handy when it came time to move the floathouse. Two of Mom’s brothers, Uncle Rand and Uncle Rory, also volunteered their commercial fishing boats to help us make the move.
The moment it really struck me that we were leaving all of civilization behind for the foreseeable future was when I had to return the books I’d borrowed from the village “library,” a bottom shelf in the tiny, one-room general store.
I squatted down, pushing the old clothbound books into place, and my eye was snagged by two more books that I longed to read: a Roy Rogers Western and a book about a horse and a dog going on a forest adventure. I couldn’t borrow them, Mom explained, because there was no telling when I’d be able to return them—if ever.
That made it starkly real. I emerged from the store into the late afternoon light and stared around in awe at my last glimpse of people and houses, hearing the private generators rumble and the bells on the fishing boats’ trolling poles ring out. The red strobe light on top of the telephone tower that serviced a single community phone mounted to a tree, a light that used to lull me to sleep at night, was beaming out a hi-tech message of goodbye.
• • •
We left at the break of day, before it was full light, to catch the tide.
The Velvet towing our floathouse and wanigan out of Meyers Chuck to the cannery. My dad is in his 13-foot Boston Whaler watching to make sure everything works. The Wood Duck and Lindy Lou (out of sight) push from behind.
Not that any of us kids were awake when it happened. We were snuggled up in our bunks while the adults moved quietly around the damp decks outside, the dripping forest muffling most sounds.
They coiled up the huge, heavy mooring hawsers that had held our home to the trees and then ran a towline out to the Velvet, Uncle Rory’s and Aunt Marion’s commercial fishing boat. (It was a black-hulled boat with a white cabin and orange-red trim. When the Velvet was decked out in longline buoys in circus balloon hues—orange, pink and blue, and yellow—it was a sight to behold on Southeast Alaska’s remote fishing grounds.) Uncle Rand in his own fishing boat, the classy little Wood Duck, and the Hoffs in their cabin cruiser Lindy Lou settled in to push the floathouse from behind.
The photos show that it was a crisp fall day, overcast with smoke from our floathouse chimney wafting behind us as our home was towed out of the long shadows of the tidal lagoon known as the Back Chuck (situated behind the Front Chuck, Meyers Chuck’s harbor).
The floathouse was then about twenty-five years old and used to belong to Mom’s parents, but Mom and Dad bought it from them when we first moved to Alaska three years before. It was a one-story, regular wood-frame house built in a “shotgun” trailer-house style. Half of the house was a large communal bedroom for us kids, plus the bathroom. The front half had my parents’ tiny bedroom, and beyond it was the combined kitchen and living room.
The house was sixteen feet wide and forty feet long, with forest-green ship-lapped siding and white trim around the windows, including the huge bay window that had a bullet hole high up in one corner.
Tied alongside our floathouse was a much smaller, ten-byfourteen-foot one-room floating cabin called “the wanigan” that my grandfather had built four years before, which Mom had since bought from him. It would serve as our schoolhouse.
The floathouses crept along, testing the lines and what kind of strain the Velvet’s engine could take, before they settled on a steady two-knot pace. The adults calculated it would take three to four hours to tow the floathouse to the cannery site.
When we woke up, the floathouse was already underway. The five of us kids and Moby excitedly ran around the house and—when Mom wasn’t looking—made a daring run outside to leap across the churning water between the floathouse and the wanigan. Mom had warned us against this feat, telling us horror stories of how a child could get trapped between the two moving buildings and be mangled for life, sawed in half, and/or drowned. As usual, her horror stories encouraged us to test our mettle.
We stood there, listening to the engines of all three boats rumble, hearing the constant splash of the water against and over the logs the buildings sat on, and watched the wanigan tug on its lines like it wanted to escape the solid maturity of the big floathouse.
Jamie, as the ringleader, was on lookout duty to make sure none of the adults were watching. When the coast was clear he’d whisper: “Now!” and one of us would take the exhilarating and frightening jump across the turbulent water to the wanigan.
When the babies insisted on their turn, Megan and I each took a hand of a little brother and jumped them across, hushing them—and our own giggles—when they shrieked with glee. Moby ran along the floathouse deck with his tongue hanging out, his eyes bright and laughing at the death-defying sport.
We were in our lifejackets, of course. We lived in our lifejackets. The one rule Mom was successful in establishing right from the beginning was that no child was to step out of the house without their lifejacket on. It was comforting being encased in protective gear—like a suit of armor against the Alaskan bush’s many dangers. At times we even slept in our lifejackets.
The water was millpond smooth, though all the adults knew that the weather in this particular part of Clarence Strait was subject to change without notice every moment. It would have taken weeks of planning, listening to weather forecasts, checking the tides, calculating how long it would take to travel to the cannery site; and then the frustration of having to reschedule the trip when an unforecasted storm raged through.
It would have been a tense time for the adults before and during the tow, looking out for any sign that the weather was about to kick up. These were dangerous waters we were traveling in—shipwrecks on the shores we passed gave silent testimony to that.
Back inside the floathouse, Mom gave us a quick breakfast. We ate while watching the storied Inside Passage glide past our windows with Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” playing in the background. Dad was in continual contact with Rory on the Velvet, Rand in the Wood Duck, and Muriel on the Lindy Lou by Citizen Band (CB) radio.
By a freak of bouncing radio signals, truckers from California would break through the squelch with their: “10-4, what’s your twenty?” and “Copy that. You’re coming in wall to wall and treetop tall.” An entire array of twangy CB slang periodically burst through the speaker. The rowdy rap of truckers hauling freight along America’s West Coast highways beamed into our wilderness home all the years we lived at the cannery.
The little inlet we headed for was a hidden harbor—it couldn’t be seen from a direct approach on the cannery. It was sheltered from the northerly gales, though southeasterly storm surges were free to wreak havoc in there, as we soon discovered.
The harbor was shallow and went dry on minus tides. In addition, there were submerged dangers everywhere, entire forests of pilings (studded with steel spikes that had held long since rotted or scavenged beams in place) that had at one time been the foundations for pre-WWII boat grids and haul-outs.
This harbor was where the superintendent had lived and where the cannery had repaired and stored their fish barges in the off season all the years it was in operation.
The cannery encompassed twenty-one acres of wilderness and had two sides: the “superintendent’s inlet” where our floathouse was parked, and “the Other Side,” the creek side where the cannery itself had been. They were separated by a high, stubby peninsula.
In
