our stomachs. I wondered how long before one or more of the windows gave way to the relentless onslaught and how long the boat would stay afloat if we took water right into the cabin.

  When Dad started swearing, we all knew it wasn’t good. I couldn’t help wondering if war flashbacks were being triggered, as I assumed happened when he was in life-or-death situations. Especially when he was responsible for other lives. I had no idea if he’d lose control and what would happen if he did, and I didn’t want to find out.

  There was only one thing I could think of to do that would help: I put Fleetwood Mac into the stereo. At the first note, hundreds of hours of warm memories flooded over us. Fleetwood Mac had always been the soundtrack to our lives.

  I could feel the tension in everyone’s muscles relax. The kids looked less scared and Dad quit swearing. He paid closer attention to the waves in a more clinical, calculating way, and soon the boat was riding less wildly. We were still taking constant whitewater over the bow as the wind howled through the stays, but we weren’t laying over as hard.

  We made it through safely that day, and I always carried a cassette of Fleetwood Mac’s music with me after that, wherever I went.

  • • •

  Megan was the next to follow Jamie’s exit. Although she could live the wilderness life and could more than keep up in our games of tree tag (chasing each other from branch to branch twenty feet up) and other bush pastimes, she’d always longed for wider pastures for her art and other talents than the wilderness could provide.

  She was a phenomenal runner, but she had few opportunities to exploit her abilities. The few times she did participate in an island district meet, she blew past the competition in startling ways. (Chris, too—he’d later break a state record.)

  When Rory and Marion moved to the city of Ketchikan, they offered to allow Megan to stay with them. The year she turned fifteen she accepted the offer. It was hard on Mom having to let her kids go at such young ages, but she and Dad had brought us up to be independent and know our own minds, so she had little choice in letting first Jamie and then Megan leave.

  Me (seated) and Megan in front of the New House down at the creek, the year Megan left.

  It was the first time I’d been without Megan’s companionship for any serious length of time since she was born.

  We only ever got into one fight, and that was when we were teenagers. Mom was so horrified that she went to extreme measures to nip it in the bud. She said, “If you two want to fight, then fight like Robin and Chris. Megan, hit Tara.” Megan looked at me and her frown turned into tears. She shook her head. “I don’t want to.” Mom turned to me, “Tara, hit Megan.” The idea was so appalling, I teared up too. We were never again tempted to fight about anything.

  Before Megan left we’d started writing a book together about a private investigator named Liam McCall. We alternated chapters and had a blast seeing what the other one had written, trying to outdo each other in absurd details and humorous dialogue. After she left, I didn’t have the heart to continue it.

  I had recently finished my first full-length book, a Western, and she and I taped our reading the entire book. I read the narration and she read the dialogue, donning a Texan accent for every character. It took us many hours, much laughter, and many takes and retakes to finish it on four cassettes. (We had learned that batteries could be resurrected if you allowed them to sit for a little while. We also used pencils to fast forward and rewind cassettes to save our batteries.)

  Writing an entire book took a lot of effort and we had ideas for so many that we took to writing just back cover blurbs and then drawing and coloring the covers, complete with one-sentence hooks: He gambled her away and had to win her back!

  Every day we’d share with each other what had happened in the books we were reading, each of us suffering through the other’s details while waiting impatiently for our turn. At school we put together a dance routine that employed
moves from the HBO music videos we’d watched on movie nights going back to the floathouse years.

  We no longer played with our Barbie dolls, but we did love to set up dioramas with them on a section of my floor. One time Mom came up and was horrified by one of the dioramas. In it, one doll with a platinum ponytail was casually steering her red Camaro, blowing a huge pink ball of bubble gum. On the hood of her sports car was Ken’s head. To the side of the car was a high-stepping Palomino. Beneath its upraised hoof, a swaddled baby lay defenselessly while equestrian Barbie smiled fixedly astride the horse. Elsewhere in the scene, two Barbies had their hands on each other’s throats.

  Nihilism Barbie for the win.

  Megan and I went to a junior prom together, with a brother and sister our age from the village (and Mom coming along to do our makeup and hair and act as chaperone), in the logging community where Dad used to work and commute from. The day after the prom, still wearing our finery, we attended the wedding of Marion’s youngest brother Ray, who was more like a cousin than an uncle-bymarriage since he was Jamie’s age, to Liz Donahue.

  They seemed incredibly young to be getting married, but both of them had already lived more deep experiences than people twice their age. They had both lost brothers in the same fishing boat sinking that Ray barely escaped from when he was sixteen.

  It was shortly after the wedding that Rory and Marion sold up and moved to Ketchikan to give their daughters the experience of a city life that Marion had never had. She didn’t want her daughters to grow up feeling as socially insecure as many bush kids did when they approached the wider world as adults. Megan joined them in December.

  • • •

  One day when the boys were driving me crazy with their constant tussling and I was missing Megan, I wandered up the sawdust trail crying. I rarely cried or bothered feeling sorry for myself, but that day life felt particularly tough. It seemed that no one noticed or cared what it was like for me to lose my closest companion from as far back as I could remember.