TRUCK FIRE – Firefighters knock down a fire in a Ford Explorer truck in Arrowhead Trailer Park in the 1200 block of Sawmill Creek Road Saturday evening. One person received fire-related injuries and was taken to the hospital, Sitka Fire Department Chief Craig Warren said, and the truck was considered a total loss. The cause of the fire is under investigation, Warren said. The fire hall received the call about the fire at 5:33 p.m., and one fire engine with eight firefighters and an ambulance were dispatched, he said. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)

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Pure Sole: A Boy Needs to Play Catch with His Father


KLAS STOLPE
Pure Sole
    My father and I did not play catch.
    I often wonder how he shaped my sporting life.
    He was never in any sport that I witnessed. Nor could he ever attend one of my contests.
    There were three tiny tin trophy cups resting on a worn-out wood shelf in the kitchen – my grandfather’s Swedish cycling honors which my father seldom talked about.
    He did not show me how to throw a curve ball, or field a ground ball, or tell me to keep my eye on a pitch.
    His expertise was removing slivers, chopping wood, and carrying me through forests or across waters or over rocky beaches.
    Yet I was shaped to function in my life by his, sometimes unseen, actions of love and, of course, the times that are stuck on my face in smiles much like one would magnetize a note to the refrigerator door.
    When I was born, he was already in his 50s. I admire him for that. He had to know that his life would long be tenured when I would be old enough to appreciate it.
    My father was 12 years old when his father died in a great flu epidemic of 1918. My father did not finish the seventh grade. He brought his mother and sister to Alaska and built a log cabin on an island and raised foxes.
    He floated that log cabin and his gene pool into Petersburg where he would eventually meet my mother and her brood. 
    He was an Alaska Telephone man then, traveling the state putting in lines. My mother, Patricia, was a switchboard operator from Queen Anne Hill in Washington. She sailed to Petersburg with a husband whom she had married because she had to look after her own siblings. They brought five children with them and my father would babysit these infant terribles when Patricia was working and her husband had left her.
    Soon my father and mother had a team of seven.
    They drafted one of their own, my real brother. Then they discovered I was in free agency, and they married to seal the contract. My mother was pushing half a century and my father was past that mark.
    He and she worked, always, to support a team of nine.
    I was always too small to be anything but an afterthought and nuisance to my older gene pool.
    I was the tiny knot that clung to my father’s pant legs, the small lump that swung from his giant hands, the stinky diaper that could sense how the world stopped when he was not in the room.
    Yet I only remember a silent man whose life was shaped with an education learned, not from books but from toil and work and things that walk among the forests and swim among the mountain’s beaches.
    He built the skiffs our family went to sandy beaches for picnics in. He steamed oak and bent it into shapes that would ride the waves. He melted lead to make anchors that held the shapes fast in the currents. His time was spent providing for his family in ways other kid’s parents could just buy or order.
    I remember throwing a baseball against a rock. Catching it and throwing it.
    My father returning from 18 hours cooking salmon in the old retorts at a salmon cannery.
    My mother calling to him to come eat and go to bed.
    He stops to watch me throw and catch the ball.
    I ask him to catch with me.
    “I don’t know how,” he said.
    My little heart was broken. I could see he was sad too, but I was mad that he couldn’t play with me like other dads did.
    The rock was unkind to my throws and I often chased the ball down roads into brush where terrible creatures hid.
    My father set his tin lunch pail down.
    He towered past me. His bulk bent low into the ditch and rose up with a large boulder. He placed it near my throwing rock.
    Then he brought another, and another.
    Soon I was in a virtual field of throwing partners. My baseball would come and go and if I missed, it would not go far, the shrubs of the rain forest would not eat it.
    I did not notice when he left me there.
    I would not notice many of the things he did over our lives.
    I knew that if someone came to our house for a tool or for help, they would receive his aid.
    I knew his handshake was his binding agreement.
    I saw tears in his eyes only twice. Once was at my grandma’s funeral. I was just 10 and had a Little League game later that day. Sitting next to him, I wasn’t sure what I could do. There was food and laughter after and I was angry that people were celebrating. I ran away.
    The second time I saw tears, he was in his last years.
    He was driving me to the docks where I would get on a fishing boat and go out again for over a month and would come back again to tell him what I had seen.
    He didn’t get to go a lot of places in his life. His travels were those of survival.
    “When I get back I’m buying you a new motor,” I said. “Something powerful enough to push that heavy old skiff you built.”
    Tears came fast in that moment. The moments of that drive to the dock sailed with me across the Gulf of Alaska, out to Kodiak and into the salty sea nights.
    I never bought that motor.
    He took ill.
    I took a job on the land to be near.
    When he passed I found old letters. Written from him to my mom and to his own mother. Written when he was away at work in another little place.
    “I’m going to learn to play catch,” he wrote in one. “A boy needs to play catch with his father.”

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20 YEARS AGO

March 2004

Businesses using the Centennial Hall parking lot testified Tuesday against a proposal to charge them rent in addition to the $200 annual permit fee. City Administrator Hugh Bevan made the proposal in response to the Assembly’s direction to Centennial Hall manager Don Kluting to try to close the $340,000 gap between building revenues and operational costs.


50 YEARS AGO

March 1974

Alaska Native Brotherhood Grand President William S. Paul Sr. will be special guest and speaker at the local ANB, Alaska Native Sisterhood Founders Day program Monday at the ANB Hall.

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