• This one our AK home base •
[5 MIN READ]
For the nearly 10 years I’ve been a part of ministry in the Copper (River) Valley, I had gotten used to The Willows, the house we rented from Cross Road Medical Center. The place was kind of strange because of the sanitary feel of the open kitchen.The living space was very 70’s, what with the dark paneling that covered every single wall. Two additions were trailers bolted to the original structure. Still, it didn’t take particularly long to get used to it and come to love it.
Our team wanted to leave a mark it and we did over the years. It’s not like no one else used The Willows. We would hear of work groups that stayed there for a week or so at a time, but they would always leave the space unadulterated—reasonable, given that it was a rental, after all—but we had all grown accustomed to it. It was our local home. We had left something descriptive of us after my first year in 2015, as a kind of test case of what the host would tolerate. Taking a river stone, we left the name of the event we were serving, Wrangell Mountain Bible Conference, with the year, our theme with scripture verse, and our names. When we found it on the same window ledge in the dining area where we had left it, we were pleased. Someone clearly felt it was worth keeping—they could easily have tossed it out. Decorations that we started leaving on the mostly bare walls—created to use for teaching or the float decorating we did for the Fourth of July Parade—we would find untouched when we returned each succeeding year (iCandybyWangC). We added more memorial rocks. Only one other group ever felt compelled to contribute to the story of the space in the form of their own group of individual rocks on that window ledge.
This year, we learned that The Willows had been sold. CRMC owned other properties, so it was a good assumption that we would be staying in one of those. Cross Road is a local Christian mission organization that provides vital urgent-care services for Glennallen and the surrounding Copper Valley. They’re often housing they’re own staff or hosting other Christian servants. When we walked into the newly purposed Pinyon for the first time, I could literally hear the sad wa-wa-wa-wa-waaaa song playing in my head on that muted trumpet.
It was dusty, musty, and barely furnished. A bunch of beds and not much more. We had heard that a work group had stayed there a week before, but the only evidence was some sheets on various mattresses. My narrative was that a bunch of teenaged boys had been the moving team from The Willows. In the garage was chairs and dishes we recognized from The Willows that no one bothered to organize and put away. Boys.
The house was a nice two-story, split-entry, wood-sided structure. I later learned from our team leader Helen that a missionary couple we had known had lived there, Don and Millie. They had retired and moved back to their home base of Pennsylvania and we had even seen them at a local organizational event. Helen had visited them at the home, but, of course, it was furnished back then. Now it was to be our base of operation for the 11 days we would be in south-central Alaska.
The two gals in our team this year, Gaby and Helen, promptly went to a native women’s conference on the Friday we arrived. That left me and Edson sitting around with nothing to do. As if. I dusted and vacuumed the rooms the gals had picked out to use and he mopped and sanitized the dining and living area and kitchen. We washed linens and towels on the provided washer and dryer and hung a make-shift curtain where one was missing. The domestic mentors of our youths would have been proud. It now felt fresher and more hospitable, a reality that the gals immediately agreed to upon their return. Together we did a little arranging with the few pieces of furniture that we found and we were ready to stage operations.
Suspecting that we could also have a hand in shaping Pinyon for the future, we gave thanks. While our mission was to the Wrangell Mountain Bible Conference teen program, we had time and the will to do things like set up the kitchen, continue cleaning towels and linens, and empty the garage. Having witnessed how our presence over the years had contributed to the life of The Willows, it was providential that we might be able to contribute to the life of Pinyon.
The next day we met the deeply apologetic property manager Ethan. He had mistaken our arrival date for a week later and had had no time to do all the preparations that he had planned for us when he learned his mistake. The previous work team had done fine with sleeping bags—hence the sheets—and the minimalism. Since The Willows sale hadn’t closed yet, we were free to collect any other furnishings we needed. Being a half mile away and with us having a van, we cleared out most of the rest of the stuff. We completed many hours of washing and drying (the heating element was dying) and folding. We set up shelves and placed accessories. We found our rocks. And we did our daily conference preparations.
The day of our departure, we cleaned up after ourselves as expected: these rental spaces are affordable partly because the owners don’t retain housekeeping services. Gaby and Edson vacuumed our guys’ rooms on the lower level that we had left undone. Hey, preparing for the gals and all of us collectively, took a lot of energy and we stopped when we got tired. We prepared our 2025 memorial stone.
We called Ethan to give him our status report. He asked us to write a ministry and historical profile of our group. He would frame it and mount it for everyone else to read. Yes, our presence clearly has been influential. We admired the handiwork God allowed us to complete. And we closed the door.
Ethan declined to invoice us this year.
FINE PRINT *Thanks to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young (YouTube) ¶Text: Calvin Wang (Wäng), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Pictures: Gabriella Dharmadi and Helen Hui
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