]<\/strong><\/p>\nI was terrified.<\/p>\n
So many people.<\/p>\n
So many lights.<\/p>\n
Too many days away from our own Mitkof Island home.<\/p>\n
Then my father’s large hand swallowed my tiny feeble one.<\/p>\n
Its warmth flowed down my arm to my torso and into my tiny black rubber boots.<\/p>\n
Looking up I could only see his hand.<\/p>\n
His huge muscled fingers pulsating life. I knotted my fist and he ever so lightly squeezed me back.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands had done a lot before that gesture.<\/p>\n
They had developed from their own Swedish baby’s grasp to Alaskan grippers.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands stole a train in Canada.<\/p>\n
Well, it was a derelict engine on wilting tracks that the government had left.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands retooled the engine, cut the wood to feed the furnace and ran the iron horse back and forth a half-mile or so until authorities stopped the fun.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands became a man’s far too early, when his father died in the great flu epidemic in Canada.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands led his mother and his sister and brother-in-law onto a steamship headed north.<\/p>\n
He was not yet a teen and his schoolbook education would end.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands learned to build a log cabin on a fox-farming island.<\/p>\n
They built pens and caught foxes.<\/p>\n
They floated the cabin into Petersburg as a home and it still stands today.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands built a house.<\/p>\n
They cut trees and cleared stumps.<\/p>\n
They moved boulders and hauled lumber from miles away.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands installed telephone lines for the Alaska Telephone Company.<\/p>\n
They shot a brown bear on Kodiak Island.<\/p>\n
They brought back two “male” rabbits that turned out to be of opposite sex and bred a never-ending supply of little townsfolk’s’ pets.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands raised the five children of his wife as his own and added two more.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands provided.<\/p>\n
They harvested a goat from Horn Cliff, a deer from Petersburg Mountain, a moose<\/p>\n
from Thomas Bay.<\/p>\n
They built the family skiffs, long flat-bottomed river punts that would pound along the water’s surface until we little ones would crawl into the bow and fall asleep.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands steamed the oak planks that bent about the skiff frames.<\/p>\n
They ladled the molten lead he harvested from discarded telephone cable into homemade casts and produced weights and trolling balls for fishermen.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands caught fish.<\/p>\n
They hoisted species of bottom dwellers across the rails and carved them out on the deck with seven sets of childish eyes in awe.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands poured concrete.<\/p>\n
They fixed broken machinery.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands did not know how to play catch with a young boy but they placed large rocks where I could bounce a baseball back and forth.<\/p>\n
They taught brothers how to hunt.<\/p>\n
They crafted wooden sleds and skis.<\/p>\n
They swung an axe in forests out the road and hauled out cords of firewood.<\/p>\n
They pulled me from the water when my five-year-old body fell from the docks.<\/p>\n
They set me on shoulders higher than a mountain.<\/p>\n
They were not afraid to use a razor strop if misbehavior continued.<\/p>\n
They wiped a tear when my grandma died.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands would hold my mother’s.<\/p>\n
They shook my own when I finished seventh grade, a year more of school then he had ever hauled a book to.<\/p>\n
They would rest on my shoulder when my heart was broken by a first love.<\/p>\n
They were awkwardly in his pocket on my high school graduation, thrust deeply inside the workers overalls that would be needed at a job any moment.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands did all the things for grandchildren and townspeople that they had done for me growing up, that I took for granted when I followed my own hands out into the world.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands became ill.<\/p>\n
They had done more heavenly good than was allowed on this place and were needed somewhere else.<\/p>\n
The last time I was aware of my father’s hands was April 22, 1993.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands had cradled his head during a brain aneurysm days earlier.<\/p>\n
They gently caressed his years of toil, so tenderly that we thought he had fallen asleep sitting upright.<\/p>\n
They would bear the tubing that fed my father for a few days.<\/p>\n
They would not flinch when doctors and family decided they should be allowed to rest.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands lay spread like large road maps many had opened and folded.<\/p>\n
The man I had become was instead that needy, loving child again.<\/p>\n
I squirmed my tiny knotted fist inside his fingers and clasped them about my terrified youth.<\/p>\n
My father’s hands pulsed a final comforting reply.<\/p>\n
• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@juneauempire.com. This column was originally published<\/a> June 15, 2019, in the Daily Sitka Sentinel.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Klas Stolpe <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":643,"featured_media":119754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[568],"class_list":["post-119753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports","tag-column"],"yoast_head":"\n
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