Here's a formula for raising good kids.
Every year, pack up the family and head to a remote cabin. Spend the summer working outside. Go without television, telephones or internet. Invite grandma.
Bring totes full of books and art projects. Encourage pancake eating contests. Let them hunt for octopus, race snails, watch bears demolish a whale carcass just down the beach. Teach the kids to pick salmon from the nets, tie knots, mend web and bait Dungeness pots and cod or halibut hooks.
During closures in the salmon fishing season, camp at other bays and beaches. Hike to petroglyphs. Tow the kids behind the skiff on inner tubes. Snorkel in wetsuits. Go salmonberry picking with a couple of goats in tow.
Raise baby mallards, chickens and geese, a pig (until it's carried off by a bear). Bring out Wilma the cat and Yogi the dog, and one year, Happy, a pet walking stick.
Pick up old electronics at the dump in the nearby village for the kids to take apart, turning wires and pieces into art projects and Father's Day gifts. Paint rocks. Paint buoys. Let the kids paint the plywood walls of the bedroom they share.
Allow their imaginations to fill the hours, stepping in only when the littlest brother is being tied to a rock and hose to "scuba dive" or launched down a ramp while strapped to an old stroller.
Laurel Hannah is a good kid. She personifies the place where all these memories were made—she's creative and curious and comfortable in her own skin. Her eighth-grade "This I Believe" essay opened with, "I believe in wearing socks that don't match."
Now a senior at Kodiak High School, Laurel spent her first 16 summers at Camp Cove, building armadas out of old buoys and surfboards pulled from a dumpster, reading books shared between fishsites and exploring each day's new tideline.
"It sparks creativity when instead of toys you've got Mother Nature to play with," said Kay Underwood, a neighboring setnetter.
That's the way of life Pete Hannah and Margaret Bosworth wanted when they bought Camp Cove, a setnet site on the south end of Kodiak Island in 1996. They wanted their kids, Clayton, Laurel and Jack, to grow up with a sense of family and place. And they wanted that place to foster imagination and industriousness.
"There's something about setnet kids that sets them apart from the conventional palette. They know how to roll up their sleeves and get busy. They're free-range kids, but there's work expected of them," said Leigh Thomet, a family friend.
When she was 14, Laurel and her brother Jack crewed for Bob Munsey, who combined his permit with the family's. "I didn't expect a whole lot, they were so young and everything. Man, those guys, when I'd get to the beach, every single pick they'd be ready on the beach, all summer long. There aren't many kids that age who would do that without ever complaining."
"Laurel has a very calm work ethic, much different than the common person," said her orchestra director, Walter Muelling. "She constantly works on being a better musician and person, and has never stopped asking questions."
During the school year, she's the top piano player in the Kodiak High School jazz band. She plays violin in the orchestra and euphonium in the pep band. Four nights a week, she takes ballet and contemporary dance classes.
"In art class Laurel is absolutely a free spirit, as she decides how to express certain ideas in her own unique way, problem solving on her own as many others might struggle," said her art teacher, Bonnie Dillard.
Laurel is equal parts artsy and down-to-earth. She doesn't necessarily think that being a girl in commercial fishing is noteworthy.
"Once we were crab fishing and my job was to dump out the old bait for new, which was old rotting squid, so I'm not sure why we needed new bait actually," Laurel said. "Our crewmember from somewhere like Idaho said, 'I don't know any other girls who would touch that.' I was wearing rubber gloves so I felt like, 'Well, I'm not really touching it.' But then I thought, 'Really?' It's just so normal to be throwing squid out of a container."
About a year ago she decided to be a pescatarian.
"It's kind of conflicting," Laurel said, "I don't want to kill animals, but I've grown up fishing. I really love fishing, but I feel bad for the fish. I guess how I deal with killing fish is the idea that it is how nature works; things have to die for other things to live. It's the circle of life, and I get to be a part of it."
Any commercial fishery is an uncertain business. Markets change and harvests change and setnetters, unlike other fishermen, can't change. They're tied entirely to a place. Giving up setnet fishing often means giving up a way of life.
For the last 20 years, setnetters on the south end of Kodiak have watched salmon runs decline in the two main systems in Alitak.
It led to a hard choice in 2014, when Laurel's family decided not to spend the summer at Camp Cove.
"We were going backwards financially. You couldn't sustain it," said Laurel's mom, Margaret Bosworth.
"We probably stayed there longer than we should have," said Laurel. "And we can make more reliable money tendering."
She and her brother Jack tendered in Bristol Bay with her dad on the Mikado in 2014 and 2015. It wasn't quite the same.
When I asked what skills she's learned from commercial fishing and tendering with her dad, she joked, "Well, I guess I can work well with others because I can deal with grumpy old men."
She says she misses the morning picks at Camp Cove, taking the skiff out at 6 a.m. "It's getting light, everything is clean and the water is calm and you can see the fish swimming around the net, birds are out on the water. It's so beautiful."
"But people are going out less and less. I really hope it picks up because I love going out there. I hope it's a part of my future, but I can't say for sure if that will happen."
For now there are jazz pieces to master and dance steps to memorize. There's enough to think about with high school graduation and leaving for Evergreen State College in the fall without worrying about whether her old way of life will still be a possibility in her future.
She wrote me a note a few days after we met for this story.
"I was thinking about some of the things we talked about today … I've been a part of the fishing industry every summer of my life and it's very sad that it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to make a living in this line of work. I just hope that humans, with all our fancy technology, can find a way to safely and reliably preserve this industry that has become a lifestyle and a crucial part of people's culture and history."
Sara Loewen grew up in Noatak, Old Harbor and Kodiak. Her essay collection, Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands, was published by the University of Alaska Press in 2013. She and her family commercial fish for salmon in Uyak Bay, on the west side of Kodiak Island. After meeting the Hannah family, Sara's kids want some fishsite goats and chickens.
This article appeared in the April 2016 issue of 61°North, a publication of ADN's special content department. Contact 61°North editor Jamie Gonzales at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.