that glinted hard and mirrorlike through the trees and crows answered them from deep in the moss-damped forest.
Mom kept to herself her “unworldly” reactions to the mystery and romance of the ruins. She’d long since decided that other adults, even the ones she connected with the most, never understood what she experienced. Places had personalities, they lived and breathed and either welcomed or scorned you. The ruins wanted her family.
Despite the fact that Linda had grown up in San Francisco while Mom had grown up on traplines, farms, and ranches in backroad regions, it was the city-girl Linda who was able to “do” the rural Alaskan lifestyle in a way Mom never could. Linda tackled trapping and flensing a skinned otter, steering Rand’s fishing boat, and everything else the men around her did with panache, while at the same time finding the time to crochet, sew, and design quirky, feminine crafts.
Mom wouldn’t know—and didn’t care to know—how to do what the men did, and though she wore a floppy, boiled-wool, faded-thimbleberry hat that looked like she’d knitted it herself, she’d bought it in a thrift store, allured by its wacky-cocky personality. The sewing arts were a deep, and deeply uninteresting, mystery to her and always had been.
She was not one of the millions of young people who, in the 1960s and ’70s, felt driven to spurn the materialistic world in the Back to the Land Movement. Despite her love of novelty and fashion and whatever was current on the modern scene, she, like Dad, were traditionalists and had no interest in the drug culture, free sex, or any of the other ideas of other people their age who dropped out and “went back to the land.”
According to Eleanor Agnew in her book Back from the Land, these back-to-the-landers thought that by going back to a simpler life and living close to and off the land, they could be better stewards of the world than the exploitative capitalist society that had given them the kind of privilege that allowed them to toss it all away on a fervent wave of idealism.
There were many of these free-floating idealistic types who latched onto Mom and Dad for their stability. My parents were young, but they were a married couple at a time when many young people derided the concept of marriage as being old fashioned and too restrictive.
My dad and mom, happy that they’re moving to the ruins, leaving civilization behind.
Mom was a stay-at-home wife while Dad—despite his rebellious long hair and bushy beard (he was once mistaken by a Hell’s Angel member as one of their own)—always held down a steady job. They wound up, time and again, taking care of and providing bed and board for any number of youthful wanderers existing in a liberated, drug-induced daze with no thought of jobs, responsibility, or providing for themselves.
These drifters were the children of “The Greatest Generation” that had saved the world from the Great Depression and Nazism… which was a lot to live up to. Dropping out was easier than competing, not to mention nobler—if you could spin it that way. And if you could find a steady young couple, who were in sympathy with the idealism of the times but maintained a traditional way of life, to keep yourself safe and afloat, all the better.
There were plenty of those types in rural Alaskan communities, including Meyers Chuck—“hippies” who were drawn as much to the drug culture and liberation from age-old moral standards, as they were by the validation of living a simpler life. And, at that time, Alaska stood out as a state that welcomed eccentrics, non-traditionalists, and made the private use of marijuana legal.
Neither Mom nor Dad, even in their most antiestablishment moments, had been drawn to that culture. They didn’t even smoke cigarettes, though their parents and most of their peers considered it normal to do so. And when old-fashioned crafts became a fad that young and fashionable townspeople followed—sewing or crocheting one’s own dresses had a certain cache at the time—Mom, a sucker for almost any hip fad that came along, was immune to the appeal.
She supported individualism and nonconformity, but her idealism remained restricted to the mind and heart; she spurned all labor-intensive manifestations of the zeitgeist. It didn’t matter to her that this was not a particularly practical point of view for someone who was determined to live in the remotest heart of the wilderness.
“You should have seen how happy and free the kids were,” Mom improvised to Linda.
“The kids will do fine here in the village with other kids around them and a school to attend.” Linda was so certain in her opinion that Mom had a low-level sense of panic at the thought of being forced to give up the lonesome blackened pillars and rusting remains of the old cannery.
“You don’t know what it’s like having five kids in a place this small,” Mom said. “It’s like having a target painted on you. People are always complaining about every little thing they do, and I don’t want them to grow up being squelched all the time. I want them to be free, to do whatever they want to do, be whatever they want to be.”
As if on cue, a woman from the village steamed up the path toward them. Before she reached them, glimpsing Mom’s floppy hat behind Linda, she barked, “Do you know what your kids are doing down at the dock?”
Mom didn’t get a chance to reply.
“They found a whiskey bottle on one of the boats, filled it with water, and are pretending to drink booze!” The woman huffed.
Linda turned and looked at Mom and acknowledged, “I see what you mean.”
There were no more arguments after that. Her floathouse home, Southeast Alaska’s version of the covered wagon of Oregon Trail fame, would be towed to the ruins.
• • •
When loggers arrived in Alaska and first eyed the timber-rich wilderness of the last great temperate rainforest on the planet, they were stymied by the multitude of waterways that prevented logs and people from being transported by land. They adapted by moving everything onto the water on rafts.
Logging machinery, power plants, stores, schools, and entire towns were built on rafts made of enormous logs lashed together. The floating towns and machinery were towed from one place to the next by powerful, sturdy tugboats that inched along the Inside Passage. (Later, when the logging boom ended, all these floating communities and single floathouses were moored in place and rarely ventured out onto the unprotected passages.)
When we moved to Cannery Creek, it wasn’t the first time our single-story, wood-frame house on a raft of giant logs had been towed abroad. It had been towed from Prince of Wales Island to the Ketchikan area and then to Meyers Chuck where we got it. In our keeping it had been towed twice across Clarence Strait, one of Alaska’s most unpredictable and dangerous inside waterways.
The first time had been so that Dad would have his family near his logging job, his home anchored in a small bight along the winding passage that leads to Thorne Bay, the largest logging camp in the world at the time. The second time it had been towed back to the fishing village of Meyers Chuck, where Mom’s parents and brothers lived. Now it would be towed to the old cannery site while Dad would continue to work at Thorne Bay as a scaler and bucker. The plan was for him to commute home on the weekends across Clarence Strait in the tiny skiff.
Dad had no interest in whatever seasoned arguments there might have been about the crossing being “impossible” at certain times of the year, or hearing that his family couldn’t be left without provisions or a man’s protection for weeks at a time.
I think there was some relief in not having his family around, demanding things of him he couldn’t give. Being a husband, being a father—especially being a father—were skills he didn’t possess. His own father, a World War II veteran, had been so harsh toward him that his mother had arranged for her mother to raise him while his siblings stayed at home.
The one time his father had been proud of Dad was when he signed up for the Army. His father wrote him a letter every week, though he wasn’t normally a letter writer. Yet, when Dad came back from Vietnam with a beard, his family disowned him. At a time when the mainstream was reviling