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

by Tom Kizzia

  Be very clear. It is in your best interest as members of this community to declare your timetable to vacate the community streets. You can only benefit from our respect and by conducting yourselves as you originally declared to the community upon your arrival to McCarthy.… After two plus years and clear proof that you do not own the land you occupy, you are in fact homesteading on the community’s land and right of ways. We find ourselves motivated to resolve this issue by legal and lawful means.

  Walt Wigger was still trying to get the wanigan back from “these would-be pioneers,” along with his D5 bulldozer.

  “Maybe by now you know this is not a gentle Mennonite family,” he told people. “I made them give me the key to my pickup at the airport, but the Park Service found it by the river where the old cars are dumped, with its windows and lights broke out. These are terrorist tactics that they use. They’re telling the people of McCarthy if you don’t go along with us, this is going to happen to you. They’ve got this made-up religion. They can justify anything that they do, because the Lord provides for them. I’m still going to move them out of my wanigan, but I’ll give you odds two-to-one that after they move out there’s going to be spontaneous combustion.”

  In a town with a proud tradition of bickering, the Pilgrims had suddenly brought everyone together.

  It was not just the wanigan camp. It was that the Pilgrims had defied the unwritten rules by which the community always got along. They had scrapped their little three-wheeled roadster and gone full-scale into the Kennicott shuttle business, undercutting the established local taxi using unpaid family drivers and an uninsured van donated by an out-of-town sympathizer. They built a tourist booth by the footbridge, sold photographs of themselves, and steered tourists toward their own businesses. The down-home neighbors were suddenly apostles of cutthroat frontier competition. They tore up chain speed bumps that a family had anchored across the Kennicott Road to slow shuttle vans passing their cabin. It was a public right-of-way, the Pilgrims argued, without apparent irony. And the Pilgrims, of all people, were invoking state laws and calling the cops.

  One afternoon, Papa came upon a group of young women, local summer workers, swimming in a sun-warmed pothole by the glacial river. Once the shouting match had died down Papa called the troopers in Glennallen to report the appalling half-naked sluttiness. The troopers declined to make the four-hour drive in response. A visitor, after hearing this story over a beer in the McCarthy Lodge, spied a knot of Pilgrims in the street and ran out to drop his pants and moon them. This time a trooper did make the trip, telling everyone to stop “picking at each other.”

  Within weeks, however, the troopers were back, filing criminal charges against two town residents who had crossed the Pilgrims.

  The first incident involved an impish bush rat named Mark Wacht, who lost his four-wheeler to the Pilgrims while he was gone on vacation. When he complained, the vehicle was returned with the gas tank empty and his new tires replaced by bald ones. There had been bad blood ever since. Wacht came up with the line, soon famous around McCarthy, that “NPS” stenciled on equipment meant “Not Pilgrim Stuff.”

  One night that summer, some Pilgrim boys started to goad Wacht by videotaping him and his girlfriend as they walked supplies across the footbridge. He asked them to stop, but they followed him around. When Wacht tried to drive his girlfriend home to Kennicott, the boys blocked his way with their van, creeping stop-and-go up the road. He tried to pass, hooked a bumper, and went off the road. The Pilgrims called the troopers and Wacht was arrested for assault and reckless driving. It was two months before the prosecutor finally looked at the Pilgrims’ videotape and saw the reflection of their stop-and-go brake lights flashing on Wacht’s truck windshield, corroborating his version of events. The charges were dropped.

  The second incident involved the owner of the riverbank land at the end of the McCarthy Road where visitors parked. Once again the Pilgrims helped themselves to the public right-of-way—this time setting up a tourist-information table in front of Steve Syren’s property. Syren noticed food and tools disappearing from his property after he argued with the Pilgrims. His welder was booby-trapped. When he knocked over the table and scattered several children, Papa Pilgrim made another call to 911. The troopers flew out to arrest Syren in a helicopter—knowing, Syren figured, how the phones start ringing every time a trooper SUV drives through Chitina on its way out the road. Once again, the charges were dropped, this time when no Pilgrims showed up in court to testify.

  “By all appearances, they’re trying to get people to lose their cool,” said Jeremy Keller, a dog musher whose family lived eleven miles from town on the Nizina River and somehow managed to get supplies without a bulldozer or an airlift. Keller had delivered the road petition and had to wait twenty minutes outside the wanigan for Pilgrim to emerge. The kids, normally friendly, stood nearby and wouldn’t speak to him. “It’s as aggressive as passive gets.”

  PILGRIM CONTINUED to present himself as the victim of persecution. “God says, ‘Men will hate Christians without a cause,’ and that is what’s happening to us in McCarthy,” he wrote in a letter to the Anchorage Daily News, which he had Country Rose sign. But around town that summer, it became apparent he was bringing on his troubles deliberately. Even the family’s closest friends and allies found themselves cut off.

  Pilgrim would no longer go by the McCarthy Lodge. He exploded when Neil Darish suggested the family not help themselves to a certain “abandoned” automobile by the river, lest they be accused once again of stealing. Pilgrim called the lodge owner a traitor.

  Rick Kenyon got an angry tongue-lashing when he stopped by the wanigan a few days before the road beautification project. The editor/preacher had come on a peace mission. He suggested the family adopt a more Christian approach to business competition in town, mentioning the shuttle van and their footbridge visitor booth. Pilgrim excoriated the preacher for presuming to tell them how to be better Christians.

  Kenyon spoke of recent assurances he’d been given by Elishaba. Perhaps he’d misunderstood her?

  Joseph turned to the preacher and spat, “Are you calling my sister a liar? I hope you rot in hell.”

  That evening at the wanigan, Papa bragged to the whole family about Joseph’s harsh words to the preacher. But Joseph confessed he had called Kenyon to apologize. Papa was embarrassed and furious. He made Joseph take the phone and call Kenyon to retract his apology. Then he accused his son of betrayal and popped him in the face. With his lip pouring blood, Joseph shielded his head with his arms and wouldn’t fight back. His father kept punching. Mama said Papa had gone too far and she made for the phone to call 911, but the children stopped her, terrified that social workers would intervene. Papa grabbed her by the hair and hurled the phone out the door.

  Joseph was ordered to leave the family compound. He went off in the woods to sleep under a tree. Mama slept that night in the family bus.

  THE SATURDAY morning of the showdown was sunny and hot. Jeremy Keller wore a Hawaiian surf shirt as he led marchers down the dirt street toward the smell of horse urine. Seventy people strode along behind him, a huge crowd for McCarthy. The number included several visitors from the Hardware Store, in town for a writers’ conference and surely not lacking for colorful local material. An Alaska State Trooper hung back out of sight at the Wrangell Mountain Air office in case of trouble.

  Keller had stepped forward as an organizer to help his friend Stephens Harper, who was feeling heat for his dual role as neighbor and park ranger. Harper had heard there was pressure coming from some congressional staffer to fire him, on the grounds that he was waging a personal vendetta against this family of inholders. The regional director had seen the Pilgrims’ camp, however, and was backing her ranger.

  The crowd reached the wanigan. Speeches were made, posters and banners waved. Randy Elliott, the local gold miner, rumbled into view atop his Cat—mostly for show in this season of bulldozers and blockades. The old homesteader Jim Edwards was
present, though he couldn’t hear the speakers’ words. Rick Kenyon was there, too, covering the event. After his own clash with Pilgrim, and particularly after Joseph’s bizarre apology and retraction, Kenyon began to reflect more openly about things that troubled him. There were theological concerns, and an underlying anger he’d heard about but never witnessed until now. He conceded privately that the fire in the church put out so nobly by the Pilgrim boys—it had been the subject of several sermonizing editorials—might have accidentally been started by them as well. The Wrangell St. Elias News would continue to agitate against what Kenyon deemed Park Service abuses in the McCarthy Creek road case, but adoring stories about the family ceased. McCarthy Annie’s byline never appeared again. Even Laurie and Keith Rowland’s names were on the petition, urging the Pilgrims to abide by local practice and move out of the public street.

  One loyal Pilgrim ally who kept his distance from the road beautification project that day was Ray Kreig. To the head of the Alaska Land Rights Coalition, this “greenie lynch mob” was the fulfillment of the government’s plan to sow division and turn everyone against the owners of the Mother Lode.

  Some blamed Kreig himself for the escalation. Mike Loso, a former head of the Wrangell Mountains Center at the Hardware Store, called Kreig and told him to “take his national fight somewhere else.” A wiry, tousle-haired mountain climber with a doctorate from Santa Cruz, Loso had gotten to know the oldest Pilgrim boys that summer when he completed a field study for the park on the family’s request to cut house logs from McCarthy Creek. The park had let him hire the Pilgrims and their horses to help with the survey, and they got along well.

  Like other well-meaning people, Loso imagined he might be the friend the Pilgrim boys seemed to need so desperately. But then one bright summer evening by the footbridge, as he was introducing his wife to Joseph, Papa Pilgrim himself walked over and tore into Loso about things he’d supposedly told Kreig. Loso had called the Pilgrims evil! Loso protested it was not true. He considered the boys his friends. Papa accused him of being filled with deceit, of trying to tear his children away. He turned to Loso’s wife, whom he’d never met, and shrieked, “You’re the enemy of my family!” Tears came to her eyes, and Loso pulled her away, saying, “You’re out of line and this conversation is over.” What shocked Loso the most was that Joseph did not speak up.

  On the day of the showdown, the older Pilgrim boys were not at the wanigan. Hunting season had started, and they had already flown off to mountain camps, where they had found work as skilled horse packers. But the rest of the family was in town. The girls lined up on the porch of the little cabin with their musical instruments.

  Elishaba’s cheeks burned with shame as she watched the angry mob surround them. She saw what had become of her dream of a clean new life with friends in Alaska.

  Below the steps, Papa Pilgrim, wearing a battered black cowboy hat, his gray beard trailing down his front, read a statement he’d prepared: “We are absolutely delighted and thankful that finally in the last few days we see that we can very soon move to our land west of the river. We want the community to know that we have never been comfortable being stranded in this situation and regret the distress it has caused.”

  The family had purchased a lot across the footbridge, right at the end of the McCarthy Road, and planned to move the wanigan and camp across the river. Ray Kreig had quietly advanced them funds for the deal. Pilgrim thanked the assembled community for offering to help move them. But they could manage themselves.

  People started shouting questions. Papa answered a few, then nodded at his girls on the porch to start playing.

  There were more shouted questions, but the only reply was from Elishaba’s fiddle. Pilgrim tapped his foot and sang a favorite song, one that had brought smiles in the audience when he sang it two and a half years earlier, during that first concert at the McCarthy Lodge.

  I was dreaming of a little cabin, when I heard somebody call my name …

  She gently put her arms around me, oh, an’ kissed her little boy once more …

  Elishaba, Jerusalem, and Hosanna did not meet anyone’s eyes. Stone-faced, they stared into a middle distance, as though watching a shoreline recede.

  The Pilgrim Family Minstrels were never to play in public again.

  Later that evening, neighbors held a party to support Stephens and Tamara Harper. Acoustic musicians set up a public address system on the Harpers’ porch, just across the storage yard from the wanigan, where the Pilgrims had once blasted music at their neighbors. They had a guitar, fiddle, and washtub bass. Mike Loso played the banjo. A friend handed the Harpers a thousand-dollar check to help with legal expenses in case they had to go to court. He took the microphone and pumped his fist in the air and hollered, “So you can run the bastards out of town!”

  “I’m actually getting a little tired of bluegrass,” Stephens Harper sighed.

  Out of the Wilderness

  Listening, I could hear

  within myself the snow

  that was coming, the sound

  of a loud, cold trumpet.

  —John Haines, “Poem for a Cold Journey,” 1966

  Along the McCarthy Road (photo credit 14.1)

  THE PHONE call came at the end of a quiet year.

  It was like the Pilgrims disappeared after the wanigan was moved across the Kennicott River. That fall, the controversies and publicity went away. The family came and went quietly through the winter, gone to Anchorage, snowmachining to their place up McCarthy Creek, camping across the river. No longer in the public eye. A big Christian family in the town of Palmer, north of Anchorage, was rumored to be helping them out. By the summer of 2005, when the boys reappeared in McCarthy with their string of horses for rent, they stopped their neighbors to apologize, vaguely, for things that had been going on. Clearly something had changed.

  The family had disappeared from my attention as well. I hadn’t even gone back to report on the gathering showdown in McCarthy’s streets. Those had been Sally’s final days. I took time off that summer for my own family. We flew into the coastal range near our home and let Sally’s ashes go from a breezy summit. I knew that one of my duties as a father would be to teach Emily and Ethan about things that were important to their mother. Sooner or later, it was going to require a trip back to McCarthy.

  One year later, in September 2005, I was back at the desk in my rural one-man bureau for the Anchorage Daily News. I had just returned from a conference marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. There had been a big turnout, as the national parks, no longer poison in Alaska politics, had become important to Alaska’s tourism economy. Emily had gone to the conference, too, with members of her high school environmental club. She was surprised to find herself treated like some kind of eco-princess as featured speakers, her mom’s old friends and colleagues, greeted her with hugs and whisked her away to shake hands with former president Jimmy Carter.

  As I listened to the speakers, I thought about Sally’s conservation career and was grateful that our children could still explore vast wild places in Alaska for themselves. A lot of historic choices had been packed into the span of a single generation in Alaska—Native land claims, oil development, the parks and wilderness bill. In the paper the next day I wrote about a Republican congressman from Indiana who got a laugh at the conference introducing himself as a token evangelical right-winger. A history buff, he said that serving on an Alaska conservation oversight committee made him reflect on his own state’s past—how the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 opened the West for private development back when the Great Lakes were considered America’s remote frontier. “You are going through this two hundred years later. It was fascinating to watch,” he said. “The differences were that you treated the Native Americans as partners, and you set aside public lands for the future.”

  Now I was back in my office, back to the daily journalistic fare of modern Alaska—the volcanoes and salmon wars and bridg
es to nowhere—when the phone on my desk rang. It was my editor in Anchorage.

  “The troopers are looking for a friend of yours,” he said. “Robert Allen Hale, age sixty-four, of McCarthy.”

  A media alert had just been issued. Hale had been indicted by a secret grand jury in Palmer and was being sought on thirty felony counts of kidnapping, assault, coercion, incest, and sexual assault in the first degree.

  Alaska State Troopers had flown to McCarthy to apprehend him. The police helicopter landed by the Kennicott River. In the woods nearby was a wall tent with a woodstove, and a dark wanigan on wheels. Troopers checked the wall tent and found the stovepipe still warm.

  But Papa Pilgrim had vanished.

  Papa Pilgrim in McCarthy (photo credit 15.1)

  THE WIPERS struggled fitfully as the flatbed truck climbed through dusk and an early season snowstorm. The heater cut on and off. Joshua drove because he had the big-truck commercial license, thanks to Mama reading the exam questions out loud. Joseph sat at his brother’s side. The two had been talking with excitement and frustration for hours, most of the way from McCarthy, trying to sort out what was going on with their father.

  It was the Tenth Month of 2004—not many weeks after the showdown in the streets of McCarthy. Things remained troublingly unsettled for the Pilgrim Family. Papa’s behavior was increasingly erratic. They no longer had any friends. They had moved the wanigan, but there was no more money for plane flights and too little feed for the horses. Freeze-up was late, and McCarthy Creek was still open and flowing—no longer summer-gray with silt from melting glaciers but clear, low, drinkable, and impassable on a snowmachine. When Joseph and Joshua came out from the homestead, they had to ride horses, packing two hindquarters of a moose shot by Elishaba and Israel. Papa’s instructions were to stop on their way to Kenai and deliver the meat to a large Christian family in a log cabin on the mountain outside Palmer, the last town on the highway before Anchorage. Apparently this new family, the Buckinghams, were not experienced hunters and had failed to get a moose that fall. The brothers recognized the gift of meat as the kind of extravagant gesture Papa favored when making a first impression. To the Pilgrim sons, the effort seemed so predictable and futile.