Raised in Ruins

by Tara Neilson

  “Go ahead and hit me,” Jamie told him, looking him straight in the eye. “And my dad will kill you.”

  Dad, with his wild beard, extreme capability, unbending will, and brooding Vietnam vet persona wasn’t someone Dave was willing to cross. He backed down. It was Jamie’s first triumph over the neighbors; it wouldn’t be his last.

  What none of the adults foresaw (or knew) was that Jamie swiftly adapted his desire of repelling the invaders to subjecting them to his martial rule. Among other cruel reprisals, he created a little pastime he liked to call “running the gauntlet.” You had two choices—you could either challenge him to single gladiatorial combat (to the death, it was implied), or run the gauntlet. In our new neighbor Chris, Jamie found an able enforcer.

  Everyone chose the gauntlet, which entailed all of the rest of us lining up on either side of a stretch of the forest where the remains of the cannery’s old wire-wrapped wooden waterline was half-buried in moss. As the runner/victim ran the distance, dodging behind saplings and what other sparse cover he or she could find, we on the sidelines hurled pine cones, skunk cabbage cones, and whatever else came to hand.

  I remember standing there halfheartedly hurling cones at Gabe as he weaved, winced, and ran, thinking, “Why are we going along with this?”

  But no one wanted to challenge Jamie, not with Chris backing him up, so his decrees and gauntlets went unchallenged until the end of that summer. When the family moved on and we were once again alone in the ruins.

  • • •

  One fall day, a hunting group from Meyers Chuck got stranded by the weather. Since we had the only homestead around for miles, they took shelter with us. The floathouse, already bursting at the seams with the seven of us, was wall to wall with chattering people. Three women fit into Mom’s tiny kitchen to cook, while the men all stayed outside as Dad, who happened to be home, took them on a tour.

  In the morning when there was a break in the weather, the guys decided to chance going hunting and left their wives and kids behind with us. Mom was talked into putting her exercise tape on the stereo (Joanie Greggains exhorting her high-stepping listeners, “Don’t forget to breathe,” while “Let’s Get Physical” by Olivia Newton-John played in the background). We girls stayed and exercised while the boys made themselves scarce. Megan and I, hardened by our daily athletic play, were baffled when all the ladies limped and winced afterward.

  It was a bizarre event for us to have strangers in our outpost. But we were delighted with the all-you-can-eat crab and all the geese the women fried up.

  Another day, this time in summer, we were surprised when almost all of Meyers Chuck showed up on our beach with their lawn furniture, beer, and food. We hadn’t invited them and never found out what was behind their appearance, reminiscent of the mysterious way limpets suddenly covered the beaches at night.

  Whatever the case, Mom immediately set to work flattening dozens of hamburgers from the ground beef the Meyers Chuck store owner had brought for Dad to barbecue on a firepit outside. There were packages of hot dogs for the kids and coolers full of ice, with cans of beer and sodas stuck in it.

  We were flabbergasted. Our remote shores were suddenly populated with kids of all ages, from toddlers to teens, with women in swimsuits—who had no intention of getting in the water—working on their tans.

  All the young local guys were at their beck and call, vying with each other to get the ladies’ attention. One woman was sophisticated enough to have a cigarette holder, which she, with ostentatious leisureliness, drew out of her shoulder bag and had a fawning teenage boy light. “Thanks so much, daaahling,” she drawled.

  This strange infestation occurred when our neighbor Sheila and her kids were still living at the cannery. They were strict vegetarians when Dave was around, but they took advantage of his absence that day to stuff themselves with as many hamburgers and hot dogs they could tuck into.

  Sheila settled right in, lying on an unfurled, tattered towel next to one of the alien-looking lawn chairs, chatting about her days as a Grateful Dead follower in California. She whipped off her shirt, deciding to go topless, and everyone acted like it was nothing out of the ordinary.

  Sheila claimed that one time she’d been so stoned that she stared into the sun for too long and had holes in her eyes. I never saw them, but it creeped me out thinking about the holes in her eyes so much that I had a hard time looking anywhere near her face, while Megan was horrified by her topless stunt.

  Everyone was gossiping, laughing, and skiffs were coming and going. We had, for one brief, bizarre day, become the Alaskan Riviera.

  • • •

  We didn’t know about two other neighbors until one day, while playing on the beach like usual, a male and female, barely out of their teens, staggered out of the woods.

  We had never experienced any shock quite like that before. Bears and wolves might emerge unexpectedly and unannounced from the woods that surrounded our home. But humans?

  Impossible.

  Where had they come from?

  The dogs went crazy, of course, and we had our hands full stopping them from biting the mysterious strangers.

  They looked terrible. Their clothes were shredded, their hair was wild, and they were ghostly pale, except for all the scratches that marred them with dark red lines. They swayed and could hardly speak.

  We led them to the house for Mom to deal with. Mom was startled, but she got their story out of them pretty quickly.

  They were two kids from New York City who had yearned for adventure, and the lonesome Alaskan wilderness had seemed just the ticket. In Ketchikan they met up with the Polish miner who lived by himself with his dog Rascal (who Moby hated with a passion) to the north of us. He’d taken them out to his place and then left to get more supplies. The problem was that whenever he went to town he tended to go on a bender, and apparently he completely forgot about the young couple from New York he’d left behind.

  When they ran out of food and he still didn’t return, they had no idea what to do. They knew about Meyers Chuck but had no idea how to reach it, since he’d taken the only skiff. They decided to walk the shoreline.

  The shores between his place and ours were forest and rock bluffs, and the forest was unlike anything they’d ever had to deal with before. They were ripped and torn and shredded in no time. They were in such bad shape when they finally reached our place that I have no doubt if we hadn’t been there, if they’d had to walk all the way to Meyers Chuck, they never would have made it. They would have been two of the two thousand people who disappear in Alaska every year.

  They knew it too, how close they’d come to dying in the forest.

  Mom gave them salve and Band-Aids for their wounds as they sat and stared like zombies, barely able to get their story out. With empathy and her love for the more civilized things in life, she knew exactly what else to give them that would help them the most.

  Close-up of the floathouse when the tide is out, with cannery pilings in the foreground.

  They came back to life when she set before them steaming cups (using her good blue-and-white Dutch dishes that we were never allowed near) of her special treat, the tinned, sweetened powdered latte called Café Français.

  It almost made them cry, they were so grateful to experience something civilized and even remotely similar to what they’d grown up with in NYC. They sipped it slowly, making it last as long as possible, holding the cups on their trembling knees and lifting them with scratched and quivering hands.

  Dad gave them a ride to Meyers Chuck where they could catch a floatplane to Ketchikan and then back to New York, leaving the near-fatal Alaskan adventure behind them.

  • • •

  Years later we had someone else try to live an off-grid adventure out near us. A man brought his entire family (grandmother, wife, and two kids) with him and built a home on a granite outcropping about halfway between us and the Polish miner. They had lived Up North in the “true Alaska” as they made it known, and
they refused to heed any advice about living out in Southeast Alaska’s wilderness on a year-around basis.

  “We’ve lived Out before, we know what we need to do,” the man of the family said, rebuffing all suggestions about where to build based on local knowledge of the severity of storms from certain directions. He gave the same response to suggestions about stocking up on firewood and what kind was best.

  Not surprisingly, things didn’t go well for them.

  At one point the grandmother was left alone with the kids in the middle of winter and became so desperate that she called us on the radio, begging for any kind of firewood that would warm the house. Our whole family went by skiff to help out and found her trying to dry rounds of dripping wood on the stove which had a tepidly smoldering fire in it. Dad rounded up some dry firewood for them and sawed and chopped it, and we kids and Mom hauled it.

  Then, still winter, his wife was alone with the kids while he was away, and sent out a frantic Mayday call on the CB radio.

  It was blowing a gale with hurricane-force winds and she was terrified that the house would be swept off into the bay, taking her and the kids with it, as the wind roared around her exposed home and monster seas crashed into the house’s foundation pilings, splattering the windows, exactly what the locals had tried to warn them about building in that spot.

  Mom was fit to be tied, furious that the woman had been left in such a position, apparently not seeing any similarities with her own situation. She was angrier when she and Dad realized they couldn’t turn their backs on the cry of distress. He’d have to go out in the storm and bring them to our place.

  “Have everything ready,” Mom told the woman on the radio as the trees thrashed around the house. We could hear the waves booming against the rocks as Dad headed outside. “He’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “He can get the kids,” the woman replied, “but I’m staying.” She was apparently afraid of what her husband would say if she abandoned the place. “I’ll go down with the house.”

  That was the final straw for Mom. “No, you won’t. What will happen is once my husband risks his life to get your children and gets back here, you’ll decide you don’t want to die after all and you’ll get on the radio demanding that my husband risk his life again. That’s not going to be how it works. You’re going to get in the skiff when he gets there!”

  We all thought, but didn’t say a word, about the night Rand went down.

  Dad turned down all offers to go with him and headed out to the skiff. He told us later that when he finally got to their place, soaked from the seas he’d taken over the bow and sides as he steered into the waves, that they weren’t in the wave-lashed house; they were huddled under a tarp behind the house.

  Mom’s furious words apparently got through to the woman because she clambered into the skiff and Dad managed to bring her and the kids safely to our place where they shivered and stared at us mutely, terrorized by their experience of a Southeast Alaskan winter storm.

  She and the kids never returned, and the man was forced to sell. Other than family visiting us or a school kid from Meyers Chuck once in a great while spending the weekend, these were our experiences with neighbors.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “It was complete culture shock, but in a fascinating way.

  I wanted more. I wanted to go to that world one day.”

  —Megan, about the first time seeing Miami Vice

  WHEN WE lived on the floathouse side of the cannery, our daily life was shaped by mail days, random adventures, music, movies, and eventually TV.

  The mail arrived in Meyers Chuck by floatplane and the post mistress would hold ours there at the tiny store/post office until Dad was home. If the weather cooperated, he’d take Mom over to pick it up and they’d shop for groceries and fuel at the same time.

  It was an all-day trip as Mom took the opportunity to get caught up with her family, and the adults sat around yakking all day.

  One mail day, Mom and Dad didn’t return even as it began to get dark. There was a special strangeness, we found, in being completely alone in the wilderness without adults around as evening fell. It felt like we had a forgotten and lost world to ourselves.

  We played Fleetwood Mac on the outside speakers that Dad had made out of a few nailed-together boards and punched tin to keep the rain off the car stereo speakers that he’d placed inside and then wired to the car stereo inside the house.

  Stevie Nicks’s voice singing “Sara” wafted through the depths of the forest as we played on the beach. Jamie had some Jumping Jacks left over from the Fourth of July—the store in Meyers Chuck sold them every year—and he discovered that if he threw them in the water they’d still whiz around and glow brightly for a few seconds.

  We also discovered that among Lady’s many accomplishments, she could swim underwater. She dove right in, chasing the Jumping Jacks with her nose and head completely submerged. She got burned by the fireworks, but she didn’t care. Every time Jamie lit another Jumping Jack, she wagged her stubby tail furiously and then dove in as it raced around underwater.

  Mom and Dad made it home that night, but I wondered what would happen if the weather kicked up and they weren’t able to make it back. Or what if the weather got bad while they were out in the skiff and they were lost?

  The five of us kids would be completely alone in the wilderness with no nearby neighbors who we could ask for immediate help if there was an emergency. As it turned out, on one of the days when they went to get the mail it wasn’t our parents who disappeared—it was our little brothers.

  We checked everywhere, both sides of the cannery. There were lots of places to look for them… but it didn’t matter. They were nowhere to be found. And some of the dogs were missing as well.

  If it had been winter we might have thought the wolves had gotten them, but instead it was summer and bear season. The salmon were spawning in masses at the cannery’s creek, and the bears—both black and brown—were busy gorging themselves. After looking for Robin and Chris everywhere, Jamie, Megan, and I had to wonder: what if the bears had gotten tired of a straight seafood diet and decided to spice it up with a surf-and-turf meal?

  Robin told me later that two guys in a seine skiff were pulling on a net and holding it to the beach on the creek side of the cannery when he and Chris stepped out of unbroken forest with a few of the dogs.

  The fishermen were astonished. They had approached the cannery in a way that had concealed our floathouse inlet, and believed they were in an uninhabited part of the Alaskan wilderness. And yet here were two ragged, barefoot children apparently living on their own in the woods with only the companionship of feral-looking dogs.

  All that existed in this spot, as far as they knew, were the burned remnants of the old cannery. How could children have been transported to such a remote place?

  The guys asked Robin and Chris how they came to be there and they responded, “We live here.” The deckhands didn’t buy that and got on their handheld radio to call the skipper of their purse seiner, the Memento, to ask what they should do.

  The skipper, Captain Harvey Hanson, who must have been perplexed by the unusual problem in a routine day of fishing, said to bring the boys out to the boat with the net. They grabbed Robin and Chris and the dogs. The boys were far too interested in the new experience to protest. They willingly went out to watch the huge net, heavy with wriggling salmon, be hauled in.

  The crew must have thought the boys had to be near starvation depending on how long they’d been alone in the wilderness. Once aboard the Memento, Robin and Chris were fed junk food in such quantity that it probably would have killed them had they really been starving: Coke, Doritos, Snickers bars, pig skins, etc. The boys, of course, were in heaven. And so were the dogs, who got treats too.

  The captain and the crew probably discussed what they could do about the situation. Call the Coast Guard or the State Troopers and ask about a shipwreck where two young boys had been lost, possibly along with t
heir family? It’s possible Captain Hanson did exactly that, outside of the boys’ hearing, but if he did then he would have come up empty for that location.

  The crew figured the boys had to have been on their own far longer than anyone could have thought possible because of the condition of their feet. Children casually strolling around rugged, rocky Southeast Alaska barefooted? It seemed impossible. They tested how tough the urchins’ feet were by poking, pinching, even rubbing jellyfish on them, and got zero reaction. The bottoms of their little feet were like leather from years of running on rocks and gravel.

  Meanwhile, as the boys were living high off the hog, we three older kids were in dread of our parents’ return, wondering what on earth we’d tell them, what sort of excuse we could give for the boys’ disappearance. It was our job to look after them.

  Once the net was hauled onto the Memento and the fish were dealt with, the deckhands who’d found them were told to take the boys back in the skiff and check around the corner of the rock bluff peninsula to make sure there weren’t any others in the area. When they turned the blind corner, they saw the floathouse and knew the boys were telling the truth and they had a home to live in.

  As they pulled out of the bight and headed back to the boat to inform their skipper, Mom and Dad arrived in the Whaler from Meyers Chuck.

  Once Mom realized what was going on, that her two youngest kids had blithely gone aboard a boat and would happily have stayed there chowing down on junk food until they disappeared from our lives forever, she was appalled. For years to come she’d be haunted by the thought of how they could have disappeared and no one would have had a clue what had happened to them.

  Robin reminisces, “When Mom got out of the skiff she was a little perturbed. ‘What did I tell you about strangers?’ she demanded. Me and Chris looked at each other and just mumbled. These were good strangers that fed us!”