Coming into the Country (22 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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In September, 1971, a Boeing 727 of Alaska Airlines, with seven crew members and a hundred and four passengers, was coming in toward Juneau at an altitude considerably below the approach-chart minimum. Investigators are sure there was an error in the navigational equipment—either in the plane or on the ground. The pilot apparently thought he had passed a checkpoint he had not yet reached, and thought he was over Auke Bay. He was still in the Chilkat Range. In cloud, the aircraft flew among mountains, feeling its way down—forty—five hundred, thirty-five hundred, twenty-five hundred feet. The height of the last ridge—before the terrain would fall away
to low ground and open water—was thirty-five hundred and nine feet.
Ray said he flew out to see the accident. “It was a terrible, terrible thing. The plane had split. It had been peeled like a banana, spewing people out both sides. But that is the only major accident we have had here. There are more accidents in Anchorage—more air traffic and more danger. And how many people get killed in Anchorage in car wrecks? What are the chances of getting shot in Anchorage—by some drug-crazed son of a bitch? Or getting acid thrown in your face? Compare
that
with Juneau. I can't even
remember
a murder in Juneau. I wonder if
anybody
remembers a murder here.”
He got up, stuck his head out the door, and asked if anyone out there remembered a murder. Zero.
“I can tell you when the last one in Anchorage was,” he went on, sitting down again. “It was last weekend.”
“What do you suppose the new capital will look like?” I asked him.
“Personally, I think the capital's going to look like Juneau. Because it's going to
remain
in Juneau. But if there ever were a new capital, I'd want them to have a collection of buildings Alaska could be proud of, I'll tell you that—not a boxworks, not an Anchorage, not a glorified privy. Anchorage looks like Poppincorn, Iowa. There is nothing Alaskan about it. A new capital should look like Alaska.”
“What sort of look is that?”
“I don't know. All I know is Anchorage stinks. The Anchorage strategy will be to piecemeal the capital. They'll peddle a temporary, functional capital to keep the cost-appearance down, and then they'll sock it to 'em, baby. At least a billion dollars. Oh, they're making a big effort, these Anchorage people, and to keep people trying that hard there's got to be, someplace, a dollar in the ground.”
“So you built Fort Ray as an immovable object, a defense against the move?”
“Right.”
“And the highway, too?”
“Right. God-damned right.”
“And the courthouse?”
“Exactly!”
“And the garage?”
“You've got it!”
“All to turn millions into masonry that could never leave Juneau, all to stop the move?”
“That's it! That's what I did! With all that built, how
could
they move it?”
“What will you do when the capital moves?”
The Senator fell suddenly quiet, and for at least two minutes stared out his window and down the street to Fort Ray. “What
is
there to do?” he said, at last. “Just sit here and look at it, that's all. Juneau. Wiped out. With more than half of the work force gone, the city will fall dead. There won't be anything left. While the state squanders money on a new capital, Juneau will fall dead. And what will we gain? We don't—in Alaska—have money to run our schools.”
He paused a moment, then went on, “Oh, we're steadily building up the University of Alaska's Southeast Branch here. We're building the fisheries-research program. There are some tourists. But, frankly, what are you going to do for tourists in the wintertime when the god-damned Taku wind is blowing fifty miles an hour and the windchill factor is sixty below?”
“Not to mention the rain.”
“People make too much of the god-damned rain. There's more than average, but you kind of like it. It keeps you alert.”
The Senator stood up, shook hands warmly, said he was sorry he had to go but he had a plane to catch, put on his coat, went to the airport, and flew to an apartment he maintains in Torremolinos, on the Costa del Sol, of Spain.
In Florida, in the nineteen-sixties, a movement stirred to have the capital shifted from eccentric Tallahassee to the center
of the state, to Orlando. The legislature's direct response was to appropriate ten million dollars for new House and Senate office buildings and forty million for a new Capitol—in Tallahassee.
Seven per cent of Juneau's voters voted for the capital move. Some of these were government employees who had lived “up north” (as they say in Juneau) and were hoping to go back. Others were people who thought the state government had inflated the local economy. And another was Fishpole John. John Klett, from Meriden, Connecticut, was considerably more Alaskan than most Alaskans, in that he had been there more than forty years when he died not long ago. In an old shop on South Franklin, he meticulously fashioned salmon rods, and he sent them on order as far as Europe. He was a big man with stiff white bristles, a red knitted cap—and before anyone who cared to listen he would fulminate as he worked. “I voted to move it. I'm glad they're going to move the son of a bitch. Jesus Christ. It costs too much to keep the capital here. If the state government was out of here, this would be a better town. No matter where you've got a capital, you've got crime. This town is a rip-off town in a rip-off state. The dirty dozen —the people that runs Juneau—want to keep all the money to themselves, but a lot of people who don't have money get nothing and would like to see the capital go. The legislature voted themselves a raise this year—to fourteen thousand seven hundred dollars. What the hell do they do up there? Nothing. Everybody wants the legislature out of here. They're the biggest bunch of chisellers. They leave stores holding their personal checks. Sitka was the capital seventy-five years ago. Sitka is better off than we are now.”
The mayor of Sitka happened to stop off in Juneau while I was there, and he did not disagree with Fishpole John. “We lost the capital, and nobody in Sitka regrets it,” he said. “The government makes Juneau a rat race, where strangers come and go.” The mayor of Sitka, John Dapcevich, had grown up in
Juneau, had become an accountant, and had once been the state budget analyst. “Sitka is a bad place for the capital,” he continued. “And so is Juneau. But it's stupid to move it. It's just a matter of economics. We can't afford this new utopia. The Boeing report was ridiculous—not even close to the picture.”
Boeing—the aircraft company—has a computer-services subsidiary that will study just about anything for anybody, and in 1974 it analyzed for the government of Alaska the cost of moving the capital from Juneau. The cost turned out to be modest, according to Boeing. Some fifteen years in the future, the cost of having relocated the capital would exceed by only a hundred and ten million dollars the cost of the capital should it stay in Juneau, in part because the state would be spared the expense of refurbishing its older buildings there. Boeing also decided that so much matériel and manpower would be on hand as a result of the pipeline project that the new capital's building costs would be significantly reduced. The Boeing report could not help but influence the fate of the initiative on the ballot, and the report left Juneau particularly bitter. Juneau attorneys were quick to say that while the report depreciated the buildings of the old capital it did not depreciate the new buildings in the new location. Juneau rumbled about a lawsuit.
One of Juneau's responses to approaching catastrophe has been to suggest that people need not actually travel to the capital to watch, or even confer with, the legislature. In Alaska, in fact, the difficulty of bringing people together to make (and to influence the making of) laws is only one of countless problems in weaving an economic, political, and cultural fabric across a third of a billion acres of land. Alaska is attempting to solve the problem with RCA earth stations that are trained on satellites and patterned so that telecommunications and closedcircuit TV can tie any part of Alaska to any other. An earth station is functioning now in Talkeetna. Others are in place as well. The goal is a hundred and twenty-nine, all over the state.
Using them, doctors in Anchorage are already treating patients lying in infirmaries in the bush. Juneau has pointed out that people in Bettles, Barrow, or Nome could go into a room in a state office building and watch, say, the House Resources Committee at work in Juneau. They could talk to the committee. They could even testify.
Rhode Island used to worry about its great size, too. In an area so large, one capital site could not serve all the people. So the legislature travelled from Newport to Bristol to East Greenwich to South Kingstown to Providence, and did not settle exclusively in Providence until 1901. Vermont's legislature travelled, too. Delaware, which is smaller than quite a few islands in Alaska, moved its capital from New Castle to Dover in order to have a central location. On the other hand, there have been capitals even more out of the way than Juneau. Of the three capitals in the history of Wisconsin, one was Burlington, Iowa. The Vermont state legislature once convened in Charlestown, New Hampshire.
Some of the people I met in Juneau were cultivating the hope that after the new capital site was chosen environmental-impact statements would show intolerable costs. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline had been projected in 1969 as a nine-hundredmillion-dollar project. Now the guess was that the pipeline would cost, in the end, something like eight billion.
Meanwhile, the dissident seven per cent still wanted the capital to go. Some people in Juneau felt that Juneau was more attractive as an old mining town than it would ever be with the development that would continue if the capital stayed. They had voted for the initiative. So had commercial fishermen, irritated by a boat harbor full of pleasure-fishing cruisers owned by state employees, by a clutter of sport fishermen, while the commercial catch declined. In the Juneau Cold Storage Company, in a big room full of running water and silver salmon in iced hampers, I watched rubber-booted men and women slicing the salmon clean. As he worked, a tall, strong, unreserved
young man, a big man in thick wool trousers and two wool shirts, said, “I know a girl who works in the State Office Building, and she knits a sweater there every month. I hate those bureaucrats with a purple passion—the god-damned parasites, walking around doing nothing, sitting on their butts. They're wrecking the fishing for the commercials. I'd like to see them go. I'd like to see mosquitoes eat them. I'd like to see them up in the bush.”
 
 
 
The big helicopter, in the air again with the Capital Site Selection Committee, moved generally southward in a loose, truffle-sniffing zigzag. In haze to the east we could barely discern the corridor line of the Anchorage-Fairbanks Highway. Someone remarked that the Matanuska-Susitna Borough had announced that it was going to put several dozen parcels of land on the market—land spaced through the valley from Willow to Talkeetna.
“Somebody's out for a land grab,” said Louise Kellogg, and she volunteered to look into it and see what she could do to discourage feverish speculation. This was her district, her borough. She had come to it nearly thirty years before, and had long had a dairy farm near Palmer. The farm—a hundred and twenty-five cows—had been leased to a younger farmer. With a partner, she was now running an antique shop, whose contents discouraged her, she said, because so many items familiar to her when she was young had now become negotiable as antiques. When she was young, she had gone to Vassar. She had recently been to her fiftieth reunion there. She had been a member of the South Central District Republican Committee and a trustee of Alaska Methodist University. Small, gentle, white-haired, wearing trifocals, she may not have appeared to be particularly forceful, but no one seemed to doubt that she
could deal with the borough. Its freeholders, like any number of other people, apparently wanted to test and sample the capital-engendered increase in the price of land. (“The capital has been located; located against the wish of the great majority of the people—located for the pecuniary and personal benefit of Tom Cuming and his brother bribers—located at a place without any natural advantages, and one totally barren of anything save whisky shops and drunken politicians … a place having no historic interest—simply because they could make a better bargain with the speculators,” wrote the Nebraska
Palladium,
in 1855.)

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