PILGRIM'S WILDERNESS by Tom Kizzia is about a large family of Christian fundamentalists who move near McCarthy, a former copper mining town in Alaska. The leader of the family called himself Papa Pilgrim, and he had 15 children.

Pilgrim picked a contentious place to buy land (via the approximately two thousand dollars a head the state gave Alaskans in oil money), and his only way of getting supplies was to cross land that had been declared a national park. He built a road with a bulldozer a previous owner had left behind. The National Park Service was not happy; he wouldn't answer their efforts to communicate and turned back a ranger who had come to see him.

McCarthy residents, sided with the Pilgrims. For one thing they were a family band who could pick it like Maybelle Carter and her clan. They got lots of publicity, especially from a local newspaper run by a fundamentalist preacher, who wasn't afraid to slant the issue.

For one thing the National Park Service had to respect the interests of the inlanders, people who had settled the land prior to its being declared a national park. They were more or less grandfathered in. But they couldn't just let Pilgrim wreak havoc with the place or everybody would be doing it.

Author Tom Kizzia was a reporter for an Anchorage newspaper; he covered the Pilgrim story from the word "go". Eventually he learned Pilgrim's real name was Robert Hale, son of a Texas Christian football all-American and agent for the CIA. Robert was the former husband of John Connelly's sixteen-year-old daughter who had committed suicide, suspiciously with a bullet behind the ear. He also learned about Hale's previous exploits near Taos, New Mexico, where he cut fences, grazed his animals on other people's land etc.

The way Pilgrim treated his family will make your toes curl, and you'll want to see him get his just desserts bad. But he used the Bible like a lawyer uses precedent, usually word-for-word. The reader can't quite figure out if Pilgrim is the real deal or a Charles Colson (see Watergate), David Berkowitz kind of Christian, using it as a cover. For one thing he forced his wife to call him "Lord" and he treated his children like an Old Testament God.

As readers we also want to know how he got from transcendental meditation to fundamentalist Christianity. We also want to know when the social workers will come to the rescue and when the town will wake up and smell the coffee.