BIG SUR, Calif.— I had been traveling for half a year. And here I was on the road again, this time for relaxation and reflection.

The journey to Big Sur was, in part, a celebration of the culmination of a six-month project searching for the soul of America. Finding Faith: A Journey through America’s Religious Landscape, was intended to show real people talking about real faith around America.

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Leaving Kivalina

KIVALINA, Alaska — Our journey above the Arctic Circle ended much as it began, on an icy runway pounded by wind and what felt like a dangerous kind of bone-deep cold.

My fiancé Tom and I stamped tingling feet and watched the sun rise as we waited for the small airplane to take us back to Fairbanks via Kotzebue. We had risen early and lugged our heavy gear on our shoulders from one end of the village to a dark warehouse next to the runway. Flight details were sketchy. There was no roster displayed anywhere, no homeland security checkpoint, no person to tell us we were in the right place and when to board. This time, there were no villagers on ATVs or snowmobiles to show us the way. There were only a couple bulldozers scraping drifting snow around the building.

We weren’t sure how long we would need to wait outside in weather with a windchill factor that felt well below zero. After 15 or 20 minutes exposed to the wind, I’d lost feeling in my feet and hands. My legs felt numb. I had wrapped my cameras and computer in sweaters to help keep them warm. We didn’t want to miss the plane, but there was also the creeping suspicion that we might freeze to death out here if we didn’t take shelter.

Five more minutes, I kept thinking.

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KIVALINA, Alaska – Lucy Swan Adams has been singing in the church choir for some 65 years. When she’s not singing, she sits near the front of the congregation and pays attention.

But on this day, she sat in the back of the empty church fielding questions about faith in the small Arctic village she has called home since she was 12.

“When we have faith, we have to look to God the creator instead of to worldly things,” said Adams, who grew up saying the Lord’s Prayer in Inupiaq and English, one of 12 siblings in a camp outside of Point Lay, Alaska. “If we want to have strong faith, we have to think of what we believe.”

She has walked here from next door because the church is less noisy than her house with her children and grandchildren, and the crackling of the CB radio emitting the voices of her neighbors. Here, she only contends with the cheerful thunk and acceleration of the heating system, the occasional interruption of someone walking in, wondering when the next service will be.

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Andrew Koenig

KIVALINA, Alaska — Long before the heart pounding fear of death began to keep him awake at night, Andrew Koenig was a lively hunter. His grandfather’s Eskimo name, the name given to him at birth, meant “point man.” He could travel 50 to 70 miles a day on the ocean in a boat the size of a pickup truck, in search of whales. He would head out across the ice and snow on his snowmobile, looking for animals whose meat his family could eat and whose fur he could trade for food and gas. He enjoyed flying in helicopters and airplanes.

And then, one day, sometime in his 40s, this fearless joy stopped. He and his wife, who’d had six kids together and their own whaling crew, divorced. Fear prevented him from going too far off shore. Fear came at him at all times, day and night.

“Everything seemed to fall down, you know, like the Book of Job in the Bible. My life is almost similar to that one,” said Andrew, sitting inside Kivalina Episcopal Church in the village he has lived in all his 53 years.

“What happened?” he asked. Somewhere along the way, he began, he said, to fear death.

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KIVALINA, Alaska — Sometimes God or fate has a way of turning life upside down, in a good way.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, if you’d asked the Rev. Anna Frank what her purpose in life was, she would have said to bear children, which she had done, happily.

Then a priest encouraged her to become ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church.

“God saw that I had gifts that I could use and taught me how to use those gifts,” she said, explaining how that encouragement, plus 10 years of being a deacon – a job she loved – gave way to eventual ordination as a native Episcopal priest in Alaska.

It is a job that has been at turns frustrating and rewarding.

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KIVALINA, Alaska — My original idea was to follow a missionary on spiritual rounds between villages in the interior of Alaska, preferably when it was warm, like in springtime.

The Rev. Anna Frank had other plans.

Specifically, she wanted to send me to the Arctic Coast. A village church she oversaw there as native missioner for the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska had a huge singing celebration during the Easter holidays.

So, I asked, just how cold is the Arctic Coast in late March? She chuckled.

For months, while driving around the country for Finding Faith, I had been seeking answers to questions like, Where are we going to stay? What will it be like? Is there electricity? Running water? Wireless? Cell phone service?

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KIVALINA, Alaska — I suspected we might be in trouble about 30 seconds before the woman behind me screamed.

The commuter plane we caught in the Arctic Coast village of Kotzebue was flying parallel with what looked like a short, plowed road flanked by snow drifts and surrounded by ice plains. High winds rocked the airplane from side to side. We were clearly about to run out of road. And I tried not to glance sideways at the long-red haired woman with freckles who was flying the plane.

Just as there seemed to be no way we were going to make the runway, I spotted a row of crosses to the right of the tiny landing strip. Oh great, these are the people that crash landed before us, I thought in a fit of eye-rolling.

Lately, I've found myself clinging to a steering wheel on icy roads, peering off the edge of a cliff or heading for a hard landing, repeating the words, have faith. And it occurs to me that Finding Faith, which is about chronicling other people’s faith stories, is also about my own journey of faith, my own efforts to try to understand some unseen force in the universe.

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ELLIOT HIGHWAY, Alaska — Melanie Titus blasted down the highway at the wheel of my rental car like a Native Alaskan born to drive on snow and ice – confident, fearless and totally in command.

“Does this thing have 4-wheel drive?” she asked, a couple miles into our trip from Minto to Fairbanks.

Melanie is the Rev. Bessie Titus’s niece. She works in the village, keeps a young Malamute chained behind her log cabin, heats mostly with wood, and lives much of the winter off the moose meat and salmon her uncle and stepdad hunt for her. She is also direct, forthright, and doesn’t mess around.

“I’m not a full-blown Christian,” she said.

She believes in God. She has faith. She believes in “the Word” as it is written in the Bible. But she sees men and women of what seems like greater faith all around her, people like her Aunt Bessie and some of the elders in the village.

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MINTO, Alaska — In a log cabin filled with photographs, plaques, trophies and other artifacts of a long and vibrant life in this native village, one picture stood out somehow.

It showed a lean young man dressed in a headband, a shirt and jacket and long dark hair, a pickup truck and a red building in the background. Dark glasses hid his expression, but he appeared to be looking at something or someone in the distance. The photo was slightly faded. Someone had carefully embroidered tiny beaded images of a moose, an eagle, a Canadian goose, a dog sled, and the village name into the leather frame.

Thirty years ago, Sarah Silas had been Minto’s nurse, called to the scene of a car accident.
The lives of seven young people from the village hung in the balance. A helicopter was on the way. She saw her son, the one in the picture, dead on the road.

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MINTO, Alaska – This is the tale of two churches. And one Alaskan village. And a road trip with an Episcopal priest.

I met the Rev. Bessie C. Titus at the Chena River Convention Center in Fairbanks. Bessie was sitting behind a laptop at a registration booth next to a table where beaded wallets, beaver skin hats and other native crafts were being sold.

Ten minutes into our conversation about faith, Bessie suggested I visit a village in Alaska's interior. I jumped at the opportunity.

The drive to Minto winds into the Alaskan Interior over mountain passes with blowing snow, icy pavement, steep hills, and semi-trucks hauling supplies to Prudoe Bay. Roads are few. There are Moose, bears and other animals.

I was traveling with a priest, I reassured myself. How bad could it be?

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