[SML] Pat Kight

[Stuart Wheaton]

Thank you Dave,

Pat is definitely one of the finest people I never met.

Stuart

On 3/26/2026 1:54 PM, Dave Vick via Stagecraft wrote:
> As promised earlier:
>
> I was living in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, barely a year out of
> college and two years into my first newspaper job, covering everything
> from school board meetings to snowmobile races for the small daily
> paper there.
>
> The fall weather had been... strange, for that part of the world,
> where it usually starts snowing on Halloween and doesn't thaw out
> until May. Snow had fallen, but only in spits; the town had gone all
> gray and cold, waiting for the white blessing of true winter.
> I lived with six other women in a far-too-small house in a fairly
> typical student ghetto... only in our case, we were at the end of a
> short street that dead-ended at a decaying bridge over the power canal
> which cuts downtown Sault Ste. Marie off from the rest of the town and
> the small college up the hill.
>
> The wind had begun rising early in the day. Not much rain, but what
> there was threatened to turn to sleet. Two of my room-mates (friends
> liked to call us the She-Demons, but that's another story) and I sat
> huddled around the gas stove in our living room, old army blankets
> tacked up over the doorways to conserve the heat, reading and
> listening to Joni Mitchell. I remember that the wind was loud, louder
> than I'd ever heard it, and managed to sneak through the smallest
> cracks around the windows and doors, making the little house whistle
> around us.
>
> Robin had just said something about it being quite a storm when
> suddenly the lights went out. It wasn't quite dark yet, so Jamie went
> to the front door to see if the lone street-light on the block was on.
> The wind almost ripped the door out of her hand, and she yelled for us
> to come look.
>
> At the end of the block, just at the barricaded bridge, the power line
> had been ripped loose, and snapped in the wind like some giant whip,
> sparking and crackling - and when it came in contact with the metal
> structure of the old bridge, it made a sound like the devil snapping
> his fingers. About that time Robin noticed that each time the power
> line hit the bridge, *sparks* flew from the electrical outlet near the
> door.
>
> We decided to get the hell out, so we flipped off the circuit breaker,
> hastily packed some overnight bags and piled into Robin's '57 VW
> bug... I don't recall where we were headed - some friend's house or
> another - but when we turned the corner a few blocks from the house,
> we found ourselves up to the hubcaps in gray, swirling water.
>
> As it really wasn't raining, we were perplexed... until we got closer
> to the St. Mary's River, which connects Lake Superior (via the Soo
> Locks) to Lake Huron, and saw that the wind was actually *pushing the
> lake* up over the locks and into the streets, to a depth of about a
> foot. Understand that the lake level is normally many feet *lower*
> than those streets, and you'll know why I decided they'd better drop
> me off at the newspaper.
>
> Now, this paper only had five reporters, including the sports guy. We
> were all frantically working on storm coverage when Shine Sundstrom,
> the city editor (and one of the best damn newspapermen it's been my
> privilege to know) looked up from where he'd been monitoring the
> police and maritime radio bands and announced, “Sounds like we've lost
> a ship out there.”
>
> A quick geography lesson: Michigan's Upper Peninsula is sparsely
> populated. I mean *sparsely*. The Soo, as it's called, had about
> 15,000 residents at the time (I doubt it's much bigger now) and it was
> the biggest town for miles, other than its substantially larger
> Canadian sister across the river. As it became clear that a huge
> maritime disaster had happened, it also became clear that it would be
> impossible to cover, in the normal sense of the word. In the best of
> weather, the part of the Lake where the Fitz was last reported was
> remote and inaccessible. The closest “big” news media were hundreds of
> miles away in southern Michigan.
>
> So it fell to us - five green reporters, an editor and a couple of
> high school kids who normally typed sports stats - to let the outside
> world know what was happening in the first 24 hours or so after the
> ship was reported missing.
>
> Never let anyone tell you reporters don't get involved in their
> stories... or that they don't care about them. We cared passionately
> about that ship and its men. We *knew* them - or men like them. You
> don't live in a small Great Lakes town without knowing guys who make
> their living on the freighters... or their children and wives. The
> Lake, its shipping, its weather - they're all woven in so closely to
> life in that part of the country that they become part of you, whether
> you've ever set foot on a freighter or not.
>
> They sent me down to the shipping company offices, to a big, cold
> warehouse near the surging water, the place where the supply boats
> usually put out to restock the freighters with food and mail and other
> necessaries. That night, and for days to follow, it became something
> like a church, or a hospital waiting room, as women and children and
> men whose loved ones were on the Fitz began arriving, by ones and
> twos, hoping for some word that the ship was safe.
>
> Not exactly the kind of situation where a person can walk in, ask the
> typical stupid newspaper question (“so, how do you *feel*?”) and
> leave. I knew some of these people. I wound up holding hands and
> making coffee and chain-smoking in the parking lot, almost as anxious
> as those who had an honest stake in the outcome... and at the same
> time feeling somehow like a vulture, with my little notebook at the
> ready just in case news came in.
>
> I think I went three days without sleep. I also wound up being the one
> stuck arranging motel rooms and a helicopter and phone lines and stuff
> for the “real” reporters when they were finally able to get flights up
> from Detroit and Chicago... a service which, a year later, contributed
> to my being hired by the Associated Press Detroit bureau... which, in
> a convoluted way, put me where I am today, wherever that is...
>
> It was also the night - the series of nights - when I began to
> understand the kind of reporter I *didn't* want to be... when I
> decided the work wasn't worth doing if it couldn't be done with
> compassion, and that the detachment and “objectivity” most reporters
> are taught to espouse are really kind of a load of crap... You try
> looking into the eyes of a 24-year-old woman who's just been told that
> her husband is dead at the bottom of an icy, treacherous lake... that
> she'll never even get his body back... and try remaining detached. Me,
> I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried with her.
>
> To all whose loves are sailors, and who wait for news beside the cold
> and unforgiving waters. I raise my glass to you every November 10th.
>
>     -Pat Kight, date unknown
>
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