Just Another Jim's

Alaska Journal

Ch. 17: Karen

Posted March 2, 2007 by James E. Nelson

The old blues song says that some folks are “born for trouble.” I, on the other hand, suspect they bring it on themselves, no matter how good their intentions. At least this was the case with Karen. She had no realistic concept of her own limitations. Her effervescent optimism continually got her into trouble. It began with men. She wasn’t so much a “fixer”—assuming that she could correct their faults through the marriage process—it was rather her eternal optimism that caused her to dwell on the good points and remain largely oblivious to the bad points.

I first met her in a marriage counseling session. She had threatened to leave her husband, whom she had in tow, but she said she was having second thoughts because he seemed to have his drinking under control. The man she came in with smelled of beer and was clearly tipsy. I wondered who she was talking about; the man she saw and the one I saw seemed totally opposite. But that first encounter with Karen encapsulated her life. Her perceptions, her very existence, was slightly askew with the rest of reality, and as a result she bumped and crashed her way through reality.

Since the first meeting, her life with Rod had become dangerous and possibly life threatening to both her and her kids, so she finally decided to get a divorce. But she was worried about her living standard. She said she had a comfortable house now but after the divorce she was going to move into a rustic cabin. She was worried about adjusting to a more demanding, back-to-the-basics lifestyle. Her “comfortable house” was the first Alaska shack I had ever seen up close and been inside of. I was trying to imagine what a step down from this place could possibly be. It was a tar paper shack with a mish-mash of siding, weathered plywood, miscellaneous rusting sheet metal, and plastic sheeting serving as the exterior. The first floor was about five feet off the ground. I’m not sure why because there was no danger of flooding. Some of the support structure (it would be far too generous to call it a foundation) was covered but most of it was open and I could see that it had become a garbage dump of sorts. I could only imagine what sort of vermin inhabited the garbage. The entry way had a smelly sofa that was so dirty I couldn’t even tell what color it was supposed to be. The kitchen was equally dirty, with every sort of thing imaginable stacked precariously here and there.

Karen had never let me near the house prior to this (Now I knew why.), but she and the boys were moving some of their belongings out. She knew that Rod always carried a rifle and a pistol. He wasn’t supposed to be home for several hours and he wouldn’t be served the restraining order until the next morning. (Everyone involved—the judge, the troopers, the former pastor, Rod’s friends—figured there was a better chance of everyone staying alive if she and the boys were completely out of the house before he even found out Karen was divorcing him.) She figured there would be less chance of violence with the preacher around if Rod did happen to show up. As she and the boys collected their things and put them in her pickup I stood on the porch watching for Rod and wondered what sort of a new life she was getting herself and her boys into.

Karen, the boys, and I survived that evening without getting shot at. Although Rod squawked quite a bit over the next several weeks, Karen was able to get on with her new life with surprisingly little interference from him. That doesn’t mean everything went well.

Her new cabin was a very typical Alaskan cabin. It was a 24x16 log structure with no running water and a fireplace as the only heat source. The south facing window made the cabin bright and airy, but also drafty in cold weather. She took Rod’s generator and chain saw when she moved out of the other house. When the courts sorted the divorce out she had to give back the chain saw, which meant she had no way to cut fire wood. I brought a lot of wood to her house over the next several months so she and the boys could keep warm.

She also planted a garden, got several rabbits, some chickens, and goats. The moose devastated her garden before she ever got to eat of its bounty. The chickens survived but never laid any eggs. The rabbits died from lack of care. The goats—her one success—provided milk for the boys. When she told me she wanted to get a dog team, I enlisted all her acquaintances to talk her out of it. The last thing I needed on my pastor-as-social-worker plate was a team of malnourished, angry sled dogs.

The boys were constantly in trouble. Like so many other aspects of Karen’s life, she was enthralled with the idea of children but utterly clueless as to the actual responsibilities involved. Rod had visitation rights, but when he discovered he could no longer control Karen through the boys, he lost interest and eventually faded out of the picture entirely. This was good because the boys’ lives were completely chaotic with just their mother involved. It would have been a disaster if he had exercised his parental rights and added to the chaos.

Up to this point (aside from the rustic character of the cabin) this could be the hard-luck story of any number of people I had dealings with in communities where I had served as pastor. But it’s at this point that Karen’s story takes on a different character. She was hard-luck, but she was no welfare mom (although she may have received welfare—I never asked).

Somehow or another Karen not only survived, but thrived in a weird, hard-luck sort of way. She continued to ask for meat from the road-kill program, although it always had to be small amounts because she had no refrigeration. She also continued to ask for produce from the Fairbanks food co-op when available. But aside from that, I saw Karen less and less. I don’t know what she did to make ends meet, but somehow she managed to carve out a niche where she was comfortable and had figured out how to survive.

Most remarkable was the joy that regularly showed up on her face. She was completely in love with the romantic image of the self-sufficient frontier family, and she had managed to get about three quarters of the way there. It seemed not to matter that her life was a shambles and the three of them were living largely on the largess of others. With her optimistic outlook, she seemed to genuinely think that she had made it. She was an Alaskan pioneer!

And maybe she was.

One of the difficult things to figure out in Alaska is the role of community. In one sense, it simply does not exist. Alaska is the Lone Wolf State; it is rugged individualism to the point of anachronism. Most people simply want to be left alone. And yet, growing out of that is a very odd sense of interdependence. There is a difference, after all, between being a self-sufficient and being selfish. When someone needs help, help is almost always there in Delta Junction.

There were a handful of people that I was aware of that were truly cut off from everyone else in society, but there was, in truth, a smaller percentage of utterly isolated people in Alaska than in other places I have lived. Bill was by far the scariest guy in town. He was bi-polar and everyone was afraid of him. But even he had a girlfriend of sorts. There was the drug couple up on the Richardson Highway. I don’t know what sort of drugs they did, but they were barely connected with reality. Then there were a few more of those sorts out east of town. There was the gold miner that was so mean no one went near his house. When his wife got cancer I was asked by a friend of a friend to go see her. It was one of the two most frightening pastoral visits I have ever made.

But these people are societal misfits. They are either sick, completely controlled by their addictions, or so hateful that they have created their own little hell on earth long before they died. Everyone else around town, no matter how crazy or angry or socially backward, had some sort of connection to the community. And this included Karen. When something bad happened, the community net managed to catch them so that they could struggle on for another day.

Jesus told his followers that they should take care of the poor. It was not new with him, either. The assumption that the poor would always be with us was built into the Old Testament Law. Individuals were required to care for the poor in their midst, not through government social programs, but through informal and personal ways. But that requires being aware of your neighbors and their needs. This whole context of neighborliness actually existed in Alaska in a manner I have never seen anywhere else. That seems to flatly contradict the idea of the Lone Wolf society, and yet it was a reality that I saw quietly working itself out every week that I was in Alaska.

Rod was one of the truly scarey guys in town. As long as Karen was with him she had no social net because people were afraid of bodily harm if they got involved. But once Karen was away from Rod and out on her own people were freed to be neighborly. And they were.

Working with Karen I began to understand that I was an anachronism in the community in yet another way. As I observed in a previous chapter, nobody needed a preacher. The locals had that covered with their own odd and private spiritualities. I figured that out shortly after I arrived. That’s why I redefined my job to be something of a social worker. But the truth of the matter is that those folks didn’t need a social worker either, and as long as I tried to do that, I had no significant role. Instead I was a neighbor, and in that role I was no different than the thousand other people living within a few miles of me, except that the State Troopers called me if there was a dead moose and the Federal Government called me if there was a commodities shipment.

To be honest, I’ve never been particularly neighborly. I would rather be left alone and I pretty much left everyone else alone. I was able to fulfill my “office,” my official functions, but once I was off duty I became a bit of a social introvert. One would think that I would therefore fit right into Alaskan life. But in truth, I didn’t. I didn’t understand the net that connected everyone together, the neighborhood and the neighborliness, the fact that mean people would stop being mean for a few moments if someone was truly in need and scared people would step outside their shell if someone was hurting. Karen understood that. As a result, even though she was born for trouble, always in over her head, and forever in some sort of a bind, she got by just fine.