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 – 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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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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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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