Raised in Ruins. Tara Neilson
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The view expanded to show the endless forest climbing ridges and mountains as far as the eye could see toward Canada. On the other side of the peninsula where the floathouse was, the remains of the cannery sprawled black and rusty in the tumbling, golden creek and on the rocky beach. Rising higher the camera took in the breadth of the bay that merged with Clarence Strait, an integral part of Alaska’s Inside Passage.
In all that space, there were no other humans. Just us.
But there were a lot of bears, some of them fishing in the salmon creek amidst the twisted cannery debris, on the other side of the peninsula from the floathouse. There were more bears than humans in this land.
Then I pictured the camera cutting back to the hot and dark attic.
“I think that was our fastest yet,” Jamie whispered.
I nodded, pushing at the hair stuck to my overheated cheeks and forehead. “I don’t think we can get any faster.”
“I wonder if Mommy was surprised?” Megan said.
“I wonder if she’ll give us a treat?” Robin speculated.
Chris responded, “I’m hungry,” and our bellies grumbled. We were always hungry.
The bears were hungry too, of course, but I never felt any sympathy for them. Not when my brothers and sister and I were potentially on their menu.
• • •
There were other things besides bears and spontaneous combustion to fear in our wilderness home.
We quickly found that the first storm we’d encountered at the cannery on our reconnaissance visit was not an uncommon event. Even inside our more protected harbor the wind could find us. And in the winter when the tides were high, blown up higher by a terrifying, roaring wind, a monster storm surge wreaked havoc on everything that floated.
The floathouse in Union Bay. Opposite it is the wanigan with pilings on either side of the bay. The white spots are our skiffs.
Firewood logs broke loose, skiffs broke loose, the walkway to the wanigan broke loose, and one night during a hurricane-force storm, our floathouse broke loose.
It was a night when Dad was home. He was the one who knew instantly when the swifter cables holding our floathouse to shore snapped in the surge. He yelled for us all to get outside. Mom only stopped long enough to make sure we put on our lifejackets and then we scrambled out.
With only flashlights, we faced the black gale. Mom and the five of us kids, from oldest to youngest, were ordered to the back of the float where we had to grab hold of one of the broken cables to stop the floathouse from being sucked out into the larger bay. We planted our feet as best we could and our hands burned on the rusty, twisted steel strands that formed the cable. Our arms were almost yanked out of their sockets as the many tons of floathouse surged.
Dad jumped into our thirteen-foot Boston Whaler, puny looking against the sixty-foot length of the heavy float. He had all the force of the fifty-horsepower Mercury outboard at his command as he turned the throttle up and pushed against the house, trying to force it back far enough into position so that we could get a wrap of the cable around the brow log to hold it in place.
Wind whipped at our bodies, buffeting the little ones so hard it was a wonder they didn’t get blown away. Maybe only their grip on the cable kept them in place. A mix of rain and spray splattered us. The tree branches of the surrounding forest rose and fell in the gusts almost as violently as the floathouse rose and fell in the heavy, sucking surge.
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