by Tom Kizzia
CHRISTIAN: But canst thou not now repent and turn?
MAN: God hath denied me Repentance. His Word gives me no encouragement to believe; yea, himself hath shut me up in this Iron Cage: Nor can all the men in the world let me out. O Eternity! Eternity! How shall I grapple with the Misery that I must meet with in Eternity!
Then came the children, from young to old, starting with Alaskaborn Bethlehem, who managed only a few words before crumpling into tears.
Unlike their mother, they spoke directly to their father. Much of what followed was plain description of life inside the family, which one of them called “an occult”—the anger and the drinking, the braided thong, the scriptural support for stealing, poaching game, and lying to authorities. Some carried written statements that Rachel Gernat read aloud. The way the older boys stumbled as they tried to read their own simple words was perversely eloquent. Each child carefully included a request that their father forgive them—for some past moment of pride or disobedience, or for holding bitterness in their hearts. Each apology was a reminder that this might be their final exchange, their moment to say good-bye.
“I remember I would try to get my sisters to do bad things so you’d like me as a special one,” said one of the little girls. When she was bad, he had forced her to do push-ups under the family table until she fell asleep. Another of the little girls said, “I remember how, on my birthday, you held me for a very long time on your lap. I have been trying to get that out of my mind for a very long time.”
Their father sat silently in his wheelchair at the defense table, scribbling furiously on a gray legal pad. He looked healthier than at earlier hearings.
The older children spoke of their embarrassment at being unable to read and do math, and at people knowing all about their father’s sins. Jerusalem, who had learned swiftly to read, described her childhood and the shock of going out in the world:
I would get on my knees at night and cry in my pillow and ask Jesus to show me the big miracle that was supposed to happen in my life. I thought I was going to be a new person and feel a natural desire to do what was right.… There are no words to describe what it means to think you are better than everyone else in the world—and to find out that you know nothing, can do nothing, and aren’t appreciated for what you can do because no one lives like we lived anymore. Plus, all the bad character that we learned from our primary examples is character that has had to be changed.… It has been very confusing to think back on memories and try to discern what really happened. So often a story would be carefully told as to how you would think it should be told, and we all told it over and over again until we believed that it really happened that way.… Please forgive me for not taking a stand because of the fear that gripped my heart. I believe we all would have taken a stand earlier, but we were all under your spell, just like a small mouse is trapped by the glaring eyes and swaying head of a poisonous snake.
Her older brothers told about the years of beatings and the whipping barrel. They expressed terrible remorse over their own ignorance and fear. They were astonished now at the confusion that had held them outside the door of the wanigan listening to their sister’s screams. Joshua grimaced and lost control trying to apologize—“I don’t know what possessed me. I beat my chest and weep,” he cried, his voice rising an octave as his family in the gallery burst into loud sobs.
Finally it was Elishaba’s turn.
The cowgirl seemed transformed by two and a half years away from Hillbilly Heaven. She wore a long pink patterned dress with maroon sleeves and a white lace collar, her dark hair pinned neatly back. Even some of her Texas twang had fallen away. Reading from a statement, and looking up periodically to elaborate, she addressed her father directly.
I have tried so many times to tell you about the deepest concerns in my heart, about the things done in secret. Things that I felt were wrong. Things that you insisted were right before God.… My eyes have been opened just like Eve in the garden when she bit into the apple and her eyes were opened to her nakedness. When my eyes were opened to the truth of my relationship with you, I found myself naked and unclean before God and before man. As you knew it would, this truth devastated me.… You took for yourself the very things that I held so dear. You knew that I wanted so badly to be pure and godly and to make it to heaven. In fact, you even encouraged that spirit in me and then turned around and used my desire to be right before God to get your own way with me.… I was just a little girl who wanted to please her papa.
Elishaba spoke of growing up in the mountains, of the punishments and the false picture their family presented to the world.
All your life I’ve watched you twist the truth of things to always make yourself be the one in the right. If you could manage to shift the blame on someone else you would feel you had won a great victory. Woe it be to the one who ever accused you of anything—they would be sure that you would turn the table around and they would be the one who would look guilty in the end.
You carefully made up signs and visions which you used on me whenever I would show the least bit of resistance to your physical advances. You would remind me that God was the one that approved of our relationship, and yet to me, it often seemed like you would just make up the vision with the forethought of needing to use it later to get your own way. Of course I would never have dared to speak of my doubt openly because you said to question you would be the same as blaspheming the Holy Spirit of God, and that would be a sin that could never be forgiven.… There was no end to the ways you could think of to punish me for not meeting up to your physical demands. It seemed like you would do anything to find an excuse to beat me up. In my weakest state I would always end up giving in to the pressure to once again meet your sexual desires. You got a sick delight in looking at all the bruises you had put on me when I resisted you. You would boast of what you had done, as if there were some secret delight in being able to overcome my resistance. All this you did in the name of God and love.
Elishaba paused more frequently now to draw fresh tissues. She talked about what happened in the wanigan, describing the beating though not the rape. Then she told of the violent nights alone with her father that followed the family’s showdown, her voice rising higher and tighter as she tried to recount his threat to tear her to pieces. She gasped with overflowing emotion and took a deep breath.
You taught me that going to the world, which meant if I left you, would be my damnation and that I would be lost forever. Even though I didn’t have all the right words and made a fool out of myself trying to tell you why it was wrong, I came to a place in the depths of my heart where it was clear to me that I needed to seek God over my father. God gives us all a natural conscience of right and wrong.… I didn’t know that there was such a thing as getting help or that the authorities would stand against what you were doing to me. I didn’t know who to trust. I just knew I had to get out of there.
Here she paused, and then turned, like her brothers and sisters before her, to say good-bye.
I believe right now you are unable to admit that you have done these things wrong, because you believe that to admit to it would be to send you directly to Hell.… Sadly, your admitting or not admitting to the wrong is not what makes it true. God and your whole family know that you did these things. Like Romans One says, you have turned the truth of God into a lie and as a result you remain in the chains of your own deception, unless you realize that it is not your perfection that gets you to heaven, but the mercy and grace of God.…
Father will you please forgive me for taking part in your adulterous sin. For fearing you over God. For my selfishness in not being willing to sacrifice my own life for the sake of what I desperately knew was right, deep in my heart.… For my bitterness that has lived in my heart against you for so long. I pray to God to deliver me from it. For I have learned that bitterness is the only way I can allow you to destroy the beautiful work that God has done in setting me free from the horrors of the past. Forgive me for my lack of trusting Go
d to hear my prayers, for I have cried hard unto him, and he did answer my cry.
THE NEXT morning, Robert Hale got his chance to speak.
This time he arrived with no Bible and asked for one. The judge said he had no Bible at hand, and neither did Richard Payne. The prosecutor leaned into the gallery to consult quietly with the family, then responded that no one had an extra Bible to lend.
Hale opened anyway with a prayer—“Lord reveal the truth, untie the knot that’s hidden so many things.” Then in a soft, mournful drawl he started to unspool one last time the long sorrowful odyssey of Papa Pilgrim, starting with his heroic father and the accidental death of his teenage bride. Soon he was blaming Rose for problems in a nostalgic, regretful tone. “I realized at some point I was probably the only one in the family who knew God.” His love for his wife had been greatly quenched, he conceded, because of all the sins she’d allowed her children to commit. He paused and wept at the memory. He’d never given anything but mild corrections, and only out of fatherly love. “I can hardly believe the lips of my children, using words like ‘beat unmercifully,’ ” he said. No one ever complained of harsh conditions back in New Mexico. Reading and writing had been his wife’s responsibility—“It’s like there’s this whole thing of blame everything on Papa,” he said. The only brainwashing he could see had come from Buckingham, who had coveted his family from the start. He felt really sorry for Jim Buckingham, for he would reap what he had sown.
After more than two hours, Judge Hopwood interrupted to say he needed to finish up.
Hale began grabbing at ideas with the wide eyes of a drowning man. He warned his children they risked hell for the sin of bearing false witness. “My biggest concern is their salvation. They’re not going to be able to stand before my Lord Jesus.” He quoted 1 Corinthians and questioned how a court of unbelievers could ever be a proper forum for admitting sin. He sang a verse of a sorrowful family song about lost lambs coming home. He said his children’s accusations of abuse would get him killed in the jail’s open population—“My family actually signed my death warrant yesterday.” He said Elishaba had committed perjury before the grand jury and lied before God about the correction he gave her in the wanigan. He hadn’t meant to slap her, he just pushed her away because the woodstove door was hanging open to the flame and “sometimes you hit the wrong place on an eye and the whole face goes black.” He said Scripture foretold how Christians would be imprisoned in the last days, their very families turning against them. “Everyone who wants to live in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. There’s just no other way about it. That’s what carrying the cross is, and that’s where I am now.”
The stove door was hanging open again and we stared in at the consuming furnace of Papa Pilgrim’s mind. Hopwood said he had just a few minutes remaining.
It was like the executioner had been summoned. Papa Pilgrim’s murmur faltered at last. In a whimper, he begged his daughter to withdraw her testimony. “In God’s eyes, we’re like a sheep in a meadow. Now and then a man goes astray, and open arms should await his return. I realized yesterday that there probably wouldn’t be a response, and I guess that breaks my heart, because they’re in real danger of eternal judgment.”
And with that, he spoke faintly, as we watched him sinking for the last time. “I don’t intend to ever see them again. I know this is the last time I’ll be with them. And they know that too. Lord Jesus, thank you for being here today. Each tear has its reward. In Jesus’s name.”
THE FAMILY lingered afterward in the hall outside the courtroom. They were relieved—even elated—by Judge Hopwood’s words at the end. They had never been in the presence of an authority higher than their father. Elishaba was still at the point of tears. “Just hearing what the judge said, he saw right through to the truth of it all,” she said.
Judge Hopwood had called Robert Hale a liar. He praised the courage and eloquence of the children. It was a classic case of the worst kind of domestic violence, he said—the way it starts, the way it escalates, the damage it causes. And yet, he said, this story had a strange twist. Robert Hale had grown up in a good home with a good father, and fled to a lifestyle that rejected society’s values and lived off the labor of others. Whereas his children, growing up with a terrible father, were gentle, and industrious, and believed in truth and now in the rule of law. “It would not have surprised me if some of the family had opted out, like their dad did, a long time ago,” the judge said.
In my notebook I had circled in red a comment along the same lines that morning from Robert Hale himself: “If my children look good, walk good, talk good, are good, well then how did they get to be good, if their father is so evil? Can a thorn bush bear oranges?” I had scribbled a big question mark next to the quote.
As I talked in the hallway with the children, Country Rose sought me out. Under her arm was an old book. It was the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress from the homestead, the storybook whose line drawings the children used to stare at for hours. She held the pages out to me, open to the illustration of the Man in the Iron Cage. Emaciated, straggle-bearded, eyes full of terror as he gazed through the iron bars at eternity: It was an exact drawing of Papa Pilgrim.
EPILOGUE: PEACEFUL HARBOR
SOMEWHERE ALONG the way, the government dropped its civil case against the Pilgrims.
The decision may have been made as early as 2004, when the town of McCarthy was concluding they had a madman in their midst and the federal courts were ruling against the Pilgrims’ legal initiatives. More likely, no final decision was ever made—only a decision to put off a decision until a future meeting that was never convened.
The paper trail in the Department of the Interior files peters out after undated handwritten notes of a meeting at which the “egregious action by Pilgrims” was weighed against the negatives of appearing to force park inholders off their land. At that point, the Park Service had a preliminary estimate for damages to park resources of $561,621, of which more than half would have gone to repay the cost of sending all those experts up the valley to do the damage assessment work. Much of what the Pilgrims had done in McCarthy Creek—scavenging lumber from historic mine buildings in the park, scraping new switchbacks up the rockslides to the Mother Lode—could not be undone. As for the bulldozed road that had started everything, biologists recommended restoration through natural erosion and revegetation, a process that had already commenced at no cost to the taxpayer.
IN McCARTHY these days, Rick Kenyon still preaches in church once a week and publishes the Wrangell St. Elias News six times a year.
The newspaper’s tone seems mellower, even chastened. Its lionizing of the Pilgrims as “a caring, loving family,” along with its strident advocacy for self-evident truths later rejected by the courts, had served to escalate dangerous tensions and obscure the real troubles at the Mother Lode. Rick Kenyon notes, in his defense, that he personally fell out with the quarrelsome old Calvinist a whole year before the criminal activity was revealed. He accounts for the mellower tone by saying the next crop of park administrators were more reasonable, having finally adopted a new inholder policy that lays out clear steps for securing legal access while declaring rural residents to be “part of the essential fabric” of Alaska’s national parks.
The editor/pastor’s chastened tone may also have to do with a painful schism at the McCarthy-Kennicott Community Church—over personalities as much as doctrines, like most such religious cataclysms—that resulted in the loss of several of his tiny congregation’s most active families. Among the departing churchgoers were Laurie and Keith Rowland. McCarthy Annie’s name no longer appears in the paper, but she and her handy husband remain active in the valley and helpful on many community projects, exerting dominion over the planet by building wide boulevards of crushed rock on the west side of the Kennicott River.
The falling-out over the church, and subsequent disputes between Kenyons and Rowlands over neighborhood roads, has perhaps muted the pleasure that the Wrangell St. El
ias News might otherwise have taken in reporting Keith Rowland’s success in erecting a private vehicle bridge across the river, half a mile downstream of the footbridge, which is now open to any household willing to pay three hundred dollars for an annual pass. After decades of debate, it is possible at last to drive all the way into McCarthy. As predicted, easier access has brought growth and change. But the toll bridge has proved to be an elegant and widely supported private-enterprise solution to the dilemma of getting lumber and groceries into the ghost town and keeping most tourist cars out—one that government could never have managed.
(The Rowlands, alone among the people of McCarthy, would not speak to me for this book, saying they considered my Pilgrim stories for the Anchorage Daily News too sympathetic toward the Park Service. I was sorry not to be able to hear McCarthy Annie’s retrospective views of her neighbors, but as a McCarthy property owner I did get a warm feeling of inclusion to find myself at last on nonspeaking terms with someone in the community.)
Motorized access up the McCarthy Creek valley remains closed, but this is not the problem of the Hale-Sunstar family any longer. In 2008, the family sold the rest of their Mother Lode holdings to Alaska Land Rights Coalition founder Ray Kreig. The Park Service’s most outspoken critic in Alaska now owns all the Pilgrim Family land in Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. He says he might want to drive there someday.
“This isn’t over yet,” Kreig says.
THE TOWN bustles with new energy in summer these days, with more building, more visitor services, and a slow increase in travel out the McCarthy Road. What was once a rough and disorienting journey into the Alaska bush has been subtly domesticated by new national park road signs. Ben Shaine, attuned as ever to paradoxes of history and perceptions of landscape, sometimes wonders if passage of the Alaska conservation act in 1980, which protected more wilderness than any law in American history, also eliminated more true wilderness in that same single stroke, by putting it all under a watchful government eye.
