by Tara Neilson
One day I decided that living in this time-choked and temporally deficient environment wasn’t working for me. I couldn’t do it.
I called Mom and Dad and told them I was coming home. But the truth was, there was no home to go back to.
• • •
Dad offered the Ketchikan buyer the house and the improvements we’d done over the years for $20,000.
The buyer said, “No thanks.”
He knew he had it all anyway, and for free. US Steel, under the new manager of remote properties, claimed that because Dad and Mom had been late on a payment they’d broken their lease. The new manager said he didn’t have to abide by what Mr. McKenzie had said when he’d assured us that it wouldn’t matter.
Once payment for the cannery went through, the buyer gave Dad and Mom a few weeks to clear out, so they worked their butts off. Their only option was to move back into the floathouse. It was in bad repair after sitting for three years without heat in that damp climate.
They needed beams and they needed lumber to refloor the living room and repanel the bathroom, but Dad didn’t have time to mill it all. In fact, he had to pack up the sawmill. So he wrote and told the new owner that he’d either sell him the lumber and beams in the house for $3,000 (which, with roofing and everything else, if he’d bought it from a dealer, he’d have had to pay at least ten times that much for it).
If he didn’t buy it, Dad said, he’d take what he needed from the house. The guy apparently thought Dad was bluffing and that he wouldn’t go to all that work.
The buyer said, “No dice.”
He probably thought he was going to get a huge, six-bedroom house for free that, as his realtor friend had said, could be turned into a lodge. But that’s not how it worked out.
Dad took from the New House whatever he needed. He took up flooring. He took down the paneling in Chris’s room, the louvered doors from the pantry, the bookcases in the game room. He stripped the house of anything usable.
And then he went in with a chainsaw and took those big beams down. He needed them for support under the workshop he had to build to put his tools and sawmill in, and at the same time he was remodeling the floathouse.
He wrote and told the guy, “Beware of the house, its support structure and beams are all gone, it’ll cave in under the first heavy snow-load.”
He didn’t dismantle it in anger and didn’t want anyone getting hurt. He was, at that point, sunk deep into a depression at losing the cannery and all he’d put into it. It was a depression that he wouldn’t come out of for many years to come. Mom was just as devastated at losing her dream.
People told us later that the new owner put it out that we were squatters who had to be evicted from his property. This was interesting since for years afterward my parents continued to be billed for the lease until the twenty years were up.
Aside from a house that would cave in, the new owner had acquired trails and boardwalk, bridge, clearings, shop, guest cabin, etc. for which he’d have paid a fortune, way out there, to have had built. Every nail, board, and material and workers would have had to be barged or flown in. Yet the new owner was, we were told by locals, perturbed that we’d left the place in a mess.
Our forts throughout the woods might have been considered junk, I suppose. And with the short amount of time he gave for us to clear out, we didn’t have time to tidy up our withdrawal. But we were told that what so disturbed him were all the twisted bedsteads and cannery equipment, the rusty machinery that littered the beaches, woods, and wherever we had not yet gotten cleared.
If he’d seen a burned-down salmon cannery the way we first saw it, odds were good he’d never have thought of buying it.
It took a Romi Neilson, with her limitless imagination, to see the potential for one family to bring it to life; and it took a Gary Neilson, with his limitless ability, to think, “I can do this,” and then do it. And it took an entire family of seven giving their all to accomplish it.
• • •
When I got there, they had the floathouse ready to move into. They’d even put in a new hearth using cannery bricks. The boys and I helped ferry everything from the New House to the other side, including the heavy Earth Stove.
In the few weeks they had, besides getting the floathouse in shape, Dad also finished building his floating workshop.
I needed a place of my own, so Dad took the chainsaw and cut down the swing set in front of the school, and he put together yet another float and positioned it below the school. With poles leading to the float, he used his logging winch to pull the building onto the float logs.
I watched in disbelief as the school shook and shuddered, sure that there was no way he was going to get it squarely on the float. I winced, waiting for it to fall off either side of the poles. But, like usual, he knew exactly what he was doing, and the school settled perfectly into place.
The filing cabinet and desk that I’d carried across the trail four years before to put in my bedroom, I transferred back into the school. I used some of the steel core sample holders for a heat shield behind my stove. Megan’s cottonwood paneling I put up on the school’s bare two-by-four framed walls, and I sanded the floor and painted it cannery red, like the floor in the little cabin across the creek.
Finally, we were ready to set sail.
But there was one last thing I had to do. I spent one entire day walking all over the property, saying goodbye to every fort, every piece of cannery debris half buried in the moss in the quiet, familiar forest.
In a way the cannery was saying goodbye to us, too, saying goodbye to being lived in again since it was now owned as an investment, not a home, to be sold from one buyer to the next. Absentee owners would from then on take the place of year-around family, of constant life and motion in the ruins. It would sleep again in the shadow of the mountain.
I visited the grave markers on the point. I stepped inside the fire tree, touched the ancient burn. I crossed the sun-dappled sawdust trail that Megan and I had helped build while wearing a gun to ward off bears and wolves. I walked the boardwalk to the house one last time, but didn’t go inside. It was too dangerous without its supports. I crossed the creek and looked in the little cabin where we’d spent our most memorable summer.
Back across the golden creek, below the remains of the bridge Dad had built, I laid my hand on the huge concrete block standing firm against time and current, remembering all the times we’d climbed and played around it.
I wandered through the pilings one last time, touched the twisted machinery we’d played with our dolls on, and crumbled a stack of concretized canning lids. And then I knelt and with a Mason jar I scooped up some of the rusty red pebbles and put them in the jar. I screwed a lid on and promised myself that I’d never open it. That I’d keep the air of the ruins, our home, forever inside it.
I walked back to the steps attached to the skeletal foundation of a ghost building. I climbed them slowly, climbed where I’d climbed a hundred times before, and when I got to the top I looked out at the bay. It stretched to Prince of Wales Island and beyond it to the largest ocean on our water planet. Behind me the forest reached up to the mountain that stared into space where galaxies swam in a current of time.
I thought about the house behind me, how it would collapse in the first big snowfall. It, with all our memories, all our work, my bedroom, Stonehenge… in time it would all be swallowed by the forest and our ruins would meld with the cannery ruins forever. Our childish shouts, the barking dogs, the memory of us would be united with the memory of the workers who had gone before.
No matter where we went or what was taken from us, those children would always be here, running free.
I stood at the top of the steps, one last time, and wondered where the future would take me.
THREE UNION BAY CANNERY WORKERS
“Gunboat interrupted, thinking that the old man was talking about the Biblical hell, saying hell was but an imaginary place used as a contrast for another imaginary place called
heaven, and that the whole thing was but so much mythology handed to us by our ancestors. Bert and the Hindu soon joined us in the debate and the rest of the day was spent in spirited outbursts of oratory… Anyway, we solved the riddle of the Universe and that’s something.”
—cannery worker Louis Evan, in a letter home sharing what life was like and the sorts of conversations held at the cannery (from Three Salmon Summers: Working in Alaska Canneries 1909, 1937, 1939, edited by Lucinda Hill Hogarty)
• • •
WHEN I was growing up in the ruins, I spent a lot of time thinking about the unknown cannery workers who had lived and worked at the Union Bay cannery. I imagined who they were, what their activities and conversations involved, and what sort of lives they returned to when they left the cannery.
It wasn’t until I was an adult and had access to the Internet that I was able to find the stories of three workers. Amazingly, two of them later became internationally known; but I think it was the third man’s story that touched me the most.
During a recent phone call with the grandson of one of the cannery workers, I kept marveling to myself that I was speaking to a relative of someone who’d worked at the cannery. When I disconnected I wished I could join my younger self as she wandered the ruins and tell her all about it.
Of all the debris that intrigued me as I wandered the ruins, one drew me the most: the giant circular door of the cannery’s retort, through which millions of cans of caught and cubed salmon had gone to their rest. It had served as a sort of travel portal for the fish. They’d spent their life in the underworld wilderness of the ocean, to be raised into the light and sent, in cans, to that distant, noisy world of constant motion.
I was fascinated by the portal, and I’d walk on its ring as it lay partially buried in the gravel. It seemed like an ancient device of mystery. I almost believed I could step through it and walk out into the other present of when the cannery had been alive. As if it, fittingly circular, was the zero bridge between space and time.
And I’d finally get to meet the real, living people who had worked and lived there before I was born.
• • •
LI GONGPU
July–September 1928
For ten hours straight, he stood feeding sheets of tin into the can-making machine. His shoulders and knees burned with pain and he almost suffocated in the heat and the incredible stench of rotting fish entrails which combined with sewage and seaweed and surged endlessly under the foundation pilings of the cannery buildings.
The stench impregnated everything—clothes, wood, food, even the steel of the machines—and was impossible to escape. Likewise the constant, rhythmic thumping of the piles being driven at all hours for the fish trap.
He, who was more accustomed to reading, debating, and writing, was wryly impressed that he was able to withstand the long hours. None of his academic friends would believe it. Thankfully, as soon as the fish run began to dwindle, so did his hours standing and feeding the sheets into the can-maker. But day after day, he continued at the job of cutting out circular pieces of tin that would be made into cans, and soon enough a curious thing happened.
As he repeated the same movements again and again, hour after hour, his tender hands—more accustomed to holding a pen—toughened with calluses, and he became a part of the automated machinery.
Four-to five-thousand three-foot-long salmon were gutted, cleaned, canned, cooked, labeled, and packed in a matter of hours. And he was just another smooth working piece of rumbling gears and cogs in the busy cannery perched at the edge of a great waterway, surrounded by a vast wilderness of temperate rain forest, completely cut off from the civilized world and the academia he came from.
Li Gongpu (sometimes spelled Gongbu), born in 1902, was twenty-six years old and studying at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, when he first hatched the idea of going undercover as a common laborer to document the experience of cannery workers in remote Alaska.
He was part of a large movement of well-off young Chinese who, because of the lack of opportunities for higher education in their native homeland, invested in a university education in America during the 1920s. In the process, these young intellectuals absorbed the patterns of American higher education and brought back ideas for change in their home country.
Li was already a well-known progressive thinker who wrote for the Shanghai magazine Life (Shenhuo) when he decided to become an undercover cannery worker, but he was confident that no one at the remote cannery in Union Bay, Alaska, would recognize him. He was right.
The year before Li’s arrival at the cannery, Chinese contractors had provided most of the workers for the cannery. Until then it had been common for Chinese contractors to exploit and cheat the workmen, serving them cheap rice, tea, and scrap fish from the cannery while they pocketed a significant proportion of the money the company paid for provisions.
In desperation, the Chinese hands—who weren’t paid until the end of the season (if then)—supplemented their meager diets by keeping gardens and gathering plants and shellfish, bartering for anything extra (for example, the feet and gall bladders of bears, which was used as folk medicine) with local Alaska Natives. To keep the overworked, hungry laborers from protesting, the contractors supplied them with opium. A stoned worker was a happy worker. The year before Li’s arrival, the cannery owners fired the Chinese contractors for mismanagement and gave the contract to the Japanese.
Academic Li Gongpu went under cover at the Union Bay cannery in 1928. (Public Domain)
Once Li adapted to the work, the pain lessened, and he was able to concentrate on his mission. He noted in his journal the instances of prejudice that he and his intellectual friends had expected to find. He was surprised by how many nationalities were represented at the cannery, describing them in his diary as a “mini United Nations.”
“Even though the cannery hires only about 100 workers,” he wrote, “this place is like a mini world, with people of many colors and nationalities. For instance, Americans are the obvious white, Japanese and Chinese are the obvious yellow. There are also several tens of native Americans who I can call reds, Filipinos are brown, those originally from Africa are black. These people come from China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Mexico, Italy, Switzerland and even some undocumented workers from other places.”
The way they arranged themselves by color into separate areas and hierarchies did not surprise him at all. He wrote that the laborers “work, eat, and sleep in separate masses according to their ethnic affiliations. White people are a group; Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans another group; Filipinos belong to yet another. Blacks and Alaskan Indians sleep and eat as a group since they are mostly involved in fishing.”
It amused him when undereducated European immigrants and Americans assumed they knew more than he, and how they trusted that they were more deserving of better treatment because of their naturally privileged position in the world. Little did they know that they had a mole from the ivory towers of academia spying on them.
Finding somewhere lonesome to concentrate on his conclusions, such as on a rock overlooking the bay where bald eagles rode the thermals above it and humpback whales spouted, he would muse in his diary: “By observing the interaction among workers, one can discern their psychology formed by the perceived status of their own countries in the world. The white workers come from probably more than 30 different countries. But about half of them were not educated. They speak rudimentary English but see themselves as the most civilized people of the world. Japanese workers are very polite to the white people but very arrogant to people of other nationalities. Filipinos appear self-important in front of the reds and blacks. The few Chinese, though with similar ‘yellow’ skin color and look as Japanese, do not get treated as courteously as the Japanese workers, probably because of China’s relatively low international political status…”
Despite his best intentions, he found himself drawn away from his intended scathing exposé as he was seduced by the scenery a
nd breathtaking sunsets of the cannery’s location.
The Union Bay cannery faced an enormous open bay, with a peninsula to the south. Looking westward, far across the changeable waters, were the snow-capped blue mountains of a nation-sized island. The sun sank behind it every evening and on sunny days it colored the sky and the sea with swaths of color, so intense it defied description.
On overcast days when the mists drifted down from the mountain, Li inhaled the forest-fresh air and wandered the shady boardwalk. It led through towering, old-growth evergreens, and as his boots clumped over the boards he made notes about the stream that emptied into the small bay at the other end of the boardwalk where the superintendent’s house stood.
The building was separated from the stench of the cannery and its polluted creek full of spawned, rotting salmon that the sea gulls shrieked over and the bears shredded with their long claws. The smaller, clean stream provided the cannery’s drinking water and the water used for cleaning and processing the fish, he wrote.
While the other workers entertained themselves during their free time playing chess and cards, gambling, debating, sleeping, swimming, playing music, and dancing with the Native girls down on the beach when the tide was out, Li liked to find a quiet place away from the stink and noise of the cannery, and during the long, northern summer days he’d soak in the birdsong and rustling of the breeze slipping through the underbrush while he caught up on his reading.
When he returned to the cannery, he particularly enjoyed listening to the Native girls sharing their songs. Their language was incomprehensible to him, but the sound of their singing fell sweetly on ears starved for the social refinements of life, especially after a working day full of raised male voices in a multitude of languages and the unending uproar of the processing machines, and the hiss and bang of the huge retort doors after stacks of cans were slid inside to be sealed.
The only contact with the broader world was through the mail boat that brought supplies and letters every two to three weeks. Li mailed off his diary entries to his editor at Life magazine in faraway Shanghai, a city that was suffering from severe political agitation. Earlier that spring the Shanghai massacre occurred when the Communist Party of China was violently suppressed by the military forces of Chiang Kai-shek and conservative factions in the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). In city after city, more violent Communist purges took place all that summer while Li worked at the cannery.