good of the burned pilings that had once upheld the wharf and cannery and towed them away to use as foundations under their village homes.
The Forest Service had also been there shortly before us. They’d been surveying the area for a possible logging project. They’d built a sauna beside the foundation beams of a building that no longer existed, and laid down boards to perch their pre-fab temporary shelters on. But in the end, they left too, taking the pre-fab buildings with them but leaving the sauna and the planks behind.
US Steel, the company that had bought the property after the cannery burned, had checked for profitable ore and, finding the extraction and transportation expenses cost prohibitive, abandoned the venture. They left behind a rock pile and stacks of core sample holders in a core shack, and up on the mountain concrete pads, cable, and other debris.
The ruins had watched and waited for life to return, for people to return for real. I felt that as we wandered through the scorched and blackened remains. I felt that we were being welcomed and encouraged to stay, that the ruins wanted us there.
We accepted the invitation and made ourselves at home. We kids could not be dissuaded from stripping down and swimming in the creek, though it was so icy it burned, fed by mountain snows. Our shrieks and laughter floated out over the twisted, rusting metal on the beach, over the solid concrete blocks barren of their former buildings, over the cannery’s retort door, its giant rusty circle half-buried in beach gravel.
When I left the water behind, shivering, teeth chattering, it was to find Mom standing in the ruins beside the creek. All around her were stark foundation pilings and rusty steel frame beds, twisted into agonized shapes from the intense heat.
The forest had taken over everything, underbrush and strangling second-growth growing rampant over what had been the bunkhouse, where only rotten boards and foundation pilings remained. Yet she stood there visualizing aloud in word-pictures what our future house, almost a mansion, would look like.
“Which bedroom would you like, honey?” she asked me, as if it were already built.
I stood there looking at the overgrown apocalypse and wondered at her ability to see the same thing and not notice the practical impossibilities of what she was saying. It felt like sheer, breathtaking madness to make real her grand designs out there on the edge of nowhere with her children and husband for skills and labor.
Dad, listening silently from behind his glinting glasses and the beard he’d grown in defiance of the clean-cut conformity that had sent him off to war, noticed the obstacles. But he considered them a challenge and saw the practicalities, not the impossibilities.
• • •
The cannery’s wide-open view of Union Bay meant that it was pummeled by savage northwesterly storms—something we discovered within hours of our arrival.
At first it was cat’s paws ruffling the bay. Then little wavelets lapped at the ruins as the tide rose. The wavelets transformed into a rushing, curling crash of heavy surf as the wind thrashed the evergreens and careened through miles of forest with a rising, freight train roar.
Dad fetched the skiff from where he’d anchored it and tied it to the remains of a Forest Service outhaul: a rope and pulley system that allows skiffs to be kept out in deep water so they don’t “go dry” (beach on the ground as the tide recedes), and can be pulled in as needed.
There was no way our little thirteen-foot open skiff could battle against the expanse of white-capping rollers marching toward us as the afternoon gave way to dusk. We were stranded, marooned in the shadowy, burned ruins without food, bedding, or shelter.
• • •
I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel about being marooned beyond the last fringe of civilization, beyond help or assistance. Fear seems appropriate, or at least unease, a troubled awareness of all the ways that two adults and five children could die alone and disappear in the wilderness.
My parents set us to work on clearing the land where Mom visualized having her home built, next to the creek, since she’d always dreamed of having a home near rushing water. As Dad chopped seedlings and undergrowth, we hauled them down to the beach in a big pile, working up quite a sweat, not to mention hunger.
We tired finally, and as the wind blowing in off the bay chilled the sweat on us, we huddled together for warmth. Shivering amidst all those reminders of the destructive power of fire, that was all any of us wanted at that moment: a good, rousing blaze.
We had no matches or lighters since neither of my parents smoked, but Dad did have his .30 carbine with him. The gun was a concession to the dangers of the wilderness, a concession made despite both of my parents’ issues with guns.
Dad was reminded of the war, and Mom had never gotten over her first introduction to firing a gun when she was a teenager. She hadn’t gripped it tightly enough and the recoil had caused the gun to fly up and strike her in the forehead. The pain and shock had been magnified by the deafening report. She’d developed a terrified aversion to all guns to such an extent that she would shake when she was near one and grow sick when she had to handle one.
We watched as Dad ejected a shell and used his pocketknife to dig the bullet out. In a place protected by the wind, behind the pile of brush we’d collected, he dumped the powder onto a rock with dry sticks and moss ready to catch fire. He put the cartridge back in the chamber and fired the primer at the powder, hoping to spark it into flame. However, it blew the powder off the rock.
Eventually—almost, it seemed to us kids, inevitably, as if the elements had no choice but to yield to his angry determination—he got flames to devour his kindling. Now we had a fire to warm ourselves, though nothing to cook on it.
We slept that night in a shelter Dad put together from planks and plastic sheets scavenged from the Forest Service’s leftovers. It was cold, with the wind roaring and the trees cracking and thrashing their branches against each other. The wind switched to the south and it rained in the night. Megan and I were envious of Jamie, who had Moby lying on his feet and keeping him warm. The boys were put in the middle and slept warm and toasty. Mom cuddled the boys, wide awake, too amazed at where she was and the adventure she was living to sleep.
Dad also got little sleep, getting up to check on the skiff as it rode the waves too near the rock cliffs for comfort, the big swells coming in and dashing the small craft forward, only for it to be yanked up short by its line tied to the outhaul. He tended the fire, hunkering down near it for warmth, waiting for first light, for the ruins to come back into focus. Despite the stress of worrying about the skiff, at least he wasn’t being shot at, and the scream of incoming mortars was far away.
We returned to the fishing village the next day, but the ruins called to us.
CHAPTER TWO
“WE’RE GETTIN’ OUTTA HERE!”
—Skip Robinson in the 1975 movie The Wilderness Family
WHEN MOM explained to Linda, Uncle Rand’s girlfriend, that she and Dad still planned to homestead the old cannery in the wilderness despite their friends dropping out, Linda tried to dissuade her.
“Romi, you have to have more faith in people,” Linda said. Maybe she was thinking that it was another instance of the rapidly-becoming-a-cliché story of a Vietnam vet alienated from humanity, dragging his family off into the wilds of Alaska.
But it wasn’t like that, not entirely, Mom thought.
They trekked the bare dirt trail that circled the village under mist-laden skies. The community trail’s narrowness only allowed people to walk single file under the towering canopy of evergreens, tendrils of overcast trailing into the treetops. The air was intoxicatingly fresh.
“You can’t just go off into the wilderness like this. People aren’t the enemy,” Linda assured her.
Weathered wood-frame houses hugged the hillsides above the winding path or perched beside it on barnacle-studded pilings over the beach. Every now and then boards corduroyed