most thrilling moment in her dawn-to-dusk rambles with Gretchen was when the deer came over the mountain.
“It was a large group of deer—until that moment I hadn’t realized that they would all travel together like that. Bucks, does, and babies. They all came straight to where Gretchen and I stood, quivering. I stretched out my arms to them and they walked quietly on both sides of me. Not as if I wasn’t there, but as if they understood that I belonged to, and with, them.
“I stood there with my arms outstretched for quite a while as the herd passed on either side, my hands on their backs as they went by, one by one, my hands sliding along backs and haunches. Bucks, does, fawns.
“They felt like… ‘alive’ feels. The only alive I wanted to be. I never wanted anything so much as to turn and go with them…”
And now here she was an adult, with her husband, a man she barely knew after Vietnam—they’d married one month before he went, and the man who came back was not the funny, laughing man she’d married—and five children, heading into the heart of the most remote country she’d ever seen, setting out on an adventure to rival any adventure or experience she’d ever had or read about. She was so excited she was shivering.
• • •
How was I to know at nine years old that this journey, toward the Old Man mountain staring up at eternity, was to become one of the favorite things of my entire life? I never imagined on our scouting trip how many times I would make it, with my family or alone.
In the skiff, the loudness of the outboard and the wind whipping at our faces made it hard to hold a conversation, so each of us retreated into our own private worlds. On every skiff ride to the cannery, I’d sink down turtlelike into the canvas-over-foam shell of my lifejacket for its comforting, tight embrace, and chew on its black plastic piping, salty from seawater. From this haven I’d look around at the dreaming faces, at the interior eyes, and I’d wonder what each person in my family was thinking as we rode silently through time, from one world point to the next.
We would always start in a place of daily bustle, of talk, of goals and intentions. Then we’d climb into the skiff, and within minutes we were in our own solitary time-out bubbles surrounded by the steady engine noise and the sky and water, suspended from human interaction until we reached the other world point where goals and talk and intentions continued. We might as well have stepped onto a transporter pad and had our constituent parts disassembled and then reassembled on the other side of the skiff ride.
Jamie and I in the front of our Boston Whaler on the very first trip to the ruins.
Besides my parents, on this particular skiff ride there were “the babies” as we still called them, my two little brothers, sardonic Robin (five) and smiling, generous Christopher (four)—or Mitmer-the-Usurper, as Robin thought of him. Chris had displaced him as the baby of the family and the natural center of attention and affection. (“Mitmer” was Robin’s pronunciation of Christopher and soon the whole family used it.) Robin, clever and stubborn, never let anyone forget the wound of this usurpation and the babies spent all their time butting heads, wrestling, and punching.
Then there was Megan (eight), my sister, best friend, and closest companion in age. People thought we were twins since we rarely did anything apart and we were both fair haired with blue eyes. Megan was artistic and sensitive, so softhearted that one time when she stepped on a slug on the narrow gravel trail as we were on our way to school in Meyers Chuck, she had to turn back. Though we were almost to school, she retraced her steps and put the slimy, squished bug out of its misery, all the while sobbing bitter tears.
Her polar opposite was Jamie (eleven), the oldest, who had been born when Dad was away in Vietnam, who had in infanthood considered himself the man of the family and had never known how to stand down from that patriarchal position after the real man of the family returned. Jamie had coopted all of Mom’s time, attention, and affection from birth and wasn’t shy about letting the Intruder—who Mom called “Gary”—know who ran the show.
When Dad would take his wife and small son to dinner at a friend’s, Jamie would decide when it was time to call it a night. He’d put on his outdoor clothes and plant himself in front of Dad and announce, “I’m weddy, Gowwy.” If Gary should, inconceivably, ignore him, Jamie would make himself more visible and raise his voice: “I said I’m weddy, Gowwy.”
This assumption of authority in his small son didn’t go over well with a man who was struggling with PTSD, the demands of a ready-made family, the cold callousness of some of those close to him who made it clear they had no use for Vietnam vets, and the requirements of holding down a job and providing for his family.
Whether it was caused by Dad’s antipathy or not, Jamie developed an interest in torturing those around him and then studying their reactions. Once, as a preschooler, he rigged a hallway with fishing line and watched as Mom became entangled and struggled like a fly caught in a web. Another time an older kid came over to play with Jamie when he was two. Moments after Mom left them together, she heard the neighbor kid yelling that he wanted to go home. When she went to check to see what was happening, the boy was rattling the kid gate, demanding to be freed. He couldn’t explain what had happened and Jamie just stood in a corner, smiling.
It was a smile we all learned to dread.
And me? Some of my earliest memories, when I was three or four years old, are of getting up every night to pad to my parents’ bedroom door. I would step inside and listen to them breathing. I remember the need to do that, to make sure they were both okay. One of them because he was broken, and the other because she was unknowing.
I couldn’t bear for anyone to feel diminished and humiliated, to experience loss, for anyone to suffer. Mom tells me that when I was two or three she read me a story about a baby horse that overcame becoming an orphan to live a happy life. At the end I was sobbing. She was bemused. “What’s wrong, honey? It’s a happy story—see the little horse grew up to be strong and happy!”
“But the mama horse is still dead,” I sobbed.
Now, at nine years old, I was the family observer, the mediator, and the chronicler of all of our adventures.
• • •
The Union Bay cannery operated at the mouth of Cannery Creek on the eastern shore of Union Bay, which is located on the east side of Lemesurier Point at the southern entrance to Ernest Sound. It existed about halfway between the cities of Wrangell to the north and Ketchikan to the south, and was unable to be reached by land, only by water and air.
Local fishermen sold their catch to the cannery, which then sold in bulk to Japan. In the 1920s there was a saltery for mild-cured king salmon and later a herring reduction plant and floating clam cannery that operated seven miles away by water in Meyers Chuck, on the west side of Lemesurier Point. In pre-WWII years, Meyers Chuck’s over one hundred residents supported a post office, store, machine shop, barber shop, bakery, and bar.
Both the cannery site in Union Bay and the fishing village of Meyers Chuck are on Cleveland Peninsula, which is a part of the mainland. The Coast Mountains, with all their glaciers and snowy ramparts, separate the peninsula from Canada.
Their location on the mainland is unusual. Most communities in Southeast Alaska are on islands. The Cleveland Peninsula terminates at Lemesurier Point, which juts into Clarence Strait, a feared branch of the Inside Passage, and stands across from Prince of Wales Island where one of the few road systems in Alaska’s Panhandle
