How to Survive

Every time I step out the door I’m thinking about what I need to do to stay alive.

It’s not a dominating thought, it’s a comfortably familiar awareness that has been with me ever since my parents moved my family to a remote part of Alaska when I was six years old. Our first home in this new, raw world, was a floathouse.

In this case, it was a regular wood-frame house that had been winched aboard a raft made up of massive logs, formerly ancient trees. It was of the “shotgun” type with one room seguing into the next in a straight line from front door to back door. My mom, with an anti-linear mindset, would soon change that. It also had a large bay window with a bullet hole in it.

Floating homes were common in this rugged frontier world made up of water and mostly sheer rock and independent folk. There were also floating stores, floating fish buying stations, floating gas stations, even entire floating communities that got towed from one place to the next. 

In fact, when we flew out to our new home on a floatplane, a gorgeous Grumman Goose that landed on its belly rather than on pontoons (making it nothing less than a flying boat), our first stop was at a floating town. I pressed my face to the plane’s Plexiglass window and peered out on a town made of floating sidewalks that surrounded regular houses. There were swing sets and slides in wooden yards, and gardens in wooden troughs. All of it afloat. 

The number one rule, as soon as we moved into our floathouse, was that no child could step outside without putting on his or her lifejacket. This was a piece of clothing that right in its title gave it the super power of being able to save life.

There was no resistance to this rule. We zipped and buckled on our lifejackets like knights donning a suit of armor. It was a dangerous world outside that door, but our lifejackets could protect us. Our lifejacket also acted exactly like a suit of armor when we got into our wooden swordfight battles. Many a skewering was averted by thick foam shells zipped over our chests.

My favorite lifejacket was one that had pockets in the front with flaps that snapped shut. I could put all kinds of survival gear in those pockets. Everything from waxed cardboard strips for fire starter, books of matches and jumping jacks for ad hoc flares in separate baggies, fishing line and fishing hook wrapped around a stick, and a pocket knife.

We were taught about how to make a homemade survival kit in school. We were also taught cold water survival skills, marooned survival skills, CPR, bear drills, tsunami drills and the more common fire drill—every time we turned around, our survival was a topic of conversation and a subject of scholarly study and practice.

The one thing they couldn’t teach us about survival was something we learned ourselves from living in a world where danger greeted us every time we stepped out the door. And that was the skill of not quitting.

This skill saved our lives innumerable times in a variety of dangers, some that we put ourselves in and some that came upon us unexpectedly. I detail a few of them in my memoir Raised in Ruins, about growing up in the ruins of a wilderness cannery, due out in 2020. There were too many to mention them all. (Some can be found at https://www.juneauempire.com/life/alaska-for-real-lessons-learned-at-the-end-of-the-world/) But to this day, those lessons I learned are with me every time I step out the door and they have helped me in everything from writing to relationships.

I know that if being aware of and prepared for the pitfalls doesn’t save me, just not quitting will.

I introduced myself to Tara Neilson earlier this year for two reasons: she writes memoir and she lives in Alaska. Her bio grabbed my heart since I have passions for both. At the time I had no idea what a wonderful, down-to-earth, warm person she is. And her writing will compel you to keep reading and living vicariously along with her. I am excited to share Tara’s blog with you at http://www.alaskaforreal.com to not only check out her amazing stories but see her incredible photos throughout the blog. Her first book, Raised in Ruins, is to be published in 2020. I will update readers when it is available. Thank you for being my guest blog and sharing a part of yourself with my readers, Tara. I ask readers to please share this guest blog.

All photos courtesy Tara Neilson