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

by Tom Kizzia

  The Wrangell St. Elias News coverage of the Bollard Wars had not been entirely fair and balanced. It was characterized by a certain vagueness regarding the laws against criminal vandalism, the possible identity of the perpetrators, or indeed the existence of any local support whatsoever for the bollards. The bollard busters could as easily be called patriots as vandals, the paper opined. Reporting focused on the government bureaucrats trying to choke off access to McCarthy—state Department of Transportation officials whose inertia had long prevented major improvements to the gravel road from Chitina, and now, increasingly, officials with the national park, in thrall to distant urban elites and unmoved by the struggles of Americans living on the wrong side of the Kennicott River, like the Kenyons, who were forced by the bollards to park at the footbridge and walk to their own church.

  “Some people are starting to think of NPS as DOT with a badge and a gun. Now there is a scary thought,” Kenyon wrote.

  McCarthy had several boosterish newspapers back in mining days but never a church until the Kenyons arrived—not even during the height of the copper boom, when the town had nearly three hundred residents, saloons selling bootleg white mule from stills out at the creeks, and a row of fourteen little cabins for working girls with names such as Tin Can Annie, the Beef Trust, and the valley’s first black female, Blanche. Long after the mines closed, however, the area did attract an end-of-the-world sect when a religious leader named Brother Ivy moved to Chitina with his followers, bought the Chitina Cash Store and renamed it the Light House Mission, and assembled a windowless log house in anticipation of the big finale in April 1976. The saga of the Ivy Sect’s disappointment was still remembered by a few old-timers, its conclusion spelled out in the unpublished memoir of Curtis Green, a blue-collar hermit who holed up in McCarthy those same years reading Whitman and Thoreau through the winter:

  When the world did not end as scheduled, the clan members gradually faded away. Brother Ivy and his wife remained and eventually opened a small grocery store/gas station on the edge of town … and Brother Ivy developed a bizarre, nay grotesque, physical condition. Testicular elephantiasis? Goiter of the gonads? Who knows? He never had it diagnosed, as he would have nothing to do with doctors—I can’t knock him for that, but there is a limit—claiming that the Lord would heal him. Now, that’s faith—even after the Lord failed to end the world when He was supposed to. His balls grew to truly gargantuan proportions, so that he could no longer wear trousers, wearing instead a long robe that reached to his feet. When you would come into the store, he would waddle out from the living area (his wife was a recluse and never waited on customers), you could not help but notice this massive bulge that reached to his knees, swaying ponderously beneath the folds of his robe as he walked. I am not exaggerating, nor do I wish to poke fun at his unfortunate condition, that is simply the way it was. Actually, I kind of liked Brother Ivy, he mellowed out and I will have to say that he never once tried to push his religion. But his balls were famous statewide and for a while were Chitina’s biggest tourist attraction.

  Just as the Ivy Sect was disintegrating, Rick Kenyon, a Florida gunsmith, felt called to Alaska to do the Lord’s work. His wife, Bonnie, wasn’t convinced—“I would have to hear God tell me that in an audible voice,” she told her husband, thinking she had ended the discussion about leaving Florida. A few weeks later, she turned on an Oral Roberts television special, and on the screen was Lowell Thomas, Jr., a bush pilot and the forty-ninth state’s lieutenant governor, pointing at the camera and saying, “If you want to get close to God, go to Alaska.” Bonnie wept and started packing.

  After twenty-three years in McCarthy, Rick and Bonnie Kenyon were warm and welcoming neighbors, affable in person, as ready to help pull a traveler from a ditch or offer a fresh slice of pie as they were to advise in print on the proper functioning of a well-regulated militia. They were busy fillers of economic niches, running a bed-and-breakfast, selling propane, and taking daily weather readings for the federal government. Despite a subscriber list boosted by summer residents and Alaska history buffs, it was no small commitment to put out a bimonthly newspaper in a community whose residents numbered in the dozens. The Wrangell St. Elias News had its small-town charms: “Items of Interest,” an intimate kind of pre-Facebook posting of community comings and goings; long articles about Kennicott history and rampaging bears; and “Good News from the Wrangells,” a homey religious column (“If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it”).

  Lately, however, the pastor/editor’s antigovernment fervor had been heating up. Anticipating national politics by half a decade, he was invoking the Boston Tea Party to explain the Bollard Wars. Now here came the Pilgrims with reinforcements. In truth, Rick Kenyon had misgivings about the family at first. For all their apparent devotion to the Bible’s word, they had not seen fit to join his congregation at the McCarthy-Kennicott Community Church. And despite their evident poverty and many mouths to feed, Papa Pilgrim insisted on rounding his propane charges up to the nearest five dollars rather than handle the “satanic” pyramids on one-dollar bills. But Kenyon remembered how the park had tried to buy Wigger’s land and got turned down. He had seen the public notices about the Pilgrims around town. It made sense to him that a finger-wagging park administration would try to run this meek and eccentric Christian family off and take their land. Kenyon’s light-in-the-forest evangelism had always thrived best in the face of adversity and struggle. He realized, as he prepared Pilgrim’s letter about the Bollard Wars for publication, that the crusade against oppressive government in McCarthy might have found something even more important than a new and multitudinous ally. It had found a new cause.

  THERE WAS more to McCarthy than the community depicted in Kenyon’s newspaper—a statement to which some of Kenyon’s more acerbic and fed-up local readers might have added, “Praise the Lord.” There were neighbors, for instance, who considered the bollards a useful innovation in social engineering, and some who saw the wilderness inside the national park as their natural place of worship.

  Within weeks of his family’s arrival, Pilgrim had a run-in with a summer institute that had been bringing small numbers of college students to McCarthy for thirty years.

  Pilgrim told the Wrangell Mountains Center that students were no longer welcome to make their annual backpacking trek up McCarthy Creek. The reason he gave was that he’d heard the college students sometimes camped in the nude. His own children had never been exposed to the naked human body, he said. In fact, they remained fully dressed even when they bathed, a practice that kept them from temptation and sin.

  The institute’s leaders approached Ben Shaine, the emeritus teacher and one-man think tank who had helped start the college program years ago, wondering how to respond to Pilgrim’s edict. Shaine relished the teachable moment—could there be a better illustration of the conservationists’ argument that private ownership, not public parks, was the ultimate “lock-up” of land? Rick Kenyon’s newspaper was fulminating about bollards and access, but the environmental studies program was the only group whose access was actually getting cut off. He loved the way students arrived in McCarthy every year expecting a summer of rural repose and left with their heads spinning at the complexities of life on the modern frontier.

  Shaine’s second thought was that this was probably about something more than allegations of nudity. Even fully clothed, college-age young people were likely to be distracting for Pilgrim’s older offspring, who were taking noticeable detours to avoid the old false-fronted Hardware Store where the program was based. It was certainly true that the visiting students were curious in turn about this strange family, with its radical rejection of society and commitment to live by its ideals. Then again, Shaine recalled an incident years earlier when a group of college-age campers, hot and sweaty after a backpacking trip, had defied mosquitoes as well as social convention to shock a few locals on their triumphal march into town.

  It was no surprise that the father of daughte
rs named Jerusalem and Hosanna would not see eye to eye with a father who had named a daughter after the earth goddess Gaia. But Papa Pilgrim and Ben Shaine had developed a nodding acquaintance around town that first summer. One afternoon, Shaine had chatted with several Pilgrim sons by the footbridge, pointing out in his soft professorial manner that ice they could see now on the nearby glacier had started down Mount Blackburn at the time of the American Revolution. Papa gave Shaine a smiling wink, presumably for having shared a geological example within the range of biblical literalism, rather than pointing to summit ridges of limestone formed on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean two hundred million years ago.

  Shaine winced, then, upon reading Pilgrim’s angry letter to the newspaper about the footbridge and the national park. He sensed that an important emerging consensus about access and the future of McCarthy had encountered a formidable adversary.

  Shaine had been working on building that consensus since 1971, when he first came to the Wrangells to lead an undergraduate field research project for the University of California at Santa Cruz. A geography professor at Santa Cruz, Richard Cooley, was teaching a class at the time about Alaska, asking students whether hard-won environmental lessons from the lower forty-eight could be applied to the unspoiled new state. Every year, Cooley threw open the subject of Alaska’s future as if it were a window into the American soul. The university wanted to start a summer program, and McCarthy had seemed a perfect location. Oil development and Native land claims were starting to redraw the map of Alaska, and environmental groups were calling for a national park in the Wrangells. The icy landscape framed natural questions about wilderness and the role of human communities.

  Shaine was soon part of the community himself, staying on for winters with his wife, Marci, a former Santa Cruz student, learning homesteader skills, and building, with experienced helpers, a house of their own on the mountainside near Kennicott. When it came time for Congress to act on the Alaska conservation bill, Shaine flew to Washington, D.C., and helped the national environmental coalition draw lines on a map of the Wrangells. He also helped ensure that the bill’s provision for rural subsistence extended to the self-reliant settlers he had learned to admire around McCarthy.

  As much as he appreciated the local way of life, however, he could see that too many immigrants would overwhelm it. Park protection would limit their numbers. So would difficult access. That was why Pilgrim’s letter distressed him. The Wrangells were still primitive because getting there had never been easy. Even the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, that iron symbol of capitalist ambition, had declined to build a permanent bridge across the Copper River at Chitina, calculating it was cheaper to remove the rails before the violent ice breakup every spring and then rebuild a wooden trestle. In its day, there was no denying that the CR&NW—nicknamed “Can’t Run and Never Will” by doubters—was an impressive engineering achievement, climbing 196 miles from Cordova on the coast, much of the way atop wooden trestles. It cost a fortune, and it generated a much larger one. But when the copper was gone, the iron was torn out for scrap. Access served its purpose, and then it went away. The last load of rails, pulled from the approach to McCarthy, was awaiting shipment on a dock at Valdez in 1964 when the big earthquake struck, spilling the iron forever into the sea.

  The first summer Shaine came to the Wrangells, in 1971, he attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new state highway bridge at Chitina. The poured-concrete bridge promised altogether more permanent access to McCarthy. A wide paved driveway would quickly spell an end to the magic of the place, he felt. Within two years, a crude sixty-mile gravel road had been roughed in over the CR&NW rail bed, with a bridge extended across the Kennicott River into town. McCarthy residents did double takes as strange camper trucks rolled past their windows that first summer bearing booty from the Kennecott company ruins. The state engineers, however, had not taken into account an important quirk of local geology. Every summer, a lake ten miles up the Kennicott Glacier fills slowly with melt-water and then dumps all at once, flooding the banks and scouring everything in the river’s path. The highway bridge lasted only one season. Weakened, reduced to a footbridge for a few years, it eventually washed away.

  After that, road improvements were stalled by controversy. Shaine and his fellow environmentalists argued that a rough gravel approach, challenging but manageable, was appropriate for the prospective frontier park. The splintery forty-year-old hand-pulled tram car across the Kennicott River, pressed into service with the loss of the makeshift footbridge, was another useful impediment. It resembled other cable trams used by prospectors in the Wrangells backcountry, where the ice-cold silty rivers were notoriously unsafe to cross on foot. For several years, the old tram into McCarthy was a primitive affair, with no rope and pulley for hauling the car back and forth. You grabbed the steel cable and worked your way across. If you were unlucky enough to show up when the platform was on the wrong side of the river, you had a choice of waiting hours for someone to show up on the far shore, firing three shots in the air to attract attention, or hiking up to where the river poured from under the glacier and crossing atop the ice.

  When residents tired of wet boots, mangled fingers, and metal splinters from the badly sagging cable, they replaced the tram in 1983—with a better tram, one on which you could pull yourself and bigger loads of supplies on a loop of rope. “Kennicott Cross Purposes,” residents called themselves in merry self-deprecation when they formed a nonprofit to rebuild the tram with state funds and local labor. Each of them had built a cabin or two and had a different idea about how the new tram should be designed. But they all had come to see a hand-powered device as a shrewd solution for controlling the trickle of summer tourists drawn to the new national park. A tram was a perfect “self-administering admissions interview,” according to those who fretted what easy road access would bring. “If you could drive to McCarthy,” said Curtis Green’s brother, Loy, “it wouldn’t be here.”

  As Shaine looked back, he remembered those days just after the mail-day murders in 1983 as a time of unusual common purpose. The town had once been divided about creating a new national park in the Wrangells. The graffito SIERRA CLUB GO HOME, bulldozed in the gravel bars of the Chitistone River by an angry prospector, was an essential scenic flyover for VIP tours of all political persuasions, until the braided river washed it away. But the murders focused everyone in a common resolve to protect their community—from nut cases, pushy park bureaucrats, and kitschy tourism developers. McCarthy would remain a refuge. Now, however, dissension over access choices and park policies had started to tear at the town. Community meetings were becoming unpleasant. From the evidence of this angry letter, the arrival of the Pilgrims was going to make things worse.

  But living so long in the Wrangells had taught Shaine to take a longer view. His rusty beard was graying now, his daughters Gaia and Ardea were grown, and the classes at the Hardware Store had been taken over by a nonprofit institute. He was the only person left to have lived in the Pilgrims’ chosen valley himself, having spent several winters with Marci in abandoned cabins along McCarthy Creek, exploring and hiking to the valley’s nether reaches. He knew how hard life would be for the Pilgrims. Wild game was scarce, and the only agriculture he’d ever seen was a friend’s marijuana plants growing in five-gallon buckets on the roof of the old Green Butte bunkhouse. Access up the old mining road, never easy, was impossible after the ravaging 1980 floods.

  Shaine once wrote a novel, Alaska Dragon, about a fictionalized McCarthy, murders and all. His geography imagined a hidden valley like McCarthy Creek, populated by a hermit who listened to Mahler on cassettes, a geologist whose view of time was so deep that glaciers were mere ephemera, and a priest waiting to be carried off to heaven by angels. In fact, as in fiction, something about the Mother Lode valley always seemed to attract mystical adventurers and scammers whose plans didn’t pan out. He urged the Wrangell Mountains Center not to press their own access issue with the Pilgrims. Better than
anyone in McCarthy, Shaine knew the newcomers might not last. Few did.

  WHILE PEOPLE around McCarthy struggled to size up the Pilgrim Family that first summer, the Park Service was expanding its law enforcement file. As early as May 2002, Chief Ranger Hunter Sharp had written in a memo: “I believe that there is the potential for conflict with this group in the future.”

  In the two decades since passage of the Alaska conservation act, disputes with so-called inholders—people who own land within national park boundaries—had been handled by administrators and resource managers, not armed park rangers. This time, however, negotiation seemed impossible. The park’s superintendent resolved to make the Mother Lode owners’ lack of compliance a law enforcement issue.

  There was another incident in late July 2002. A Park Service helicopter flew over Bonanza Ridge to close down the last tunnel entrance to the Mother Lode mine. The Pilgrims knew they were coming. Only one flat ledge on the finback ridge could be used for helicopter landings. Park personnel found the ledge blocked by a canvas tent belonging to the Pilgrims. The mission had to be aborted.

  Pilgrim’s letter about the bollards in the Wrangell St. Elias News was added to the file. Investigators highlighted the phrase: “I DO NOT consider the park service as a person, but rather a ruthless, relentless and uncaring political system of deceptive and harmful motives.”

  On September 17, 2002, Hunter Sharp sent one last letter to Robert Hale, now sterner, saying they planned to proceed with a survey of his property line and insisting on his cooperation. The park had a pretty good idea of the corners, but cutting a survey line would forcefully make the point that parkland was not open to homesteading.