Anchorage Daily News

HAINES -- Once, years ago, the late Austin Hammond, leader of the Chilkoot Tlingits, said a prayer and a few more words to runners at the beginning of a relay race on the banks of the Chilkoot River. The river rolls over boulders and echoes off cliffs. The Chilkoot Indians are said to be good public speakers because of it. You have to shout to be heard over the noise. Austin spoke both loudly and wisely.

He told us that the Tlingit people often ran long distances between villages, and when they got tired, wet or cold, the ancestors helped them. He said spirit hands pushed up on the bottom of the living's feet from beneath the ground.

Spirits I couldn't see helped me last year when I was afraid I might never lift my feet again after I was hit by a truck. Then, it felt as if something or someone, maybe those ancestors Austin was talking about, was softening my fall, cradling my broken bones.

I was thinking about that in Totem Park in Sitka this week, where the Haines cross-country running team, which I coach, had a meet. The spirits in the park are so close you can almost feel the palms of their hands on the soles of your feet as you walk down the avenue of tall trees and somber totem poles.

At least I usually can, but when the team walked the three-mile course the day before the race, it was raining so hard, and my shoes and socks were so wet, that even my good foot was numb.

Totem Park is officially called Sitka National Historical Park. It is a federal park dedicated in 1910, but the trails and layout have been around since the 1890s, and the area has had local significance since 1804, when there was bloody battle for Sitka between Tlingits and Russians.

Our team has Tlingit runners, part-Tlingit runners and the grandchildren of pioneer Alaskans, who, as the old-time non-Natives around here say, are "natives with a small 'n.' " There are also kids whose parents moved here just before or after they were born and one who arrived in August. In lots of ways, we are both Tlingit and Russian.

I wanted to give them an inspirational speech, not quite like Austin Hammond but at least after his style, about how the Tlingits who survived the battle ran back into the dense woods and steep mountains on Baranof Island all the way to Peril Strait, something that is very difficult to do today, even with GPS and high-tech gear.

I wanted to tell them that a good reason to stay strong and fit is in case you ever have to make a run for your life. Like the Sitka Tlingits, or the Von Trapps, who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria on foot through the Alps, or the people in or near the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

We stopped for a minute next to a perfect lawn surrounded by old woods. It was oddly lovely. It is the site of the Tlingit fort. A friend told me that the grass was the killing field during the Battle of Sitka. It was so saturated with blood that no trees ever grew back. I cannot find that story in any of the park literature, so it may not be true. But I hope it is, because I want to believe nature is not indifferent to our suffering, that something in it remembers.

But the kids took off down the trail before I could tell them all that. It was raining so hard, they needed to keep moving or they'd get hypothermia, or at least a bad cold.

I caught up with them again as they trotted out of the park past the totems and trees, the hundred-year-old cottages lining the street, the arts-and-crafts-style buildings of Sheldon Jackson College, the old yellow-planked Russian Bishop's House, past the crowded harbor, through a busy intersection and into a steamy Subway sandwich shop -- the only place to take 17 drenched teens for lunch. We covered 200 years in three blocks.

That night, listening to them sleeping near me on the floor of a Sitka High classroom, I thought about what I'd tell them the next morning before the race. I'd tell them to run like a Tlingit warrior, like a Russian sailor and like a Sitka black-tailed deer. I'd tell them to run with the determination of a salmon swimming in the Indian River. But mostly, I'd remind them to be grateful -- to be very, very grateful -- for spirits past and present, for strong bodies, mud on their shoes and rain on their sweet wet heads.

It won't be nearly as strong as Austin's oratory, but I think he'd approve. He may even give their feet a hand up.

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.