kick up. These were dangerous waters we were traveling in—shipwrecks on the shores we passed gave silent testimony to that.
Back inside the floathouse, Mom gave us a quick breakfast. We ate while watching the storied Inside Passage glide past our windows with Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” playing in the background. Dad was in continual contact with Rory on the Velvet, Rand in the Wood Duck, and Muriel on the Lindy Lou by Citizen Band (CB) radio.
By a freak of bouncing radio signals, truckers from California would break through the squelch with their: “10-4, what’s your twenty?” and “Copy that. You’re coming in wall to wall and treetop tall.” An entire array of twangy CB slang periodically burst through the speaker. The rowdy rap of truckers hauling freight along America’s West Coast highways beamed into our wilderness home all the years we lived at the cannery.
The little inlet we headed for was a hidden harbor—it couldn’t be seen from a direct approach on the cannery. It was sheltered from the northerly gales, though southeasterly storm surges were free to wreak havoc in there, as we soon discovered.
The harbor was shallow and went dry on minus tides. In addition, there were submerged dangers everywhere, entire forests of pilings (studded with steel spikes that had held long since rotted or scavenged beams in place) that had at one time been the foundations for pre-WWII boat grids and haul-outs.
This harbor was where the superintendent had lived and where the cannery had repaired and stored their fish barges in the off season all the years it was in operation.
The cannery encompassed twenty-one acres of wilderness and had two sides: the “superintendent’s inlet” where our floathouse was parked, and “the Other Side,” the creek side where the cannery itself had been. They were separated by a high, stubby peninsula.
In the superintendent’s inlet the orderly sentinel pilings, silent witnesses to the passing years, stood in marked contrast to the twisted, scorched chaos we’d found on “the Other Side.” There had also been a building that had overlooked the superintendent’s inlet that was later put on a float and towed the seven miles to Meyers Chuck. There it was put back on land where it still stands today, painted in cannery red, and known locally as “Hotel California” for the hippie inhabitants who lived there in the Seventies.
The Velvet, Wood Duck, and Lindy Lou couldn’t maneuver inside the shallow harbor with all the underwater hazards, so they untied from the floathouse and Dad used his skiff to push the house to a central location, tying it to trees on shore and a tall piling on the wanigan side. After it was secured in position, the Lindy Lou picked its way inside and tied up to the floathouse on the other side from the wanigan.
There’s nothing quite like being in your familiar home and glancing out the window to see not the view you’ve lived with for years but terra incognito—an unknown, unexplored landscape.
The light shines through the windows differently, making the inside of the house seem subtly strange. There’s a continuing, pleasurable, tingling disorientation about it, a breathtaking, awe-inspiring sense of waiting discovery—an almost Alice in Wonderland sense of having fallen down the rabbit hole with all kinds of amazing experiences to live outside the familiar walls of your transported home.
Once the house sat down on dry land, the water gradually receding and lowering us onto the ground as if our house was on a giant elevator, Mom couldn’t hold us kids back. She yelled at us to stay within sight of the house as we ran outside. The tall forest of evergreen trees encircled the small harbor, with drift logs, beach grass, and seaweed in a jumble at their heavy skirts.
I don’t know about my brothers and sister, but I felt like a Star Trek adventurer who had landed on an unknown planet with the remnants of a long-ago civilization to explore. On this side the ruins, although less extensive, were better preserved. All the buildings and barges and anything still valuable had been moved out, so what remained were foundations, wire-wrapped wooden waterlines, and an old winch for hauling out the cannery barges.
We found signs of ancient Native occupation in the form of a “fire tree.” The tree was a huge silo of a cedar tree burned hollow in the center. It was outside the part of the cannery that had burned in 1947, and it wasn’t a lightning-struck tree since the only burned section was the interior. It was so huge that I could walk around inside and stand in the middle without being able to touch the sides. I used to wonder at the mystery of it, why it had been deliberately burned hollow inside. Later I read that modern researchers hypothesize that the Tlingit tribe used such trees as a way to preserve their precious communal store of fire from the persistently rainy climate.
Our greatest, most awestruck discovery was a grave. It was marked by a weathered and rotting wooden cross on the point that overlooked the bay. (Later we found another one farther back in the woods.)
Who was buried here? What had been their stories? There was no one to ask so we were free to imagine our own stories. There was plenty of scope for a child’s imagination in the ruins that we now called home.
CHAPTER THREE
| “4th grade correspondence our 4 children school | Outside, beyond the lapping of the water |
| housing our 4 desks with the attached chairs | Against the worm-eaten logs of the wanigan |
| and open up tops and rusted 50 gallon gas barrel stove. | I hear my father’s chainsaw We will haul wood for recess.” |
| —my Fourth Grade poetry composition |
THE LINDY LOU was hauled out of the water and held upright by a wooden cradle Dad built for it near where he eventually moved our floathouse, so high on the beach that our home only floated during the highest tides of the year.
After Dad did some repairs to it, Muriel and Maurice moved into the sole remaining, still-standing cannery building on the property, the little red cabin we’d noticed on our first visit as it stood on the edge of the creek across from the ruins.
The Forest Service had marked a trail between the two sides of the cannery. Dad civilized it by cutting down some small trees and laying them down over boggy spots, and overall made the trail easier for the Hoffs to follow. Muriel took it every morning to teach us in the wanigan.
The wanigan was tiny. It was one room with a small loft. It had a front and back door that slid in wooden troughs, like a boat door. There was a hand-hewn counter at the back with a sink that had no running water, and a four-paned window above it. In one corner the wood stove, made from an old fuel drum, squatted.
The interior and exterior were all raw wood, unpainted, with visible nails and hammer dents in floor, walls, and rafters. But this was common to Southeast Alaska where the timber-loving men in the area disliked splashing paint around and strongly resisted all attempts to put anything but varnish on floors or walls.
The small building had served as a home for my grandparents while they built a house on land, and from the first my brothers and sister and I loved playing in and on it. Mom handwrote on lined yellow paper a story called “The Wanigan Kids” and each of us, plus our cousin Shawn who came up in the summers to visit his dad (Rand), had a starring role in the story.
It was a Wizard of Oz story, but instead of our house being whirled away by a tornado, in Mom’s version the wanigan broke its mooring lines during a high storm tide when just the six of us kids were aboard, and we floated away from adult authority. Instead of the fantastical sights and experiences of Oz, Mom asked each of us to contribute an idea to the story and we decided on adventures of coping with the real and present dangers of the Alaskan wilderness.
She read many books to us and we loved all of them—but we loved none more than “The Wanigan Kids,” which we clamored for her to read all the time.
The small, weathered