Mom around the house, describing every scene with photographic clarity, following her down to the bathroom, despite her laughing protests, where he’d continue his rant outside the door. There was no escape.
Or he’d come over to share a long-winded, off-color joke that Mom would do her best, to no avail, to head off at the pass. Or he’d entertain us kids by producing the sound of flatulence with nothing more than his hand in his armpit, working his arm industriously. The boys were deeply impressed. Another time he came over to bedazzle Mom with an illusion where he turned his back to her, wrapped his arms around himself, and managed to conjure a woman madly in love with him.
He and Mom also loved playing “Name That Tune.” While we watched, they took turns putting a cassette in and allowed a song to play only a snatch of music. They were both good at recognizing who the artist was from the barest riff, but Lance usually won in the end. He was merciless with his disgust and disillusionment when Mom missed one, though she just laughed.
After he left the wilderness to live in the city of Ketchikan, he never forgot us and sent out mixtapes with the latest hits: “The Breakup Song” and “Jeopardy” by Greg Kihn, “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, “Seven Year Ache” by Rosanne Cash, “Morning Train” by Sheena Easton, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” by Elton John and Kiki Dee, and so on.
He also recorded directly off the radio, particularly channels that offered a “blast from the past” line-up of hits from Mom and Dad’s youth. Through these albums of Fifties and Sixties songs, our parents’ era also became a part of ours. We heard these songs at least as often as the modern Eighties ones.
The most memorable recording that Lance sent out to us was Jeff Wayne’s rock opera of HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds, brilliantly narrated by Richard Burton. We never tired of listening to it. We sang the songs from it while we played in the woods and on the beach. Megan and I, with doubtful harmony, crooned “No, Nathaniel, no, there must be more to life” at the drop of a hat as we rode pretend horses around the beaches and built our forts in the woods.
And, with ghoulish relish, all of us intoned the eerie Martian war cry: “Ulaaaa!” It rang off the fortress-like wall of trees and the shore-lapping bay at all hours. We loved to do it at least in part because Mom hated it; she tried to ban it, with zero success. Creeping her out added to the entertainment value.
The story of Earth being taken over by aliens, torching civilization with their death ray, resonated with us almost as much as it had terrorized the victims of Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio play. While his audience believed it to be a real, live program and panicked, racing away into the night in a mad scramble for survival or stuffing rags in the cracks of doors and windows to escape the fumes of the Martians’ deadly poison gas, the five of us kids listening to a recorded rock version of that show nearly half a century later could have easily been convinced that it was true.
My parents could have told us that the world had been destroyed by an alien race or nuclear warfare, with only a few pockets of humanity surviving on Earth, and we would have believed it—because we saw nothing around us to disprove it, and plenty to suggest it was true.
The Other Side seemed to confirm it.
• • •
While Lance was staying with us, he and Mom cooked up an expedition to the ruins.
Unlike our practical, work-oriented father, Mom and Lance were fascinated in a purely aesthetic sense by the atmosphere of the ruins. Their excitement about the illicit trip into ceded bear territory infected us kids. Though they were both adults, Dad’s influence tended to dampen risky, arty whims even when he wasn’t there. The sense that we were on a covert trek only added to the thrill of it.
We set out into the forest. The narrow dirt trail was marked here and there by giant moss-covered, rotting stumps. At some point in the past the cannery superintendents had fallen massive spruce and cedar trees surprisingly deep in the woods, but for what purpose it wasn’t clear. Had they milled their own lumber to build the boardwalk? Or had they somehow hauled the enormous trees down to the water to be used in making fish traps?
Because these large trees had been cut down in the middle of the peninsula that separated the two sides of the cannery, and many trees had been cleared to put in the wide boardwalk connecting both sides, oddly enough the deeper we went into the woods, the more open and airy and bright it became. There was a strangeness to it, as if we were stepping into a zone where the natural laws of the temperate rainforest ceased to exist.
Porcupines clambered clumsily up slim, young trees that had sprouted in the absence of the big trees’ shadows. Moby barked at the prickly, comical beasts, but after having one dropped on him when Lance shook it out of a tree, Moby learned that he wasn’t interested in a closer acquaintance.
Mom made no effort to stifle our young, high-pitched chatter, believing that human noise warned away bears. She’d attached bells to our life jackets for that purpose and told us to talk loudly, whistle, and generally make a lot of noise whenever we were in the woods. This was one of the mandates of hers that we zestfully obeyed.
The forest was brilliant with every shade of green, the moss a spongy verdant ocean that waved over fallen trees, rocks, and hills. Far below the canopy, giant-leafed, almost tropical, stands of banana-yellow skunk cabbage colonized boggy areas, and shyly curled fiddlehead ferns lined the trail and windfalls in thick profusion.
When we broke out of the woods, we went from comforting color and life to a scene of black-and-white desolation.
Under a leaden sky the ruins were stark. The creek, hidden by the trees, rumbled monotonously. The tide was way out, probably a minus tide, and the blackened pilings stretched in broken rows down yard after yard of rocky beach. Amidst them, the frames of the cannery’s machinery lay where they had fallen decades ago when the floors, decks, and pier were engulfed in flames.
We picked our way through the debris field, like divers exploring a deep sea wreck. The minus tide added to the strangeness. I imagined old-fashioned wooden freighters tied to the pier these pilings had supported, floating far above my head as they took onboard tons of canned salmon.
The abundance of metal in odd shapes appealed to both Mom’s and Lance’s creative natures and they enthusiastically fitted them together into modern art steel sculptures right there on the spot. We kids were encouraged to follow suit, as an ad hoc school fieldtrip.
Back in Meyers Chuck when Lance was fourteen, he and his friend Norman Miller (one of my Aunt Marion’s five brothers) used to act as city architects on the beach building entire metropolises, beginning with a rusted-out starter they found as a town power plant. Inspired by these memories, when Lance investigated the ruins that day with us and saw a rusty bedframe complete with bedsprings and a headboard, all concretized together, he knew that he had to build a car.
He used it as his platform and Mom and the five of us kids pounced on tortured rusty shapes, calling out “car parts” and dragging them to him. We watched in delight as the junk turned into a jalopy, as Mom called it. Lance positioned four huge gears on both sides as wheels, and a wheel valve attached to a long steel pipe as a steering wheel. He built up seats, the hood of the car, and a trunk.
When he was finally satisfied, his collaborators were sweaty and grungy, covered in rust, but elated with the results of their labors and Lance’s vision. Mom lamented not having film in her camera to capture the junk jalopy as it rested on the rocks, far from any road, with the expanse of the bay and the distant mountains of Prince of Wales Island on the horizon beyond it.
Nevertheless, we posed on it, riding in the back seats as Lance drove and Mom took pictures with squared fingers held up to her eye.
“Where should we go?” Lance asked, jauntily honking an invisible horn.
Each of us kids got to shout out a destination and Lance made engine noises. We leaned when he leaned, taking sharp corners around precipitous drop-offs, laughing as the jalopy careened into one imaginary story after another.
The jalopy remained on the beach long after Lance left, eventually scattered by heavy storm