Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

by Tom Kizzia

  Your family has accomplished considerable ground clearing work near the Marvelous Mill Site.… Some of your recent ground clearing work appears to have been performed on land to which you do not hold title or to which you do not have a valid right-of-way permit, and thus is a violation of law. Please stop your clearing and ground disturbing actions on federal parklands immediately.…

  Mr. Hale, you have refused and rebuffed all of our attempts to communicate with you. You have publicly characterized our attempts to communicate as harassment. You have persisted in taking actions that we have reluctantly concluded to be deliberate violations of law. Many of these serious issues might have been avoided if you had cooperated with our initial attempts to establish communications with your family. Please consider this letter another attempt.

  Just as Sharp’s letter was being sent, a backpacker from California started up McCarthy Creek on foot. Along with several visiting friends, Anne Beaulaurier planned to follow an old trail up the valley to Nikolai Pass. She had spent the summer hiking in the pristine, trail-free vistas of Denali National Park, fell in love with Alaska, and found work so she could stay. Denali was one of the original parks in Alaska, and friends had recommended she visit one of the new parks created in 1980.

  So far, however, with its PRIVATE PROPERTY signs along the road from Chitina, coughing rusted-out trucks around town, and rowdy hunters partying at the local saloon, McCarthy and environs seemed more like the Wild West than a sacred natural treasure.

  The backpackers crossed the stream on a log bridge and had hiked only a short way up McCarthy Creek when the trail opened unexpectedly into a road. Freshly cut alder and willow lay everywhere, tangling their ankles. The difficulty seemed to go on forever, Beaulaurier later told the Park Service. Finally the trail crossed the creek, and when they waded out the other side they found raw bulldozer tracks over a muddy and torn landscape. Trees alongside had been cut down, the sawdust still white and fragrant. After another mile or so, the depressed hikers turned around.

  Back in McCarthy, they griped about the mess they’d seen along McCarthy Creek. No one knew what they were talking about.

  It was early winter before a ranger flew another reconnaissance mission up the valley. He reported back to the superintendent that Papa Pilgrim had bulldozed his own access road from the Mother Lode to McCarthy, thirteen miles through the national park.

  Billy Hale, left, visiting his brother, Bobby, in the New Mexico mountains in the 1990s (photo credit 4.1)

  IN THE years after the death of his teenage bride, Bobby Hale became a wanderer. He never returned to high school at Arlington Heights. He got a degree from a local alternative technical school and tried college on several campuses, studied marketing for a while, without ever lasting long. At one point he was enrolled at Texas Christian University, where his father was still a hero, but flamed out spectacularly, according to his twin brother’s wife, Patsy Dorris Hale. Bobby, still supremely confident as a scrapper, challenged a hulking football lineman to a public fight for flirting with Bobby’s latest girlfriend. This oedipal challenge ended with the lineman demolishing Bobby in front of a fraternity crowd. Battered, swollen, and humiliated, Bobby went into hiding, leaving behind his classwork and other responsibilities. That was his way of dealing with shame, Patsy Hale said, after Kathleen Connally’s death and now this.

  Finally he left home altogether in a fog of marijuana smoke, motorcycle exhaust, and parental frustration. It was America in the 1960s. He popped up in San Francisco for the 1967 Summer of Love and in rural communes from Oregon to the Mojave Desert, pursuing women and gurus and hallucinogenic enlightenment. In later years, he referred to this period as a search for Truth. It was a search that began in Fort Worth, whose motto is “Where the West Begins,” and his choices thereafter skewed to the old frontier: In Oregon and California and New Mexico, as later in Alaska, he drifted into abandoned mining claims and shepherd cabins, finding comfort as well as convenience in recycling the work of earlier pioneers. He rode horses and drove old trucks that were hard to find parts for. He told more than one person he’d been born one hundred years too late.

  Before he left Texas, however, in the summer of 1962, his name showed up in FBI files, in the curious case of President Kennedy’s mob mistress.

  In Los Angeles, J. Edgar Hoover’s men had staked out an apartment belonging to a woman named Judith Campbell, a ravishing dark-haired beauty involved romantically with both President Kennedy and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. On August 7, 1962, the FBI watched two young men break into Campbell’s apartment through a sliding-glass balcony door. Two FBI reports identified the burglars’ getaway car, a blue Chevrolet Corvette, as registered to I. B. Hale, a former special agent who by 1962 worked in security for the General Dynamics fighter jet plant in Fort Worth. The FBI noted that the description of the burglars—around twenty-one years old, between five-nine and five-eleven, around 165 pounds—matched that of Hale’s twin sons, Bobby and Billy. The report also noted, as a matter of passing interest, the story of Bobby Hale and John Connally’s daughter, and added further circumstantial evidence: “An associate of I. B. Hale has indicated to the Dallas Office that one of Hale’s sons had obtained a Chevrolet sports car and was possibly in California.”

  The story was unearthed by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh for his 1997 book about Kennedy, The Dark Side of Camelot. Hersh, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for uncovering the My Lai massacre, labored in his book to corroborate the claims of Judith Campbell Exner, made decades after the fact, that she once served as personal courier for money and messages between Kennedy and the mob leader related to vote buying in Chicago and CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Many historians of the era remain unconvinced, calling Exner’s claims unsubstantiated and improbable. But there is no question about the president’s compromising relationship with her. The FBI never reported the August 1962 break-in to the Los Angeles police for fear of compromising their own investigation. Exner claimed her phone was tapped by the feds; the FBI agent at the scene guessed that the burglars, who appeared to take nothing, had placed their own wiretap on her phone, for reasons unknown.

  In his book, Hersh speculates that General Dynamics, a company in “desperate” financial straits at the time, used evidence gathered from the break-in to blackmail the president. It was not long before the White House overruled the Pentagon on the largest U.S. military aircraft contract in history up to then, a $6.5 billion deal to build the experimental TFX fighter jet, later renamed the F-111. The contract award to the General Dynamics Fort Worth plant shocked the military and Congress at the time, since General Dynamics had been a distant second to Boeing in procurement studies leading up to the decision. Congress convened an investigation, which initially turned up no collusion between the company and White House officials. But, Hersh wrote, FBI chief Hoover never revealed to Congress the report of the break-in at Campbell’s apartment naming his old friend, former special agent Hale. The congressional investigation was called off after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

  Hersh’s own investigation reached a dead end. I. B. Hale was long dead, Billy Hale could not be found, and efforts to contact Bobby Hale, living in rural isolation in New Mexico in the 1990s, were rebuffed. Asked about this episode years later, Papa Pilgrim dismissed the allegations as preposterous. (General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, the company that took over the Fort Worth fighter jet plant in 1993, declined to comment on the Hersh allegations for this book.) But Patsy Hale, Billy’s girlfriend in 1962 and later his wife, said there may indeed have been something to the connections Hersh drew. Bobby had been out in Los Angeles that summer, she said, obsessed with Marilyn Monroe and trying to arrange a personal meeting in the weeks before the movie star died. The boys’ father was in California, too, on some business or other. When everyone got back to Texas, I. B. Hale summoned the boys urgently one night and they drove off in the blue Corvette at midnight. They told Patsy they were going to California to sell the car—wh
ich struck her as odd, given how easily they could have sold it in Dallas. When she picked up Billy after he hitchhiked home from California, he of course said nothing about a break-in. It was only many years later, after Hersh tracked her down, that she learned of the FBI reports and recalled something the twins’ mother had said before she died: that even after going to work for General Dynamics, I.B. still went away from time to time to handle secret special projects for Mr. Hoover.

  So the mystery surrounding I. B. Hale’s sons and the FBI reports remains. Inevitably, under such circumstances, the names of I.B. and Bobby Hale twinkle dimly within the labyrinth of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Various coincidences have been examined: the ties to John Connally, General Dynamics, and J. Edgar Hoover, and the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald attended the same high school as the Hale twins before dropping out to join the Marines. Virginia Hale, working for the Texas Employment Commission after separating from I.B., helped Oswald get a welding job and make some Russian-speaking contacts in 1962, according to the Warren Commission Report. Papa Pilgrim insisted that I. B. Hale rode in the motorcade that day, though he is not listed in the investigation. These strands lead to dead ends, however, as conspiracy theorists have struggled to explain, for example, how the 1959 shotgun death of Connally’s daughter could have had any bearing on the assassination four years later—or be linked perhaps to the 1969 20-gauge shotgun suicide of the daughter of Fred Korth (“This was the way that a large number of people who knew too much about the assassination died,” mused one conspiracy buff in an online discussion group), who succeeded Connally as secretary of the navy and was also involved in procurement of the F-111 fighter from General Dynamics.…

  IN THE summer of 1974, Bobby Hale met Kurina Rose Bresler at a hot spring in Southern California. For years afterward, he liked to describe how the Lord appeared in a haze of rainbows and waterfalls and told him that Rose would give him twenty-one children. Twenty-one was an important number to him, since it is a multiple of the sacred number seven, which comes up repeatedly in the Bible, as when Jesus told Peter to forgive another’s sin not seven times, but seventy times seven. The Book of Revelation also features a seven-headed beast, seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven mentions of the wrath of God.

  Another number of possible significance was sixteen—Rose’s age at the time, as it had been Kathleen Connally’s when they eloped. Hale was now thirty-three. He had been married two more times since his first bride’s death and had already fathered four children of his own.

  There had been other women, too, including one who led Bobby Hale to Haight-Ashbury in 1967. On their way to New Orleans the following winter, the couple stopped in Los Angeles and had dinner with a Scripture-quoting man doted on by several dazed female followers. According to the girlfriend and to Patsy Hale, who heard about the visit from her brother-in-law, it was a passing encounter with Charles Manson, one year before the murders that gripped the nation.

  Three years later, Bobby Hale had moved with a new girlfriend and baby to a commune in the wooded hills above the southern Oregon coast. Sunnyridge was a genial, open-ended community on a federal mining claim, where back-to-the-landers paid a small annual fee to the government, under the mining laws of the West, supposedly for the right to look for gold. It was a family-friendly place along an old logging road, with a number of college-educated refugees and a central lodge built of salvaged barn wood and straightened nails, according to Ellen Sue and Ted Pilger, ex-residents who maintain a website recalling the commune’s halcyon days. Hale remained on the social margin, the Pilgers say. He was tall and lean, with long black hair and a black beard, good-looking but self-impressed. He taught Transcendental Meditation and carried himself with an implacable self-confidence that some women found attractive but men couldn’t stand. Sunnyridge flourished for a half dozen years and then broke apart, the Pilgers say, as families grew up and everyone felt the faint disillusion that follows hope for a perfect place.

  Hale had moved on by then, traveling to Europe to help run a lecture tour for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation movement. He was now deeply immersed in TM, with its promise to connect with the “creative intelligence” of the universe. And then, he later told Rose, he was turned off in an instant by an overheard conversation between two leaders, regarding ways to keep crowds coming back by dangling promises of cosmic consciousness. He said he took the Maharishi’s limo straight to the airport and flew back to California.

  His spiritual beliefs evolved into a blend of Christianity and a worship of the planets. In 1973 he headed to South America to escape the Comet Kohoutek. The comet’s sudden discovery had some people predicting that a great doomsday event would strike North America in January 1974—it would be “brighter than seven moons,” one cult leader foretold. Hale departed from Geyserville, north of San Francisco, with a girlfriend later known to Kurina Rose as “the one-legged lady.” (Hale drilled a hole in her wooden leg to hide their cash, which came in handy after their backpacks were stolen.) As Rose recalled her husband’s tale, the pair rode horses through Ecuador and Bolivia, consumed copious amounts of LSD, and encountered many cosmic signs—trees bending in homage, voices from the high Andes—that convinced Hale he himself might be some kind of prophet. Eventually the Americans were deported, but not before Kohoutek had safely passed the perihelion in its orbit, relieving anxieties about doomsday while leaving in its wake a new earthbound metaphor for dim anticlimax.

  Meanwhile, Kurina Rose was struggling through her teen years. Her parents were divorced. Her mother, a singer and actress who had played a nun in a touring production of The Sound of Music, had remarried a movie producer whose films included Shaft and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Growing up in a Beverly Hills canyon, frequently in the care of her grandmother, Rose rebelled against the materialism of Los Angeles, drawn instead to the freedom that beckoned in the countryside. She swooned watching Little House on the Prairie on television, and dreamed of going back to the land. She left school and ran off to a hot spring outside Apple Valley, in the dry creosote and piñon pine mountains west of Los Angeles, where she met Bobby Hale.

  He was going by the name “Ram,” which was short, she understood, for something Hindu. She recalled that he was tripping when they met, and God appeared to herald the moment. He called the pretty teenager Sunlight. She gave him the name Firefly. They changed their names legally, and took the name of his star-spangled faded-lemon vintage truck as their surname. He followed her home to Beverly Hills, and when her parents told him to get lost, Sunlight snuck out in the night, just like Kathleen Connally had, and ran away with Firefly. She did not see her parents again until she was pregnant with a daughter whose legal name would be Butterfly Sunstar.

  FIREFLY SUNSTAR was energetic and clever, and he made his new mate comfortable in their tumbleweed camps and squatter homes. They worked to build a self-contained world, and Firefly, older than anyone else around, was a natural leader. He had a brilliant way of divining what was going on in people’s heads, though Sunlight discovered this did not automatically endear him to those whose heads were being thus invaded. He could be volatile and inconsistent. He would charm people and draw them in, then turn on them and drive them away. It did not take Sunlight long to figure out that alcohol and psychedelics could make him angry and jealous. He was like Jekyll and Hyde, she told him. But she was determined to prove that she hadn’t made a bad choice—that her relationship would not break up like her parents’.

  One night in a rage he flung burning coals on Sunlight and baby Butterfly as they sat naked by a campfire. When she threatened to go seek medical care for the baby’s third-degree burns, he apologized, piteously and at length. He said he was tortured by things from his past. He told Sunlight the story of eloping as a teenager. He couldn’t forgive himself for driving his sweet bride to her death. It was years before he could even hug his own mother again. He was convinced he had a devil in him. His brother, Billy, was the good son
. He was the bad seed, rejected by the world, unreachable by pity or love.

  Then on a visit to Texas they attended a Baptist church with Billy. People remembered I. B. Hale and the story of the Connallys. They told Bobby they’d been praying for him for twenty years. Firefly and Sunlight went to one service after another. Firefly couldn’t sleep; he was up all night driving around Fort Worth thinking about what he should do. In church he stared at his Bible, sifting for his soul while the preacher spoke rapturously of salvation, and finally he rose up. Sunlight grabbed his arm. He was never one for doing things halfway, and she feared where this might lead. He tore free and strode to the front of the church to receive Jesus. He saw that all the voices and signs he’d been sensing, which he thought were communication from God, had been the devil fighting to keep him.

  He removed his bag of marijuana from the bus and sprinkled it over a field. He cut his hair and shaved his beard and renounced the name Sunstar and lit a bonfire to burn their eagle feathers and tarot cards.

  Kurina Rose joined him in Jesus after he broke down in tears. He told her he hadn’t cried so hard since KK died.

  Winter tourists and snowmachines at the McCarthy Lodge, 2003 (photo credit 5.1)

  IT MAY be that few McCarthy neighbors, busy with preparations for the long cold season ahead, took time to read all the way through the ardent handwritten epistle delivered around town in the Tenth Month of Papa Pilgrim’s first year in the Wrangells. If anyone managed to penetrate the blaze of incandescent self-regard, they found the four pages of cramped lettering to be a birth announcement. A child had been born at the Mother Lode, the first birth in that part of the Wrangells since the copper mines closed. The letter was also an account of a desperate motorized trip up McCarthy Creek that fall, over a route still impassable to vehicles as far as most people knew, but nobody seemed to pick up on the improved access.