The notary public embosser used by Sol Ripinsky was returned to the Sheldon Museum last month, but half of the die – the part that sqeezes a piece of paper into a raised insignia – is missing.
The embosser came from a house, an old Army building on Union Street that Richard and Mary Manuel had spent decades filling shoulder high with newspapers, magazines, mining equipment, tools, lathes, drill presses, guns, maps, so many things that after a dozen garage sales enough remained for a Palmer antique dealer who calls himself Alaska Picker to haul off two truckloads of collectibles.
Four loaded guns were found, one tucked up in the rafters.
The missing die part looks like a gold coin with raised lettering, imprinted with Ripinsky’s name. Maybe it was swiped as a souvenir by anyone here in the last 120 years. Maybe it slipped between floorboards at Manuel’s place. Or maybe old Sol himself pried it off the machine as a remembrance of his mighty trek from poor Polish immigrant boy to U.S. Commissioner and tucked it into the pocket of the suit he wore to his grave.
The embosser is not complete without the second die. Searching for the shiny medallion would amount to a quest akin for a local Holy Grail. Making the heavy, iron stamping machine whole again would bring a remarkable ending to this story.
Or would it?
Decades ago, Greg Podsiki dove into Rutzebeck Lake on a hot, summer day and his wedding ring slipped off and into deep muck at the lake’s bottom. We all know almost exactly where in the lake Greg was when the ring came off but it still hasn’t been found.
Even on the warmest days, the water at the bottom of the shallow lake is icy and the muck several feet deep. Sometimes swimmers dive and snatch a handful of bottom on the off chance of snagging the ring, but salvage efforts end there.
When I told her decades ago that I swam at Rutzebeck, old-timer Mary Meacock asked me if I dove off the rock, a stray boulder of an island that’s the lake’s only attraction and landmark. Now when people tell me they’ve been swimming at Rutzebeck, I ask, “Did you find Podsiki’s wedding ring?”
Greg’s ring long ago moved from misfortune to mystery to legend, and places like Haines that are empty and removed from the world need legends and lost treasures more than they need people.
For decades I’d heard of a stray stand of yellow cedar trees in Haines, somewhere behind the old Army tank farm at Lutak. Stands of cedars don’t grow here, but one apparently did for reasons that can’t be well explained. I finally searched for the stand and found it, a few scrawny trees growing in the wrong place, struggling to survive.
It was a disappointment. In my imagination, the stand was a remarkable thing, a mighty aberration, a robust glade, an inexplicable galaxy of cedar amid a universe of spruce and hemlock.
The epic struggle of a quest, the daunting odds against finding one precious shell in an ocean, the exhilaration of returning a treasure given up for lost decades ago all make for a heady mix. They still don’t match the appeal of a legend of an object gone missing.