Robert Allen Hale: Papa Pilgrim

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Outside Magazine, December 2008

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Robert Allen Hale: Papa Pilgrim
The Darkest Place (cont.)


	Joseph and Lolly Hale, with their sons (Courtesy of Joseph Hale)

JOSEPH HALE, NOW 31, LIVES outside Palmer, Alaska, with his wife, Lolly, Jim Buckingham's second-eldest daughter, and their two young sons. Their post-and-beam home lies high up on Lazy Mountain and looks out over a rolling pasture that tumbles down to the Matanuska River—a braided glacial outflow that unfurls along a road that travels a hundred miles to Glennallen and farther still to McCarthy.

Like his other siblings, Joseph doesn't go back to McCarthy much; the family homestead has been sold, and the children's lives are firmly planted in the Palmer area, where the wilderness is a bit closer to the rest of the world. His mother and younger brothers and sisters live not far off, with the Buckinghams. Joshua and his wife, Sharia, also a Buckingham daughter, and Elishaba and her husband, Matthew Speckels, are just up the road.

In November 2007, I sat in an Anchorage courtroom for Hale's sentencing hearing, watching as Country Rose and the children catalogued his abuse and deceit. For the adult children, there was self-recrimination as well—born of a painful frustration that they had not intervened earlier. "I want to ask forgiveness that I ever let the things go on that went on in our house," Joshua cried from the witness stand. "I don't know what possessed me, in all my life, to deal with it and let it happen. I beat my chest and weep that this family undertook . . . There is so much to undo—there is so much that can't be undone." The entire Hale family sobbed along with him.

The family continues to embrace a virtuous and simple life. They go to a local church and pay their bills by working in the trades they learned while living off the grid—construction, carpentry, caring for livestock. They read the Bible and support one another in their various projects. But the children face a long recovery and many enduring challenges. They were all poorly schooled. Joshua, Joseph, and Elishaba share a strong sense of having had half their lives stolen from them. And they all have a lingering wariness about the outside world.



	Elishaba with her husband, Mathew Speckels (Courtesy of Matthew Speckels)

One chilly day this past March, I drove out from Anchorage to have dinner with Joseph and Lolly. When I arrived, Joseph welcomed me with a beaming grin and the shake of a hand nearly twice as thick as my own. "C'mon in," he said. Remembering Alaskan custom in mud season, I pulled off my shoes at the door.

Lolly had made a pot roast with carrots and potatoes, and we sat in their sparse kitchen and talked as we ate. All of the Hales remain very religious, so most of the conversation concerned my own salvation: Had I felt Jesus in my life? Did I have a girlfriend? If so, when would I marry? When Joseph spoke about his own upbringing, he did so through a haze of doubt and bewilderment—as if he was still sorting out which parts had really happened. "I'll never be able to understand why my father did the things he did," he said. Both Joseph and Lolly were incredibly gracious, responding to my inquiries long after I could sense they were ready for bed.

"The strangest thing about it," Lee Ann Kreig, a close friend of the family, told me later, "is that for all the evil in Bob, his kids certainly came out all right."

Hale was sentenced to 14 years in prison, and in May he died of complications from diabetes. Soon after, I e-mailed Joseph to express my condolences.

"It has been both sad and liberating," he responded. "But more liberating. God has been good to us."

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