you could spin it that way. And if you could find a steady young couple, who were in sympathy with the idealism of the times but maintained a traditional way of life, to keep yourself safe and afloat, all the better.
There were plenty of those types in rural Alaskan communities, including Meyers Chuck—“hippies” who were drawn as much to the drug culture and liberation from age-old moral standards, as they were by the validation of living a simpler life. And, at that time, Alaska stood out as a state that welcomed eccentrics, non-traditionalists, and made the private use of marijuana legal.
Neither Mom nor Dad, even in their most antiestablishment moments, had been drawn to that culture. They didn’t even smoke cigarettes, though their parents and most of their peers considered it normal to do so. And when old-fashioned crafts became a fad that young and fashionable townspeople followed—sewing or crocheting one’s own dresses had a certain cache at the time—Mom, a sucker for almost any hip fad that came along, was immune to the appeal.
She supported individualism and nonconformity, but her idealism remained restricted to the mind and heart; she spurned all labor-intensive manifestations of the zeitgeist. It didn’t matter to her that this was not a particularly practical point of view for someone who was determined to live in the remotest heart of the wilderness.
“You should have seen how happy and free the kids were,” Mom improvised to Linda.
“The kids will do fine here in the village with other kids around them and a school to attend.” Linda was so certain in her opinion that Mom had a low-level sense of panic at the thought of being forced to give up the lonesome blackened pillars and rusting remains of the old cannery.
“You don’t know what it’s like having five kids in a place this small,” Mom said. “It’s like having a target painted on you. People are always complaining about every little thing they do, and I don’t want them to grow up being squelched all the time. I want them to be free, to do whatever they want to do, be whatever they want to be.”
As if on cue, a woman from the village steamed up the path toward them. Before she reached them, glimpsing Mom’s floppy hat behind Linda, she barked, “Do you know what your kids are doing down at the dock?”
Mom didn’t get a chance to reply.
“They found a whiskey bottle on one of the boats, filled it with water, and are pretending to drink booze!” The woman huffed.
Linda turned and looked at Mom and acknowledged, “I see what you mean.”
There were no more arguments after that. Her floathouse home, Southeast Alaska’s version of the covered wagon of Oregon Trail fame, would be towed to the ruins.
• • •
When loggers arrived in Alaska and first eyed the timber-rich wilderness of the last great temperate rainforest on the planet, they were stymied by the multitude of waterways that prevented logs and people from being transported by land. They adapted by moving everything onto the water on rafts.
Logging machinery, power plants, stores, schools, and entire towns were built on rafts made of enormous logs lashed together. The floating towns and machinery were towed from one place to the next by powerful, sturdy tugboats that inched along the Inside Passage. (Later, when the logging boom ended, all these floating communities and single floathouses were moored in place and rarely ventured out onto the unprotected passages.)
When we moved to Cannery Creek, it wasn’t the first time our single-story, wood-frame house on a raft of giant logs had been towed abroad. It had been towed from Prince of Wales Island to the Ketchikan area and then to Meyers Chuck where we got it. In our keeping it had been towed twice across Clarence Strait, one of Alaska’s most unpredictable and dangerous inside waterways.
The first time had been so that Dad would have his family near his logging job, his home anchored in a small bight along the winding passage that leads to Thorne Bay, the largest logging camp in the world at the time. The second time it had been towed back to the fishing village of Meyers Chuck, where Mom’s parents and brothers lived. Now it would be towed to the old cannery site while Dad would continue to work at Thorne Bay as a scaler and bucker. The plan was for him to commute home on the weekends across Clarence Strait in the tiny skiff.
Dad had no interest in whatever seasoned arguments there might have been about the crossing being “impossible” at certain times of the year, or hearing that his family couldn’t be left without provisions or a man’s protection for weeks at a time.
I think there was some relief in not having his family around, demanding things of him he couldn’t give. Being a husband, being a father—especially being a father—were skills he didn’t possess. His own father, a World War II veteran, had been so harsh toward him that his mother had arranged for her mother to raise him while his siblings stayed at home.
The one time his father had been proud of Dad was when he signed up for the Army. His father wrote him a letter every week, though he wasn’t normally a letter writer. Yet, when Dad came back from Vietnam with a beard, his family disowned him. At a time when the mainstream was reviling the war and its veterans, the next letter his father wrote him was “anonymous” (although still in his handwriting), suggesting that it might be better if there was no Vietnam vet in the family.
What did Dad know about being a good father, or any kind of father at all?
He could have asked the old-timers for their advice about his plans for leaving his family in the bush while he worked across the strait, but he didn’t. He probably wouldn’t have gotten much.
When they first arrived at Meyers Chuck, he and Mom attended a community “town hall” meeting where they realized from the awkward silence that fell at their arrival that they and their five kids had been under discussion. They were invited to participate, but when they spoke up they were seen as overopinionated newcomers.
Besides, even if the locals had taken Dad under their wings, the old-timers’ ever-so-reasonable and knowledgeable arguments wouldn’t have impressed him. He’d long been accustomed to thinking that, as he liked to joke-but-not-joke, “Where there’s a Gary there’s a way.” No matter how impossible something seemed to be, he could find a way to make it work.
Surviving a war with a Purple Heart Medal, which he refused to accept, had solidified his certainty in his ability to carry out what he’d decided on. He didn’t balk at the dangers or the brutal load of hard labor that would be required; holding down a physically demanding job all week and homesteading the wilderness on the weekends suited him just fine.
• • •
Although we kids didn’t know it at the time, we almost didn’t get to live at the old burned cannery because the other families got cold feet and dropped out.
Fortunately, the company that now owned the cannery, US Steel, was willing to let my parents take over the entire lease with payment due on a yearly basis. It would be easy enough to keep up with since Dad’s logging job was a well-paying one for the times.
The woman who had originated the plan, the village school teacher, felt so guilty at leaving my parents high and dry that she arranged for friends of hers, Muriel and Maurice Hoff, who had their own cabin cruiser called the Lindy Lou, to go with us.
The Hoffs were typical back-to-the-landers who’d come from the realm of academia to live a simplified, rustic life on a boat in the Alaskan wilderness. Muriel would stand in as a teacher since Mom knew she wasn’t up to coping with our education needs.
