The Lithuanian Book Smugglers, the Song Keepers, and the Man Who Raced Hills Into His 70s

Early 1900s. A man leaves Lithuania.

Not because he wants to. Because the Tsar has banned his language, his alphabet, his songs. The punishment for speaking Lithuanian in public is exile to Siberia. The punishment for teaching a child to read their mother tongue is prison.

So he walks through forests at night. He carries books hidden under hay in a wagon. He crosses borders that don't want him. He boards a ship in the dark.

He arrives in America with nothing.

Maybe twenty dollars. Maybe less.

He settles in Michigan. Foundries. Rail lines. Work that breaks bodies. He saves. He sends for a wife. They raise six children in a house on 14th Street, blocks from the Baltic immigrants who will become their in‑laws.

He does not speak of the old country.

He doesn't have to. He carries it in his hands.

1913. A son is born. His name is Alphonse.

The father—my great‑grandfather—is still a Lithuanian citizen when the boy arrives. The census will mark him "Al" for Alien. He will not naturalize until the 1920s.

But the boy doesn't know that. The boy grows up in Michigan, in the roar of industry, in the smell of grease and gasoline. He watches his father work. He learns that a man's hands can build anything.

He becomes a master machinist.

He builds custom motorcycles from scratch. He stretches frames, welds swingarms, modifies engines to handle torque that would tear a normal bike apart. He races those machines up near‑vertical hills—hill climbing, one of the most dangerous sports in America.

He does this into his 70s.

Not because he has to. Because he is made of something that doesn't stop.

His bikes become legendary. He sells them around the world. Today, authentic vintage hill climbers built by men like Alphonse Skrelunas routinely sell for over $100,000 at elite auctions. They are not motorcycles. They are functional art. They are the mechanical expression of a man who refused to quit.

He also plays golf. Avid. Relentless. The same focus he brought to everything.

But here's what the auction catalogs don't tell you.

During my childhood. He gets in his car and drives.

From Oregon to the Navajo reservation. Visiting often. A Lithuanian man in his 60s and 70s, sitting in a sheep camp on Big Mountain, watching a boy herd sheep under a sky that looks nothing like the forests his own father left.

The boy is me.

He doesn't speak Navajo. He doesn't know the names of the plants or the ways of the mesa. But he eats mutton stew and frybread. He drinks coffee so strong it could wake the ancestors. He listens to my great‑grandmother Masan tell stories—though he doesn't understand a word.

He doesn't say much.

He just shows up.

That is the teaching. The same teaching the book smugglers knew. The same teaching the song keepers knew. The same teaching Masan gave me when she raised me.

"The dog hears what we miss," she said. "And you listened."

Showing up is listening. Listening is surviving. Surviving is keeping what is ours.

What they carried.

The book smugglers—knygnešiai—walked through forests at night with Lithuanian books under their coats. The Tsar's police hunted them. Some were executed. But they kept walking. Because a book in your own language is not just paper and ink. It is a declaration that your people still exist.

The song keepers—the grandmothers—sang the dainos in kitchens and fields, under the noses of occupying soldiers. You cannot ban a melody that lives in a throat. You cannot confiscate a rhythm that passes from mother to daughter while grinding corn.

My great‑grandfather left Lithuania with nothing but work in his hands.

My grandfather built motorcycles that now sell for six figures, but he never forgot that the real machine is the one that shows up.

Same thing. Different words.

What I honored in Stone Breath.

Not their names—though I know them. Not their biographies—though I could tell you.

What they carried.

The weight of leaving. The courage of keeping. The quiet, stubborn, relentless power of showing up when it would have been easier to stay home.

The book smugglers carried paper across borders. The song keepers carried melodies across generations. My grandfather carried himself across a continent to sit with a boy who needed to know he was not alone.

That is the thread. Lithuanian, Navajo, Japanese. Three cultures. Same teaching.

The stone in your pocket. The breath in your chest. The showing up.

That's what ancestors do.

Read more in Stone Breath — a novel about a man who forgot how to breathe, a woman who stayed when everyone left, and the tools that brought him home. The book is currently being published.

For the book smugglers. For the song keepers. For the grandfather who never stopped showing up.