Just Another Jim's

Alaska Journal

Ch. 10: Harold and Maude

Posted November 3, 2006 by James E. Nelson

I purchased a small trailer to pull behind my pickup. Since it was a small truck, I couldn’t pull that much weight. But the trailer was originally built to haul a small but very heavy piece of mining equipment. It had therefore originally required a huge tow ball—bigger than would fit on my pickup (with it’s 3/4" hole). I mentioned my dilemma to Harold and he suggested I buy the big ball (with the 1” bolt) and he would machine down the bolt to the correct size for my pickup. Harold wasn’t a trained machinist, but he had an unbelievable array of machinist’s tools. He wasn’t a diesel mechanic nor a contractor either, but he probably knew more about fixing cars and trucks and building houses than anyone in town.

He looked to be in his sixties but he was actually in his early 80s. He and Maude (who had managed to stay similarly young) came to Alaska shortly after World War II and settled in Delta Junction before there was a junction, and the one “road” that did exist was not much more than a mud trail. They were completely self-sufficient pioneers who never talked about their early days in Alaska because it would sound like bragging. And Harold and Maude didn’t brag.

I bought the trailer ball and took it over to Harold’s. I brought Chris along because he had never seen machine work done and I thought he might enjoy that. At one point Harold went upstairs, leaving Chris and I alone in the basement. As soon as he left Chris grabbed my arm and pointed excitedly, “There’s food over there that’s older than I am!”

“What do you mean?” I responded. It was, after all, an odd thing to say.

“Come here. I’ll show you!”

Sure enough, there were cans of Campbell’s soups and green beans that had expired back in the 70s and early 80s.

Chris, pushed an old gallon can of oil aside . . .

Lot’s of old food. Dusty, pushed back on the shelf, and seemingly forgotten.

I suddenly saw Harold and Maude’s house in a whole new way. Looking around the basement, and later upstairs, over coffee and cookies, it occurred to me that probably nearly everything in the house was older than Chris. Much of it may have been older than me! One wouldn’t have thought of it though (other than the 50s styled furniture) because it was all immaculately clean and in excellent shape. Harold and Maude wasted nothing and took exceedingly good care of everything they had.

Few people in Delta were more careful than Harold and Maude. Whenever they went anywhere by car they had extra supplies, extra fuel, and everything one might need in an emergency. More than once I came across someone broken down on the road with Harold pulled up behind them. Invariably he was able to fix the problem with supplies he had on hand in his trunk.

In my mind no one embodies the pioneer spirit better than Harold and Maude. Over time I began to pick up bits and pieces of stories from the early days. They sometimes didn’t make it to town (that would be Fairbanks, before there was a general store in Delta) for months at a time. If an emergency arose, chances were that the roadhouse up the road might have supplies to tide them over, but rumor had it that the roadhouse was more likely to run out of stuff than Harold and Maude.

But neither were rough cut. While true pioneers, they had manners and culture. Shortly after we moved to town I was invited over for coffee and cookies. The order of the morning was no different than what I might expect from some wealthy widowed socialite in Lincoln, Nebraska. The morning began with about ten or fifteen minutes of pleasantries, after which Maude went to the kitchen, put on the coffee, and began to set the table. We ate from her finest dishware. The cookies and tidbits were elegantly set on the serving table. The napkins, although slightly worn, were cloth and not paper. Following the cookies we retired to the living room where Maude warmed up our coffee and our conversation continued.

They were originally from California. Their own parents (or grandparents, I’m not sure) were among the pioneers to California. Continuing in that same spirit Harold and Maude made their way to interior Alaska where they could carve out a small niche of self-sufficiency, independence, and freedom. They remained independent to the core. They despised the Democrats and all their handouts. They decried the newer residents who moved to Delta on a shoestring and then didn’t know how to take care of themselves. They derided all the grand economic development schemes sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce aimed at turning Delta into a booming community through the use of government funds. Each individual was responsible to either make it or fail on their own in the view of this couple who had clearly made it and created a comfortable lifestyle along the way.

The “Alaska Pioneers” is a fraternal organization that has been in existence for years. I was never completely clear about the exact requirement for membership, but you had to be a long term Alaska resident. I first became acquainted with the Pioneers at a funeral service at the Presbyterian Church. The person who died was not a religious person, which is not uncommon in Alaska, and Harold asked me to officiate. I was glad to oblige.

The day before the funeral I was informed that Harold was the chaplain of the Alaska Pioneers and he would therefore have a part in the service. I assumed that Harold planned on doing a eulogy and prayer, and I was fine with that. As people began to gather for the funeral, it was clear that there was more involved than just a eulogy.

Presbyterians are fiercely protective of their worship services. (Or, I should say, that the Book of Order is fiercely protective of the worship service; not all ministers are of the same mind.) Worship services, whether Sunday worship, a wedding, or a funeral, are exclusively for the purpose of the glory of God and are complete toward that end in and of themselves. Following the logic of this principle, church boards and ministers are explicitly forbidden to combine other rites with worship services. The most common rites that fall into this category are military and fraternal (such as Masonic) rites. Strictly speaking no military nor fraternal rites are to be performed within the church building and grave side rites are not to be performed until after the Christian grave side committal rite is finished. (Of course, in reality many Presbyterian ministers ignore this injunction, although it is something I have tried to be faithful to throughout my ministry.)

Five minutes before the service all of the Alaska Pioneers filed in to the front two pews wearing their special symbolic garb (reminiscent of the Masons). When Harold stood to do his “little” part, it turned out it was a complete funeral service in and of itself, celebrating the independent spirit of the Pioneers and the glory of the Alaska wilderness which both gives and takes away all good gifts. A similar rite was performed at the grave side, as Harold solemnly assured those gathered that although this Pioneer was dead, his memory would live on as long as his fellow Pioneers maintained their rituals and his memories. (Any person trained in the most rudimentary elements of Christian theology would recognize the whole thing as vaguely pagan.)

Over time I discovered that the Alaska Pioneers had similar rituals for weddings (to be done in conjunction with the Justice of the Peace), and other significant life events. This organization made up mostly of old cusses and hermits provided rituals and forms for a vague spiritualism that permeated so many Alaskans (a spiritualism that I have earlier described as Carlism). Both Harold and Maude were key leaders in the Presbyterian Church. As I probed their thinking and beliefs in the weeks to come, it was clear that they saw no conflict between the specifically Christian spiritual values of the church and the vaguely naturalistic spiritual values championed by the Alaska Pioneers.

How this state of affairs came about makes perfect sense. The earliest Christian missionaries in Alaska worked among the native population. The gold panners, fur traders, and other white pioneers (being outsiders) were pretty much left to their own devices. (Congregations and Mission Committees aren’t interested in providing financial support to people who are called to be missionaries to the gold panners, after all! It’s sort of like being a physician specializing in diseases of the rich.) But, as sociologists have observed, humans are inherently ritualistic beings. And, as we observed when considering Carl, Alaska, with its remarkable grandeur, is a deeply spiritual place. Given the history of how Alaska was populated by white people with no church, an organization like the Pioneers was nearly inevitable.

Just as Carlism is an inevitable corrective to the sort of domesticated Christianity that most Americans practice, so the rituals of the Alaska Pioneers (and other fraternal organizations) offer a critique to the worship-as-mere-socializing that is so common in American churches. Of course neither Harold nor Maude saw any conflict of interest between their Pioneer rituals and Christian faith. For them the Pioneer group represents their pioneering spirit while the Presbyterian Church represents their heritage; and in a strange inversion of traditional values, the Pioneers provided them with their rituals while the Presbyterian Church offered friendship and a place of belonging.

As a pastor this sort of inversion, this secularizing of the church and making human creations sacred, caused me almost to despair for the church in Alaska. But if I would have succumbed to that despair I would have been no different than a previous generation of missionaries who ignored the white man’s needs in favor of the more glamorous ministry to the native population. It would have been the triumph of secular self-sufficiency that grew up largely because of benign neglect on the part of the Christian churches. And as self-sufficient as Harold and Maude were, they were not, in their deepest desires, secularists. They were part of the church because they believed, because at some level it stirred the truth that lurked within them. In short, they were good people trying to be faithful Christians to the best of their understanding, so I redoubled my efforts to be, in turn, a good pastor who served in the face of the challenges that this independent, rural community offered.

But, even though I tried to remain a faithful pastor, it was realities such as this that were at the root of my divided loyalties described in the previous chapter. The Lutherans had a sense of faith and Christian practice that was similar to my own while the Presbyterian expression of faith seemed watered down. Serving a number of different congregations and having passed through several widely varied Christian traditions (Fundamentalism, Evangelicalism, Liberal Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy), I have come to learn that it is dangerous to assume that an expression of faith different than one’s own is somehow less Christian or non-Christian. Each tradition has its weaknesses which are typically glaring to the outsider. Each tradition typically has some remarkable strengths and depth that are not so apparent. Harold and Maude illustrated this reality better than anyone else that I knew in Alaska. They were both Christians and Alaskans. Their Alaska-ness created in them a sort of Christianity that I found quite foreign. It would have been easy to merely be critical of its obvious weaknesses. The ongoing challenge for me, as their pastor, was to celebrate and build on their strengths.