29. Peace at Blair Valley

© 2020 Daniel Yordy

April 1997 – December 1997

Into Blair Valley
Kyle and I turned left at Mile 122 on the Alaska Highway onto a gravel road heading directly south. The road stayed on the top of the ridge for ten miles; to our right was the valley of the Gundy Creek. We passed two ranches down in the valley, the last one near where the road turned west and we dropped down towards the Gundy, still ten miles to go. After wandering another mile or so we came to the Gundy Creek. The original bridge across the Gundy had been wiped out a few years before. While Wes Shaw was at Blair, he had Randy Jordan come over and they put a new bridge across the Gundy for access to Blair Valley.

After crossing the small bridge, we meandered slowly upward until we came to the steep ridge that separated the Gundy Valley from the Blair Valley. Here the road went up sharply and then turned steeply to the north as it angled up the side of the ridge. Near the top it turned west again. As we came over the top of the ridge, we saw the road ahead dropping steeply down into the valley of the Blair Creek. It’s quite an exhilarating ride down that steep slope. The brethren who had built the Shiloh Community had simply followed the seismic line straight down the slope.

At the bottom of the slope, the road continued west across the northern fields of the Blair Valley property before turning south again. We drove a mile through hay fields on either side, with the Blair Creek looping to our right. In the center of the property we came to the wooded area interspersed with lawns in which the original Shiloh buildings had been constructed. The pastures of the Blair Valley property continued on another mile, but we turned to the right and followed the lane in amongst the cabins.

We were home.

We passed Rick and Shirley Annett’s cabin in the woods on our right, and then Kars and Minnie Kiers’s cabin. We drove a little further and came to a stop at the building now used as the Blair Valley tabernacle. This was the building above the root cellar, right next to the large old Tabernacle, where Richard and I had stayed when we came to the 1986 Shiloh convention. Rick and Shirley and Kars and Minnie soon came to greet us.

It was April 16, 1997, and we were home.

I loved the Blair Valley community with all my heart and still do. There is no painful memory from our time there; the only difficult question is why we left. But that question is for another chapter. I do feel like crying, however, for our loss is truly great.

I want to describe for you the land, the buildings of Shiloh as well as those of Blair, and the brethren who shared Blair Valley as home with us.

First, Bob and Connie Newman were no longer living at Blair Valley. We had heard while we were at Bowens Mill that they had moved away, back down to the states. This was quite sad for Maureen and I. for I had hoped to teach school to their teenage children. The company of the Newman family would certainly have added goodness to our life together. I will share more of why they left at a point when it best fits.

But before we go any further, here is a map of the larger property inside the Blair Valley.
The property is most of two square miles, running north and south, the area of white amongst the green, mostly on the eastern side of the Blair Creek, but a small portion on the western side, accessible only by a ford. The majority of the acreage is vast fields across two miles north and south, once partly grain, but now almost entirely hay and pasture. The bottom of the Blair Creek is wooded as well as the part of the property going up the slopes of the ridge to the east, a mix of poplar and spruce trees.



The valley itself is bounded on its eastern and western side by ridges about a thousand feet up. The flat on the bottom is nearly a mile wide, giving a sense of both spaciousness and bounded protection. High green ridgetops were always in any view while outside.

The building area in the center is spread across a wide area. Here is a map showing the old buildings of Shiloh, a few of which we were using. I have marked those, the “Blair Valley” buildings, in red. Note that sizes and positions of everything is approximate only. Also disregard the scale lines needed for drawing everything in.



The building area in the center is spread across a wide area. Above is a map showing the old buildings of Shiloh, a few of which we were using. I have darkened those, the “Blair Valley” buildings. Note that sizes and positions of everything is approximate only. Also disregard the scale lines needed for drawing everything in.

Cabins were built wherever anyone felt like without a sense of togetherness, though Shiloh was not nearly as spread out as Headwaters had been. From our house to the old shop or to our cow barn was about a quarter-mile walk. Our house, the Kiers’s house and our Tabernacle were reasonably close. The buildings we did not use, which were many, were derelict and filled with squirrel debris and old things left behind. Walking through them always felt a little haunted. 

The dotted line represents the edge of the level area where the slope dropped down, either to the seasonal creek down through the middle or to the Blair Creek on the left. The slightly darkened area shows the woods (Thick Spruce Woods). There were a few scattered trees elsewhere, but not many, mostly open grass fields. Views in different places and directions were stunning. The roads were all dirt and would turn to mud whenever it rained. 

Kars and Minnie had insisted on keeping the whole area beautiful, which included NOT using the roads when they were wet. I agreed fully. Minnie had flowers around her house and around the Tabernacle, and regardless of the insides of the derelict buildings, the outsides were all clean and neat except for around the old shop.

I would like to give you a real sense of how beautiful this valley and community building area was to us, but I cannot without taking you there, so I will leave the description at that. Pictures don’t really do it justice, for they could not capture that sensation of wonder one felt.

The Kiers’s and Annett’s
Kars and Minnie were probably in their seventies. They had been teenagers in Holland when the Germans invaded. After WWII, Kars served for a time in the Dutch East Indies, in the failed attempt to keep it from becoming independent. They told us some stories of these times, but nothing of the atrocities. In fact, the Dutch did as badly to the Indonesians as the Germans had done to them. Kars and Minnie had immigrated to Canada, where Kars farmed in southern Ontario before they connected with the move in the late 1960’s.

Kars and Minnie did have several children, but they were long since grown and wanted nothing to do with move community. We may have met a daughter, but I don’t remember any other, except Kars’ brother who came from Holland to visit.

Kars and Minnie were very hospitable, and we always felt welcome in their home. Minnie tried her best to give it a Dutch feel inside and even outside with tulips during the summer. We spent many good times visiting with them in their home and around the dinner table at the Tabernacle. At the same time, they were set in their ways and were not always open to other people’s ideas. Whenever a conversation ventured into areas that did not interest them, their expressions of disapproval ensured that it ceased.

Rick and Shirley Annett were probably in their late forties at this time, a few years older than Maureen and I. Shirley was one of the daughters of Alvin and Marie Roes and had lived at Blueberry with them. Rick was from the same part of southern Ontario as the Roes’s. Rick and Shirley had married before my time at Blueberry.

Rick was laid-back and easy-going. The problem with calling Rick a “dear friend” is that you will find hundreds of people lined up to call him their “dear friend” as well. Rick made you feel warm and accepted; his expressed friendship was always genuine. Shirley was like her dad a fair bit, not as talkative in general conversation, but with a dry sense of humor, always coming up with something funny with a dead-pan face. Shirley was efficient and business-like. I think she kept the books. By trade, Rick was a barber. He also played the piano and led our praise services. Rick and Shirley never had children. 

Working on our Home
When we first arrived, Kyle and I stayed in the upstairs of the Kiers’s cabin. Right away we started working on our new home.

Maureen and I had our hearts set on the former caretaker’s cabin and when we had shared this earlier with the Blair family, they had agreed it would be ours. We had great plans for it that would take a couple of years to complete. 

Here is a picture of our cabin; this is while Kyle and I were working on it. It is plain, yes, but we hoped to make it more comfortable over time.



I had drawn out a complete plan for both upstairs and downstairs. As you can see, the upstairs wall was only five feet high, with the pitched roof going up from there. We really liked the compact feel of that style. In order to have a place for us to live, however, I left the downstairs alone and worked only on the upstairs, turning it into our home for the time being. 

I took out the inner stairway (which was in a poorly-chosen place) and put it to the side of the house up to a landing and cut a doorway into the side of the upstairs. Then our bedroom and Kyle’s were on that side, with the living room in the middle behind the upper window in front, put in later. I built a little kitchen in the back center, where the final stairway would be. On the far side, then, were Johanna’s (and Katrina’s) room in the front and a nice-sized bathroom in the back corner.

The downstairs, which would later contain a larger kitchen, and living room, etc. (by our plan), I left as it was, with the woodstove in the middle. We used it as storage and as Maureen’s laundry room. In the back corner we piled our winter’s supply of firewood, which meant that it was dry and right at hand. In the front behind the right window, I had my office. I found a nice teacher’s desk from the old tabernacle and placed on it my electronic typewriter. 

None of this was in place, however, when Kyle and I began, so we had to remove all the old walls and start anew. Kyle was just five, so he mostly played while I worked, but he helped me when he could. We worked hard but were not nearly finished when it was time to go get Maureen and Johanna in Edmonton. 

My strength was waning, but when I mentioned to the Kiers’s that I needed to take a day off to recuperate, they expressed disdain. Nonetheless, they left me free to order my time and work as I chose.

Let me add a few more details about our home. When we heard that the Newman’s were leaving Blair Valley a few months earlier, I had asked Bob if we could buy their solar panel and battery set-up, which we did. We now installed it on our house. I had asked Randy Jordan to make us a steel pole that would easily swivel, which he did. That way I could turn it through the day to follow the sun. This gave us 12-volt DC power for our home.

In the top part of the roof slope above the bathroom area, I placed the large water tank that had been in that house. All of us, including the Tabernacle, had such a tank as high up as could be. About once a week, we used a gas-powered pump to fill a larger tank from the spring just up the road from our house and then pumped it into each of the four tanks as well as down in the cow barn. That gave us a somewhat pressured waterflow inside. To our system, however, I added our 12-volt pump. We also had a propane hot water heater next to the bathroom. A tank of propane would last us about a month. I would heat the water in the late afternoon, then shut the propane off again. That way we had hot showers that evening, and Maureen would have reasonably warm water for laundry the next day.

We also had a 12-volt picnic cooler for some foodstuffs and 12-volt lights as well as my tape-player for music. I set up a real washing machine in the downstairs for Maureen. We used the small community generator to run it on wash days. Then the clothes were hung to dry either out back during the summer or inside the downstairs during the winter. Laundry was still hard work for Maureen, but much better than what it had been for the mothers in the early communities, that is, all by hand.

Maureen and Johanna Arrive 
Because we did not have our new home ready for Maureen and Johanna’s arrival in mid-May, we moved over from the Kiers’s to a little house just across the road from us, on the edge of the slope. Wes Shaw had fixed up this little cabin for himself, and the Annett’s had also stayed there until they could move into their new place. It was tiny, but cozy. The bed in the back corner was a tight fit and the children slept in the loft, accessible by ladder. It would be our home for a few weeks.

It turns out that soon after Kyle and I had headed north, the Mack’s decided to take a trip to visit relatives all across Texas. So, after several days of rest, Maureen and Johanna went with them. They were gone to Texas for more than two weeks during this time. It was great for Maureen because it gave her a chance to visit with sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins on both sides of the family before she left for the northern wilderness. They returned to Bowens Mill a few days before their flight up.

In the middle of May, Kyle and I drove to Edmonton the day before, spending a night at the Hilltop community with Patrick Downs on the way. We picked up Maureen and Johanna at the Edmonton airport. We were back together again. After spending the night with brethren in Edmonton, we drove back to Blueberry that evening. We went on to Blair Valley the next day, arriving to a cold evening, but a warm welcome with a turkey dinner made especially for Maureen and Johanna’s arrival.

We stayed in the tiny little cabin on the edge of the slope while we continued to work on our new home. We completed and moved into it in phases over several days but did not spend our first night there until June 8. We were home.

Life at Blair Valley 
Let me now give a general sense of life at Blair Valley through this first summer. I will begin with our Tabernacle, the heart of the community.

The original building that was our Tabernacle had been built by Shiloh, right next to the large old tabernacle, with a root cellar below ground and a food processing facility on the main floor. The building had no second story, and we were hardly conscious of the root cellar beneath of us as it was heavily insulated. It was a long rectangle. On the north end were the stairs down, a small office space, where we had a solar powered setup to run the phone, and then the main entry on the east side. The larger center was split down the middle with a kitchen on the west side and the dining room on the east side. Both were comfortably sized for our use. They had carpeted the dining room, so it felt quite homey. The windows had lovely curtains. On one end of the dining room was a couch and living area, on the other side was the piano and a space for the service and in the center was our dining table. The kitchen had both a propane stove and a propane refrigerator. It was also comfortably laid out. Then, on the south side was a large room that had been the school room when the Newman’s had been there, but which was not used now. 

We ate dinner and supper together in the Tabernacle each day. Breakfasts were at home. It was six adults around the table, plus little Johanna and Kyle. Bob Newman had shot a young moose the winter before and they had canned most of it. It was wonderful meat and lasted us for most of the first year at Blair. The root cellar beneath was filled with last year’s crops, cabbage, potatoes, onions, beets, and carrots. Minnie was a wonderful cook, and Maureen and Shirley as well. We ate well, just as we had at all other move communities.

We had worship services on Wednesday evening and Sunday morning. I often shared in the services, as did Minnie, Kars, and Rick. Shirley shared only occasionally and Maureen not at all. Rick played the piano and led the praise. Eating together and worshipping together are what Christ life is all about and our fellowship was warm and good.

Kars had been a farmer and then in charge of the gardens at Headwaters and Blair Valley. When I asked to share the gardening, he was hesitant, but then he agreed. I took charge of the little garden across the gulley, while Kars continued over the greenhouse and the root crops in the gardens down along the creek. You can look at the map above to see the locations of these. I have made them a darker shade. In my part of the garden we grew the broccoli, cabbage, peas, and other above-ground crops. There were tomatoes and cucumbers in the greenhouse, and carrots, potatoes, and onions in the creek-bottom garden. Around the greenhouse was a field of chives, planted by Shiloh, but that now grew of its own, and along the path to the lower garden there was a large stand of rhubarb that also continued each summer on its own. Minnie made tremendous rhubarb pie; Kyle still remembers it as his favorite. He and Johanna would snap off the stalks and eat them raw. 

When we arrived, there were still a number of horses up at the horse barn area. Bob Newman and his sons were cattle and horse men. We chose not to keep them through the next winter, however, for we had no use for them. They were sold later this summer. We also had a few beef cattle, including one angus milk cow that would give birth later in the summer. But I wanted chickens, and so early on, I received permission to order a small flock of new-born chicks from Fort St. John. I think Kars and Minnie expected them to be white meat chickens, but I don’t care for standard white chickens. They only looked disapproving, however, and did not say anything, when they discovered the chickens were all red or black and white. We kept the little chicks in our downstairs until they were old enough to be out in the grass. I built a wired hutch for them that I could move along the ground so they would have fresh clean grass every few days. Little Johanna loved reaching in and picking up a fuzzy chick to carry around.

During the spring, I also worked with Rick some in cutting down poplar trees along the edge of the slopes and dragging them into piles with the tractor. Next year’s firewood had to be cut at the beginning of summer so it would have a few months to dry out. We would then saw and split the firewood in the fall, just before the snows came. The firewood we were using now had been cut and split the summer before.

When Sister Barbara James had been at Blair Valley the year before, she had advised the family not to distinguish between elders and non-elders in the governance of the community. They had followed this advice to good fruit. Rick, Kars, Minnie, and I were elders, and Maureen and Shirley were not. To have discussed anything about our life together without those two would have been wrong. So we had our governance meetings every Monday evening, up in our house, so that Maureen could be near the children in their beds. We called them family meetings instead of elders meetings. I was deeply struck with the difference. There was NO “us versus them” at Blair Valley, something that felt wrong in all other move communities. We conducted our family meetings with the same level of respect for one another that I had known at Blueberry.

We enjoyed a number of visitors through our time at Blair Valley, families coming to visit as well as ministries. The problem, however, was our road – twenty miles of dirt road in, some of it quite steep. If there was any rain, then whoever was in, was in, and whoever was out, was out. Sometimes when we went to town we had to stay overnight at Shepherd’s Inn or Blueberry because it rained and the roads in were impassible. And so most visitors kept one eye on the sky to the east and would leave abruptly at the slightest hint of a rain cloud. This quick departure of some left us all feeling a bit disconcerted.

One visitor this summer, however, was Sister Janet Myers. She stayed with us for several days, a true mother in the Lord. When the rains came, she just laughed and used the phone to cancel her scheduled meetings elsewhere. She had come to be with us, regardless. Brother Dural and Sister Ethelwyn came to minister; we had a communion service while they were there. Elisabeth Roes/Kroker also came for a few days with her children to visit Shirley.

One final thing was the pressing need for income. There were twenty sometimes impassible miles to the highway, and it took two hours to get to Fort St. John. We were not farmers or cattle ranchers. Kars and Minnie had their pension income, while Maureen and I now received child benefit payments from the Canadian government, which amounted to a reasonable sum, actually, several hundred dollars a month. The Annett’s had no income, however. The point is that I came up with the idea of starting a magazine and obtaining an income from the sale of subscriptions. I shared this idea at the family meeting, and we agreed to consider it. We would actually launch a much smaller version the next year, which I called “Times of Refreshing.”

Katrina’s Birth
Meanwhile, Katrina’s due date was coming closer, she would be born on July 27. From the time Maureen arrived at Blair, we went out to Blueberry and to town regularly to prepare. We had chosen a hospital birth this time.

Maureen and I had always read to the children from the time Kyle was old enough to look at a book. This practice, however, increased at Blair Valley. There were no other distractions, and so, I would read, with Johanna in my lap, and Kyle and Maureen on the couch. I doubt that you will find two children who had more books read to them than Kyle and Johanna. This summer, in the weeks before Katrina’s birth, we started reading the Laura Ingalls Wilder’ books, interspersing them with many other books over the months.

The old tabernacle was a large building, between our house and the Blair Tabernacle. The Shiloh community had put large sums of money into an almost complete renovation not long before the community had closed. The one thing they did not renovate was the roof, and so it leaked. The “new” floor was rotten and caved in. The upstairs had been the school, a long hallway with classrooms on each side. One of these was the library filled with school and reading books. The books themselves were not being dripped on, but the room was damp and the books uncared for. This was quite distressing to me and I did what I could to protect and order them. I pulled so many good books out of this collection to read to the children. One of my favorites was Along Came a Dog by Meindert DeJong. 

Because of the road conditions, we went out from Blair Valley ten days before Katrina was due. We stayed at Blueberry with Eric and Lynn Foster mostly, but also with the Bell’s, who were able to purchase a house in Fort St. John through this time. Even when we spent the night at Blueberry, we usually went into town during the day. The week Katrina was due was Fort St. John’s fair time. We spent a couple of days visiting the fair. This was great, because we were finally connecting with Canadian people and events, something we had no experience with before. Maureen’s doctor for the birthing was at the fair as well; in fact he was at the fair with his daughter the morning Katrina was to be born and had to be called to the hospital.

Katrina Dawn Yordy was born on July 27, 1997 in the Fort St. John hospital. It was the easier of the four births. Many friends from the communities and from town came by to visit Maureen in the hospital, including the Annett’s. We did not return to Blair Valley, then, until the end of July.

It often was that both the Annett’s and the Keirs’s were out from Blair Valley as well, sometimes at the same time. We did enjoy the summertime at Blair, the days it was just Maureen and I with the children. The first week of August was Kyle’s sixth birthday. During that week, when it was just us, we had a hot dog roast in our yard and then Kyle and I went “camping.” Kyle liked eggs and pancakes, so that was his birthday treat.

Blair Valley was a wonderful place for the children. They liked to play in the ditch down the road, coming home all muddy. We often went down to the Blair Creek to watch the beavers or to play in the water. The cold water did not bother the children. One time, however, I remember that Kyle ventured too far out into the water and could not swim. I leapt in to rescue him. Kyle often helped Maureen hang laundry. And there were so many places to explore. One time we hiked through the fields to the original trapper’s log cabin that was on the property before it became Shiloh.

To Lubbock and Back 
Meanwhile, Maureen’s sister, Jessica, had walked out a year with Matthew Sanchez at the community just on the northern outskirts of Lubbock, Texas. Matthew had been in our school at the Albuquerque farm when I lived there. He had set himself to win Jessica’s heart. It took some years, but he was patient. Their wedding date was August 23, and, of course, Maureen would be the matron of honor. 

So, we planned a trip all the way down to Lubbock, Texas. Little Katrina was just two weeks old, but Maureen braved the trip for her sister. We left Blair Valley August 10, but spent the night at Shepherd’s Inn, this time with Doug and Meri Witmer, both of whom I had known at Graham River. Meri was Sister Ethelwyn’s daughter, and I had milked cows and worked in the butcher shop with Doug. They had a large double-wide set on a full basement on a small property right next to the Shepherd’s Inn property. When we stayed with them, we had the downstairs as a guest suite. We always felt so comfortable and welcome in their home.

We had to stop in Prince George for part of the immigration process. Then we headed east to Jasper National Park, which was beautiful, then down through the Rockies on the road connecting Jasper to Banff National Park, which was even more beautiful. We have a most wonderful picture of Kyle and Johanna sitting on a stone wall looking out over Lake Louise, one of the most picturesque lakes in the world.

Nancy Cheney, Katie Bracken’s sister, was living with her family in the Kalispell, Montana area, near the move community. We spent the night with them before continuing on. We managed to fit in a trip to the top of Pike’s Peak before arriving in Lubbock on the 16th. 

Tim and Frieda, as well as April and Ryan, were living at the Lubbock community at this time, so we got to see them. Frieda made Maureen’s dress for the wedding. We were there a week before Matthew and Jessica were married in a lovely ceremony. We left for home three days later.

We drove through Santa Fe, New Mexico and enjoyed the southwestern shops, including the church with the  "miraculous stair." I was in my “county collecting mode,” and so, I swung over to Los Alamos. That’s when our little Ford Escort first began to show symptoms of trouble. We limped along up to Alamosa in Colorado. After spending the night in a motel, I had a mechanic work on it. He “solved the problem” for about $400. The car seemed to be fixed, so we drove on through the Colorado mountains and across most of Utah. Then, I took another side-trip to acquire another out-of-the-way county, and then the car started acting up again. We made it back to the freeway before it stalled out completely. There we were stranded alongside the road in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t long, however, before a trucker stopped and invited us all to climb into the front cab of his truck for a ride to his home in Pocatello, Idaho. He promised to come back the next day to retrieve our car. We spent that night in his home, which did not feel entirely comfortable though he was very helpful. While he went back to pick up our car, Maureen remembered that friends of their family lived in Pocatello, so we called them. They invited us to stay in their home until our car could be fixed.

The trucker continued to help us. He took our car to a shop. We were in Pocatello for a week. We had to ask my mom and Maureen’s parents to wire us money for the car repairs. Matthew and Jessica happened to be coming through on their honeymoon, so we spent time with them. We went to the Pocatello zoo. It was not until the 3rd of September that we finally headed north again, with the car seemingly fixed. Driving through Missoula, however, something serious happened in the engine. It still kept running, however, and we made it back to the Cheney’s by evening. 

We were with the Cheney’s, then, for four more days. The car did start the next morning allowing me to drive it to a repair shop. When they took the engine apart they discovered that the front main bearing was gone and the driveshaft had been “flapping in the breeze,” so to speak. How it got us through those miles is something only the Lord knows. But now it was toast.

We visited at the community, called Meadowbrook. I shared in their Sunday morning service, and they generously took up the offering for our needs. The next day, we moved over to the community and stayed with Walt and Doris Koslosky. We were there four more days. The big question, of course, was how do the five of us get back to Fort St. John with all our stuff?

In the end, Doris Koslosky offered to drive us to Shepherd’s Inn in her mini-van. Another sister from the community went along so she would have a companion on the way back. They were both very friendly and kind. We had a wonderful time on the road with them. We spent the night in Edmonton and did some shopping. This is when I first found the Lee Valley tool store in Edmonton, one of my favorite places. We were finally back at Shepherd’s Inn on the 13th. Doris dropped us off with warm hugs. The brethren there gave us the use of a motel room for a couple of nights. The road to Blair Valley was impassible.

We went into Fort St. John the next day for Maureen to see the doctor. She was fine, but this had been a lengthy ordeal with a new-born child. It was the 18th, then, when Merlin Samson and Don Rutherford, two brothers from Shepherd’s Inn, finally drove us back out to Blair Valley with all our stuff. We were home. All this way, Maureen and I felt carried by the Lord, that we could not find a way, but He carried us, through many helpful people along the way, all the way home.

Preparing for Winter
In the north country, frosts begin in August, but it usually doesn’t snow until the end of September. October is usually alternating rain and snow, however, before winter begins in earnest by its end.  Because of our isolation, preparing for winter was a bigger deal than at the other communities.

The biggest job was getting the logs that had been stacked the year before cut up into firewood for the winter. This time, the logs were down at the far end of the southern field. We first sawed them into firewood length with chainsaws. Then, we used a borrowed hydraulic log-splitter to split the poplar into stove-sized pieces, which we would stack on a wagon. At the end of each day, we would pull the wagon load of firewood back to the community with the tractor and stack it at the four places that needed firewood, the three houses and the tabernacle.

One day, I was working with Rick chain-sawing the logs into proper lengths. I was accustomed to “taking charge” of work projects and I always think efficiency. Rick was sawing and I was stacking, but Rick was not being “efficient” in his approach to the job. I stopped him and said, “It will go quicker if you do it this way.”

Rick paused for a moment. Then he said, “You know, Daniel, this is me, this is the way I like to do it.”

Rick’s words went all through me. Rick was my friend, and I honored him. This was a turning-point for me. I was ready for the Lord to take from me my need to “control” the flow of work. Of course, as I think now, I realize that I have seldom had a crew of men to direct on any job since then, though such had been my whole work life for the twenty years prior.

Then, near the end of the job, we had one more day’s work to finish the pile of wood and have it all back near the buildings. But I was completely worn out, and I could not work the next day. When I shared with Kars that I needed a day to recuperate before we returned to finish the job, he was not impressed. “Sons of God” are supposed to move in great faith and are supposed to “keep the flesh” obedient.

So Kars persuaded Minnie to go with him the next day to prove what “sons of God” do. (And I’m saying it this way to position the narrow place God was taking me into.) They worked hard and almost finished the job. I felt bad, but I hardly had the strength to move. Before the end of the day, however, Kar’s back went out bad. It would be a couple of months before he would be able to do any physical work. This is something I long pondered, how that attitude so often leads to that outcome, how “manly strength” as the “proving of Christ” by strong elders, so often resulted in such loss.

And so, I must come back to my relationship with Kars Kiers, and, in fact, his relationship with all the men at Blair Valley. Kars was a bully, and he would insist on his way, with strong religious overtones, most of the time. At the same time, he would often speak very demeaning things to others, including to Rick. I had not realized until now, but Kars’s practice of speaking down at Rick had caused great distress for him and Shirley.

Yet Kars did not overtly speak that way to me. Let me share part of the reason why. Sometime during this summer or fall, I was talking with Kars outside, the two of us together, I think about halfway between our house and the tabernacle. I was sharing with Kars an idea I had for the community. Kars shut me down with contempt, but I stopped him. (I learned this approach from Sister Charity, actually.) 

I said, “Kars, Kars. This is not the issue. Look at me. The issue is you and me, our relationship together. Whenever you share any idea, I listen with eagerness and respect. But when I try to share my idea, you respond to me in this way. The idea is not the issue, the issue is you and me. I need you to respect what I share, whether you think it’s a good idea or not.”

I don’t know what went on inside of Kars, of course, but that was enough to mostly end his attempts to bully me religiously. I did have to say the same thing again the next spring, but that again sufficed until Maureen and I left. At that point, the bully in Kars did get in the last kick. But that comes later.

But Kars had been really hard on Bob Newman, refusing his desire to somehow provide for his family in that setting as being “not of God.” I know that Kars could be awful. In fact, while we were still living at Blueberry, I had seen Bob and Connie come to counsel with Brother John and Sister Nathel more than once. In the end, it was Kars’s bullying that had first driven away Wes, and then Bob and his family. The problem was, of course, that Kars could never see that; to him it was always them abandoning “God’s will.” 

Now, as winter approached, it was Rick. When they shared with Maureen and I the shamefulness Rick was being subjected to, I wanted him and me to sit down with Kars and address this wrongful practice. But Rick disagreed. I can only say that confronting people in that way was not in his makeup. It’s not in mine either, but bullies must be dealt with and there is only one way to do that, by showing them the relationship instead of the “issue.”

Meanwhile, Rick and Shirley had racked up some expenses both for constructing their home and for a complete and costly overhaul of their vehicle when the engine had gone out. They had no income, and so their debt was on credit cards. They needed to work in town in order to pay it off. One day in October, in the family meeting, Rick and Shirley announced that they were planning to live in town to work through the week, but that they would be home every weekend and were still part of the community and of our lives. This was quite a blow to Maureen and I, and we did not witness to it nor agree with it. Nonetheless, it was not in us to impose ourselves upon them, and so we gave them the respect of making their own decision without interference from us.

I did raise a different possibility. The community owned a trapline that we were not using as well as some large farm equipment up on the hill by the horse barn. I suggested that we sell the trapline, which would have provided more than enough to pay off the Annett’s debt as well as give us money to find some way to earn a living.

Rick, Kars, and Minnie were against such a thing. Let me try to explain why. There was a belief that we were “preparing a place for God’s people” in times to come. In fact, one summer before we arrived at Blair Valley, a man from Edmonton had driven into the property. He said to the brethren there, “Do you know that God has reserved this place for His people in times to come?” “Yes, we do know,” they had replied.

And so to sell anything for the sake of the present people of God seemed to be against that vision. What was not realized was that not selling those things would mean that the entire property would be lost to community. 

Even though Rick and Shirley did come out faithfully every weekend as they had promised, their absence through the week left a hole in our community life. Now it was just Kars and Minnie, and Maureen and I, with our three little ones as the “community.”

It is only now that I am finally understanding God’s wondrous purposes in our lives. At that time, I did not understand at all.

Other tasks I did before winter included, first, that I began to build an insulated second wall around our Tabernacle to make it much warmer inside while burning less firewood. As part of that job, I put on a lower skirting as well as a new large front porch at the main entry door.

There was also the harvest of the gardens and food preparation for storing. We set a day to all help butcher the male chickens for meat. The hens we would keep through the winter for eggs. For that reason, I created a “chicken” room in the cow shed, building a wall of hay bales to keep them warm, alongside the room that the several cows would also keep “warm.” The two rooms would be cold, but they remained above freezing. We might have put in some auxiliary heat for the coldest days, I don’t remember. The hens did lay eggs for a while, until it got too cold.

Then, we asked Randy Jordan to come over for a few days from Blueberry to help us put a snowplow on our tractor. He did that, and gave us a crude, but effective way to keep our winter road open whenever it snowed. Once the roads were covered in snow, the route over the ridge and across the Gundy Creek was impassible. At the same time, we were able to plow out an ice road across the marshy ground going south down the valley until our road connected with a well-kept gas-well road which went east past farmsteads to the Alaska Highway just north of Wonowon.

Final Immigration
We had one more trip before the end of the year, however, and that was to finalize our immigration to Canada. 

Kars and Minnie had purchased a newer vehicle and given their pickup to the community for general use. It was now our only vehicle, except the blue van, which, although I could use it around the farm just a bit, it had little power for the steep hill slopes in and out.

So, we all five piled into the farm pickup and headed south to Prince George on November 20. The starter went out on the pickup in Prince George, and we stayed an extra night with some friends there and got it replaced. We did not know, when we drove down through the day, that our tail and break lights were not working. 

We crossed the border into Washington state in the late afternoon and headed to Whidbey island for the ferry crossing that would take us to Sequim and the Howat’s. It was dark, however, as we approached Anacortes and the highway three-lanes-wide was packed with cars in rush hour. Suddenly police lights went on behind us. I was in the left lane and could only pull over to the left. Maureen rolled down her window. A very red-faced policeman came up to the window and screamed obscenities at me, right across Maureen and the children. I did not reply.

In the end, he did not ticket us, but instructed us to drive no more after dark until we got our lights fixed. He drove behind us to the nearest motel, just outside of Anacortes. It was early evening, so, after we put the children to bed, Maureen and I turned on the television to find The Godfather just starting. This was the first time we had seen it and we watched it all the way through. Stark, but impressive, to say the least.

The next day we crossed the ferry and drove on to Sequim. They were having a service that evening, so I had the opportunity to share a word. We visited with the Howat’s but spent the night with the Killam’s. The next day, Mr. Killam slid under the pickup and saw that the wire running to the lights had been broken. He pieced it back together and our problem was solved.

We went on that day to the Rutledge’s in Gresham, Oregon, and spent the night with them. The next day we met up with Katie Bracken. We went to a mall together where Johanna wandered off and got lost. We spent awhile in frantic searching before Kyle hollered her name and she stood up from a lady’s lap who had found her and was waiting for us. We spent that night back at the Yordy house with Franz and Audrey. The next day we visited with Glenn’s wife, Kim, who had come to Oregon for a visit. We also spent part of the day visiting with Cheryl and Dave.

The next day was Thanksgiving. We all gathered at Franz’s for dinner and a family get-together. The next day we were back at Sequim with the Howat’s. Marlyss Johnson was visiting Sequim, and she shared a word in the service.

In the late afternoon of November 30, we crossed the Canadian border again at Aldergrove. We took our immigration papers in to the same man who had been kind to us over many years. He said to us, “You are the kind of people I like seeing immigrating to Canada.” He signed and stamped our papers with a flourish.

We were landed immigrants to Canada. 

That night we spent with Ruth and Ricky Singh before heading back north.

Without Hope 
For some reason we took the route into the Rockies and Jasper Park instead of through Prince George. I like driving roads I’ve never been on before. On this trip through the Rockies, Maureen and I listened to a tape of a sermon that Dan Ricciardelli had preached at a Bowens Mill convention that year. Brother Dan’s topic was “hope.”

In order to set the stage, I must explain to you what “hope” meant to me by that point in my life. What Dan taught about hope went deep into me. I witnessed to it in my spirit. I had a significant problem, however; I did not really know what hope was, for I had lost any hope I once had.

My hope in the move of God fellowship for over twenty years was that, through the years of the dealing of God, of walking under His hand, of living in Christ community, of submitting to the covering, of commitment to a Tabernacles word, that I would become a manifest son of God, part of the firstfruits of Christ in the ending of this age of human folly, and part of the arising of a new age, that I now call “the Age of Tabernacles.” My understanding of that calling and vision had grown at that time to include a real hope of entering into union with God.

The problem was very simple. None of that was happening. My eldership role was going nowhere, Blair Valley had suffered a significant loss with the Annett’s in town most of the time. My physical strength was vanishing. 

I remember one of our times at Sequim, that Sister Barbara James was there. She is wonderfully anointed, in praise and in word. We had one of the most wondrous praise times of my life that evening. But she had preached a word, common to the move, in which she warned us that if we allowed any weakness of our flesh to gain an upper hand, then it would keep us from connecting with God. She said that allowing inadequacies to continue meant that they would rule our life and not God. And this idea came inside a constant preaching of hear and obey, and do not do anything unless God tells you to do it.

I have never known a life of “hear and obey.” Such a way of living has always been far away from me. And now the tiredness of my body and the inadequacies of my person seemed to stand against any hope that God might one day make me like Jesus.

To put it very simply, we believed that salvation was OF US, and not of God, and that if we did not “measure up,” then, we might “go to heaven,” but God would not include us in the revelation of Jesus Christ.

I did not measure up in any direction. I drove back home to Blair Valley without hope.