Just Another Jim's

Alaska Journal

Ch. 20: The Long Journey Home

Posted April 13, 2007 by James E. Nelson

I began looking for another church within months after I arrived in Delta Junction. Not long after we moved to town the final report of the Base Closing Commission was released and in a surprise move, Ft. Greeley was on the list for closure. Up until the final report Ft. Greeley had never been on the list. The only Alaska base on the list was Ft. Richardson in Anchorage. It was (and is) a command post, although it made more strategic sense to make the much colder Ft. Wainwright in Fairbanks the command post. But Ft. Richardson was home to the three finest golf courses in Alaska. In a complete surprise to the state, the government, and certainly everyone in Delta Junction, tiny Ft. Greeley was exchanged for Ft. Richardson in some back room deal to save the golf courses. The final report recommended moving Cold Regions Testing (located at Ft. Greeley because the temperature could stay below -30° for days at a time) to Yuma, AZ, where Desert Testing and Jungle Testing were currently headquartered, and listed Ft. Greeley for closure.

The base was truly the economic backbone of the Delta area. Pipeline people lived in Delta but pipeline money and jobs were concentrated in Fairbanks and Anchorage; living in Delta was a matter of convenience and lifestyle rather than necessity. Every other industry was marginal at best. It was recognized by everyone that without the base it was no longer economically feasible for us to remain in Delta. At least that was the public story. Everyone also knew that the base could not be fully shut down. It houses an inactive nuclear reactor. In a few thousand years that could be safely dismantled, but until then, the military would have a presence at Ft. Greeley.

The Presbyterian Church was not reliant on the base in the same manner as some of the other local congregations, so the impact would not be nearly as great, but the Presbyterians were barely keeping their head above water financially as it was. Bob, the retired former pastor, had the knack for making a buck here and there to make ends meet, so he was able to thrive for years with an on again, off again paycheck, but I didn’t have those sorts of skills. Without a regular salary I was sunk. Finding another church was obviously best decision for both me and the congregation.

I was an active member of the local base reuse committee until we moved to Sioux City. We considered a prison, and native college, a vo-tech school, and some other rather outrageous ideas. Each time we brought a proposal to the military they came up with a laundry list of reasons why the idea was not workable. In the end it was clear that in spite of orders from Congress to divest itself of most of the property, the army had no intention of letting go of the fort. A few years after we moved to Iowa, the base was fully operational again and home to Alaska’s Striker Force. The Striker vehicles are unnaturally huge and the new assignment was a boon to the interior construction industry because all the bridges for miles in every direction had to be rebuilt and roads had to be fortified in order to handle the weight of the vehicles.

In retrospect, if I could have held on for another year or so, things probably would have been fine. But the future was not nearly as clear then as the past is now.

For a minister, moving out of Alaska is hard. Because of the inordinate costs, much of the moving expense is taken care of by the Presbytery in Alaska when a minister moves out, but that’s in the fine print. When Pastor Nominating Committees see the cost of an airline ticket for a simple visit and begin to multiply that out, estimating what it will cost the congregation to hire a pastor from Alaska generally stops the negotiations in its tracks. The result was a very long search process which finally ended when Third Presbyterian Church in Sioux City, Iowa extended a call.

My father and brother flew to Fairbanks to help us pack and drive back to Iowa. Seeing Alaska again for the first time through their eyes was like a recapitulation of the Alaska experience I have tried to relate in these pages. For instance, nearly all the flights into Fairbanks arrive around midnight, so their first taste of Alaska was the all night dusk that is simply a part of summer in the land of the midnight sun. Even though it was 1:30 a.m. when we left Fairbanks, the road crew was busy with road work on the Richardson Highway. Working twenty four hours a day for three months a year is simply the way road work gets done in Alaska, but to Dad and T.K., it was kind of amazing.

Moving day itself was a typical late July day with temperatures in the 90s. Again, we had come to take that for granted, but temperatures that high led to some wide eyed wonder from the visitors. They never expected to work up that much of a sweat moving our belongings onto the truck.

The trip to Iowa was relatively uneventful. We left Chris at the border and didn’t discover he was missing for an hour or so. He didn’t seem too worried and had great confidence that eventually we would return to pick him up. The two trucks were broken into and we were robbed in Whitehorse, Yukon. The scenery was spectacular as we drove north to south through Canada. We didn’t have any problems with the vehicles until we got a rock in the windshield in a stretch of road construction just outside of Billings, Montana. When we arrived in Sioux City, someone was there at the house waiting for us to take us out to dinner. When we got back, both trailers were unloaded and pretty much all the heavy lifting was done.

In a sense, there was really nothing to say about the move. It was all quite ordinary. But at the same time, it took a long time for things to become ordinary again. Just as we knew we were going to move for two years before we actually moved, similarly, it took a year or so for everything to get to a state of normal once we arrived in Iowa.

We were minor celebrities because we had lived in Alaska. Chris said a day didn’t go by in band that his band teacher didn’t ask him something about Alaska. It was fun for a few days, but after that he grew weary of the unwelcome attention. His baseball team dubbed him “the Alaskan Assassin” after a particularly wicked hit deep into the outfield. All of us were asked to tell stories to let people know what it was like.

But even beyond those expected things, coming to Iowa from Alaska was every bit as strange as being in Alaska itself. I often thought of Rip Van Winkle during the first couple of years in Iowa. I read the newspaper every day while in Alaska and I also traveled to a number of denominational conferences, so it was not that I didn’t know what was going on and had to catch up. Life in Alaska is every bit as modern and connected as anywhere else, after all. But for three years I had lived with a very different set of values and out of those different values came a different set of expectations. I had learned to view life in a very different way and so in a sense, I was a foreigner with foreign values learning to function in modern America again.

Alaska encouraged a different sort of busy-ness. It was rarely frenetic; there was always time for a cup of coffee at the White Raven or a conversation leaning over the back of the pickup. (In this sense, it was like any rural congregation.) If the Sunday School curriculum didn’t arrive in time for the first day of class, there was no worry, the kids did something else. When that happened in Sioux City it was a small crisis complete with the necessary fault finding. If we had no business to attend to at a session meeting, Maude called around and we didn’t have it. Having no business to attend to happened frequently enough in Sioux City, but it never occurred to anyone to not have the meeting anyway—we could always create some sort of business. While the Alaska folks worried little about curriculum and meetings, I did have much more earthy matters to attend to; often they were urgent. I had to take a very drunk man who had severely burned his hands to dry out at the hospital in Fairbanks. It was outside the law enforcement job description so the police wouldn’t be bothered. He was drunk and would probably get disorderly, so the ambulance crew refused the job. Besides, that had always been the sort of the thing the Presbyterians took care of. Aside from the occasional emergency, my other urgent tasks involved food, shelter, and firewood—absolute necessities in the extreme Alaska winters.

There was a remarkable sense of substance to these tasks that gave concerns about curriculum and meeting agendas a sense of unreality and insignificance. But soon after arriving in Iowa I was caught up in this social activity, that Presbytery event, another meeting, and a regular stream of paper work and treating it like real ministry as I had for a decade prior to going to Alaska. I was back to business as usual as a Presbyterian pastor, with nothing but a memory of that odd three hiatus in Alaska where everything was the same and yet profoundly different.

I suppose I will never view pastoral ministry nor my pastoral tasks in quite the same manner again. I also suppose that as a pastor I will always be an outsider looking in. In Kansas I was Mr. Presbytery, one of the young turks that questioned procedures and got things done. In Lincoln my life revolved around the endless program of a program church. I attended meetings, greased squeaky wheels and slow cogs, soothed hurt egos, and in general did my part to keep the program going at the break neck pace we equated with ministry.

But I simply didn’t (and don’t) have the same gusto for all that stuff. I serve on committees where it’s expected or where I have expertise. I take part in community events and do what needs to be done, but things are different. I’m fast approaching middle age and some might argue that my change in values is simply a reflection of my maturity. But I suspect there’s a lot more to it than that. Alaska changed me. As a result, when I came “home,” the home I expected to find was no longer there.

On the west side of Sioux City on a high bluff overlooking the Missouri River is the Prospect Hill monument. It commemorates three Presbyterian missionaries, Messrs. Jackson, Cleveland, and Elliot, who were sent out from civilized Sioux City into the uncivilized west to teach Christianity. All the Presbyterians, and a great number of other Sioux Citians, gathered for a proper Presbyterian commissioning service on this bluff overlooking the west, to send them on their way. The Rev. Sheldon Jackson finally ended up in Alaska. Although the official history is full of glorious words about his ground breaking ministry (and a college in Juneau is even named after him), a close look at the minutes of Presbyteries where he had served, and personal correspondence between Jackson and various denominational leaders indicates that he was a trouble maker with few people skills and not well liked by the denomination. He couldn’t abide by the system and so the system sent him packing (turning his exile into a “missionary venture” in order to avoid uncomfortable questions). There was work to be done and Jackson caused no end of headaches to Presbyterians around him getting the work done in the way he saw fit. He eventually took his maverick style of ministry to Alaska where no one complained about his style and rather odd commitment to ministry. I suspect no one that far north even noticed he was a bit odd in personality and style.

I often went up to the Prospect Hill monument on a slow afternoon to simply sit and look out over the Missouri River into the mists of the west. I liked the view from the bluff and admired the three missionaries who were sent west from that spot. I am no Sheldon Jackson, nor will I ever be, but I suspect that some of his spirit rubbed off on me while I was in Alaska. Unlike Sheldon Jackson, I work within the system quite well, but since coming back to Iowa I have discovered that the system often rubs me the wrong way, and that new sensibility means that it has been a long journey home.

And so it is that my return to a normal ministry in a normal place such as Iowa was a lot like our arrival in Alaska. In the introduction to these memoirs I asked what Alaska was like. My response was, “It’s no different than any place else we lived. We watched cable television, shopped at K-Mart and the mall. Several people from Delta went to see Phantom of the Opera when it came through Anchorage. But at the same time, Alaska is a world apart.” And now that these memoirs have come to a close, I ask, what was it like to move from Delta to Sioux City? It was no different than any other move we made. Packing the truck was a hassle, and trying to do the final cleaning of a house while simultaneously moving can be frustrating. Getting settled into a new place is both exciting and frightening. But at the same time this move was different than every other move we’ve made. There was a sense of finality about moving away from Alaska. Since it was the adventure, moving to Iowa didn’t have the normal sense of adventure I had associated with previous moves. The simple fact is that being a pastor in a normal Presbyterian Church is a world apart from Alaska.