old cannery site.
A forest of fire-scorched pilings, one with a stunted tree growing on it, stood between the forest and the bay. The blackened timbers of a building’s foundations remained below the evergreens’ skirts and giant concrete blocks stood out whitely above the rust-colored beach. Amidst the pilings were strange, rusty skeletons of former machinery. The creek rumbled past all of it.
The ruins.
“It looks like it was bombed,” Chris said. “Like an atom bomb was dropped on it!”
“It does.” I tried to picture what it would have looked like when it was whole and people lived and worked at this remote location. The buildings, like all the canneries in Alaska, would have been cannery red (the color of chili peppers) with white trim, glowing in the water-reflected light. The sound of machinery would have competed with the constant rumble of the creek and men and boats would have been working above and around the pilings of the wharf as clouds of shrieking gulls filled the air.
“If we could time travel,” I said, “we could step into their world when the cannery first operated and watch the fish being packed into cases to be sent out into a world that didn’t know atom bombs could exist.”
I didn’t try to row us closer and Chris didn’t suggest getting out on shore. We could see big, dark moving things in the creek that we knew were bears. I didn’t want to draw their attention because, although I didn’t mention it to Chris, I knew they were powerful swimmers and could probably overtake us if they’d wanted to.
We sat in the small skiff with the water lapping against the aluminum sides, rocking in the swell, and gazed at the ruins of a former world, gone long before we were born.
Then I turned the skiff around and we headed for home, promising each other we wouldn’t tell anyone about this adventure.
This one was just ours.
• • •
MEYERS CHUCK, ALASKA
35 MILES NORTH OF KETCHIKAN
SPRING 1980
We were supposed to be a group of intrepid families braving the apocalypse. Our unified mission: to homestead the ruins of a bygone civilization and resurrect and transform them into an off-the-grid, self-reliant wilderness community.
The adults spent long kerosene-lamp-lit hours poring over the maps, studying the remains of the old cannery that had burned nearly half a century ago. None of them had seen it in person, but they marked out where each home would go, the supplies they’d need, the school they’d build. They figured out how they would barge fuel in, what kind of generators they’d need for electricity, if they could arrange a mail drop way out there in the wilderness far away from all human industry.
When I overheard the talk, I felt like I was overhearing plans for moving aboard a generational starship that was going to explore and colonize deep space.
My family of seven in our tiny thirteen-foot Boston Whaler skiff, overpowered by a fifty-horsepower Mercury outboard motor, went alone on the reconnaissance expedition. Together, we would be the first ones to scout the old cannery.
We whipped past the green forest that seemed to stretch from here to the moon as it climbed a ridge on one side. Across the glassy strait was a vast island covered in snow-capped mountain ranges, headland after headland disappearing into a pearly blue distance.
That was Prince of Wales Island where Dad worked as a logger at the largest logging operation in the world. There were enormous bald patches in the dense green hillsides, giving the island a mangy appearance at odds with the pristine, breathtaking beauty of sea, sky, and the unmolested mainland we skimmed along beside.
Our uncovered skiff, about the length of a Volkswagen Beetle, was a speck.
The world was big; I knew that from school lessons. But the wilderness was bigger. There was no end to it. We were the only humans in it as we sped across the gigantic white-cloud reflections. Ahead of us, a mountain lay on its back, a giant Easter Island head with its stern nose pointed toward the sky, toward space, toward the orbiting planets around the sun, and beyond.
And my family was heading toward it and the slumbering ruins that it had shadowed for decades.
I turned my face into the wind, my hair whipping into a knotted mess around my head as I leaned forward. The bearded man with his hand on the tiller handle of the outboard had decided he was going to go to the ruins, and I knew nothing, not even all this wilderness, was going to stop him.
This was, after all, a man who had stopped the Vietnam War. For an entire day.
He told me years later that when he’d just turned twenty-one, married one month, he had arrived in Vietnam during Phase 1 of the Tet Offensive. In the span of twenty-four hours he saw a bustling metropolis, the Asian people living in it as they had for generations, become a bomb-blasted landscape of skeletal buildings and streets filled with smoking rubble.
After seeing the effects of war close-up, one of the first things he did was to build himself and his fellow grunts a sturdy shelter—a bombproof igloo, so to speak—out of cast-off rocket ammo boxes that he directed his companions to fill with sand for the walls. For the roof he used PSP (perforated steel plating) with more sand-filled rocket ammo boxes on top.
No one had thought of building such a thing, even with screaming missiles and mortars constantly overhead. Everyone else sweltered in flimsy tents or buildings with uninsulated steel roofs that acted like ovens. His igloo was the only comfortable building in the muggy jungle heat. He and his friends had it for three months before the officers evicted them and took it over for themselves.
Dad was a helicopter mechanic (the sole mechanic available for the Huey; a group of mechanics serviced the other helicopters) and it was his job to say which helicopters were fit for duty on any given day. Every day some helicopters didn’t come back—and friends and companions disappeared or were brought back bleeding, maimed, or dead. One day one of his best friends was killed.
The next morning he put an X on every single Huey, grounding them all. Without the support of the Hueys none of the other helicopters could fly, and without air support the ground war couldn’t progress. That day he wasn’t going to allow anyone else to die in an ugly war no one really believed in or knew what they were fighting and dying for.
His commanding officer said to him, “You know you can’t do that, Gary. You have to take those Xs off.”
Dad just looked at him. The Xs stayed. There was no war that day. Across from him in the back of the skiff, hugging her youngest child, Mom couldn’t believe she was there, that she was living her childhood dream of Alaska as few people had ever gotten to experience it.
Despite her obsession with fashion, music, the arts, and her dream to become a Parisian club singer, she had always felt a fey-like affinity for wild creation and the animals in it. As a teenager she’d gone for day-long walks in the rural Montana countryside with her Belgian Shepherd named Gretchen, spinning dreams out of the Big Sky sunshine.
In her own words:
“We lived on a ranch high in the hills. I would get up early, have breakfast, feed Gretchen and the horses, then I would sit my record player on an old wooden chair on the porch, put my Bob Dylan album
