Beyond the Floathouse: Gunhild’s Granddaughter

When Myrtle Rae Forberg steps from her father’s boat to the floating dock at Rock Bay, and walks along the board walk to school, she takes her first steps from the water-constrained world in which she has lived since birth to the freedom and independence of a land based world in which she will live the remainder of her life.

A nine-year-old granddaughter of Norwegian immigrants, Myrtle’s story moves through bewildering and lonely experiences. First there is an adjustment from homeschooling, taught by her mother in their floathouse kitchen, to a one-room school with eight grades on land, in a truck logging camp. 

Then it was off to high school leaving a home with parents, sister and familiar faces to a world of strangers, boarding with a different family each year, being the new kid in a school that involved moving from room to room for each course taught by a different teacher and surrounded by four hundred new classmates. At age 13 she was on her own