by Tom Kizzia
Back in McCarthy, the newlyweds had to cross a neighbor’s yard to reach their cabin. The meadow out their front window was blocked by the dreary dark brown wanigan, along with old vehicles and oil drums, stacks of storm windows, pallets, batteries, saddles, and other tack hung in a shed built of tree poles.
Tamara had planted a little garden, and one morning she found the Pilgrims’ goats finishing off the tender seedlings. Stephens told Joseph that if he saw the goats in his garden again he was going to shoot them. This was no longer park business, in his view. This was his hearth and bride. He checked with a state trooper acquaintance as to whether Alaska’s law regarding defense of life and property, generally invoked when grizzly bears were shot out of season, could be applied to domestic goats. The trooper recommended trying anti-bear pepper spray first.
Harper was surprised a few days later when Elishaba came over with new seedlings to help replant the garden. It felt like she was trying to clean up the mess. When she asked them to say nothing to her papa about her visit, he felt a flicker of sympathy. He felt it again a few days later, as he was threading his way through the junk piles in the Pilgrims’ camp—it was, after all, his legal access—and Joseph, following behind, picked up a hammer. When Harper turned around and stopped him with a practiced lawman’s stare, Joseph set the hammer down and blushed.
Harper did some more legal research. This part of town looked like vacant woods. The old schoolhouse and other nearby buildings had burned or collapsed, the poplars and cottonwoods grown back. But all of it was platted town lots, and Harper found that Wigger never owned land there. The wanigan had been left on an overgrown lot owned by an elderly lady in Anchorage, an original McCarthy kid whose father had been the local U.S. commissioner. Wigger apparently assured the Pilgrims they could claim the land by adverse possession since his little trailer cabin had sat there for so long. This legal advice proved unreliable. The owner, contacted by Harper, said she wanted the Pilgrims off her land.
The Pilgrims checked the survey corners themselves and moved everything into the platted road right-of-way. Unable to haul the material to Hillbilly Heaven because of the park blockade, they had now used it to block Harper’s legal access completely. Harper felt like he had been drawn into some eye-for-an-eye battle out of the Old Testament.
On the night they finished making their piles, the family lined up at the Harpers’ property line and sang “Mind Your Own Business.” They hung up blue tarps and surplus parachutes in the poplars to screen the view of their wanigan. Then they moved a twenty-kilowatt generator with no muffler to the edge of the property and ran it all night so that Stephens and Tamara had to sleep with ear plugs.
IN AUGUST 2003, the team of government specialists assembled at the park’s May Creek outpost across the Nizina from town.
The post consisted of a remote cabin purchased by the park, and wall tents set in military fashion around a mowed-grass parade ground. It was used by firefighters and would provide a helicopter base camp for the next two weeks. The assessment team had been whittled to nineteen, including three cultural resource specialists, a plant ecologist, and rangers to keep the Pilgrims outside the work perimeter. Stephens Harper would carry a video camera, to record the work and any confrontation that might develop at Hillbilly Heaven.
In Rick Kenyon’s newspaper, McCarthy Annie described what came next. First she set the garden-like scene into which the government machinery came crashing: a little old-fashioned cabin, a curl of woodsmoke, a “chuckling stream” and “wildflowers on the breeze.” Sounds of singing, children playing, doing chores, the faithful old dog. Amid forbidding peaks, this little piece of paradise that Country Rose called home.
She tried not to let her mind dwell on how vulnerable she was—a woman alone on the mountain, with half a dozen of her youngest children to care for.
Far from help. Far from Pilgrim and her sturdy, capable older sons.
With a suddenness that made her head jerk up, the heavy wooden door flew open. An excited voice called out, “Mama! The helicopter! I can hear it coming! Hurry, come on!”
Alarmed, Country Rose left her bread bowl and scooted out the door.
The rangers were “warlike apparitions.” Little Psalms offered them a plate of cookies, “as trusting eyes the hue of faded bluebells searched earnestly for approval.” She was pushed roughly away, the paper’s correspondent wrote.
The Park Service saw things differently. The Pilgrims shoved up against the single ranger guard, trying to provoke something. One afternoon, Marshall Neeck was fending off the three oldest boys on the trail. At a signal they split, running in several directions into the trees toward the assessment team. Neeck retreated to join the others and they circled up, not sure what the Pilgrims, crashing unseen in the woods, would do next. They called in the helicopter and retreated for the day.
Stephens Harper was able to reach Tamara on the phone each night after they flew back to May Creek. She reported that the Pilgrims still in town had put up protest signs in front of the blue tarps. The generator with no muffler was running again. They played loud recordings of old-time spirituals and pointed the headlights of two trucks right at Tamara’s cabin. It sounded to Harper like the Branch Davidian siege, except with the religious crazies on the outside.
On the night she finally moved out, she looked out the window and saw teenaged Moses in a nearby tree, watching her. Hanging from a limb below was the butchered and skinned carcass of one of the Pilgrims’ goats.
Bible lessons in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (photo credit 10.1)
THE OLDER Pilgrim children were raised to believe they shared a special destiny. The younger siblings grew up in the hopeful belief that their older brothers and sisters knew what they were doing.
In the mountains of New Mexico, they had access to only two books. One was the Bible, of course—the King James Version, preferably, but other translations as well, some of them underlined and carefully annotated in Papa’s small fine print. The other was a book with pictures, written by a Puritan preacher who lived in England in the seventeenth century.
The Pilgrim’s Progress is considered one of the great books of the Western canon, never out of print since it was published in 1678. To modern scholars, it is a landmark in the development of English fiction and allegory, an imaginative historical and religious novelty, a window into the literal-minded piety and harsh Calvinist theology of another age. For many modern evangelicals, it remains a relevant testament to faith and a warning against errancy. In the immanent landscape of the Sangre de Cristos, however, it was much more. The centuries-old story was encyclopedia and atlas, the textbook describing how the world worked, the treatise explaining why few ever make it all the way down the perilous path to salvation and a father’s love.
The family took comfort from John Bunyan’s classic. On special occasions, Papa read parts aloud. The children studied the geography of the straight and narrow path to the Celestial City as closely as the canyon road leading up the Staircase to home. They, too, skirted the quicksands and the By-Path Meadow, refreshed themselves in the River of the Water of Life. They had built their own Wicket Gate, like the one the hero Christian passes through—in their case, poles of aspen sunk in concrete on the Jeep road to the Rainbow Cross. They struggled as Christian did to leave earthly burdens of sin behind, to match his single-minded quest. To be sure, the adventure stories of Christian’s battles with fiends and giants had unusual appeal for children growing up without exposure to television, movies, or other books. Yet these were inescapably moral battles, as were the hero’s encounters with dissemblers and tempters such as Obstinate, Timorous, and Mr. Ready-to-halt. The lessons shone with clairvoyant Truth once explained in consuming detail by their learned father, for whom sleepy little Mora posed worldly dangers comparable to the seductions of the market town known as Vanity Fair.
The children also learned stories from the Bible, of course. But they did not know these as well as other devout families might ima
gine. Papa’s lessons tended to bring together essential passages from separate chapters and books, making connections he alone had discovered in his long hours of study, a distillation process that sometimes deprived the original stories of their narrative power, not to mention their moral context.
Family readings of The Pilgrim’s Progress were special occasions. When a black thunderstorm would force them into the cabin, they would make popcorn and gather around. Papa’s renditions were expressive and dramatic, and it was agony for any child to be excluded as punishment. Papa liked to toy with his captive audience, cutting off Bunyan’s tale at some cliff-hanging moment. It was tantalizing the way, in later years, he refused to read the end, never sharing the part where Christian finally reaches the Celestial City, never dispelling for the younger children that cloud of gloomy Puritan uncertainty.
The saved do not let doubt or temptation or worldly wickedness lure them from the path—that much of the book’s message was clear. If the children strayed, Papa was near to guide them back with a loving correction. This was the duty of a father. Sometimes the correction involved an explanation or a lecture. Sometimes it was the quick whip of a switch across the palm, followed by a reading from Scripture. These corrections could be private or they could go on for hours with the family assembled to witness. If it grew late and one of the younger children nodded off, a small slap brought her back.
When someone committed a forbidden sin such as lying or disobeying, the discipline was commensurate. Some corrections were blunt and direct. He used a braided leather thong, and sometimes just his fists. All the children had known bruises and welts, bloody noses, and swollen lips inflicted in front of the others. There had been a few broken bones. “Correction is grievous to him that forsaketh the way,” as Proverbs says. Papa was trained as a boxer, and his children could be grateful for his mercy in not inflicting the kind of pain he was capable of. This is what they learned to pray for, what Papa called his “mercy”—the moments when God’s angry heart would be moved to forgiveness.
One of the worst corrections was to be put on silence. It was like being excommunicated. The offender could not be spoken to. A child might get no food except bread and water, or be made to eat outside the New Mexico cabin. He would sit out in the rain or snow. Or sleep outdoors for seven nights. Mama had to take crying babies away, and the older children learned to sit silently while he read the Bible to himself.
Papa corrected Mama all the time. It was an ongoing project, he explained, to save her from going to hell. In the early years, when she had been happy as an old-fashioned frontier mom, leaving spiritual matters to her husband seemed an easy concession. But it turned out that she had conceded everything. Any activity might figure into their relation with the Lord. It was a rare day that had no major drama, no signs and wonders and revelations from on high.
Living in rural New Mexico had actually been Mama’s idea. When they found the land owned by Jack Nicholson, it had not really been Papa’s eloquence that secured their position as caretakers, but rather a call from Mama to Beverly Hills, where her mother’s movie-producer husband was a friend of the movie actor’s agent. But now Rose had become an unhappy servant. She had to prepare Papa special meals, with fresh food the others never tasted. She had to remember to call him “Lord,” for it was through the father that God spoke to a family. As their eldest daughter grew into her teens and Papa turned more to her for help and company, he had to devote even more time to guiding Mama away from jealousy and rebellion.
Jerusalem was the second daughter, born fourteen years after her sister. One of her earliest memories was a day when the children were kicked out of the New Mexico cabin. She could not bear the screams so she peeked in the kitchen window and saw her mother getting beaten with a broomstick. This was horrible to behold, but Papa explained and explained until they all understood how the correction would help Mama get her heart right with God. If Mama persisted in challenging him, he would hold her hair and scream in her face until she was in tears. Only when Mama got to shaking hard and couldn’t stop, like she was having some kind of nervous breakdown, did Papa back off.
In this world, God’s law was more important than man’s. The boys learned to butcher a deer and sweep the spot clean in fifteen minutes so no trace of blood was visible. In fact, it’s pretty much against man’s law to be a true Christian family, Papa said, because so many things in the Bible are illegal. The state uses the word “abuse,” but doesn’t Proverbs say that a father who spares the rod hates his child? If you brought some matter before the judgment of a state court instead of God’s eternal judgment, the choice to do so was already your defeat. The state would entice children to speak against their own parents and then send them off to jails and foster homes. It would turn them all from righteousness and drive them from the land.
AT CHRISTMAS they feasted in the Sangre de Cristos and enacted their own manger scenes in the snow, with sheep and cows and every other year a new babe to wrap in swaddling clothes. As Hosanna, Job, and Noah were born and Papa got deeper into his preparations for the tribulation, he began to use the name “Elishaba” for Elizabeth, his oldest daughter. It was the original Hebrew version of her name from Exodus, he said, the name of the loyal wife of Aaron, the brother of Moses. He called her “Elishaba” when he put her on a pedestal as an example to her mother. When he interrogated her in anger, however, he went back to “Elizabeth” and the old name jabbed her like a stick.
Elishaba did not grow up resenting her father’s discipline or the absence of books. She understood his rule was hard, but so was the secret sin in her heart. The corrections from her father were her best hope. Every time she came out of a discipline, she would work harder to do right and please him. It made her angry when her siblings did not do what their father wanted. As she grew older, sometimes the intensity of this desire to please made her confused and forgetful. She stumbled and broke things and the punishments got worse. Still she did not question them.
What did seem hard and unfair was being so cut off from other families. Her father’s attitude toward the world surely did not need to be so harsh. At times the natural longings of adolescence edged her dangerously toward rebellion. She wanted a friend. She hated that the world called her family weird. Why would God say in the Bible that they couldn’t have people in their house? On the rare occasion a visitor came up the mountain, the girls hid in the cabin and the older brothers stood beside Papa to bar the door. When they drove to town the girls had to duck down in back, so no one would see them and try to snatch them away.
Elishaba later recalled how it hurt to hear false rumors being spread. “I began to feel like a wild animal, prone to run every time I saw a person.… It made me draw back from people, and try to find some sort of happiness in being the rugged, tuff, and hard working, dirty little mountain girl I was.”
She found comfort in the high country. By the time Elishaba was thirteen, she was being sent off with a black powder rifle to guard the sheep against wild beasts.
Rising up early in the morning when it was my turn, I would get my leather shepherd bag which held my Bible, refried beans wrapped in a tortilla, and fire starting kit. Strapping it over one shoulder, with my staff in the other hand and a brother in tow, we would head for the sheepfold. The sheep were very happy to see me, especially my own little lamb (or “baabaa” as we called the ones that were our special lambs). “Baaa come on baby let’s go,” I said. After feeding the little lamb, I opened the sheepfold, raising my staff to count the sheep as they rushed out to find grass and kicking their little hoofs. Shepherding became more and more of a challenge as we took turns taking the sheep out on the mountains and down in the valleys to find them fresh green grass to graze. We could take them just about anywhere on the neighboring properties because they could easily crawl under the bob-wire fences. I felt a bit scared when I took the sheep down in the valleys on to other people’s properties not knowing what might happen. Anytime I heard the sound of a vehicle I beg
an to rush the sheep into the deep woods to hide, as I was afraid they would see us. It was hard to get those sheep to move as fast as I wanted them to, so at times in frustration and fear I would yell at my brothers telling them to hurry, “Papa is going to be mad if we don’t hide these sheep now, please help me or I’m going to tell Papa on you!”
The children were trained to report misbehavior and to listen for prideful or rebellious words. Failure to report others was grounds for punishment. Timely information could win their papa’s smiles. He seemed to go out of his way to make the children jealous of one another. Elishaba’s brothers and sisters came to resent her bossiness. They offered no support when Papa was angry and his impatience rained down on her. Like the time she helped him run an old-timer’s cattle across the property and up into the high summer meadows. Riding bareback, she could hardly hold on as the family’s red mare leaped through thickets of fallen trees to nip at strays. Her father was mad about how stubborn the stupid cows were and took it out on her. The day was long and when they finally made it to the top and her father turned to look at his little girl—bloody with cuts, clothes torn, matted hair and hungry and face streaked with tears—she saw that he was sorry. On occasions like these he would admit he was wrong, ask forgiveness, shed tears of remorse. The Bible teaches to forgive so the children learned to reach out and hope the harshness would cease. It was not safe to speak among themselves about their desire for his mercy, however.
They were attuned to nature but not to all of nature’s secrets. Human sexual relations, for instance, were an unfathomed wilderness—the Impassable Mountains from the old maps of the Santa Fe Trail. As the children began moving into puberty, the family continued to sleep all together in two large beds. Then in 1994, when Papa returned from a trip with Elishaba and Jerusalem to visit his twin brother in Texas, seventeen-year-old Joseph confided that some of the siblings had been experimenting on their own bodies and with one another in the big bed they all shared.
