cannery had been built in this isolated place in 1916 by Union Bay Fisheries Co., going through two other owners before it was sold to the Nakat Packing Co., which was owned by the son of the Norwegian founder of the city of Petersburg and a partner. They owned it until it burned in 1947.
Burned canneries were not an uncommon sight in Southeast Alaska. Between 1878 and 1949, 134 canneries were built. Sixty-five burned and were never rebuilt. Ours was one of them.
The few photos Mom has of our first day at Cannery Creek are gilded with sunshine. We’re in our lifejackets, discovering the miracle of that rarest of all rare embellishments in rocky Southeast Alaska—a true sand beach.
Above it are the usual seaweed and barnacle-covered rocks. In the photos Dad is behind us kids as we explore; he’s pushing the skiff off and anchoring it in the current of the creek so that it won’t go dry as the tide recedes.
Jamie’s dog Moby is out of the frame: he’s already taken off, nails clicking and scratching over the rocks, to do his scouting ahead of us. Jamie is watching over the two little ones while my sister and I stand together out in front. The bay stretches out behind us kids and Dad to a shimmering, hazy horizon, as if we’ve stepped through a curtain into another dimension, into a different experience of time.
The ruins of the cannery were on the other side of the creek from us. Dad had decided against landing the skiff there since fallen machinery littered the entire beach and could extend for some distance underwater. He didn’t want to foul the outboard’s propeller, leaving us stranded.
Once Dad secured the skiff, he led our family up the sandy beach and into the rocks.
The limitless forest of cedar, spruce, and hemlock lined the creek. Evergreen scents sharpened the air over the sun-warmed beach grass. The amber-colored creek, pierced with sunshine, tumbled over the stones and boulders, rushing past the rocky bank we stood on. Up a ways, on this side of the creek, a small cabin dappled by the shadows of alders was the sole building left standing. Its faded red paint was the color of Southeast Alaska’s historical canneries.
Opposite us, on the other side of the creek, we could see the ruins of the cannery proper, with its broken and blackened pilings and giant, rusting fuel drum on a point of rocks. Great chunks of weathered concrete stood in the creek between us and the ruins. They stood against the flow, refusing to crumble to the doublebarreled forces of time and water. They had probably once supported and anchored a bridge.
Megan and I in the front, Jamie and the boys behind us with Dad anchoring the skiff in the creek’s current as we first set foot on the old cannery site.
When we got to the edge of the rushing creek, Mom and Dad carried the younger boys from stone to stone in the shadow of these concrete monoliths of a long-gone world, telling us older kids to be careful as we followed. Moby, a Sheltie with a touch of Cocker Spaniel, ran ahead, pausing and looking back with a panting grin from every dry perch.
I wonder now at our lack of fear as we tackled that abandoned place, where the bears, both black and brown, had reigned unopposed for decades; where there was no hope of help, no one to hear us or come to our aid if we were harmed.
Instead, we pushed forward, all of us, eager for this exploration. And the ruins? They’d been there a long time… waiting.
This had once been a community, as many as a hundred men and women living here cut off from the world, telling their stories, thinking their thoughts, dreaming about their futures. They played cards, drank, danced, sang, and worked and worked and worked as the cannery rumbled, with fishing boats and freight boats coming and going. And in the background the unending thud of the pile driver pounding in pilings for piers and fish trap.
This was a place that had known people, that had made room for them. But after the fire, after the scars and disfigurements, the people had left. For many silent years this place was visited infrequently by fishermen and by locals who came to scavenge—who sawed off what was still good of the burned pilings that had once upheld the wharf and cannery and towed them away to use as foundations under their village homes.
The Forest Service had also been there shortly before us. They’d been surveying the area for a possible logging project. They’d built a sauna beside the foundation beams of a building that no longer existed, and laid down boards to perch their pre-fab temporary shelters on. But in the end, they left too, taking the pre-fab buildings with them but leaving the sauna and the planks behind.
US Steel, the company that had bought the property after the cannery burned, had checked for profitable ore and, finding the extraction and transportation expenses cost prohibitive, abandoned the venture. They left behind a rock pile and stacks of core sample holders in a core shack, and up on the mountain concrete pads, cable, and other debris.
The ruins had watched and waited for life to return, for people to return for real. I felt that as we wandered through the scorched and blackened remains. I felt that we were being welcomed and encouraged to stay, that the ruins wanted us there.
We accepted the invitation and made ourselves at home. We kids could not be dissuaded from stripping down and swimming in the creek, though it was so icy it burned, fed by mountain snows. Our shrieks and laughter floated out over the twisted, rusting metal on the beach, over the solid concrete blocks barren of their former buildings, over the cannery’s retort door, its giant rusty circle half-buried in beach gravel.
When I left the water behind, shivering, teeth chattering, it was to find Mom standing in the ruins beside the creek. All around her were stark foundation pilings and rusty steel frame beds, twisted into agonized shapes from the intense heat.
The forest had taken over everything, underbrush and strangling second-growth growing rampant over what had been the bunkhouse, where only rotten boards and foundation pilings remained. Yet she stood there visualizing aloud in word-pictures what our future house, almost a mansion, would look like.
“Which bedroom would you like, honey?” she asked me, as if it were already built.
I stood there looking at the overgrown apocalypse and wondered at her ability to see the same thing and not notice the practical impossibilities of what she was saying. It felt like sheer, breathtaking madness to make real her grand designs out there on the edge of nowhere with her children and husband for skills and labor.
Dad, listening silently from behind his glinting glasses and the beard he’d grown in defiance of the clean-cut conformity that had sent him off to war, noticed the obstacles. But he considered them a challenge and saw the practicalities, not the impossibilities.
• • •
The cannery’s wide-open view of Union Bay meant that it was pummeled by savage northwesterly storms—something we discovered within hours of our arrival.
At first it was cat’s paws ruffling the bay. Then little wavelets lapped at the ruins as the tide rose. The wavelets transformed into a rushing, curling crash of heavy surf as the wind thrashed the evergreens and careened through miles of forest with a rising, freight train roar.
Dad fetched the skiff from where he’d anchored it and tied it to the remains of a Forest Service outhaul: a rope and pulley system that allows skiffs to be kept out in deep water so they don’t “go dry” (beach on the ground as the tide recedes), and can be pulled in as needed.
There was no way our little thirteen-foot open skiff could battle against the expanse
