the bay. The cannery superintendent’s house had once stood not far from where our floathouse was. Oil and kerosene lamplight would have spilled out of its twelve-paned windows on the same little bay, surrounded by the same pointed silhouettes of trees that were a deeper, more impenetrable black than the sky.
I stared up at the stars and thought about time. The light from those stars, Jamie had said after reading one of the science books he was always asking Mom to buy him, was millions of years old.
I focused on a single star. That twinkling pinprick of light had been birthed in a distant part of the universe, before constantly, tirelessly traveling across great voids to reach a girl one Earth night in the Alaskan wilderness, curled up in a firewood box listening to her family. She would see it and acknowledge its existence and have her own existence, a part of the ever-changing, ever-moving universe, acknowledged in turn.
Had a cannery worker looked up and seen an earlier version of this light? If so, the light connected me to him in time. We were fellow witnesses of the light’s eternal journey to… where? When? Was it going to return from where it had come, like the spawning salmon in the cannery’s creek?
It would continue its journey, speeding in the silent vacuum of space, taking a part of me, this moment, with it. That unknown cannery worker who had looked up and seen the same light was a fellow passenger.
I always felt everywhere I went, in the woods and on the beaches, that somehow some part of the cannery workers who had lived here so long ago were still here, but in their own era, going about a life they’d already lived, but somehow present, too, in our time.
There was a sense of the place being haunted, but not in the usual sense of that word. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I did think that as long as a person was remembered at least a remnant of them lived on. What was a memory-person who could almost be seen, almost touched, almost interacted with? Was there a technology not yet invented that could free their memory-images from time’s grip?
The cedar shake walls of the wood box surrounded me as I hugged myself to keep warm and stared up into the twinkling sky.
Did time have mirages like space did? Was the Flying Dutchman, I wondered, an example of a temporal mirage?
We owned a large annotated chart book covering British Columbia and Southeast Alaska that all of us, adults and children alike, pored over and discussed. One margin note recounted a sighting of the legendary “ghost ship” in our general area as it was recorded in the logbook of the Alaska State Ferry M/V Malaspina.
Like all log entries, it gave the exact day, hour, position, weather, and barometric pressure: Sunday, 6 a.m.; February 15, 1973; sixteen miles south of Ketchikan, abeam Twin Island in Revillagigedo Channel; unlimited visibility with northeasterly winds at ten knots; temperature 28°F and barometric pressure at 29:71.
Chief mate Walter Jackinsky was standing watch on the bridge with the helmsman and lookout when “a huge vessel loomed up approximately eight miles dead ahead, broadside and dead in the water.” The appearance of it was so striking that they were careful to write down the vessel’s exact position in longitude and latitude, near the south end of Bold Island in Coho Cove, marked by Washington Monument Rock.
The log entry reports: “This vessel strongly resembled the Flying Dutchman. The color was all gray, similar to vapor or clouds. It was seen distinctly for about 10 minutes. It looked so exact, natural and real that when seen through binoculars, sailors could be seen moving about on board.”
As they watched, the ship dissolved and disappeared.
Huddled in the wood box, I wondered: Were the cannery workers a kind of mirage, recorded on the land around us, and on the ruins—the same way that spatial mirages of long-dead people and past events were mysteriously recorded and preserved on film?
I longed to know who they’d been, what they’d thought, how they’d reacted to this lonesome edge of the world. After we were gone, would we leave temporal mirages of ourselves behind, recorded on the beaches we played on, to mingle with the cannery workers?
• • •
Once we settled in, on the protected side of the cannery, we hardly ever went over to the Other Side where the burned ruins were, especially when it was just Mom and us kids. The charred wreckage lined the large salmon creek where the bears roamed, undisturbed by the rusty skeletons of machines. It meant nothing to them that once a mechanized world hummed, pounded, and rumbled in this remote outpost.
In my mind, the Other Side came to feel a bit like the Forbidden Zone in the original Planet of the Apes where the surf washed endlessly against the remains of a destroyed civilization. Yet, though it retained its strangeness and mystery, it still felt like home. I suppose in the same way an ancient castle with a ruined wing can be a home.
Any visit to the Other Side was memorable, but none more so than when Uncle Lance came to stay with us and act as our tutor for a short while after Muriel and Maurice left.
Although technically he was another adult who could be with Mom and us kids while Dad was away during the week, Lance had only recently graduated high school and Jamie, me, and Megan had shared the same classroom with him in the one-room, all-grades bush school in Meyers Chuck.
He was born late in life to Mom’s parents—Mom was a teenager during his preschool years, and while her parents worked she raised Lance. When Jamie was born, Lance was more like an older brother to him than an uncle.
I have few memories of him teaching us, probably because we didn’t see him as a teacher since he’d only recently been a classmate. I doubt he took the position seriously himself, but being of an artistic bent he did enjoy teaching us from our art history books. One time he took us on a school field trip into the woods to find leaves and ferns to use in sponge painting and stenciling art.
He was well read with a large, picturesque vocabulary and wised us up less through direct teaching and more through incidental moments. Like the time Megan was appalled when Lance mentioned that he was going to take a “spit bath.” She let it be known that she thought anyone who would bathe in spit was just plain gross. Lance, swallowing a grin, explained that a spit bath was one that used little water.
Coming to live in Union Bay with us at the old cannery site was a boon to him—jobs were scarce, and it allowed him to get out on his own. Sporting the long-haired hippie look, he turned the wanigan into a smoky man cave where he could blast his screaming Seventies music so loud the cannery workers probably heard it after it tore a hole in the space-time continuum.
Still, he had a knack for knowing what music suited other people’s tastes.
Every now and then Lance would cross the beach in the evening, his boots crunching on gravel, seeing by the moon, starshine, and the lamplight falling out of the wanigan’s windows on one side of the beach and the floathouse’s lit windows on the other side. He’d burst in on us while we were playing board games with Mom (Chinese Checkers, Sorry!, Yahtzee, Monopoly, Risk), or when she was reading a book to us before bed (Down the Long Hills, Little House on the Prairie, Five Little Peppers, The Hobbit, “The Wanigan Kids”).
Lance attended the same one room school as we did in Meyers Chuck and was more like an older brother than an uncle.
Without so much as a greeting, Lance would insist, “You have to hear this!” He’d go straight to the car stereo that Dad had rigged inside the floathouse to a marine battery and shove a cassette in.
We’d sit at attention for the entire album, completely absorbed by the music in the yellow lamplight: Kim Carnes with her broken, rusty voice sang “Bette Davis Eyes,” or Shot in the Dark’s inspired guitar/flute duet on “Playing with Lightning” chimed out. We immediately fell in love with and played these albums, and others he introduced us to, on endless repeat until they became the soundtrack to our wilderness life.
During the daytime he and Mom had lengthy discussions about the books they were reading. Though in Lance’s