By Pam Postema, Asst. to GM, Yuma Bulldozers

August 24, 2014: Kivalina, AK – Residents in the remote Inupiat village of Kivalina, Alaska are planning a bonfire and send-off party for their baseball team, the Bowheads, after a short three-game home stand against the Wasilla Sledge Dogs.

No big deal, right? Happens all the time, right? Not in Kivalina. Never before.

First, the Short Season-A ballclub that calls this remote outpost along the northwest coast of Alaska home has never enjoyed much support among the locals – all 300 of them, 295 of whom are Native Americans. Understand that baseball is not a popular sport among Alaska’s native tribes – certainly not among the Inupiat. Not surprising since they had been playing a stickball game, mukpaun, long before white sailors showed up with their funny round sticks and stitched balls.

Second, baseball requires vast expanses of open, dry land. Kivalina sits on a narrow peninsula barely wide enough for a one-lane dirt road – and that was before the spring storms of 2012 flooded most of the village. The spit of land Kivalinans call home is better suited to archery, a favorite local pastime.

Third, when professional baseball finally arrived in Kivalina in 2008 during the decline of MLB and the subsequent rise of the PEBA, it came in the form of the Surf and Snow Amalgamation, a loose affiliation of far-flung Hawaiian and Alaskan villages with little in common except their proximity to volcanoes. Kivalinans attended the first games out of curiosity. What could these strange-looking boys who invade our village during the summer be up to? What game could be so important to bring them from their comfortable homes in cities in the Lower 48 up to our fishing village above the Arctic Circle? That, or something close to it, is what Kivalinans asked themselves. Six and a half seasons of baseball later, they are still wondering.

In 2011, when the Bowheads made it to the playoffs, the tiny hamlet of Kivalina experienced its first tourist invasion. Fans from all over Alaska, but principally from the megalopolis of Sitka – with 8,000 residents, it’s 27 times the size of Kivalina – flooded into Kivalina like the rising seas. They tented every empty room, filled every closet large enough to sit down in, even kicked the local high school students out of their classes. They slept in shifts on the floor of the only church in town.

When they left, when the Sitka Capitals had ended the Kivalina Bowheads’ best season, when all the tourists and ballplayers, all the coaches and managers, all the equipment boys and traveling secretaries and umpires finally filled the final flight and lifted above Kivalina’s narrow dirt runway to fly south to Hawaii for the Surf and Snow Amalgamation Pacific Pennant (Sitka lost to the boys from Mokule’ia, Oahu), when finally the dust of tourism had settled in Kivalina, the locals were aghast at the damage done, the trash abandoned, and the behaviors they had endured but felt insulted by.

All of which comprise the fourth reason baseball hasn’t caught on in Kivalina. Fishing villages do not party late into the night. The Inupiat do not cheer for the defeat of others. Kivalinans do not usually raise their voices except to warn their neighbors of rising seas. No, when it was all over, the Kivalina council voted to ban baseball from their tiny strip of sand and sanity.

Which brings us to the fifth reason: baseball ignored the wishes of the Kivalina council. Baseball continued to be played in Kivalina. Boys from the Lower 48 spent their summers in a tiny whaling village batting strangely seamed white balls around acres and acres of green grass. And where did they find grass in Kivalina? They didn’t. There’s none to be found for hundreds of miles. They had to ship it in, plant it, cultivate it and protect it from the salt air and Arctic winters. So they built a stadium. They circumvented the Kivalina council by building across the harbor, on the mainland, technically outside the purview of the council. Adding injury to insult, they built dormitories into the stadium, beneath the seats and adjacent to the club offices and vendor spaces. That way, the displaced boys from the Lower 48 could sleep late after a night game or party all night before an off day without disturbing the local fisherfolk and thereby denying Kivalina its second-most lucrative source of income after whale hunting.

With construction of the stadium, though, a cool peace came to Kivalina. The boys played on their side of the water; the Inupiat struggled to survive on theirs. And rarely did the two mix.

Until that eventful spring storm in 2012 flooded the village and sent the residents across the water and into the stadium. There was nowhere else to go. The edifice was on high ground, safe from the sea. There were more rooms in the stadium than in the entire village of Kivalina. They were dry, and there were bathrooms, kitchens and all the necessary facilities for a small community. Kivalina moved into the Bowheads’ ballpark – with every hook, line and sinker they owned.

Thus began the strangest love affair in the annals of baseball. A village of Inupiat whale hunters and fisherfolk fell in love with a baseball team of high school and college boys. The Bulldozers renovated the stadium to accommodate its new residents, renaming it The Sanctuary. But while Yuma may have adopted Kivalina financially, it was the Inupiat who adopted baseball and the Bowheads. The game became the rage of the town.

This season, when the Kivalina Bowheads suddenly found themselves in first place in the Oiler division of the Alaskan League, nine full games ahead of the Fairbanks Grunts, Kivalinans responded with an outpouring – quite out of character with Inupiat culture – of hope and enthusiasm and high expectations. And bonfires.

Monday night, August 26, after the final game of the series with Wasilla, the village will host a bonfire to honor their winning team. On the sand and rocky flats just outside the stadium (where the parking lot would be, if there were any cars within 300 miles of Kivalina), locals will bring their broken chairs and abandoned bed frames, cardboard boxes and wooden crates. Anything and everything that will burn, because there are no trees in Kivalina, no lumberyards, and precious little wood of any sort.

And that’s the sixth and final reason this bonfire is a big deal.