I know I’m not perfect and I know everything can’t always go like its suppose to, but I perceive that I have been on the raw end of a few heart wrenching circumstances. Today I ‘m going to do my best to tell you one of the worse possible situations I had to overcome. This is not fiction, though I wish it was.
It was in the early summer in the 80’s. My ex-wife and I both got jobs in Denali Park at the Lynx Creek Store and Pizza Restaurant. I worked in the store and she worked in the restaurant. We lived a small log cabin we built north of Healy, AK, and we had to drive over twenty miles to the park every working day. It was summer so her two boys and my three boys stayed at the cabin most days.
I’ll never forget the day when she came over from the pizza place to the store and told me she wanted to leave me. First she started to cry and said she wanted to go see her mom. I could understand that but we had just started working and plane trips from Alaska to anywhere were very expensive.
This went on for a day or two. Then late one evening before our days off, she came over to the store and told me she wasn’t coming home with me that day. I asked what she was going to do. She said she would stay with a friend. I knew she didn’t have very many friends and I became very suspicious.
I went home that night in utter fear. I cried so much that I felt sick when I arrive at the cabin. I didn’t know what to tell the boys, especially hers. My boys said they heard from her boys that she had a boy friend she met in the bar at the pizza place.
That first night I couldn’t sleep. I had no idea what to do except pray, and that was even hard. I hadn’t seen her in a day or so, so I drove up to the park on my second day off to check on her. She was nowhere to be found, but I talked to some of her co-workers, and they said she was with this guy whom I had met. In fact I introduced him to her. He lived in a little ten foot travel trailer down below Lynx Creek. I guess that’s where she was.
The next day at work she found me and told me she wanted her stuff from the cabin, so she could move in with this guy. It took a lot for me to do that, but I did. We had many a yelling and crying session in the back room of the Lynx Creek Store. It’s no wonder I hated going back to that store every working day that summer. She continued to work at Lynx Creek pizza. Her boy friend drove a red pickup that I would see every day.
Secretly I would drive down by their little trailer to see if I could talk to her or at least see her. Her boys still stayed with me for a while until she made enough money to send them to Oregon to be with their dad. The summer was waning fast and my sons and I had to get prepared for the winter to come.
As soon as this entire calamity started, I returned to my roots. I would have probably committed murder otherwise. For months since we had come north, our family hadn’t attended church. I take all the blame for that. There were several local churches and after she left my three boys and I found a great one.
The pastor gave us encouragement and support but not always did it work. I’ll say more about that later.
My wife and I needed to settle a lot of financial stuff so periodically we had to meet. She really didn’t want to. One day she wanted me to meet her at allocation in the canyon near the park in broad daylight, but her friend came along. If it wasn’t for my wife I might be dead today. He was twice my size and tried to choke me to death because I wanted to talk to her. She pulled the big hunk off of me.
I always carried the hope inside of me that we would get back together, that she would see the error of her ways, and that everything would be happily ever after. Well, not so much. In fact for me, it got worse.
I continued to go to work just so I could feed my three boys and to keep myself from going completely crazy. I was good at my job and I was a good fake until summer was finally over. Then I was in the cabin as it got darker each day with just my boys, whom I loved, but my life almost seemed worthless.
I tell you what, church, God, The Word, and my boys are the things that kept me from losing my mind that winter. I would spend hours out in the cold deep in the woods crying out to God and asking him to bring her back or give me peace. For a long time I got nothing but pain and heart break.
I wrote her many letters. By this time they had moved to the Anchorage area. She got really cold to me. We met once or twice down there to settle little spats but I received no hope that she would return. She never did.
My sons and I drew closer to God that I had ever been in my life during this ordeal. We read the Scriptures together and prayed. My boys always encouraged me. I home schooled them which was fun, and we learned to survive a winter from hell in Alaska.
Some of the boys and my greatest memories come from the days in the cabin that winter from hell. I’m always telling the story about the boys and their baseball diamond in the snow and playing football at forty below.
In addition, I was given the opportunity that winter for the first time in years to lead worship in the little log Assembly of God church in Healy, Alaska. I met some life-long friends there and expect one day to return to my home in the north.
David Erickson
