by Tom Kizzia
Phones were a recent innovation in McCarthy, where noisy gasoline generators and solar cells still provided the only electricity. Years before, on my first visit to McCarthy, after flying for hours in a small plane as dawn filled the mountains, the place had seemed cruelly isolated from the world. It was the morning after the murders in 1983, and vinyl body bags still lay beside the snowy airstrip. McCarthy was so cut off that when I departed to make my newspaper deadline, homesteader Jim Edwards asked me to get word to his son back in Anchorage that his mother was among the dead. Despite that grim introduction, I found myself going back again and again, at a time when getting in touch required a letter on the weekly mail plane, a bush message over the Christian radio station in Glennallen, or a bone-rattling drive. Now the Pilgrims had a microwave line at the Mother Lode camp that connected through a cell phone tower on Sourdough Peak to a satellite uplink in McCarthy. They also had a landline at the wanigan in town, where I reached Pilgrim.
He was guarded at first, saying he wasn’t used to talking to reporters. He said others had approached them in their time in New Mexico, struck by his family’s pleasing countenance and musical abilities. He had always turned them away.
When I mentioned my wife and I had a cabin a few miles from McCarthy, he perked up.
“So you’re a neighbor,” he said.
He told me he hadn’t seen his own wife and small children in weeks. They were up at the homestead. Since a knee operation, he was no longer able to ride a horse. The family had no more money to pay for airplane charters. They had never been separated like this, he said, and it was tearing them apart emotionally.
“We really enjoy our Christian life together,” he said. “We’re not a political family at all. We knew this land was in the middle of a national park, but to us that just meant our neighbors would be few and far between.”
We discussed community attitudes in McCarthy. Each of us tried to be ingratiating. He told me about the shepherd’s life in New Mexico. I described our cabin and Sally’s fiddle playing. We agreed that bluegrass and gospel and New England folk music traditions shared certain fine American qualities.
After this first story, I said, I would surely be writing more about conflicts between the national park and the community. Sally and I were planning a trip out to our cabin later that summer, in August—would it be all right if I came up to the Mother Lode?
He thought about it a minute. He decided I should see the historic road to Hillbilly Heaven for myself.
“Come on by, neighbor,” he said. “You’ll see we’re just modest simple folks, not some strange religion.”
MY DUBIOUS claim to being Papa Pilgrim’s neighbor I owed to Sally, whose attachment to McCarthy was older than mine and even more improbable, given her career in environmental politics protecting Alaska’s national parks from encroachment by mankind and womankind.
Recently, while going through old boxes of Sally’s things, I found some hidden-away journals from her first years in Alaska. I had never fully realized, in the time we had together, the strength of her early infatuation with McCarthy—the mesmerizing daily focus of cabin living, the long drives out from Anchorage to play music and visit friends, all the sweet resolutions to make herself into a woman strong enough to live on her own in the Wrangells someday. It helped explain how a Sierra Club lobbyist came to own five acres and nine foundation posts inside a national park. The year after we were married, we built the cabin above the Nizina River canyon. It was our hopeful pioneer moment. Sally chose not to punch in a short road or open up the view by knocking down more than two or three spruce trees. She wanted to camouflage her presence and be a good inholder.
When we returned to our cabin out the McCarthy Road in August 2003, on my way to meet the Pilgrims face-to-face, the worn spiral guestbook told us how long we’d been away. Our son, Ethan, had been a newborn our last visit. Now he was turning nine—Sally had brought a chocolate birthday cake from home. Our thirteen-year-old daughter, Emily, had only faint memories of the cabin’s interior: playroom-pink fiberglass insulation under a clear plastic epidermis. The gangly willow wood was closing back in, the access footpath even narrower than the summer we hand-carried our lumber to the building site—the Bored Feet Trail, we called it then. We were both a little disappointed to realize we had taken our nibble out of the continent’s last wilderness for nothing more ennobling than a recreational getaway.
There were reasons we hadn’t come more often—the distance, our careers, the demands of raising two kids in another hand-built cabin far away on the coast, where we hauled children and groceries home in winter a half-mile on a sled. And now, above all, there was Sally’s advanced-stage ovarian cancer, which by that summer, three years out from her diagnosis, had begun another slow march. She was trying a new drug that would have left her too weak even for this long-hoped-for family trip—except that her blood platelet count fell so low she had been forced to skip a chemo cycle altogether. Not good news, really. But it left a small window of energy for the Wrangells trip and a chance to lead the life we once imagined.
After a day of gentle biking and a night of birthday cake and drumming rain, I said good-bye and headed to the end of the road to meet the Pilgrim Family.
Across the clanging metal footbridge in town, I met up first with Marc Lester, a watchful and shrewd photographer from my new paper. Someone else was waiting at the McCarthy Lodge as well: Ray Kreig, an Anchorage property-rights advocate with a long list of grievances against the National Park Service in other parts of Alaska. I was surprised to learn Kreig and his wife, Lee Ann, had been invited along to see the disputed route for themselves, and apparently to serve as media minders.
Papa Pilgrim showed up in the puddled street outside the lodge. He wore a denim shirt, a dusty gray quilted jacket against the morning chill, and a broad-brimmed Western hat of dark felt under which white hair spilled to his collarbone. He looked lean inside the puffy jacket, a little used-up for someone only sixty-two. His eyes, set in leathery webs of worry, were a crystalline blue-gray. A wavy silver beard, untouched by scissors but adoringly brushed, trailed away like a waterfall.
Seven of his older children, smiling with quiet intensity, assembled in wings at his sides.
“I wish I could ride up there with you all,” Pilgrim said in a soft Texas drawl, his beard shifting emphatically. “But I can’t get up on a horse no more with my knee. Since they closed that road on us last spring, I haven’t been home but four days. It’s been a hardship on us, not being together as a family. But you can see we’re not beat to the ground.”
He would join us that night, he said. A local pilot would fly him up the valley.
My senses hummed as we followed the Pilgrims through the woods to their town camp, where their gear was still stockpiled on the town site right-of-way in pointed rebuke to park policies. The wanigan’s porch was crowded with tools, washbasins, jars of salmon, a guitar case. A handmade bird feeder hung from a rafter. Nearby, a canvas wall tent was carpeted with old sleeping bags. Goats and kittens and big furry dogs—a Great Pyrenees and a Newfoundland—wandered in the mud and around horse piles and puddles made iridescent by workaday hydrocarbons. The bark of several cottonwoods had been chewed down to fleshy wood. A long-skirted daughter approached with a string of horses and joined her brothers in preparing for our ride, collecting bridles and saddles and replacing a hind shoe on a sleek brown horse.
Pilgrim was telling us how the Mother Lode property line passed right through their cookstove.
“Two-thirds of our cabin was not on our property at all. We all were devastated. Walt Wigger stands in a very liable position on this. His reason for telling us wrong was just based on his own greed and own evil purposes. I said we would move the cabin, but the park rangers flew Wigger up to our place and he put a lock on that bulldozer. So we can’t do anything about it. Then park ranger Stephens Harper did a survey of this property here. What happened was really ironic. His outhouse wasn’t even on his own proper
ty. You could really see God’s hand.”
The park team was still helicoptering back and forth to his place every day, looking over the old road for damage. “There’s thirteen highly qualified people up there wandering around, almost doing nothing,” he said. “They’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hassling the Pilgrims. Just to try to run us out of the national park.” He veered away to a gentler theme. “We’re really just a simple family, who never lived anywhere but in the mountains. We brought what the epitome of a wilderness family really is in Alaska. We consider this, McCarthy here, the last part of real Alaska. You got to admit—McCarthy is pretty down home.”
I watched the sons and daughters at work, wondering what their lives could be like. Many fundamentalist Christians spoke of living apart from the world, but few had gone so far.
Pilgrim was sending three of his offspring to guide us up the contested trail: Joshua and Moses, sons numbers two and four, ages twenty-three and eighteen, and Elishaba, eldest daughter and firstborn child, now twenty-seven. “Most people leave home by that age,” Papa Pilgrim said with a twinkle. “There’s a reason why ours don’t, and you’ll pick up on it.”
He doffed his hat and said a blessing, asking the Lord to watch over our travels. We closed our eyes, all except Marc, who stepped back to take pictures, and Moses, who stared curiously into the lens.
GOD SAID in Leviticus never to round the corners of thy head nor mar the corners of thy beard. This was why the Pilgrim boys wore hair to their shoulders, Joshua explained matter-of-factly. I was surprised how relaxed and talkative our guides proved to be, once we were mounted and plodding along the sloppy road by the creek. Joshua described the challenges of traveling the valley road in a wagon pulled by two Percheron workhorses. The creek was too high for the wagon to cross after these rains, he said. He had a youthful downy beard and an easy one-handed manner in the saddle, wearing a broken-down black Western hat and green Carhartt jacket. He was the family’s expert horseman, their farrier, in charge of the trail rides for tourists that helped pay for the upkeep of the horses they were accumulating.
“The park says we need a permit if we take people in the backcountry,” he said. Applying for a permit meant getting insurance and cooperating with the government, both of which were apparently out of the question. Joshua was still sore about the undercover ranger who had tricked him several weeks ago by requesting a trip up to the Bonanza Mine. “He was talking about all those boodles of money they’re going to spend, and trying to entice me, so why shouldn’t I?”
The sky above the steep-sided valley was turning with clouds after the night’s rain. The muddy trail narrowed onto hard gravel. We rode out by the river and made the first of a dozen crossings. In baseball cap and borrowed slick-yellow rain pants, awkwardly lifting my hiking boots as the silty gray glacier water splashed the horse’s belly, I recalled the horseback drowning of the Irish prospector James McCarthy. I was grateful to feel the sure-footedness of my steed on the loose underwater cobbles. Approaching a steep rocky climb on the far bank, I considered how to urge both of us forward, but without encouragement the horse rocketed powerfully from the water and over the berm. I relaxed, sensing someone competent was in charge.
The valley swung to the north and opened up. Occasionally we could see ahead to cloud-sheathed mountains that were white year-round. Twin rock tunnels left no question that a road had once been blasted through here. Elsewhere, though, the roadwork looked new, marked by piles of freshly felled trees and, on gravel bars, cuts where Papa’s Cat had sculpted a lip of rocks or detoured around a stream meander, conforming to current geology rather than any historic survey. The swiftly eroding valley toyed with my sense of timeless nature: The landscape was newer than the civilization.
The road climbed high on the left to avoid a steep cut bank, then descended to some flats, where we could see how willows and poplars had rushed in thick after the biblical floods of 1980. In plants, as in people, the country favored pioneer species, able to move quickly and throw down shallow roots.
We stopped by a small dump truck with pale-green paint peeling off the rusted cab. The truck was surrounded by small spruce trees, as though imprisoned by a sorcerer’s spell. Ray Kreig rode up to say the truck had been used as recently as 1973, proving in his view that the Pilgrims were only doing maintenance, thirty years later.
The truck had been left by Gary Green, a local bush pilot. I’d known Gary since my first visit to McCarthy at the time of the murders, when he had been the pilot who warned the mail plane away. He came to McCarthy originally to hunt for gold and learned to fly when he worked for sheep-hunting guides. These days his flying customers were mostly national park visitors—backpackers and flightseers and the occasional hunter in the preserve, where one could still hunt for sport. But he missed the way things were before the Park Service domesticated the mountains with their aerial patrols and ridge-top radio repeaters. The scenery was still there, he said, but the wilderness feeling was gone. His pale green dump truck would be a rusting junker anywhere else, but here by the creek it was a museum piece.
“You see how minor the damage is along this road,” Ray Kreig was saying. “The park did FAR MORE DAMAGE when they clear-cut the survey line around the Pilgrims’ property last month.”
Kreig was a big man—big bones, big head. Under a purple rain sombrero, he dwarfed the horse that carried him. He was helping turn Papa Pilgrim’s fight into a national cause. A self-employed engineer, he got started in national park issues at Kantishna, the turn-of-the-century gold-mining district that in 1980 was absorbed—“engulfed,” in his words—by Denali National Park and Preserve. He had a cutting and effective way of pointing out how the park set up visitor displays about Kantishna mining history once it had finished driving the last few placer miners out of business. He ran a website that collected accounts of alleged Park Service perfidy, editorializing heavily in capital letters, and in person hammered away with the same bold-faced urgency.
“The Park Service is waging a HEARTLESS AND FANATICAL war of intimidation against the Pilgrims with this investigation,” he said, riding on. “I ask you, is the reaction of the government a measured, reasonable reaction, or is it gross overkill? It’s punishment, pure and simple, for trying to use their access rights.”
When Rick Kenyon began looking for reinforcements, it made sense that he would hear about Kantishna and find Ray Kreig. Now Kreig was enlisting support from national property-rights groups to get supplies past the “blockade” to Hillbilly Heaven. A top mining lawyer in Anchorage had agreed to take on the Pilgrims’ cause, and talks were under way with the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative nonprofit law firm from the lower forty-eight that envisioned these facts developing into a U.S. Supreme Court case.
On the other side, environmental groups were urging the Park Service not to back down. They worried about the political pressure that might be brought to bear, from President George W. Bush and his libertarian-leaning Interior secretary, Gale Norton of Colorado (who once worked for a legal firm linked to the Pacific Legal Foundation), down through Alaska’s all-Republican congressional delegation and Governor Frank Murkowski, to the development-minded state legislature. Environmentalists could foresee any number of similar situations around Alaska, with latter-day Daniel Boones in the seat of D5 Cats ready to blade open the widest interpretation possible of the Alaska conservation act’s unique inholder protections.
“Instead of a SCORCHED EARTH EXTERMINATION POLICY, they should let these people thrive. The Pilgrims can provide a great service to visitors,” Kreig said. “Does the park really want to see a Hundred Year War out here?”
“Why won’t the family talk to the park rangers?” I asked. “Couldn’t this have been avoided?”
“You’re dealing with an INNOCENT FAMILY that has never had to deal with the government before,” Kreig said. “They think that to ask for a permit is to give in. But we’re working on that.”
BY AND by, the horses halte
d in thick grass. We climbed down gratefully to stretch and eat some lunch. The Pilgrim boys ate popcorn. Elishaba hooked one hiking boot in a stirrup, lifted the other across her horse’s neck, and leaned back in the saddle to nap. She clutched her battered white cowboy hat to her chest like a security blanket.
We stopped again at my request when we came to a little tin-roofed log cabin that had been home to the last man in the valley before the Pilgrims.
Loy Green was a trumpet player and a painter of oil landscapes tending toward the surrealist: mountains with pyramids floating in the sky. Sally knew him pretty well and had hung a pyramid-free landscape on a wall in our bedroom. Long-faced, lean, with mussed hair and a few buttons left open, Loy had been the model for the hermit in Ben Shaine’s novel, listening to Mahler symphonies on his small cassette deck. The Wrangells gave him space, he used to say, to think about nature and God. His woodsy Transcendentalism did not prevent him, however, from rigging a shotgun trap in his cabin, aimed at taking out the grizzly who tore into a plywood wall every time he went off to McCarthy.
Loy’s environmentalism was old-school and pre-park. After living through the 1970s in abandoned Green Butte mining cabins, he got help from current and former Santa Cruz students to tear down a collapsing bunkhouse kitchen and move the milled logs across the creek. The logs were reassembled on his unpatented mining claim, which Loy defiantly named “Copper View.” The cabin-rebuilding project, during the land freeze in the last few years before the park, had been surreptitious and unsanctioned. But Loy’s place looked so venerable the Park Service never caught on until much later.
Access had been a challenge for Loy, as it was for the Pilgrims. Before the big flood, his system involved two sputtering dirt bikes and an aluminum canoe cut and welded into a pair of half canoes. Leaving town, Loy would ride one motorcycle to the first ford, then cross the river in a half canoe hooked to a cable angled downstream so that the current, sweeping him along, delivered him to the far side. (A second cable angled back for the return trip.) He would continue on a second dirt bike hidden in the bushes, and at the next river crossing deploy the other half of his canoe in a similar fashion. From there he could walk the rest of the way home. When alders had grown in too thick over the old road, he built a one-man airplane from a kit. This system worked flawlessly except when a nagging carburetor problem caused the engine to quit. Most of his crashes were minor, and he only had to replace the entire plane once, after a forced landing in the trees. Loy trod so lightly on the land—his shotgun bear trap notwithstanding—that the park granted him a lifetime cabin permit after he surrendered his worthless mining claim.