Tara Neilson

Raised in Ruins


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I overheard the talk, I felt like I was overhearing plans for moving aboard a generational starship that was going to explore and colonize deep space.

      My family of seven in our tiny thirteen-foot Boston Whaler skiff, overpowered by a fifty-horsepower Mercury outboard motor, went alone on the reconnaissance expedition. Together, we would be the first ones to scout the old cannery.

      We whipped past the green forest that seemed to stretch from here to the moon as it climbed a ridge on one side. Across the glassy strait was a vast island covered in snow-capped mountain ranges, headland after headland disappearing into a pearly blue distance.

      That was Prince of Wales Island where Dad worked as a logger at the largest logging operation in the world. There were enormous bald patches in the dense green hillsides, giving the island a mangy appearance at odds with the pristine, breathtaking beauty of sea, sky, and the unmolested mainland we skimmed along beside.

      Our uncovered skiff, about the length of a Volkswagen Beetle, was a speck.

      The world was big; I knew that from school lessons. But the wilderness was bigger. There was no end to it. We were the only humans in it as we sped across the gigantic white-cloud reflections. Ahead of us, a mountain lay on its back, a giant Easter Island head with its stern nose pointed toward the sky, toward space, toward the orbiting planets around the sun, and beyond.

      And my family was heading toward it and the slumbering ruins that it had shadowed for decades.

      I turned my face into the wind, my hair whipping into a knotted mess around my head as I leaned forward. The bearded man with his hand on the tiller handle of the outboard had decided he was going to go to the ruins, and I knew nothing, not even all this wilderness, was going to stop him.

      This was, after all, a man who had stopped the Vietnam War. For an entire day.

      He told me years later that when he’d just turned twenty-one, married one month, he had arrived in Vietnam during Phase 1 of the Tet Offensive. In the span of twenty-four hours he saw a bustling metropolis, the Asian people living in it as they had for generations, become a bomb-blasted landscape of skeletal buildings and streets filled with smoking rubble.

      After seeing the effects of war close-up, one of the first things he did was to build himself and his fellow grunts a sturdy shelter—a bombproof igloo, so to speak—out of cast-off rocket ammo boxes that he directed his companions to fill with sand for the walls. For the roof he used PSP (perforated steel plating) with more sand-filled rocket ammo boxes on top.

      No one had thought of building such a thing, even with screaming missiles and mortars constantly overhead. Everyone else sweltered in flimsy tents or buildings with uninsulated steel roofs that acted like ovens. His igloo was the only comfortable building in the muggy jungle heat. He and his friends had it for three months before the officers evicted them and took it over for themselves.

      Dad was a helicopter mechanic (the sole mechanic available for the Huey; a group of mechanics serviced the other helicopters) and it was his job to say which helicopters were fit for duty on any given day. Every day some helicopters didn’t come back—and friends and companions disappeared or were brought back bleeding, maimed, or dead. One day one of his best friends was killed.

      The next morning he put an X on every single Huey, grounding them all. Without the support of the Hueys none of the other helicopters could fly, and without air support the ground war couldn’t progress. That day he wasn’t going to allow anyone else to die in an ugly war no one really believed in or knew what they were fighting and dying for.

      His commanding officer said to him, “You know you can’t do that, Gary. You have to take those Xs off.”

      Dad just looked at him. The Xs stayed. There was no war that day. Across from him in the back of the skiff, hugging her youngest child, Mom couldn’t believe she was there, that she was living her childhood dream of Alaska as few people had ever gotten to experience it.

      Despite her obsession with fashion, music, the arts, and her dream to become a Parisian club singer, she had always felt a fey-like affinity for wild creation and the animals in it. As a teenager she’d gone for day-long walks in the rural Montana countryside with her Belgian Shepherd named Gretchen, spinning dreams out of the Big Sky sunshine.

      In her own words:

      “We lived on a ranch high in the hills. I would get up early, have breakfast, feed Gretchen and the horses, then I would sit my record player on an old wooden chair on the porch, put my Bob Dylan album on at ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and Gretch and I would go, hearing the music all down the old dirt road.”

      Her most thrilling moment in her dawn-to-dusk rambles with Gretchen was when the deer came over the mountain.

      “It was a large group of deer—until that moment I hadn’t realized that they would all travel together like that. Bucks, does, and babies. They all came straight to where Gretchen and I stood, quivering. I stretched out my arms to them and they walked quietly on both sides of me. Not as if I wasn’t there, but as if they understood that I belonged to, and with, them.

      “I stood there with my arms outstretched for quite a while as the herd passed on either side, my hands on their backs as they went by, one by one, my hands sliding along backs and haunches. Bucks, does, fawns.

      “They felt like… ‘alive’ feels. The only alive I wanted to be. I never wanted anything so much as to turn and go with them…”

      And now here she was an adult, with her husband, a man she barely knew after Vietnam—they’d married one month before he went, and the man who came back was not the funny, laughing man she’d married—and five children, heading into the heart of the most remote country she’d ever seen, setting out on an adventure to rival any adventure or experience she’d ever had or read about. She was so excited she was shivering.

      • • •

      How was I to know at nine years old that this journey, toward the Old Man mountain staring up at eternity, was to become one of the favorite things of my entire life? I never imagined on our scouting trip how many times I would make it, with my family or alone.

      In the skiff, the loudness of the outboard and the wind whipping at our faces made it hard to hold a conversation, so each of us retreated into our own private worlds. On every skiff ride to the cannery, I’d sink down turtlelike into the canvas-over-foam shell of my lifejacket for its comforting, tight embrace, and chew on its black plastic piping, salty from seawater. From this haven I’d look around at the dreaming faces, at the interior eyes, and I’d wonder what each person in my family was thinking as we rode silently through time, from one world point to the next.

      We would always start in a place of daily bustle, of talk, of goals and intentions. Then we’d climb into the skiff, and within minutes we were in our own solitary time-out bubbles surrounded by the steady engine noise and the sky and water, suspended from human interaction until we reached the other world point where goals and talk and intentions continued. We might as well have stepped onto a transporter pad and had our constituent parts disassembled and then reassembled on the other side of the skiff ride.

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      Jamie and I in the front of our Boston Whaler on the very first trip to the ruins.

      Besides my parents, on this particular skiff ride there were “the babies” as we still called them, my two little brothers, sardonic Robin (five) and smiling, generous Christopher (four)—or Mitmer-the-Usurper, as Robin thought of him. Chris had displaced him as the baby of the family and the natural center of attention and affection. (“Mitmer” was Robin’s pronunciation of Christopher and soon the whole family used it.) Robin, clever and stubborn, never let anyone forget the wound of this usurpation and the babies spent all their time butting heads, wrestling, and punching.

      Then there was Megan (eight), my sister, best friend, and closest companion in age. People thought we were twins since we rarely did anything apart and we were both fair haired with blue eyes. Megan was artistic and