Everyone has heard of putting your name and address and/or message on a slip of paper and putting it in a bottle and tossing it out to sea, just to see if anyone ever finds it. The bottle tossed around in the waves, carried by currents to faraway lands, will hopefully be found by someone someday and they will then, hopefully, try to find the person that wrote the message.

The week of Thanksgiving, Mikey Peterson was falling timber near Schutz Pass. Schutz Pass is on the way to nowhere, the only reason a person might go there is to work or maybe hunt and most of the time the area is behind locked gates.

So when a basketball caught his eye as he was working, he must have thought, “Is that a basketball?” So as he kept working he decided he had to go look, after moving a couple of limbs, laying there in the middle of nowhere, was a basketball. But, this basketball had a name, a phone number and an address on it and it looked to be in pretty good shape, even almost full of air.

When he read the name it sounded familiar, so since he had his phone with him he snapped a picture and called his mom. He asked his mother Christi Peterson what Wilda Blankenship’s sister’s name was, her sister that had died in 1995. She told him Karen Woody and he said, “I found her basketball.”

He brought the basketball back into town when he was done with work and Wilda was at Sully’s, he brought it into her there and she was speechless! She recognized her sister Karen’s handwriting. The address and phone number are still used by their mother to this day and she was amazed at the condition of the ball.

Karen graduated from Forks High in 1979 and left for college, never residing in Forks again, and sadly she died from cancer in 1995. Wilda says that neither she nor any of the family remembers a basketball going missing.

She also says her mother keeps a tidy garage and knows the contents and this ball has not just recently been taken from the garage, even though it looks like it is only a few years old, not 35 years old, and not a ball that looks like it has been in the weather for 35 years.

So, how did Karen Woody’s basketball make it to Schutz Pass, the middle of nowhere? Has it been there for 35 years? Did someone have it and take it there? But why? and sadly the person that wrote the message on the basketball is no longer here.

The Woody family would love to know.