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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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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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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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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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 — 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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