Ever heard of a guy going into treatment to avoid the law? Kip S. did, a few days after his last drink, March 25, 1981.

"I got home on the 18th," he recalled. "Two days later, I got nailed on cocaine, and didn´t wake up for three days. When I did, my eyes were swollen shut and I was covered with cuts and bruises. I had no memory of what had happened, but I was afraid I´d killed someone. I thought, ´I gotta hide somewhere.´

"I was yellin´ and screamin´, and I stank. A friend told me I´d left the house for fear I´d hurt my wife or the kids. He also reminded me my insurance covered me for treatment.

"So that´s what I did, I went into treatment to hide from the police. After a day or so, I called a friend to ask what had happened. ´You got into a couple of fights,´ he told me. ´Knocked a guy out and kicked him in the head, and slammed the door on someone else. When another guy called us strikers assholes, you bit his ear off and beat the hell out of him. But they don´t have any warrants out for you. You were lucky that happened in Fife.´" (Kip has a long history in Fife.)

"Well," said Kip to himself, "I don´t have to stay here, I guess." But he was warm and safe, so he decided to stick around a few more days. And that´s when the miracle happened. "Basically, I decided I didn´t want to drink anymore." The miracle is that he made that decision without any sudden flash of insight or revelation. It just seemed to him it wasn´t something he wanted to do anymore.

When he got out of the treatment center, he plunged into work with Alcoholics Anonymous. "I thought I was doing good, sponsoring like crazy, but I was overdoing it. My wife laid papers on me. Our marriage was over.

"I wound up living in a cold, wet place, and developed crippling arthritis. I was still sober, but I was nuts on Prednisone (a powerful pain-killing drug with serious side effects.) They locked me up twice for depression. I figured the best thing for me was to check out." Instead, he staggered to an A.A. meeting at Orting, and changed his life for good. "I could not hear what people were saying. That was the bottom. I was morally and physically bankrupt." He somehow got back to his apartment, fell on his knees and begged for help. "It was complete surrender. That night, I slept for the first time in months, and when I woke up the next morning, I knew everything was going to be okay. From then on, I tried to come from a place of love, not anger."

To facilitate the change, Kip went on a spiritual quest all over North America. His arthritis was as bad as ever and he´d been told there was nothing the medical profession could do to help him. But three months into his spiritual quest, the pain disappeared and his knee brace came off, never to return. The arthritis does flare up on occasion, however. When his knee starts to ache, Kip knows it´s time to take it easy and dig harder in his search for serenity. "I keep giving to God, and it works."

Kip was a tugboat crewman when he joined A.A. He got into the trade after blowing a landscaping business with booze and drugs. An old friend, a tugboat captain for Foss, hired him for ocean-going tugs in 1979, and he´s been in that trade ever since. Thanks to the captain, that is. Kip got drunk in Juneau and missed his watch, an automatic firing offense.

But the captain, instead of putting him ashore, told him to "shut up and listen," proceeded to describe the 12 steps of A.A., and invited him to go into a treatment program-OR ELSE. Another episode and the job would be over.

"I blew him off about treatment," Kip said, "but I didn´t foul up again." Not till the Inland Boatmen´s Union went on strike in early 1981 and he went on the tear described earlier that led to his sobriety. He´s still working tugboats, but mostly around Puget Sound nowadays.

Like many people in this series, Kip started his drinking career early in life, at the age of either 5 or 7, to be approximately exact. His parents never could agree on when it began, but they agreed on the circumstances. His late father, with whom he seems to have had a love-hate relationship, took him to a sportsmen´s club where the boys were sitting around siting their rifles for hunting season, and fueling the fun with vodka. "I was too young to shoot a gun, but it was okay to drink. I drank all day with ´em,"

Kip says he didn´t drink much after that until he reached his mid-teens. The family lived in a tight-knit agricultural community in the Fife Valley. The Swiss farmers made hard cider and the Italian farmers made wine. Kip and his siblings always got their share.

Kip is a great admirer of the ethnics he grew up with. Though he was born in 1946, he has been told that the Swiss and Italians protected the other ethnic group of farmers there, the Japanese-Americans. When World War II erupted, hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans were removed from the West Coast to inland relocation centers. In most places, the taxes on the Japanese-American farms and businesses went unpaid, the property was seized by the counties and resold on the cheap to white farmers.

But that didn´t happen in the Fife Valley, Kip said. Instead, the Swiss and the Italians paid the taxes and saved the land for their Japanese-American neighbors when they returned at war´s end.

"I remember them as a clannish bunch, but everyone intermixed. I was never conscious of race till a black family moved into the valley when I was 14. First time I ever saw bigotry. But not the last. My mom had a big collection of old family photos. One time, I saw this tintype of a group of women, including one who was black. Turned out she was my great-grandmother on my father´s side of the family. She was light skinned, but clearly of African descent."

This incident led to Kip´s interest in genealogy, and to more surprising discoveries. The "S" in Kip´s last name stands for "Smith," as in Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints. Kip says he is the great-great-great-great-great grandson of Joseph Smith´s brother, and the last Smith of that branch of the family. He said his father, by virtue of his ancestry, was in the high priesthood, but had left the church by the time of his death.

Kip himself is no longer a Mormon, "though they won´t take me off the records books because I´m a Smith. To me, the Mormons are the Second Church of Redeeming Guilt, as are most churches. But the Mormons and the Catholics are best at what I´d call a cult."

Kip says he suffered from ADD (attention deficit disorder) as a youth, but wanted to prove he could make it in school. He made it through junior college on a diet of speed, the same stuff, he says, as the drug Ritalin which is prescribed for ADD. With speed´s help, he worked full time as a door-to-door salesman and made it through junior college, UW and finally Western State, where he got a master´s degree.

Heavily into drugs and liquor when he graduated, he somehow got a job as a seaman on ocean-going ships. In the course of that five-year career, he visited 64 countries, including Vietnam while that war was going on. His ship was shelled on the Saigon River once, but no one was hurt.

He says he had a camera in those worldwide wanderings, and took a total of 11 pictures. "All those countries looked the same to me," he said-"basically, the dock, the bar, the booze, the mama san and the whores."

The hippy/psychedelic culture was in full swing in Seattle when he went ashore in 1970, and Kip joined right in for eleven years until his sobriety in 1981. He married and fathered three now-grown children before the marriage collapsed. He´s been married twice since, most recently for the past 10 years.

All is well with his present marriage. He credits that to his spiritual growth. When there´s a problem, you work it out. "I´m really committed to this marriage. It´s real. We don´t yell and scream, well, maybe a little bit, but we work it out. We communicate better than any couple I know. Love is something you work at. Life is about love. When you come from a place of anger, you make other people miserable. I don´t want to do that, ever again.

"I suffer from the disease of humanity. I try to learn from my mistakes, to make sure that if I´m coming from any place but love, I know that something is wrong.

Interviewed and written by Dick S.