Raised in Ruins

by Tara Neilson

  Something made me look up and I saw Dad up ahead of me, facing me. I hastily wiped my tears away and continued walking because it would have been too awkward to do anything else.

  When I got close I looked into his bearded face and tried to think of something casual to say.

  He opened his arms.

  I walked into them, smelling engine oil and sawdust, and he hugged me.

  “I love you, Dad,” I said, crying again. How was it that he was the only one who understood what I was going through? A man who was so emotionally shut down after Vietnam that he rarely showed affection, or even acted as if he was aware that the children surrounding him were his own.

  He hugged me back. “I love you, too,” he whispered.

  • • •

  Despite the drastically depleted labor force of Dad, Mom, me, and the boys, Mom continued to think up highly impractical, amazing house designs. One day when we were out in the skiff she saw the remains of the cannery fish trap high up on a beach buried in drift and beach grass. Her imagination was sparked and she immediately designed a kitchen nook implementing the massive twelve-by-twelve-inch timbers from the old trap.

  So one day we all went down to the fish trap and after we cleared away some drift and brush, Dad measured the huge timbers and cut out what he needed to be able to follow Mom’s design, which required two vertical beams and a lintel on top of them, a bit like Stonehenge, which was what we promptly named it.

  I was writing a paper about the cannery for a school assignment, so the old trap interested me. I balanced along its huge timbers below the skirts of the forest and wondered about the men who had worked on it.

  Had they been in league with the fish pirates who liked to plunder cannery traps? Or had they fought off the local fishermen who came under cover of darkness—blasting a shotgun into the dark to warn them away? Had Pinkerton agents walked these same timbers I stood upon as I paused to look out at the broad bay?

  Once Dad had sawed what he needed, he shackled a chain, attached to his jerkline that he pulled logs off the beach with, around the largest timber and dragged first it and then the next heavy timbers down into the water and we towed them home.

  Then came the tough slog of getting them to the house. Dad constructed a cradle of ropes with two-by-two-inch handles the length of each beam, like he had with the living room beams and the Earth Stove, and then assigned each of us to a side. With many pauses for breathers, our arms feeling like they were going to be pulled out of their sockets and knees about to give, we finally got all three timbers into the kitchen.

  We managed to get the two end pieces vertically into position where Mom directed, and Dad secured them to the wall. But then came the question of how we were going to get the longest and heaviest piece on top of them to form the lintel. The ceiling wasn’t high enough for us to rig a rope and tackle the way we’d done for the rafters in the living room. Maybe it couldn’t be done?

  Of course it could be done. Hadn’t the builders of Stonehenge, with nothing more than the same tools we had—our muscles and brains—done the same thing with actual stones, much heavier than these wooden beams?

  Dad heaved each end in turn onto one of the table benches. Then onto the table that we’d pressed up against the vertical beams. We kids and Mom then put the bench onto the table and Dad lifted the lintel, one end at a time, onto it, up next to the two uprights. As we got near the tops of them we had to use blocks of wood, sliding them under first one end and then the other until finally Dad could slide the massive beam onto the two uprights.

  And we had our very own Stonehenge, Southeast Alaska–style, in our kitchen. I liked to sit at the table across from it and think about what the men who had worked at the cannery would say if they could see it.

  • • •

  With Megan gone, I buried myself in my writing. I found that I could write, by hand, an entire Western novel in two to three weeks by staying up late and scratching it on paper by lamplight.

  Decades before I was born, Mom’s grandfather had picked up a faded daybook from an old store building in the ghost town of Garnet in Montana. I used it for research for the books I was writing. I was amazed at the items and their prices that were listed in its old, yellowed pages. I loved to touch it and hold it and feel its connection to the Old West.

  The teacher in Meyers Chuck, a dynamic, humorous woman named Patti MacDonald (along with her husband, Paul Mercer, who taught the younger grades) supported and encouraged my writing, arranging for me to run a school newspaper all about the village doings. She also contacted a newspaper in Ketchikan to try to get me a job as a columnist for their weekly supplement.

  Knowing my love of reading, Patti arranged for me to anchor our school in the Battle of the Books competition. Bundled up in warm clothes, we had to tramp down the narrow forest trail to reach the village phone near the post office and store. Our breaths hung visibly in the air as we spoke the answers into the receiver.

  Patti also set me up with a library account through Juneau’s rural mail services department so that I could thoroughly research the cannery for the term paper she’d assigned. She helped me locate an old fisherman who had sold his fish to the cannery and I loved receiving letters from him, hearing about the early days.

  He told me that the workers had been primarily Asian—Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino—but there had been men from European nations as well, particularly from Norway. He got a little coy when I asked him if he’d ever pirated the cannery’s fish traps and I figured that meant he probably had. With or without the cannery watchman’s collusion.

  Through the library and the tirelessly helpful mail services librarians, I tried to research when US Steel bought the property but couldn’t nail it down. They’d bought it for its possible mineral resources but never developed it. US Steel had been formed by JP Morgan and Elbert H. Gary in 1901 and was, at one time, the largest corporation in the world.

  I was fascinated to read that JP Morgan owned the White Star Line, which had built the Titanic. In his personal suite aboard the ship he had his own private promenade deck and a bath equipped with specially designed cigar holders. He was reportedly booked on the ship’s maiden voyage, but for some reason canceled the trip at the last minute.

  Conspiracy theories immediately arose that he arranged for the ship to sink in order to eliminate any threat to his banking empire. Aboard the ship were some of the wealthiest men in the world, including John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Straus who were said to be opposed to Morgan’s support of creating a Federal Reserve Bank.

  As I continued to research, I found that US Steel had eventually tumbled from its lofty position until in 1980, when we moved to the cannery, it began shutting down its steel mills in city after city. I realized that Bruce Springsteen’s song “My Hometown” was about this phenomenon—and it gave me a surprising link to him.

  • • •

  Without Megan there, I spent a lot of my time wandering the cannery by myself. At the end of the sawdust trail, on the cannery side, when I stepped from the shade of the forest into the light, I was immediately confronted by a blackened set of steps. They clung to the skeletal foundations of a missing building.

  They fascinated me, those steps that led nowhere. I always made a point of climbing them and standing on the top one, feeling sure that if I only had the key to the invisible door in front of me I could step into Time itself.

  I could almost see the shape of it. Was it a circle, where if you start with the past it followed clockwise into the present into the Moving Now, into the future and back again into the past as an endless cycle? Or maybe it was a spiral where the future circled one level above the past.

  Time, to me, was like one of the video games Jamie and the boys played. God had designed the broad outlines of our future as we acted in the Moving Now. Every decision, every choice we made, shaped the next part, took us to the next level. The future was ahead of us, already set in its broad outlines, but we coul
d affect how it affected us by our decisions and actions, our free will.

  Our choices and the actions we took turned the limitless possibilities, the either/or, into the concrete present. It was an elusive concreteness though, because once the present became the past it began to dissolve, however slowly, like the rusty remains of the fire-scorched cannery ruins.

  I thought about déjà vu as I stood on the top step that led to air. That feeling of having a memory of a place you’d never been but you felt like you had lived it. Was déjà vu memories of the future? We obviously had to live a little bit in the future to be able to form our present, a present edited according to our own biases. The Moving Now was a zero bridge between the present and the future. Maybe déjà vu was when our brain lifted the curtain on when we crossed the bridge and for a moment we experienced the raw, pure future as it happened before we edited it.

  Every day, rain or shine, I’d climb the steps and wonder about the past when others had lived here. I’d wonder about the present when I stepped on the footsteps of those who had gone before and built these blackened foundations, and I’d wonder about the future… my future. Where would I be one day? Where did these steps lead me?

  Sometimes I wandered over to the floathouse side and I’d push against the floathouse’s front door that stuck, swollen from the dampness of not having regular heat in it. I’d stand in the silent living room and look out the huge, bullet-pocked window with its sweeping view of the wild bay and remember when it was just Mom and us kids.

  I’d go up to the school and look at the clay people still arranged in front of the plexiglass windows. Our last homeschool lesson remained on the chalkboard in Mom’s handwriting. Then I’d go and sit on one of the swings in the monumental swing set Dad had made for us out of rooted trees. I’d sit and twist the lines and look around at the forest and think of those immensely free childhood days when we played in the water and built forts all hours of the day, not seeing any other humans, just whales, bears, eagles and wolves.

  On the cannery side, I climbed the rocks out at the point where the gigantic steel fuel drum sat on huge timbers and concrete. It was the only thing that remained intact of the cannery, aside from the little cabin across the creek and the other fuel drum behind our house.

  I felt dwarfed next to it. With the bay spread out endlessly in front of me, I’d dance on the concrete pad as the sun set in brilliant glowing colors to the music in my Walkman.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Nobody believes my stories! It’s fiction to everyone. I have one old Native Alaskan logger friend at work who whenever I tell stories he tells everyone else to ‘shut up and listen. Everything Robin tells you happened and you had better believe it!’”

  —Robin

  FOR YEARS my address was FP Union Bay. The FP was an inside joke—we called the ruins Fool’s Paradise because only a fool would work so hard to live somewhere and still call it paradise.

  After living in the New House for three years we found out that we were, indeed, living in Fool’s Paradise.

  The catastrophic downturn US Steel experienced in the 1980s forced them not only to sell their steel mills but their undeveloped, remote properties as well. Mr. McKenzie had retired and the new man who dealt with our lease had no history with us and felt no stake in our homesteading difficulties and triumphs.

  The lease was a twenty-year lease with option to buy if they ever wanted to sell. Included in the terms was a paragraph that said that if US Steel did decide to sell, whoever bought it had to give us “fair market price” for our “home and improvements.” At that point we had a six-bedroom house, shop, trails, boardwalk, bridge, etc., and we’d renovated the little guest cabin across the creek.

  Two potential buyers came out from town—the property had been advertised far and wide. One of the buyers was from somewhere in the Lower 48; and the other was from Ketchikan.

  It was a shock to us and it happened incredibly fast. One minute we were living our frontier life in the ruins, the next perfect strangers were striding around our home, checking it out with speculative eyes, with a view to buying it.

  Although we had the option to buy, we were barely scraping a living as it was. There was no way we could offer what it was worth. But at least, Mom tried to comfort us, we’d be paid for all the work we’d put into the place. It would give us enough to start over somewhere else.

  The Lower 48 buyer absolutely loved the place and marveled over all that we’d accomplished, hugely impressed by Dad and his abilities. He wanted to figure out a way where we could continue to live there and help him build his own place using Dad’s know-how and lumber-making skills. He told us that he offered the realtor $80,000.

  The other man, the local, had come out with the realtor who was handling the deal. According to the realtor they were old friends and school chums. The realtor was impressed with the house, saying that Dad had done a “fantastic job” and that it would make “a wonderful lodge” or “anything!”

  The Ketchikan buyer remained noncommittal. The place sold to him, for $60,000, or so we heard from the Lower 48 man who called us, upset about it. But there was nothing he or we could do.

  • • •

  Before the place sold, in the months when the cannery was being haggled over, I was living in Ketchikan. The previous summer when Megan was home, she talked about how much fun the two of us could have if I went in and stayed with her at Rory and Marion’s house in town.

  The teacher in the village, Patti, thought it was a good idea for me to get a taste of city school before I went on to college and she pressed the case with Mom. I saw the logic in it and also wanted to be with Megan again—it would be our last chance before we went our separate ways as adults.

  Rory and Marion opened their home to me with the ready, hospitable generosity they were known for by everyone in their lives. Living with them was the easiest part of moving to town because wherever they lived had always been our home away from home.

  They were the only part of living in town that I felt comfortable with, as it turned out. Megan had formed other friends in her grade and we had almost no classes together so I didn’t see that much of her, except when we were back at Rory and Marion’s.

  I went into it thinking it would be a new adventure, but the city school experience alienated me. First there was the bus ride. I watched as kids boarded at each stop and then were disgorged at school, only to be returned to their spot later in the day. It looked coldly mechanical to me, like Fisher-Price toys being run through a factory on conveyor belts.

  Then there were the school bells. I never got accustomed to kids being herded from one class to the next at the strident command of bells. They left one class at the ring of a bell, went to their lockers to switch out books, slammed and locked them, and moved onto the next class. Again and again, throughout the day, every day of their lives.

  I’d put my Walkman on, playing Australian Crawl, and escape when the bells rang to wander the deserted ball field until I felt able to return.

  The one thing I really enjoyed at school was the day my English teacher gave us our term paper assignment. I perked up and didn’t hesitate when asked to write down what my chosen topic would be.

  I wrote: Time.

  Losing myself in the library in stacks of books, researching all the different takes on time, down through history—for the first time I felt like I belonged; I felt like I was home.

  I realized, as I researched my subject, that Town was a spatially dominant world, whereas I’d grown up in a temporally dominant setting.

  Town, and the social culture at large, had been shaped according to the limits of current science which dictated that there were three dimensions of space and one, the most obvious and easily graphed one, of time. There was no temporal depth in this world. Each second wasn’t lived so much as skated on as if people were afraid—or at least, untrained—to dip deeply into the rich temporal current that our ever-moving existence depends on.

  In
stead, time had become a social construct, almost an illusion, that only worked and seemed real because everyone agreed to it for convenience’s sake. Like the painted lines on the road. The reason they worked was because everyone agreed to abide by what they represented. But if everyone had decided to ignore them and drive anywhere they pleased, they would have ceased to have any meaning, they would have just been paint splashed on the road.

  When an artist visited Meyers Chuck School and taught us to make masks, we were asked to make one according to a theme. I chose Time.

  I was a temporal refugee, being told on all sides that I needed to adapt to town life and town ways, that it was simple culture shock. But it wasn’t that. I was starving for time in a world populated and formed by temporally malnourished citizens, a world suffering from temporal anorexia.

  After graduating from high school (somehow as an honor student, despite my tendency to escape the strident bells and skip classes) I worked at the Ketchikan Daily Newspaper as a proofreader. It had odd hours, starting at three in the afternoon and stopping late in the evening. I didn’t drive, so I walked home at night, skirting all the downtown bars with the drunks spilling out and propositioning me.

  Because Rory and Marion lived so far out, at the end of the road, it had been difficult for Megan and me to attend the many school events that were sometimes required for a grade. Megan decided to ask if she could live with Lance, who lived right in town.

  He agreed, and I wound up living there too. Megan had one of the bedrooms and Jamie stayed in the backroom when he was home from fishing. Lance’s trailer home was soon overflowing with young people.

  He lived on a hill at the opposite end of town from the newspaper so it was a long, thirty-minute walk at night on unfamiliar pavement, breathing in traffic exhaust. On the way I’d stop and buy a burrito at the mini mart and nuke it in their microwave for dinner, or I’d stop in at McDonald’s and eat a burger and fries, sitting alone under industrial lighting with the dark city rolling by outside.