Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Fair winds, my friend

Last Saturday, a man who loomed large in my life died.  Since that time I have been struggling for the right words and they haven't come easily.  Today a friend asked me to read an editorial he wrote for the Anchorage Daily News and that opened the gate, I guess.  I wrote a message for the memorial page for Stan Stephens and am repeating it here.  There isn't enough room to go through 25 years of memories.  When I write on here about my time on the boats, most of that time was spent on Stan Stephens boats.  Here is what I wrote to his family:


It has taken me a while to absorb this news and I have been struggling for the right words to say.  Today a friend asked me to read an editorial about Stan planned for publication in the Anchorage Daily News and it gave me the push I needed, I guess.


First of all, to you Mary Helen, Carrie, Jenna and Colleen, one of the things I admired most about your husband and father was his devotion to his family and the love that held you all together.  I hope it is comforting to you now.

Something else I admired him for was the influence he had on generations of young people in Valdez. All of the kids who washed boats, shuffled supplies, served Russian tea to tourists and performed the myriad of chores it takes to run the business came away influenced positively by a role model of a type that's difficult to find anymore.  Two generations of my family worked on those boats. We all owe him a debt for that and we should carry that influence forward.

Stan stood large in many people's lives, including my own for the better part of 25 years and he was a strong influence.  We didn't always agree but we always respected each other and I held the highest esteem for him.  We fought many battles together, saving Prince William Sound's killer whales from capture, dealing with an oil spill in our most beautiful place and later doing what we could to protect it from another such tragedy. Stan saw that the biggest danger was complacency and continued the fight long after it was popular.

Since hearing the news,  I have been living with a great sense of loss and a mind full of  memories of this and that from our relationship over the years, some of it uncomfortable, but mostly happy. I spent some the happiest years of my life on Stan Stephens' boats and in friendship with the man.

And as you will read in the Daily News shortly, he set a standard and a stage for the rest of us to continue on with the legacy he leaves us to also be keepers, of Prince William Sound, on a larger scale the world's oceans and, too, the love that holds families together.


1 comment:

  1. This might be comment # 2. Sorry. I wanted to thank you for your articulate and kind comments. They are very much appreciated! Carrie (Stephens) Nash

    ReplyDelete

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The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

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"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

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Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

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It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

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