Wisdom and Grace: North to Alaska

When you read this, Rod and I won’t be around. Lord willing, we’ll be somewhere in the middle of Alaska. I had hoped that we could make our trip as soon as I retired. That would have been 2018. I had dreamed that shortly after my retirement from Northern Montana Health Care, we would get in the pickup and head north.

As things happen, something better came along … and her name is Janessa Renee Jorgenson. She is the much-anticipated and loved daughter of our daughter Beth and her husband Jeff. She arrived six weeks early and spent six weeks in the NIC unit in Great Falls. Timing just wasn’t right … and yet it was.

The more we thought and planned on going, we realized that it had been 30 years since we made our last journey to Alaska in 1989. But 1989 wasn’t the first trip we made.

The year was 1983. We were living in Green River, Wyoming, and waiting for our third child to be born. Green River and its sister city of Rock Springs had been boomtowns in the late ’70s. Because so many young people moved in and out of the area, it was required that the OB doctors be paid in full, lest the baby be born and the new family skip town without paying the doctor.

Area mines were in the midst of a recession. Many at Allied Chemical where Rod worked as a mechanical engineer had been laid off. He still had a job and we were thankful.

The day I made the last payment to the doctor, I came home and soon after Rod called, “Well, the recession got me. I got laid off. Come and get me.” Pregnant me with two little girls drove the 25 miles to the trona mine and picked Rod up. Tears flowed as we tried to imagine what our future held.

Thankfully, our third baby girl arrived on June 27, just before the insurance ran out. Rod came back to the hospital and asked, “You know how we’ve talked about going to Alaska? Well, we don’t have much money, but we’ve got a lot of time. What do you think?”

“What?” I thought to myself. “A new baby! A 2-year-old and a 5-year-old! No job! You’ve got to be kidding!”

A million reasons why we shouldn’t go raced through my mind. No words came out of my mouth until finally I blurted out, “Sure. That sounds like a great idea.”

It was a great trip. We made our way north to Havre to introduce our new daughter to my family and then on crossing into Canada at the Wild Horse Port. On and on we went through Alberta via Jasper and Banff and onto Dawson Creek, British Columbia, where we joined the famed Al-Can Highway. The highlight was seeing Mount McKinley and grizzly bears.

We got back just in time for our oldest daughter to enter kindergarten. Soon Rod was hired as a sales engineer for Mobil Oil.

But we couldn’t seem to get Alaska out of our hearts. Neither could our good friends Daryl and Pam Moses, who had previously been on a mission trip to Skagway, Alaska, with their church.

So, in June of 1989, we took off again. There were now six in our family as we had added a fourth baby girl named Laura (age 3) to Beth (age 11), Lynn (age 8) and Amy (who celebrated her sixth birthday in Anchorage). The Moses consisted of two boys ages 12 and 11 and a girl age 8. Plus, Daryl’s parents traveled with them. They traveled in a motorhome and we were in a 1988 Chevrolet three-quarter ton pickup with an overhead camper. We traveled to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and got on the ferry bound for Skagway, Alaska.

That’s when misfortune struck. With vehicles parked behind ours on the ferry, we hurriedly made our way to the top deck to find a place to “camp out.” As Pam was getting out of their camper, she slipped on a “button” that was used to tie vehicles down when the ocean was turbulent. Her ankle was crushed and she needed immediate attention.

Someone was needed to stay with Pam. Finally, I said, “I will.” The men needed to go on because the vehicles could not be taken off. So off we sent two men with seven kids and a grandma and grandpa.

On the ambulance ride to the hospital I inquired, “You do have an orthopedic surgeon, don’t you?’

“Oh, yes, we certainly do!” Come to find our there was an orthopedic surgeon who had arrived a half hour before the accident from Vancouver, B.C. … and he came twice a year! He had arrived just before Pam’s accident. That’s when we really knew we were in God’s hands. Three days later, Pam and I got on another ferry and met up with our families in Juneau.

It also was a wonderful trip. We traveled onto Fairbanks, toured Denali, and enjoyed snagging salmon on the Homer Spit. We are still friends with the Moses family ,but our beloved Pam passed away several years ago. Lots of memories!

So here we are 30 years later making plans to head north to Alaska. This time it’s just Rod and me and that’s okay. We’re very excited. We bought a pop-up overhead camper for a long-box pickup. We had a hard time trying to find a used three-quarter ton long bed pickup with low miles that we could afford. We started to look around and our eyes kept coming back to the same pickup that we took to Alaska in 1989. It hadn’t run in 14 years, but it had very few miles on it. We took it to a mechanic and got in running again. I call it the “resurrected pickup” because it was brought back to life after being left for dead.

I hope to write a couple of articles about our trip in the resurrected pickup. We will have to see. I also want to get back to writing about the Havre High School Class of 1970. It’s been therapeutic for me to start writing again. Thank you to all those that have encouraged me

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not upon your own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3: 5-6

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Ila McClenahan is a retired chaplain and activity director living on the farm where she was raised in the Amos community north of Havre.