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My daughter and my little grandson came for a visit and left last week.  Yes, it was wonderful beyond words to see them.  Since then I am deeply involved and invested in paring down the four existing volumes of my mother’s writings (in Hope for a Mountain) into a single manageable volume containing her Alaskan homesteading story, Mildred’s Mountain.

I am including here the work-in-progress I am doing on the preface for this book.

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It is important to realize that this story takes place in the years just following the ‘modernization’ of America and in the post WWII era of our nation’s history.  Mildred’s dreams for obtaining land under the requirements of the great Homesteading Act that settled our nation’s frontiers were met by the complications of working with limited financial resources.  Mildred, who was 31 with a family of four children under the age of seven when she moved to Alaska, had been raised in Boston and moved with her mother at age nineteen to Los Angeles.  She had never spent a birthday or a holiday away from her mother and had never even been on a camping trip in her life when the homesteading began.

Mildred and Bill had been married eight years to the day Bill arrived in Alaska ahead of his family to begin his new job and attempt to secure housing so that his family could join him.  They had moved out of their home, sold it, and lived in a single motel room in the Los Angeles area for two weeks before Bill left.  It was another stress filled six weeks before Mildred and the four children reached Alaska.

The family was suffering from great financial indebtedness and strain before the move had even been contemplated, a situation that never improved throughout the duration of their homesteading years.  Living in a time before credit cards, the Lloyd family debt had been accumulated by buying on ‘time payments’, borrowing money from high interest rate finance companies, and through borrowing money from Mildred’s mother.

In spite of the obvious differences concerning available means of communication during the time these letters were written, the financial woes of the Lloyd family can strike a resonating chord even among family’s struggling to raise their children in today’s world.  Continual medical bills that were not covered by insurance and the eventual nearly constant repair of vehicles involved in the homesteading process contributed to the family’s inability to budget or save ahead enough money to ever meet unforeseen financial difficulties when they arose.

As Mildred’s story explains, the fight with the mountain as it actively destroyed efforts to create an accessible road to the homestead meant that large sums of money repeatedly invested in road building created an additional major financial burden that was never overcome during all the years the homestead consumed Mildred’s life.  Perhaps if the Lloyds had arrived in the Anchorage-Eagle River area during earlier years when far more accessible land was available for homesteading, Mildred would have chosen a less challenging spot for her dream to play itself out.  Yet considering Mildred’s great difficulty in living near (and with) people and her deep desire for pristine land and its silent privacy, even if homesteading acreage had been available ‘lower down’ and ‘closer in’, I as her daughter personally believe that much of what constituted the drama of the Lloyd family’s saga would have happened anyway – and probably exactly in the spot it did.

Mildred had always intuitively valued and appreciated the kind of healing that the full powers of the untrammeled, unpolluted and untamed land itself has always been able to provide for those who know what they have found even if they do not fully understand what they need.  Mildred did not have an easy childhood, yet from a very young age had been exposed to the wonders of the natural world through summer visits to her relatives’ homes in the New England countryside where she had found a peace that cannot be reproduced in any artificial way.

The fact, in my opinion, that so much of Mildred’s inner woundedness lay forever cast beyond her realm of conscious awareness meant that for all the healing powers that the mountain she loved held for her, the ‘contamination’ she had within her own self prevented her from ever making the kind of progress toward a better life on that mountain she hoped for no matter how much she dreamed and worked for it.  What was left for her was the struggle, the perpetual struggle to obtain what she deeply knew she somehow needed but could never describe.

The process of homesteading under the requirements of America’s Homesteading Act was a challenge to everyone who ever picked up that yoke and placed themselves and their family within it.  The only true tools and weapons a homesteader has are those that lie within them.  Mildred’s battle was never for the land.  Hers was a battle between herself and ‘the world’ that began with her birth in 1925 and ended with her death in 2002.

Perhaps it is because of the contrast between Mildred’s inner struggles and those few moments of stunning joy, peace and absolute love for ‘the land’ of Alaska and of her mountain that Mildred described in her writings that we can begin to understand and appreciate the difference between land that is tamed by civilization and land that is not.  Although Mildred never saw the building of a cabin or the creation of her dream house on the homestead, never saw a well or a cesspool dug there, never saw the coming of electric poles, and never found a way to live a life of peaceful health and happiness anywhere on this earth, let alone up on her mountain, her story still portrays the human willingness to place one foot in front of the other upon virgin soil to claim it as one’s own.

In my mind Mildred’s greatest accomplishment was not, with the help of her husband, in fulfilling the requirements to gain title to 160 acres of an Alaskan mountainside.  It was not the civilizing of that piece of land that was of consequence.  What mattered is that Mildred had the ability to allow the land to touch her heart in ways that nothing else in her lifetime possibly could.  The land itself met her where, when and as she met it in return during those glistening moments when nothing else mattered.  At those moments this pure place had the power to civilize her.

It is not my intention to analyze or to interpret Mildred’s words in this book.  I present these pages as a synopsis of her much longer story as it is published intact in the four volumes of HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN.  These books present the narrative and chronicle of my mother’s story as it was contained within the papers that were left to me upon her 2002 death.

I will say here, however, that my mother had, unknown to anyone during the years covered in these volumes, severe undiagnosed mental illness.  Her children’s assessment today is that Mildred probably suffered from and was tormented by Borderline Personality Disorder that stemmed from a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment disorder from the time of her birth.  Mildred’s own words completely leave out any direct reference to the severity of the crimes of child abuse that she committed, and my discussion of these problems are reserved for two following books.  In UNSPEAKABLE MADNESS I will present selections from Mildred’s writings that I believe do pertain to her mental illness.  In the book, THE DEVIL’S CHILD I present my own stories about being Mildred’s severely abused daughter.

So when I say that the land of Alaska, of the Eagle River valley, and of Mildred’s Mountain had the power to touch my mother’s heart, and that my mother had the ability to experience the healing Alaska provided for her, I mean this statement in a profound way.  For all the flaws my mother possessed and even with the mental illness that possessed her, I believe it was her extraordinary desire to experience inner peace that led Mildred to her mountain in the first place, and led her back to it again and again and again in spite of all obstacles.

That she could not recognize her woundedness, either its existence or its source, did not prevent her from realizing the experience of healing from the land on those moments when it actually happened.  That she could not incorporate this healing (or any other) into herself in any permanent way was the tragedy of her life.  Yet Mildred still had an incredible adventure.  She homesteaded a piece of wilderness with her family high on an Alaskan mountainside and called it home.

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