trail as we were on our way to school in Meyers Chuck, she had to turn back. Though we were almost to school, she retraced her steps and put the slimy, squished bug out of its misery, all the while sobbing bitter tears.
Her polar opposite was Jamie (eleven), the oldest, who had been born when Dad was away in Vietnam, who had in infanthood considered himself the man of the family and had never known how to stand down from that patriarchal position after the real man of the family returned. Jamie had coopted all of Mom’s time, attention, and affection from birth and wasn’t shy about letting the Intruder—who Mom called “Gary”—know who ran the show.
When Dad would take his wife and small son to dinner at a friend’s, Jamie would decide when it was time to call it a night. He’d put on his outdoor clothes and plant himself in front of Dad and announce, “I’m weddy, Gowwy.” If Gary should, inconceivably, ignore him, Jamie would make himself more visible and raise his voice: “I said I’m weddy, Gowwy.”
This assumption of authority in his small son didn’t go over well with a man who was struggling with PTSD, the demands of a ready-made family, the cold callousness of some of those close to him who made it clear they had no use for Vietnam vets, and the requirements of holding down a job and providing for his family.
Whether it was caused by Dad’s antipathy or not, Jamie developed an interest in torturing those around him and then studying their reactions. Once, as a preschooler, he rigged a hallway with fishing line and watched as Mom became entangled and struggled like a fly caught in a web. Another time an older kid came over to play with Jamie when he was two. Moments after Mom left them together, she heard the neighbor kid yelling that he wanted to go home. When she went to check to see what was happening, the boy was rattling the kid gate, demanding to be freed. He couldn’t explain what had happened and Jamie just stood in a corner, smiling.
It was a smile we all learned to dread.
And me? Some of my earliest memories, when I was three or four years old, are of getting up every night to pad to my parents’ bedroom door. I would step inside and listen to them breathing. I remember the need to do that, to make sure they were both okay. One of them because he was broken, and the other because she was unknowing.
I couldn’t bear for anyone to feel diminished and humiliated, to experience loss, for anyone to suffer. Mom tells me that when I was two or three she read me a story about a baby horse that overcame becoming an orphan to live a happy life. At the end I was sobbing. She was bemused. “What’s wrong, honey? It’s a happy story—see the little horse grew up to be strong and happy!”
“But the mama horse is still dead,” I sobbed.
Now, at nine years old, I was the family observer, the mediator, and the chronicler of all of our adventures.
• • •
The Union Bay cannery operated at the mouth of Cannery Creek on the eastern shore of Union Bay, which is located on the east side of Lemesurier Point at the southern entrance to Ernest Sound. It existed about halfway between the cities of Wrangell to the north and Ketchikan to the south, and was unable to be reached by land, only by water and air.
Local fishermen sold their catch to the cannery, which then sold in bulk to Japan. In the 1920s there was a saltery for mild-cured king salmon and later a herring reduction plant and floating clam cannery that operated seven miles away by water in Meyers Chuck, on the west side of Lemesurier Point. In pre-WWII years, Meyers Chuck’s over one hundred residents supported a post office, store, machine shop, barber shop, bakery, and bar.
Both the cannery site in Union Bay and the fishing village of Meyers Chuck are on Cleveland Peninsula, which is a part of the mainland. The Coast Mountains, with all their glaciers and snowy ramparts, separate the peninsula from Canada.
Their location on the mainland is unusual. Most communities in Southeast Alaska are on islands. The Cleveland Peninsula terminates at Lemesurier Point, which juts into Clarence Strait, a feared branch of the Inside Passage, and stands across from Prince of Wales Island where one of the few road systems in Alaska’s Panhandle connect a variety of small towns.
The cannery had been built in this isolated place in 1916 by Union Bay Fisheries Co., going through two other owners before it was sold to the Nakat Packing Co., which was owned by the son of the Norwegian founder of the city of Petersburg and a partner. They owned it until it burned in 1947.
Burned canneries were not an uncommon sight in Southeast Alaska. Between 1878 and 1949, 134 canneries were built. Sixty-five burned and were never rebuilt. Ours was one of them.
The few photos Mom has of our first day at Cannery Creek are gilded with sunshine. We’re in our lifejackets, discovering the miracle of that rarest of all rare embellishments in rocky Southeast Alaska—a true sand beach.
Above it are the usual seaweed and barnacle-covered rocks. In the photos Dad is behind us kids as we explore; he’s pushing the skiff off and anchoring it in the current of the creek so that it won’t go dry as the tide recedes.
Jamie’s dog Moby is out of the frame: he’s already taken off, nails clicking and scratching over the rocks, to do his scouting ahead of us. Jamie is watching over the two little ones while my sister and I stand together out in front. The bay stretches out behind us kids and Dad to a shimmering, hazy horizon, as if we’ve stepped through a curtain into another dimension, into a different experience of time.
The ruins of the cannery were on the other side of the creek from us. Dad had decided against landing the skiff there since fallen machinery littered the entire beach and could extend for some distance underwater. He didn’t want to foul the outboard’s propeller, leaving us stranded.
Once Dad secured the skiff, he led our family up the sandy beach and into the rocks.
The limitless forest of cedar, spruce, and hemlock lined the creek. Evergreen scents sharpened the air over the sun-warmed beach grass. The amber-colored creek, pierced with sunshine, tumbled over the stones and boulders, rushing past the rocky bank we stood on. Up a ways, on this side of the creek, a small cabin dappled by the shadows of alders was the sole building left standing. Its faded red paint was the color of Southeast Alaska’s historical canneries.
Opposite us, on the other side of the creek, we could see the ruins of the cannery proper, with its broken and blackened pilings and giant, rusting fuel drum on a point of rocks. Great chunks of weathered concrete stood in the creek between us and the ruins. They stood against the flow, refusing to crumble to the doublebarreled forces of time and water. They had probably once supported and anchored a bridge.
Megan and I in the front, Jamie and the boys behind us with Dad anchoring the skiff in the creek’s current as we first set foot on the old cannery site.
When we got to the edge of the rushing creek, Mom and Dad carried the younger boys from stone to stone in the shadow of these concrete monoliths of a long-gone world, telling us older kids to be careful as we followed. Moby, a Sheltie with a touch of Cocker Spaniel, ran ahead, pausing and looking back with a panting grin from every dry perch.
I wonder now at our lack of fear as we tackled that abandoned place, where the bears, both black and brown, had reigned unopposed for decades; where there was no hope of help, no one to hear us or come to our aid if we were harmed.
Instead, we pushed forward, all of us, eager for this exploration. And the ruins? They’d been there a long time… waiting.
This had once been a community, as many as a hundred men and women living here cut off from the world, telling their stories, thinking their thoughts, dreaming about their futures. They played cards, drank, danced, sang, and worked and worked and worked as the cannery rumbled, with fishing boats and freight boats coming and going. And in the background the unending thud of the pile driver pounding in pilings for piers and fish trap.
This was a place that had known people, that had made room for them. But after the fire, after the scars and disfigurements, the people had left. For many silent years this place was visited