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

by Tom Kizzia

  We climbed through a dead electric-wire fence and peered inside at the wreckage left by bears. A few years earlier, Loy’s friends had eased him out of his McCarthy Creek cabin and into a state Pioneer Home after he showed growing signs of Alzheimer’s. When the Pilgrims came upon the abandoned cabin, Papa praised God and cleared out the rifles and dishes. Loy’s unsalvageable belongings were now piled outside in the weather. In a decade or two, the tin-roofed cabin would be flattened, rotting and rusting away in the brush, as grown-over and indiscernible as Loy’s memories of living in the antediluvian valley.

  When we started riding again, I pushed my horse to catch up with Elishaba’s. I asked if her name was really Butterfly. I had seen it on a Park Service complaint.

  “When I was born, that was what they named me,” she said with a shy smile. “They were hippies back then I guess. These days it depends who I’m talking to. Elishaba is from the Bible. My grandma calls me Elizabeth. The little ones call me Eba.”

  She spoke with a Texas drawl developed, I supposed, from living in isolation with her father. She wore a flowered blouse with a bandana around her neck, a gray hooded sweatshirt beneath a denim vest, and a riding skirt. Under her cowboy hat she had long brown hair and dark bushy eyebrows, and the pink-cheeked outdoor prettiness of the Pilgrim girls, round-faced where their brothers tended more to Hollywood-cut cheekbones. Everyone always commented on the kids’ good looks.

  “Nobody calls me Butterfly no more,” she said. “Nobody but the park, I guess.”

  She loved to ride and hunt and work outdoors. But the five siblings who came along after her had all been brothers, Elishaba explained, so it fell on her to take care of the young ones. Each of the children had special duties in the family, she said. Some were assigned by Papa, and some just came naturally to their personalities. She had prayed hard for a sister, she admitted.

  Elishaba looked around pensively as she rode along the creek. I asked if she ever thought of going away to do something else.

  “Why would I leave?” She seemed annoyed by the question, but not surprised. “I love taking care of the children here and living how we do.”

  I pulled out a reporter’s pad and scribbled something indecipherable as the horse jostled me back and forth. She was not finished.

  “People can’t understand us, the way they rush around in their busy lives these days. We just have a different way of looking at things out here. I know my life here has been blessed by the Lord. I’m really lucky. It’s all I could ever want.”

  What about grandparents? Did they ever travel to see their relatives?

  “Papa’s parents are dead. His daddy was with the FBI. He was the best shot in the world, but he never had to kill anybody, because he was so good at his job.”

  She had mentioned a grandmother who called her Elizabeth.

  “She lives in Los Angeles. We used to visit, but we don’t see her no more. Her heart has been turned against us.”

  What happened?

  “She doesn’t understand what we’re doing here. She thinks we’re all crazy, living off alone the way we do. Her world is just so different, just money and material things.” Elishaba grew more animated. “I feel sorry for her. I really do. I wish she could see us and understand who we really are.”

  A dog barked up ahead. Elishaba heeled over and paused at the head of the line. “Hallelujah, Jesus!” she called as loud as she could. A child’s voice called back, “Hallelujah!”

  A few minutes later, the forest opened to bare dirt ground and the cabin lay ahead. Small children were spilling onto the porch. The place looked neatly picked up, with an air of industriousness—the fenced-in garden and outbuildings a contrast to the neo-Appalachian desperation of their place in town. There was a flurry of dismounting, hand shaking, lowering of bags, and surrendering of reins. Then I stepped onto the cabin porch for a greeting from Country Rose, the matriarch of the Mother Lode, a sad-eyed woman in a long skirt, smiling, but with her arms clasped behind her back.

  “We Pilgrim girls don’t shake hands,” she said.

  “WHEN MAN got down off the horse, things changed for the world,” Papa Pilgrim said as we sat around the big country kitchen. His words came slow and were heavily cadenced. “Somehow we thought Alaska would be some old wooden hotels and dirt roads. Our vision was trappers and people living an old-fashioned type of real life. It’s the way everybody used to be. All of us should be interested in keeping that lifestyle and not destroy it. The park would have so much to benefit from a relationship with a family like ours, working together to inspire people who come here.”

  With the sun slipping behind Bonanza Ridge and the valley turning cold, even in August, Pilgrim warmed himself by a wood-burning cookstove where apple pies bubbled. The room exuded comfort, with cast-iron pans on the walls, open shelves heavy with jars, a big slab of a wooden table. Overhead a few bare lightbulbs ran off a generator somewhere out of earshot.

  Two solemn little girls, Psalms and Lamb, balanced on their father’s knees. The rest of the family sat without a murmur at the kitchen table behind me, or further back in the careworn living room. All attention and energy in the cabin was focused on Papa. If the children were hungry, they weren’t saying.

  I had lived in enough Alaska cabins to be able to consider this one’s architectural demerits. The walls were thin for such a cold valley, mere two-by-fours clad with paneling. The place had been built for summer mining. The barrel stove, a converted oil drum, could probably pump out heat like a sauna, but would require a tremendous supply of fast-burning spruce. The main room was furnished with two threadbare sofas and had plenty of open space for spreading out sleeping bags. In winter, I imagined, the outermost orbit from the stove would be the least desirable. In a small back room was a pile of sleeping gear, and on a shelf a Bible, a hymnal, and a fax machine. There were no toys or other books.

  Pilgrim recounted the story of the fire that took their other cabin, garbling the time sequence as he swung effortlessly from gripping tale to plaintive conclusion: His reason for opening the road was to bring in emergency building supplies. It was God’s own desire.

  “I believe God is moving in our lives all the time,” he said. “It’s the basis of our hope.”

  He recited the Pilgrim Family story, smiling a bit at the colorful parts. He told of meeting Country Rose at a hot spring and the Lord’s promise of twenty-one children. He talked about New Mexico and how their numbers grew, how he held each baby up to divine the child’s name. Then God sent them to Alaska, truly a land that provided for its people. The moose they hunted. Salmon in the Copper River. And the state’s Permanent Fund dividends. “We got on it and they okayed it, and we couldn’t believe it. Thirty thousand dollars. That was more money than we’d ever had in our life.”

  I asked about their family backgrounds. His father was indeed an FBI man, he said—“practically the right-hand agent for J. Edgar Hoover.” Pilgrim also claimed his father had been a famous all-American athlete. I imagined these must be wild exaggerations, which seemed curious coming from a self-proclaimed ascetic and defier of federal authority, and resolved to check when I got back to my office. His own children did not engage in competitive sports. The only grandparent still alive was Country Rose’s mother. They were not in touch, Pilgrim said. She did not agree with how they had chosen to live. She did not understand the great togetherness of the family, nor would she accept his authority as the patriarch. “But that’s what God said. The father is the head. There’s no question about it.” The children have never left and have no desire to leave, he said. “No one ever goes anywhere alone. This is a godly principle, too, for He sent his disciples out by twos. He required a witness. And I can honestly say my children do not know what hatred and bitterness is.”

  Elishaba was pulling out the apple pies and came over to stroke her father’s forehead. His long white hair was thin on top. He told us about his diabetes and heart trouble and reminded us about the bad knee. He wore a buckskin
holster on his belt in which he carried nitroglycerin tablets for a heart attack, matches, and a heavily underlined Bible.

  When I asked about the bulldozer, he considered the newspaper’s audience.

  “I had no idea the hornet’s nest I was stirring up. We just did what Walter Wigger told us to do—go down that road and get your materials. I am as much an environmentalist as anyone could ever be. We wanted to get to the farthest-out place where we could live. We wanted a place you couldn’t get to with a road. But once I was here, I realized that in order for me to love my children, I have to be a provider. That was God’s word to me. Everyone in town kept asking us, are you going to use the road? I kept saying no. Neil and Rick had told us you have a real good road as a 2477. It took me so long to memorize those numbers. Two, four, seven, seven.”

  The innocent hillbilly sighed at the perplexity brought on by that obscure government statute and a simple act of love.

  “My family are not discouraged in any kind of way,” he said. “We’re almost more concerned for the people in McCarthy. It’s really become evident that their very existence is threatened. The park wants this to be like another Yosemite, where you got to stay on the boardwalk and if you get off you’ll be arrested. They say they’re doing it to protect the land. Their purpose is to run people off.”

  It was getting dark and I felt rude for holding up supper. I spoke up at last, and though there had been no rustle of family impatience an immediate movement of children erupted as the simple provender came forth, kettles of potato chowder and loaves of fresh bread and bowls of salad from the garden. Before reseating ourselves we stood in a circle as Pilgrim closed his eyes, gave thanks for our safe arrival, and asked the Lord’s guidance toward a just resolution in the matter of Revised Statute 2477.

  THE NEXT day at noon, the Pilgrim Family were assembled beside the gravel airstrip as we bounced past in Gary Green’s accelerating Cessna. They were smiling and waving—the whole big and woefully needy clan in their farthest-out place.

  As guests of the Pilgrims, Marc and I had been pampered in a little outbuilding for tourists, which they called the Happy Cabin, with actual beds, framed pictures, and wildflower bouquets. The contrast only underscored the squalor and strangeness of the family’s everyday existence: the absence of printed matter, the young adults’ refusal to leave, that rule about traveling around in twos, the back-to-nature children who had never seen a naked body. The silent unanimity of purpose had put me on guard. The older Pilgrim offspring, thoughtful and articulate on their own, had hardly spoken once we got in the cabin. The only mirror was small, with smoky glass and a cross painted in the middle—to discourage vanity, I was told. You’d have a hard time getting anyone to sign up for a cult this rigorous. But in the farthest-out place, it seemed, you could raise up children to do almost anything.

  Airborne, the plane banked in the narrow valley. Gary Green, in a sharply creased cowboy hat, aimed us back at the homestead. Marc squeezed off some last photos and I looked up for visible remains of the Mother Lode above. All I saw was two thousand feet of bare rock, a sheer slope that dumped avalanches regularly into the creek next to Hillbilly Heaven. A retired geologist who lived in McCarthy had warned Papa about this hazard, but he was dismissed, along with his natural science.

  Below, Ray and Lee Ann Kreig stood in the family’s midst and waved. They’d stayed behind to talk strategy with Papa.

  OUR VISIT that morning to the site of the national park’s forensic investigation had felt secondary and anticlimactic—a few men and women poking at shrubs with clipboards, a dour ranger standing in the trail to keep the family at a distance.

  The morning did give me a chance to peel away the two eldest sons, Joseph and Joshua, asking them to show me a controversial planting of oats near the cabin. It had turned out to be in the national park.

  “The only thing we did was this, which to my mind wasn’t very bad. It’s just not natural, is all,” Joseph said.

  What about never applying for a permit to do work on the road, I asked—was that a naïve oversight, too?

  Joseph, who was bigger than his brother and more full-bearded but somehow softer in manner, looked abashed. He said it was too bad they went about it in a way that got everyone stirred up, but Joshua jumped in.

  “Once we admit we need a permit, that’s something they can take away from us,” Joshua said, echoing his father. “We learned by being here we have a real good case for a 2477. We don’t want to apply for a permit not so much for us as for the sake of the entire Alaska community. Because if they win on us, they’ll roll it over everyone behind us.”

  Their mother had been skittish, but when I managed to get Country Rose alone she tried to persuade me that their way of life was a rare thing worth defending.

  “These children aren’t under some kind of spell,” she said. “They know where they’re going. People come away from meeting them with a feeling of joy and amazement in the kind of confidence they have. You asked about my mother. She once told me we will just see what happens when they all turn eighteen. Kick ’em out the door—that’s the attitude of the world. Then she had to tuck her tail and hide, because they didn’t want to go nowhere.”

  Raising such questions directly with Pilgrim had proved more difficult. Had I been intimidated by whatever was smoldering behind his gentle pacifism? It would have made a great story to be banished into the wilderness for impertinence. But during the evening it had seemed more important not to put him on the defensive, to keep him talking. Like any good politician, Papa dangled access as a reward that could be withdrawn.

  They played their bluegrass gospel for us after supper, and then as the guitars and fiddles were put away, I plunked down beside Pilgrim on a sofa—possibly the one Jonathan had been born on, I thought squeamishly—and asked how he liked owning his own copper mine. Here was a topic to which the good politician warmed easily. They had gone in with flashlights, he said, their beams disappearing in the darkness. The surviving support columns were made of pure copper. The minerals in the tailings, the malachites and azurites, sounded like tribes from the Bible.

  “It’s like a miniature Carlsbad Cavern, made by hand,” he said.

  I asked what the access tunnels were like. Did the family feel claustrophobic going into the mountain?

  “My children don’t even know what that means, so they’re not afraid of it,” he said.

  I found this response a little unsettling—as if one could wish away some basic human reflex by suppressing knowledge of it. But it brought me indirectly to a bigger physiological concern. Did he consider his children free to marry and start families of their own?

  He faltered. I noticed several older Pilgrims look up sharply.

  “If someone believes what we believe, and is willing to come join us, they would surely be welcome,” he said.

  What about the future? I asked. His children seemed to have all the skills necessary to live out here in the wilds. But what did he foresee them doing twenty years from now?

  This answer was easier. They didn’t need to look that far ahead, he said. “We truly believe the Lord’s return is coming before my death,” he said.

  I pulled the notepad from my hip pocket to write down what he’d said.

  “I never did trust talking to a reporter,” Pilgrim said, watching my hand. “There was a reporter once who wrote a story about my father. It was a terrible thing he did. He just told one lie after another. I wouldn’t be talking to you now, but for this thing the park is doing. And you being a neighbor.”

  I said I’d do my best to tell the truth. But I scribbled a note to check when I got home whether someone had ever written a scandalous story about an FBI man named I. B. Hale.

  THE JOURNEY back to the Internet took several days. Once there, I discovered Pilgrim was telling the truth about his famous father, the national football championship, and the law enforcement career. I checked further, and found there had indeed been a story that took a different angle.
It was written by one of the most famous investigative reporters in the country.

  I called my editor and mentioned Seymour Hersh and John F. Kennedy. I told him the Papa Pilgrim story was turning out more complicated than expected. He agreed to give me more time.

  After another week or so, I called Pilgrim on the phone at Hillbilly Heaven with new questions.

  The first time I called, he denied everything. It was wrong to write about the past, he said, because it would just confuse the people of Alaska.

  “If you write those lies about my father and my past, people will think, ‘Well, no wonder they ran off into the wilderness.’ We’re here because it has to do with my new life with the Lord. It doesn’t have to do with running from my past.”

  The next time I called, he said those were stories he had never even told some of his own family. Now he had been forced to reveal everything. They had all sat up until one that morning, going through the events of the past before they appeared in the newspaper, “with many tears and explanations.”

  He appealed for sympathy. Then he got tough. Why would I tear at his family this way, when they had trusted me?

  “You promised us, and very encouragingly so, you wanted to be fair. You know we draw a lot of jealousy. People are always looking for something bad. You’re giving them bullets for their guns and I’m going to pay for it. People are going to reject us just because of that. Sports cars and golf, that’s not who I am. They don’t understand the kind of spiritual changes a person can go through. I’m going to be living under the shadow of Jack Nicholson and John Connally and I. B. Hale.”