by Tara Neilson
Probably because we considered her letter writing important. A lady in Ketchikan conducted a Bible study with her through the mail. Mom put so much importance on responding and was so diligent about doing it that we developed a deeper respect for the notion of
Bible study than we probably would have based solely on our own irregular Bible studies with her. Her example impressed us because we weren’t accustomed to her being so determined and consistent about anything.
Family and friends scattered far and wide also received letters from her. Whenever I meet them now they always bring up how much they loved getting a letter from the wilderness.
Mom was well known, it turned out, for the pleasure her letters gave people. They were written in cursive and accompanied by a jungle of smiley faces, hyphens, and exclamation marks, not to mention last-minute add-ons and insertions that climbed up the margins and across the top so you had to turn every page in a circle before you were finished with it.
Mom wrote these garrulous letters about our wilderness life to Mr. McKenzie (I never knew his first name). His title was Manager of Remote Lands & Properties, or something like that, and he worked for US Steel, the company that owned the cannery property. He was the one who handled the twenty-year lease Dad and Mom had committed to, and to whom they sent in their payments. Mom disliked the idea of sending in the check cold, so she always added a chatty letter full of all our doings.
Mr. McKenzie must have been surprised when he received that first letter, but he soon began to think of us fondly and developed a personal bond with us. We were his own personal Wilderness Family.
This was most apparent when Mr. McKenzie retired and could no longer keep up with his correspondence and his son wrote to us, assuring us of his father’s continued affection and how much enjoyment he—and, we gathered, Mr. McKenzie’s entire family—had received from Mom’s letters over the years.
Apparently, we were a lot of people’s remote Alaskan reality TV show long before that was a thing, thanks to Mom’s letters.
CHAPTER NINE
“It was like The Hunger Games!”
—Delaney Neilson, after hearing stories about her father Chris’s childhood
LIFE IN the wilderness for us children was all about three things: chores, play, and food. Not necessarily in that order.
Mom loved cookbooks and owned a large selection of coffee table books that featured food. We liked to pore over them, drooling at the glossy pictures. She let us experiment with cooking our own meals—her only rule was that we had to eat whatever we made, no matter how badly it turned out, because we couldn’t afford to waste any food.
We made some pretty gruesome messes but we never balked at eating it. Food was food, however it looked, smelled, or tasted to children in the wilderness who knew it wouldn’t be easy to get more if we ran out.
Our favorite staples to experiment with were popcorn and oats. There was a five-gallon bucket of popcorn kernels and another of sugar. Meanwhile, flour and oats each had their own green plastic fifty-five-gallon garbage barrel.
The oats we turned into every kind of granola imaginable, adding raisins in the winter and huckleberries in the summer. We put the granola in baggies to keep us powered up as we played outside, from the moment we were freed from home school until dinner time.
Popcorn was more versatile yet. When we ran out of cereal we mixed up some dry milk with water, sprinkled sugar on a bowl full of popcorn, and poured milk over it. You had to eat it quickly because it became soggy fast. We mixed molasses with peanut butter (two more staples we had in industrial amounts) and stirred popcorn into it. Or we broke into the cases of boxed macaroni and cheese to liberate a silvery packet of bright-orange cheese and we sprinkled it on popcorn.
We loved to make cakes and our number one favorite, when we ran out of eggs, was chocolate mayonnaise cake. If you open our family’s copy of The Joy of Cooking, it falls open to that page, the most floury and chocolate-smeared page in the entire book. I learned from it how to make pie dough and became an expert at it. We had thirty-pound boxes of apples, so I made a lot of apple pies. My secret ingredient was Ronald’s Tea, an instant powdered tea packed full of citrus flavoring.
Potatoes and onions, which we had in fifty-pound bags, were a favorite morning food when fried and drenched in ketchup. We also had gallon cans of instant mashed potatoes. I don’t know who the genius was who decided to combine them with Tang and stir in hot water, but that was a thing we did for a quick and weird treat.
• • •
When we built forts, they were mainly the setting for the play food we stocked them with. Megan and I built several forts throughout the woods, using the tin and steel core holders from US Steel’s core shack. Our favorite fort was set in an indentation in the large smooth rock at the point overlooking Union Bay. We had a couch made of moss and a chair we’d made from a firewood block. The main focus of the fort was the shelf set in the rock wall.
On it we placed an egg carton full of “eggs”—clam shells stuffed with yellow cedar sawdust. There was a can of “chili”—the rich heart of a rotten red cedar tree mixed with water. We had bags full of seaweed; both popweed and the bright green sea salad; sea asparagus; and the pale-green and yellow hemlock tree buds that could be crumbled to add “parmesan cheese” to any dish. Plus, of course, the dark mud behind the floathouse that could be made into hamburger patties and chocolate cakes and cupcakes.
Megan washing cannery dishes to play with in our forts as puppies follow her.
When Linda left she hadn’t taken all of her things with her, leaving behind in the wanigan bottles of shampoo and soap, packages of wheat germ, and quite a few dishes and cutlery. Megan and I hauled them off to our fort and used them in our food fantasy life. We could spend entire days cooking on our pretend stove, breaking the clam-eggs over bowls filled with assorted condiments, making it all stick together with shampoo. I still remember the beach and perfume smell of some combinations.
Jamie’s first fort was built below the school and he called it “the store.” He had his favorite meat, “ham hocks” (sawed-off tree knots) strung up in beachcombed netting, various fruits (different tree cones), grains (beach grass, wild rice), and vegetables (skunk cabbage cones for corn, rocks for potatoes, gravel for peas) stashed about that we could come and peruse.
We saw what he was doing and then gathered our own supplies from the same places he had and created our own stores around his until we had an entire outdoor food market below the school. When his store no longer flourished, Jamie decided that instead of being civilized about food, it was time to switch to the Tooth-and-Claw Stratagem. We would battle each other for the food in our stores and forts!
This allowed him to indulge his fondness for crafting weapons of every description. At the age of twelve he was already an expert in carving spears, wooden swords, knives, and throwing stars, and was particularly good at making bows and arrows.
He made the bows from sturdy tree limbs and filched fishing line and twine from Dad’s stores. The arrows he cut from leftover cedar shakes from the school’s siding and roof and then carefully shaved until they were perfectly smooth. He slit the ends and fitted in beachcombed eagle and sea gull feathers. For the tips he sharpened stones and tied them in place with twine or Dad’s black tape. After dipping them in tree sap and allowing them to harden, the tips couldn’t be knocked loose. These were serious weapons and could easily be mistaken for museum artifacts.
He press-ganged Robin and Chris into his army. They weren’t the best shots, but they were enthusiastic and didn’t mind retrieving arrows or thrown spears. Plus, each of us had big stores of chopped-up bull kelp, skunk cabbage, and pine cones to fling at invaders. Once our defenses were breached it was all about hand-to-hand combat with wooden swords, spears, and knives.
And yes, there were casualties. I remember one hard-fought battle that raged over hills, beaches, and finally into the water. Jamie got in a blow with his wooden sword that I didn’t bl
ock in time (he was in his small aluminum skiff, I was in the water) and I wound up with a bloody lip.
Retreat seemed advisable. I swam home and Mom was shaken out of her faraway daydream world by the copious amounts of blood I was spewing. It was worth it to me though, because she gave me a cup of her precious Café Français (a powdered latte drink that came in a blue, red, and white tin that was her own personal treat) and a package of Saltine crackers to make me feel better, while Jamie looked on in deep chagrin. My brothers and sister were envious that I’d managed to win real food from the battle.
I settled on the couch, tucked in with a fuzzy afghan, nursing a huge, throbbing lip. I couldn’t help wincing when the salt from the crackers got into the cut, but I was quite content otherwise. The tide was high and water bounced off the bay outside and rippled across the ceiling. I could hear my siblings resuming the fight with envy-fueled gusto, their shouts and yells and bangs muffled by the floathouse walls.
Mom put on some music and gave me an old photo album to look at. It was mostly of people I’d never known but had heard my Grandma Pat talk about. The photos were black and white, a bit yellowed in places, pasted to pages of black construction paper. Many of the people in them no longer existed and those still alive were different now, no longer the free-spirited children captured and trapped in their time-frozen world.
Why, I wondered, as I turned the pages filled with bygone people caught in bygone moments feeling bygone emotions, was it possible to snatch and capture moments of time, like Regency ladies netting butterflies and pinning them to a board? Like the way Zeno with his mathematical paradox had attempted to capture and pin motion and change.
Why did time with all its depth and motion become this flat, spatial thing?
What was this urge to spatialize time? To conquer it and physically own it? I turned the pages with a deep sense of mystery and wonder, sipping the sweet, creamy Café Français as Patsy Cline sang about walking along the Nile at night in the background and the water-reflected sunshine rippled all around me.
• • •
Spinach noodles.
Say those two words to any of us and you’ll be greeted with an involuntary grimace.
It reminds us of the time it stormed for weeks, preventing Dad from crossing the strait. Every day we stood at the big window, peering out at the thrashing trees as the wind roared through them, and watched the waves pummel the big rock, twenty-foot explosions of spray wetting it down and turning it black.
Every day we willed the weather to moderate, for the maelstrom of white water out on the bay to subside.
And every day, as the food dwindled, it blew harder.
Mom tried rationing when she realized how low our staples were getting and that it might be a while before Dad could reach us, but it didn’t do any good. One day we woke up to no food.
Mom was faced with the certainty of not being able to feed her five children—for how long, there was no telling. We made macabre jokes, wondering which of us would be eaten first. We figured Jamie would be the one to make that choice, and it probably wouldn’t be much longer either.
We scoured the bare cupboards and every corner of the kitchen obsessively until someone turned up ancient spinach fettuccini noodles in a jar that had been used for décor, never meant to be eaten. That didn’t matter; it was food, and our bellies were grumbling.
Mom boiled them. She had nothing but salt and pepper for seasoning, but the important thing was we’d have something hot and filling to put in our hollow stomachs. We watched with keen interest as she stirred the noodles. We saw them clump together into a greenish-gray, lumpy goop. They smelled funny.
Our grandparents had owned the floathouse before us and they were heavy smokers. When we dug into The Green Blob, all we tasted was cigarette-smoked, stale spinach. We normally ate anything put before us; we never turned anything down. But not one of us could manage more than a few bites before our stomachs rebelled.
Jamie picked up Dad’s .30–30 rifle.
“What are you doing?” Mom demanded. Maybe she thought the Cannibal Time was upon us.
“I’m going hunting. There are deer all over this place.” Mom didn’t like it. She loved deer, felt an almost mystical connection to them, but her impractical heart had to give in to the relentless physical needs of her children’s empty stomachs.
She didn’t go down without a fight. “You could get lost. Or have an accident. And we wouldn’t know where you were or how to find you.”
Jamie was impatient to be gone, but he said, “If I get hurt or lost, I’ll shoot the gun three times like Dad told us to do in an emergency, every fifteen minutes. You’ll be able to find me by following the sound.”
Mom had to let him go. The rest of us kids watched as he strapped on Dad’s Bowie knife, loaded up with ammunition, and picked up the .30-.30. He struck out for the ridge behind the house where we often heard wolves howling.
A few hours later we heard a single shot.
Jamie got his first deer. He was thirteen years old.
He didn’t know how to dress it out so he carried the entire deer down to the beach. When he stumbled out of the woods, sweating and covered in blood, the conquering hero waiting for the accolades to commence—Dad showed up in the skiff. It was piled full of groceries.
“Aw man,” Jamie says was his chagrined and exhausted thought. Still, he was glad that Dad was there to show him how to dress the deer and hang it.
Dad, frustrated at not having been able to get to us, built a dock for floatplanes to land at that he anchored to a rock beyond the lowest tide. As it happened, before the year was over he had to charter a floatplane to send us groceries when it stormed again. He sent other supplies as well, and mail. At one point we lost our rowboat and the canoe needed to be patched, so Mom was forced to haul the tin washtub down the beach and row out to the floatplane in it.
An innocence we didn’t know we’d had crumbled over the spinach noodles incident. We realized how cut off we were, how scarce food was, and how quickly starvation could threaten us. The result was that Mom began a decades-long obsession with squirreling away extra food “for the famine.” Every extra dollar Dad made was put into stocking up on nonperishables.
In addition, she made it a law that no deer could be killed within a few miles of the floathouse. She claimed that she wanted them tame enough to hang around so we would always have a fund of food on the hoof. But we all knew she just jumped at the opportunity to protect the deer while at the same time managing to put a practical spin on it.
Jamie became obsessed too—with providing us with food before we reached famine conditions. Since Mom wouldn’t allow further deer hunting, he focused on fishing. We couldn’t go far on his fishing expeditions because his aluminum skiff was powered by oars. Plus, Mom had made it a rule that we couldn’t get out of sight of the floathouse. We were also never to get out on shore, where bears and wolves roamed.
This seriously limited the scope of Jamie’s fishing mission. Only bullheads, perch, and hooligan swam right inside our little harbor. The real fish were out there on the bay. When Dad was home he’d take one of us kids in the skiff and jig up a Red Snapper or a variety of cod an hour before dinner, without fail. So Jamie knew they were out there, in Mom’s forbidden zone.
One day, skirting the zone, he managed to snag a halibut. Mom had told us horror stories about this peculiar flat fish, which could reach gigantic proportions. Some had been caught that weighed as much as a full-grown black bear. They were powerful fish and she told us that fishermen who had hauled even the more moderately sized ones into the skiff with them had ended up with a broken leg or been knocked overboard. It was common for fishermen to shoot a halibut to avoid such dangers. She told us we were never, under any circumstances, to haul a live halibut into the skiff with us. We were supposed to haul it to shore and pull it onto the rocks and kill it before putting it in the skiff.
So that’s what we did. The fish dragged us around a bit as Jamie fo
ught to keep it on his line. Megan and I worked the oars and finally managed to bump the skiff into a rocky shore down around a bend from the floathouse.
With the fish between the rocks and the skiff, Megan and I got the net under it. We got out on shore and Jamie killed the halibut, about a thirty-five pounder, with the gaff hook. When it was no longer moving, the three of us struggled to haul its slippery, awkward weight into the boat.
Buzzing with adrenaline and flushed with the good feeling that comes with knowing we’d helped to put food on the table, we hurrahed and yelled and banged on the sides of the boat as we headed for home.
Mom was on the deck shouting too. She obviously recognized the epic moment for what it was.
It was only when we got closer that we realized she wasn’t shouting praise and acclaim. She was furious.
Shortly before, she’d been immersed in one of her books, like usual, but something made her glance out the window. She saw us in the rowboat and to her disbelief we were rowing toward shore with the obvious intention of getting out—against her express orders. In moments we were out of her sight, behind a bend in the shoreline.
Megan, Jamie, and I proudly hold up the halibut we caught to help stock our food supplies.
“That’s it. They’re never going to be allowed in that boat again!” She stormed out onto deck and was made madder by our carry-on. When we got within hearing range she reamed us out.
“I told you that you were never, never, to go to shore, and never get out of my sight! So what do you do? The minute you think I’m not looking, you do both!”
Jamie managed to get a word in edgewise. “You told us we couldn’t take a live halibut into the boat with us. You said we had to take it to shore to kill it.”
It took a moment, but it finally penetrated. “Halibut?” We revealed our trophy.
Mollified, and realizing she’d given us conflicting rules, she made up for it by oohing and aahing over the halibut. She fetched her camera to use some of her precious film on our prize. She had us pose with the fish, which we’d hauled up the beach in the tin washtub.
