Coming into the Country (18 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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BIG RED'S FLYING SERVICE. BELUGA STEAM & ELECTRIC THAWING. DON'T GO TO JAIL LET FRED GO YOUR BAIL.
There is a street in Anchorage—a green-lights, red-lights, busy street—that is used by automobiles and airplanes. I remember an airplane in someone's driveway—next door to the house where I was staying. The neighbor started up its engine one night toward eleven o'clock, and for twenty minutes he ran it flat out while his two sons, leaning hard into the stabilizers, strained to hold back the plane. In Alaska, you do what you feel like doing, or so goes an Alaskan creed.
There is, in Anchorage, a somewhat Sutton Place. It is an enclave, actually, with several roads, off the western end of Northern Lights Boulevard, which is a principal Anchorage thoroughfare, a neon borealis. Walter Hickel lives in the enclave, on Loussac Drive, which winds between curbs and lawns, neatly trimmed, laid out, and landscaped, under white birches and balsam poplars. Hickel's is a heavy, substantial home, its
style American Dentist. The neighbors' houses are equally expensive and much the same. The whole neighborhood seems to be struggling to remember Scarsdale. But not to find Alaska.
I had breakfast one morning in Anchorage with a man who had come to Alaska from The Trust for Public Land, an organization whose goal is to buy potential parkland in urban areas and hold it until the government, whose legislative machinery is often too slow for the land market, can get up the funds for the purpose. In overbuilt urban settings—from Watts to Newark and back to Oakland—The Trust for Public Land will acquire whatever it can, even buildings under demolishment, in order to create small parks and gardens that might relieve the compressed masses. And now The Trust for Public Land had felt the need to come to Anchorage—to the principal city of Alaska—to help hold a pond or a patch of green for the people in the future to have and see.
Books were selling in Anchorage, once when I was there, for forty-seven cents a pound.
There are those who would say that the only proper place for a new capital of Alaska—if there has to be a new one—is Anchorage, because anyone who has built a city like Anchorage should not be permitted to build one anywhere else.
At Anchorage International Airport, there is a large aerial photograph of Anchorage formed by pasting together a set of pictures that were made without what cartographers call ground control. This great aerial map is one of the first things to confront visitors from everywhere in the world, and in bold letters it is titled “ANCHORAGE, ALASKA. UNCONTROLLED MOSAIC.”
 
 
 
To place its government nearer the center of things, Missouri moved its capital from St. Charles to Jefferson City; West Virginia from Wheeling to Charleston; South Carolina from
Charleston to Columbia; North Carolina from New Bern to Raleigh. The first capital of California was San Jose. Then General Mariano Vallejo offered to underwrite a new capital in, as it happened, Vallejo. The capital soon moved to Benicia, to Sacramento. New York has moved its capital more times than can conveniently be counted. New York City, White Plains, Harlem, Fishkill, Kingston, Marbletown, Hurley, Poughkeepsie … When you have been espoused that often, you are possibly in no hurry to make matters legal the next time around. Such was the case with Albany. The legislation designating Albany the capital of New York was finally written and passed in 1971. Santa Fe became the capital of the Kingdom of New Mexico ten years before Plymouth Rock.
Now, from the Arctic to Southeastern, the committee had been holding “workshop hearings,” inviting and even recruiting people to come and help “relocate” the capital of Alaska. The total attendance each evening would first be separated into small conversational units, and after an hour or so of that a mass parliamentary fracas would follow, during which the various groups reported what had turned up in their discussions.
“Our group is not really familiar with the Susitna area. To us, it's a swamp.”
“A swamp is an appropriate place for government.”
“Swamp or no swamp, get those legislators up here where we can watch them.”
“Even if we don't go to see them many times during a session, just the thought that we can will keep them on their toes.”
Maps were put up on the walls, and people were invited to offer their suggestions on the maps. Someone drew an X in the ocean near Anchorage and wrote, “Just the place for watereddown politicians.”
Someone else said, “Put the capital on a barge. It can travel around the state.”
Quickly the maps were covered with advice.
“Put the money into education.”
“Why destroy one town and at the same time destroy more wild land to build another?”
“Don't mess up more of Alaska.”
“I strongly suggest that the capital not be placed in a wilderness site. We are not Brazil. I don't think we need a new city in Alaska.”
Brasilia, unsurprisingly, had been much on the minds of Alaskans, and they tended to assess Brasilia in the light of their opinions of the Alaskan initiative. Certain promoters of the new city recommended that the Capital Site Selection Committee go to Brasilia to see a vital new capital at work. Others believed what they had read, and saw Brasilia as an airplane (it is laid out in the shape of an airplane) that had made a long flight inland and crashed.
In one of the seminar discussions in a workshop hearing I attended, everyone kept nodding in agreement as grandiose assumptions circled the table.
“I don't know if anybody should even bother to figure the cost of something as important as this.”
“We're going to be Arabs when the royalties come from the pipeline.”
“Alaska will be another Saudi Arabia.”
Then someone compared Anchorage to the slums around Brasilia.
Someone else said, “Yes sirree. What we do not need is a Brasilia in our wilderness.”
And someone else said, “At least, we should profit by others' mistakes.”
Whereupon a distinguished-looking gray-haired man, whose spine was straighter than a T-square, straightened it a little more and gave a short-bark cough for attention. He appeared to have received in his lifetime an unquestioning lot of attention. He said firmly that he felt the moment had come for him
to make himself known. His name was B. B. Talley, he said, and he lived in Kenai and was a retired brigadier general in the United States Army Corps of Engineers. During the Second World War, he had built bases in Alaska. Later on, as a civilian contractor, he had been “in on the planning of Brasilia from beginning to end.” When building began, his company was the only foreign firm with a construction contract there. “We poured the concrete for Brasilia.”
He paused, and looked around the table. A woman across from him said, “Beg your pardon, sir. Are you bragging or complaining?”
General Talley went on to say that Brasilia had been placed far out in the wilderness because various parts of Brazil despise one another and would agree only on a wilderness site. Surely, he said, that's not the case in Alaska.
“Begging your pardon, sir. It surely is.”
Canberra, to a lesser extent, came into the workshop conversations. Canberra, set in the Australian bush between Sydney and Melbourne, had been designed in Chicago by Walter Burley Griffin and had won, through the years, the acceptance of Australians. A somewhat sterile place, undeniably attractive, it has tended to depress some visitors because it offers nothing but government, no relief from government.
In groups formal and informal, small and large, however, the city that was talked about more than any other was Juneau.
“Juneau will be decimated in its spirit as well as in its pocketbook.”
“Juneau's fishing industry is almost gone. The gold mine closed thirty years ago. The logging industry is down—cut down by the Sierra Club. What a shame! The timber is rotting on the vine.”
“The capital is Juneau's only economic base.”
“They will move the capital over my dead body.”
“That condition is acceptable.”
“This move in effect puts up a fence across the hundred-and-forty-first
meridian and says, ‘We don't care what happens to you in Southeastern Alaska.'”
“Juneau snatched the capital from Sitka in 1900. They lobbied secretly in Washington.”
“Anchorage thinks Juneau exercises an undue and malign influence over the entire state—in matters of money, land speculation, capital improvements.”
“Juneau, with the legislature, has had more than its share of appropriated funds. People want to get the money up here in Anchorage.”
“People maneuver, and they put on masks to cloak their maneuvers. Those behind the scenes don't really want to have the legislature close to the people, but that's been the way to peddle the move. What they want is the money.”
“To make a power play work, you have to give lip service to the people.”
“Juneau will survive. Many government employees will stay there in service jobs for Southeastern.”
“Tourists will still come. Every spring, they can't wait, in Juneau, for the legislators to leave, so they can fill the houses with tourists.”
“Juneau will just have to broaden its base.”
“Long before Juneau was ever the capital, Juneau was making a living.”
“They might even start digging some more gold out down there and spending it up here in Alaska.”
 
 
 
Gold prospectors in the nineteenth century had little to go on except an association of gold with quartz and pyrite, and, since that required neither a great deal of intelligence nor academic training, many gold prospectors were the sort of people who had little to go on whatsoever. Two such were
Richard Harris and Joe Juneau, whose most noted employer described Harris as “an inveterate drunkard” and said of Juneau, “Between hooch and squaws he never had a cent to get away on.”
The employer was George Pilz, a mining engineer who set up a mill near Sitka to extract gold from bearing rock. Sitka, in the Alexander Archipelago, had been the Russian capital and was now the American capital of Alaska. The year was 1879, and three events of that season led, ultimately, to the moving of the capital away from Sitka. First, Kowee, principal chief of the Auks, travelled a hundred and fifty miles to Sitka to show the mining engineer certain rock he had collected along Gastineau Channel, near his home. Pilz had promised a hundred Hudson's Bay blankets and steady employment to any tribe that led him to a place where mining could successfully follow. Kowee wanted the work and the blankets. Then, by odd coincidence, the naturalist John Muir passed by on an eighthundred-mile canoe trip. He reported that he had been through Gastineau Channel and had seen interesting mineralization there. And, third, Joe Juneau and Dick Harris—each about forty-five years old—came wobbling down a gangplank off a ship from Wrangell. They owed the purser and the captain for passage, and they were looking around for work.
There was no special hurry about checking out the leads of Muir and Kowee. Pilz had prospectors all over the archipelago —from the Taku Inlet to the Peril Strait, Admiralty Island, Chichagof Island—playing hunches or following the reports and hunches of others. He grubstaked prospectors and salaried them at four dollars a day. In return, he reserved the right to choose two claims from every three they might make. He himself was little more than a middleman. He had to go to the merchants of Sitka, or even to San Francisco, for money to keep all his prospectors active. In attempting to cover an archipelago four hundred miles in length, Pilz in his employment practices could not impose high standards. He took what came
along. Joe Juneau and Dick Harris had been around mining camps much of their lives, and they had come along.

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