in the shadowy, burned ruins without food, bedding, or shelter.
• • •
I don’t know how you’re supposed to feel about being marooned beyond the last fringe of civilization, beyond help or assistance. Fear seems appropriate, or at least unease, a troubled awareness of all the ways that two adults and five children could die alone and disappear in the wilderness.
My parents set us to work on clearing the land where Mom visualized having her home built, next to the creek, since she’d always dreamed of having a home near rushing water. As Dad chopped seedlings and undergrowth, we hauled them down to the beach in a big pile, working up quite a sweat, not to mention hunger.
We tired finally, and as the wind blowing in off the bay chilled the sweat on us, we huddled together for warmth. Shivering amidst all those reminders of the destructive power of fire, that was all any of us wanted at that moment: a good, rousing blaze.
We had no matches or lighters since neither of my parents smoked, but Dad did have his .30 carbine with him. The gun was a concession to the dangers of the wilderness, a concession made despite both of my parents’ issues with guns.
Dad was reminded of the war, and Mom had never gotten over her first introduction to firing a gun when she was a teenager. She hadn’t gripped it tightly enough and the recoil had caused the gun to fly up and strike her in the forehead. The pain and shock had been magnified by the deafening report. She’d developed a terrified aversion to all guns to such an extent that she would shake when she was near one and grow sick when she had to handle one.
We watched as Dad ejected a shell and used his pocketknife to dig the bullet out. In a place protected by the wind, behind the pile of brush we’d collected, he dumped the powder onto a rock with dry sticks and moss ready to catch fire. He put the cartridge back in the chamber and fired the primer at the powder, hoping to spark it into flame. However, it blew the powder off the rock.
Eventually—almost, it seemed to us kids, inevitably, as if the elements had no choice but to yield to his angry determination—he got flames to devour his kindling. Now we had a fire to warm ourselves, though nothing to cook on it.
We slept that night in a shelter Dad put together from planks and plastic sheets scavenged from the Forest Service’s leftovers. It was cold, with the wind roaring and the trees cracking and thrashing their branches against each other. The wind switched to the south and it rained in the night. Megan and I were envious of Jamie, who had Moby lying on his feet and keeping him warm. The boys were put in the middle and slept warm and toasty. Mom cuddled the boys, wide awake, too amazed at where she was and the adventure she was living to sleep.
Dad also got little sleep, getting up to check on the skiff as it rode the waves too near the rock cliffs for comfort, the big swells coming in and dashing the small craft forward, only for it to be yanked up short by its line tied to the outhaul. He tended the fire, hunkering down near it for warmth, waiting for first light, for the ruins to come back into focus. Despite the stress of worrying about the skiff, at least he wasn’t being shot at, and the scream of incoming mortars was far away.
We returned to the fishing village the next day, but the ruins called to us.
CHAPTER TWO
“WE’RE GETTIN’ OUTTA HERE!”
—Skip Robinson in the 1975 movie The Wilderness Family
WHEN MOM explained to Linda, Uncle Rand’s girlfriend, that she and Dad still planned to homestead the old cannery in the wilderness despite their friends dropping out, Linda tried to dissuade her.
“Romi, you have to have more faith in people,” Linda said. Maybe she was thinking that it was another instance of the rapidly-becoming-a-cliché story of a Vietnam vet alienated from humanity, dragging his family off into the wilds of Alaska.
But it wasn’t like that, not entirely, Mom thought.
They trekked the bare dirt trail that circled the village under mist-laden skies. The community trail’s narrowness only allowed people to walk single file under the towering canopy of evergreens, tendrils of overcast trailing into the treetops. The air was intoxicatingly fresh.
“You can’t just go off into the wilderness like this. People aren’t the enemy,” Linda assured her.
Weathered wood-frame houses hugged the hillsides above the winding path or perched beside it on barnacle-studded pilings over the beach. Every now and then boards corduroyed a boggy spot and Linda’s and Mom’s boots clomped onto them, the mud beneath slurping loudly. Sea gulls screeched from the small harbor that glinted hard and mirrorlike through the trees and crows answered them from deep in the moss-damped forest.
Mom kept to herself her “unworldly” reactions to the mystery and romance of the ruins. She’d long since decided that other adults, even the ones she connected with the most, never understood what she experienced. Places had personalities, they lived and breathed and either welcomed or scorned you. The ruins wanted her family.
Despite the fact that Linda had grown up in San Francisco while Mom had grown up on traplines, farms, and ranches in backroad regions, it was the city-girl Linda who was able to “do” the rural Alaskan lifestyle in a way Mom never could. Linda tackled trapping and flensing a skinned otter, steering Rand’s fishing boat, and everything else the men around her did with panache, while at the same time finding the time to crochet, sew, and design quirky, feminine crafts.
Mom wouldn’t know—and didn’t care to know—how to do what the men did, and though she wore a floppy, boiled-wool, faded-thimbleberry hat that looked like she’d knitted it herself, she’d bought it in a thrift store, allured by its wacky-cocky personality. The sewing arts were a deep, and deeply uninteresting, mystery to her and always had been.
She was not one of the millions of young people who, in the 1960s and ’70s, felt driven to spurn the materialistic world in the Back to the Land Movement. Despite her love of novelty and fashion and whatever was current on the modern scene, she, like Dad, were traditionalists and had no interest in the drug culture, free sex, or any of the other ideas of other people their age who dropped out and “went back to the land.”
According to Eleanor Agnew in her book Back from the Land, these back-to-the-landers thought that by going back to a simpler life and living close to and off the land, they could be better stewards of the world than the exploitative capitalist society that had given them the kind of privilege that allowed them to toss it all away on a fervent wave of idealism.
There were many of these free-floating idealistic types who latched onto Mom and Dad for their stability. My parents were young, but they were a married couple at a time when many young people derided the concept of marriage as being old fashioned and too restrictive.
My dad and mom, happy that they’re moving to the ruins, leaving civilization behind.
Mom was a stay-at-home wife while Dad—despite his rebellious long hair and bushy beard (he was once mistaken by a Hell’s Angel member as one of their own)—always held down a steady job. They wound up, time and again, taking care of and providing bed and board for any number of youthful wanderers existing in a liberated, drug-induced daze with no thought of jobs, responsibility, or providing for themselves.
These drifters were the children of “The Greatest Generation” that had saved the
