Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
Coming into the Country (28 page)
All water must be lugged from the community well house, which is up past the post office, in the center of townâdrinking water, dishwater, bathwater. I prefer my scent. Under
the eaves of the cabin, however, are barrels, buckets, tubs, which will occasionally catch enough water to wash and rinse a moose. In the rainwater, lather swells and crowns, forms pillows on the skin. The lather is a particular luxury in Eagle, where rain is fairly scarce and the well water is so hard it turns soap into stone. Eagle is directly over an old inactive fault, and its water rises through a fracture from an exceptionally deep source, bearing a taste of soda. There is a stream not far away called Champagne Creek. The ground that lies between the cabin and the outhouse is unvegetated glacial flourâfineground soil, soft as powdered talc, brought down by the Yukon from the ice fields of the high Wrangells and left here for aeons past. It sticks to shoes and is tracked in. Clothes become stiff with it, so they are washed in leftover bathwaterâand, after that, in goes the odd pot or pan. Finally, the water washes the floor, where its arc of utility ends. What is left is carried to the riverbank and dumped over. A block of shore ice, at the same time, is chipped out with an axe in order to refill an insulated cooler.
the eaves of the cabin, however, are barrels, buckets, tubs, which will occasionally catch enough water to wash and rinse a moose. In the rainwater, lather swells and crowns, forms pillows on the skin. The lather is a particular luxury in Eagle, where rain is fairly scarce and the well water is so hard it turns soap into stone. Eagle is directly over an old inactive fault, and its water rises through a fracture from an exceptionally deep source, bearing a taste of soda. There is a stream not far away called Champagne Creek. The ground that lies between the cabin and the outhouse is unvegetated glacial flourâfineground soil, soft as powdered talc, brought down by the Yukon from the ice fields of the high Wrangells and left here for aeons past. It sticks to shoes and is tracked in. Clothes become stiff with it, so they are washed in leftover bathwaterâand, after that, in goes the odd pot or pan. Finally, the water washes the floor, where its arc of utility ends. What is left is carried to the riverbank and dumped over. A block of shore ice, at the same time, is chipped out with an axe in order to refill an insulated cooler.
A quart of milk in the cooler cost $1.36. It came from Visalia, California. It is neither condensed nor evaporated but “sterilized” whole milk, in a can, without preservatives. It is fine milk, but too expensive. Condensed milk, appropriately diluted, works out at 60¢ a quart, and powdered milk at half of that. Frozen steak costs $4.20 a pound, bacon $2.07, chicken $1.15, hamburger $2.10, cheddar cheese $2.35, butter $1.85âall this in Eagle's only store. Grapefruit cost 55¢ apiece, a cucumber 75¢, tomatoes and lettuce about $1.15 a pound. Fresh food, after travelling upward of two thousand miles, for the most part has jet lag. Campbell's soup is 51¢ a can, a dozen eggs $1.30. A standard box of Morton's salt costs 62¢. Much is said about the high cost of things in Alaska, but what seems remarkable is that prices are not much higher than these, since virtually everything arrives by truck, plane, or boat from the rest of the United States. The supply lines to Anchorage and
Fairbanks are long and costly enough, but these pricesâroughly half again as high as they would be in New Jerseyâare set in Eagle, where nearly everything has been brought in light planes another two hundred miles over mountains. Dave McCall, the pilot-storekeeper, charges 19¢ a pound for flying things in. Hence the especially costly salt.
Fairbanks are long and costly enough, but these pricesâroughly half again as high as they would be in New Jerseyâare set in Eagle, where nearly everything has been brought in light planes another two hundred miles over mountains. Dave McCall, the pilot-storekeeper, charges 19¢ a pound for flying things in. Hence the especially costly salt.
Outside the cabin window, a robin is hopping around with feathers fluffed up against the cold. The ice goes out. The birds come in. Transition is almost instant from winter to spring. It is curious to see these robinsâbig, tough robinsâso far up here, so near the Arctic Circle, near the top of their range. They seem miserable, fluffing themselves up into balls in an attempt to make down jackets of their own feathers. Dozens of Lapland longspurs are jumping, pecking, jumping, pecking in the dust near the robins, and looking immeasurably more at home. We have seen warblers, juncos, blackbirds, gyrfalcons, a pair of golden plovers, an Arctic tern. A seagull sits on the outhouse, thirteen hundred miles upriver from the sea.
Twilight holds through the night now, and darkness has gone for the summer. There is little need of lamps, but when I want them to read or write by I fiddle with mantles and pump up pressures for intense white-gasoline light.
The dogs staked out all over town set up a chorus wail. They seem to be responding to direction from the sky, because their arioso howls begin with a simultaneity that has no explanation. There is a hint of wolf in some of these dogs, and the part that is wolf seems to be their voices. The wailing stops the way it startsâall at once there is silence, and no saying why.
In woods across from the cabin window, the remains are visible of two or three older cabinsâmoldering away, so far gone now they are barely discernible and have almost disappeared. A little to the right of them is Elmer and Margaret Nelson's new place, wood still shining from the saw. The neighborhood represents the rise and fall and rise of Eagle. The Nelsons have come here to retire, like one or two other couples
in the town, which, as retirement centers go, is about as far as you can get from Sun City. Margaret Nelson is grandmotherly, with whitening hair, and Elmer is wiry, spare, and gray. She came to Alaska from the state of Washington in the thirties, worked for the Northern Commercial Company, and, during the war, wrapped parachutes in Fairbanks. He grew up on a homestead in Montana and has lived in Alaska fifty years. He built roads and he trapped. Deep among the mountains off the left bank of the Yukon, Nelson and a partner had a chartered airplane fly them around while they dropped packages. Eventually, they landed at a hand-dug airstrip. This would be in September most years. They would ask the pilot to return a day or two before Christmas. Thenâwithout machines of any kind, without dogsâthey would separate and cover country as rapidly as they could in an attempt to get to their dropped supplies in advance of foraging bears. They laid out patterned traplinesâloops, cloverleafs. Every five days, they rendez-vousedâeach to see that the other was all right, and to pass on information. This was total wilderness. They were something over a hundred miles from Circle and eighty from Eagle and eighty from Big Delta, where the Nelsons lived at the time. In any kind of need, there was nowhere else to go. In discrete valleys were a few cabins, and they stayed in them or siwashed (camped on the trail). When they were picked upâafter three months in there, generally apart and aloneâthey had collected a good share of their income for the following year.
in the town, which, as retirement centers go, is about as far as you can get from Sun City. Margaret Nelson is grandmotherly, with whitening hair, and Elmer is wiry, spare, and gray. She came to Alaska from the state of Washington in the thirties, worked for the Northern Commercial Company, and, during the war, wrapped parachutes in Fairbanks. He grew up on a homestead in Montana and has lived in Alaska fifty years. He built roads and he trapped. Deep among the mountains off the left bank of the Yukon, Nelson and a partner had a chartered airplane fly them around while they dropped packages. Eventually, they landed at a hand-dug airstrip. This would be in September most years. They would ask the pilot to return a day or two before Christmas. Thenâwithout machines of any kind, without dogsâthey would separate and cover country as rapidly as they could in an attempt to get to their dropped supplies in advance of foraging bears. They laid out patterned traplinesâloops, cloverleafs. Every five days, they rendez-vousedâeach to see that the other was all right, and to pass on information. This was total wilderness. They were something over a hundred miles from Circle and eighty from Eagle and eighty from Big Delta, where the Nelsons lived at the time. In any kind of need, there was nowhere else to go. In discrete valleys were a few cabins, and they stayed in them or siwashed (camped on the trail). When they were picked upâafter three months in there, generally apart and aloneâthey had collected a good share of their income for the following year.
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The Nelsons' place is landscaped only by its woods. Neat, odd, it lacks the expectable outdoor furnishings of an Alaskan cabin. My side of the road makes up for that. A few feet away from me, in the direction of the center of town, is the cabin of Dale and Gloria Richert, who sell used snow machines,washing machines, sledsâexamples of which are strewn about the space between the cabin and the road. The cabin is roofed with slit and flattened fuel cans. Richert had a store in Michigan not long ago. It was firebombed by hoodlums. This helped him decide that an appropriate community in which to seek a new life might be somewhere near the Arctic Circle. A sign among the used machines says “Eagle Sports Shop.” Richert has lures, flashlights, tents, bootsâa little L. L. Bean going on inside the cabin. In their regard for his goods, the river people call him Taiwan.
Close by me the other way are the yard and cabin of Louise and Sarge Waller. The remarkable propinquity of these dwellings is characteristic of nearly all settlements, large and small, in Alaska. In three hundred and seventy-five million acresâa sixth of the whole United Statesâso little property is available for purchase that conditions are as crowded as they are in Yonkers. A window of my cabin frames a postcard view of Sarge's yard, which, in no discernible geometric arrangement, contains boxes, tarps, stove parts, cans, buckets, Swede saws, washtubs, tires, sawhorses, fourteen fifty-five-gallon drums, and five snow machines in different stages of dismantlement. When you drive along an old back road in the Lower Forty-eight and come upon a yard full of manufactured debris, where auto engines hang from oak limbs over dark tarry spots on the ground and fuel drums lean up against iron bathtubs near vine-covered glassless automobiles that are rusting down into the soil, you have come upon a fragment of Alaska. The people inside are Alaskans who have not yet left for the north. An architect I know, who prefers to style himself an “environmental psychologist,” once remarked to me, “Aesthetics are not compatible with survival.” In any case, Sarge Waller's place is by no means atypical of the world he has taken for his own. He is out in his yard now, surviving. He is piling up wood. On his pickupâwhich has three spare tires, a gun rack, and a searchlightâis a load of driftwood he has collected from the boat-landing eddy. To get his cabin through a winter, he needs
at least five cords. His cabin, exhaling smoke, is angular and miscellaneous. Sarge himself is less vulnerable to heat loss. He is a big man, with a girth approximating four feet. His arms are legs of lamb. His large, ovoid head is covered with Marine brush. In all this magnitude, his eyes, which are dark, seem small. Sarge is amiable, garrulous. In his house is a framed photograph of the younger Sarge, dimensions the same. He is dressed for battle, but not in his staff sergeant's uniform of the United States Marines. Instead, he wears the white robes of karate, cinctured with black. Sarge was tough. He has dragons on his skin, and snakes, and skullsâeleven tattoos, from as many parts of the world. He survived the battle of the Chosin reservoir, in Korea. He liked the Marine Corps as he found it in 1949 but not as he left it a decade later. He was a junior in high school when he joined up, and what the Marines had then, he says, was “spirit de corps.” In the aftermath of Korea, the U.S. Marines, in his view, “turned into a Girl Scout troop.” If a private first class became troublesome, a sergeant could no longer “punch him in the mouth.” An increasing number of officers, at any rate, would not encourage or support such gestures. One day at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, a corporal in Sarge's unit had trouble with a private and the private was locked up in the brig. Sarge took justice literally into his own hands. He went to the brig, reached through the bars, grabbed the offending Marine private, and pulled him forward with such force that his face crashed into the bars and blood ran from his nose. Sarge explained why he had come, and left. In short order, his phone “jumped a foot off the desk.” The chaplain wanted to see him. “This is no longer the old Marine Corps,” the chaplain informed him, and warned him that a repetition of such behavior could cost him his stripes. He remained a sergeant, but such a disappointed, disillusioned one that he planned on quitting, and wondered what on earth he would do.
at least five cords. His cabin, exhaling smoke, is angular and miscellaneous. Sarge himself is less vulnerable to heat loss. He is a big man, with a girth approximating four feet. His arms are legs of lamb. His large, ovoid head is covered with Marine brush. In all this magnitude, his eyes, which are dark, seem small. Sarge is amiable, garrulous. In his house is a framed photograph of the younger Sarge, dimensions the same. He is dressed for battle, but not in his staff sergeant's uniform of the United States Marines. Instead, he wears the white robes of karate, cinctured with black. Sarge was tough. He has dragons on his skin, and snakes, and skullsâeleven tattoos, from as many parts of the world. He survived the battle of the Chosin reservoir, in Korea. He liked the Marine Corps as he found it in 1949 but not as he left it a decade later. He was a junior in high school when he joined up, and what the Marines had then, he says, was “spirit de corps.” In the aftermath of Korea, the U.S. Marines, in his view, “turned into a Girl Scout troop.” If a private first class became troublesome, a sergeant could no longer “punch him in the mouth.” An increasing number of officers, at any rate, would not encourage or support such gestures. One day at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, a corporal in Sarge's unit had trouble with a private and the private was locked up in the brig. Sarge took justice literally into his own hands. He went to the brig, reached through the bars, grabbed the offending Marine private, and pulled him forward with such force that his face crashed into the bars and blood ran from his nose. Sarge explained why he had come, and left. In short order, his phone “jumped a foot off the desk.” The chaplain wanted to see him. “This is no longer the old Marine Corps,” the chaplain informed him, and warned him that a repetition of such behavior could cost him his stripes. He remained a sergeant, but such a disappointed, disillusioned one that he planned on quitting, and wondered what on earth he would do.
He had grown up in Massillon, Ohio. (His father was a conductor, brakeman, trainman on the Nickel Plate.) In Massillon,
there was an old man with fur clothes and nuggets in his pocketsâa living mothball from the far-northern rush for gold. He liked to talk to kids, and every Saturday he told them stories. He showed Sarge pictures of the wild north. Sarge took to trapping, hunting, and fishing until the truant officer was sent in search of him. When he was nine, he got his first rifle, and decided he would live someday in Alaska. All this came back to him as a depressed Marineâin 1959, the year the territory became a state. Sarge quit the Corps and moved north. It was another eleven years before he came into the upper-Yukon country. He lived meanwhile in Slana, on the “Nigger Highway”âthat is to say, on a road that had been built by a black regiment of the Army Engineers. He married Louise there, a somewhat metropolitan woman, touched with glamour. She was an outback restaurateur. She had a daughter, and they had two more, and Sarge, all the while, had a vision. He was a riverman whose time had not yet come, and one day he would live, utterly on his own, on a big river in a big wilderness. To fulfill these requirements, he need not go farânot two hundred miles away. He arrived in Eagle in 1970 with two boats, a thousand feet of lumber, corrugated roofing, and what he estimated to be a year's supply of food. It was a place “where a guy could branch out into the country.” With his three daughters and his wife, he went fifty miles down the Yukon and built a cabin. Sixteen by twenty feet, with log walls, it was two stories high, and was thus unusual. Its upper level was a sleeping loft. Food ran low, and Sarge's hunting, much of the time, failed to make it up. On rabbit tacos, his waist shrank and shrank to a low of thirty-four. He trapped with some success. Meanwhile, his “womenfolks,” as he lumps them, were not affectionate toward the cabin. They were lonesome, for one thingâmiles from the nearest human beingâand, for another, the cabin had not been designed by a heating engineer. The warmth of the wood stove collected against the roof, and the overall insulation was not adequate to keep much
heat on the ground floor. The family was in the cabin all winter, 1970â71, and spent much of it up in the loft. There were timesâtoo many times for the womenfolksâwhen the stove could not raise the temperature of the ground floor any higher than forty degrees below zero. In this situation, Sarge's vision, the dream of his life, froze solid. He saw himself as a man of the wild, but his family did not. Whatever else might happen to him, though, he was not about to lose his spirit de corpsâand the corps, now, was his family. He retreated from the deep wild and settled with them back in Eagle. Louise, more at home, became the clerk of the city and in some ways its leading politician. Gracefully, she will still say of her husband, “He does not have blood in his veinsâhe has Yukon River water.” Sarge has set himself up as a charter boatman, taking hunters and geologists downriver. He has established traplines near town. For the most part, though, he seems to enjoy himself talking; and he likes to say, “I did not come up here to work anyway. I don't work. And my family is happy.”
there was an old man with fur clothes and nuggets in his pocketsâa living mothball from the far-northern rush for gold. He liked to talk to kids, and every Saturday he told them stories. He showed Sarge pictures of the wild north. Sarge took to trapping, hunting, and fishing until the truant officer was sent in search of him. When he was nine, he got his first rifle, and decided he would live someday in Alaska. All this came back to him as a depressed Marineâin 1959, the year the territory became a state. Sarge quit the Corps and moved north. It was another eleven years before he came into the upper-Yukon country. He lived meanwhile in Slana, on the “Nigger Highway”âthat is to say, on a road that had been built by a black regiment of the Army Engineers. He married Louise there, a somewhat metropolitan woman, touched with glamour. She was an outback restaurateur. She had a daughter, and they had two more, and Sarge, all the while, had a vision. He was a riverman whose time had not yet come, and one day he would live, utterly on his own, on a big river in a big wilderness. To fulfill these requirements, he need not go farânot two hundred miles away. He arrived in Eagle in 1970 with two boats, a thousand feet of lumber, corrugated roofing, and what he estimated to be a year's supply of food. It was a place “where a guy could branch out into the country.” With his three daughters and his wife, he went fifty miles down the Yukon and built a cabin. Sixteen by twenty feet, with log walls, it was two stories high, and was thus unusual. Its upper level was a sleeping loft. Food ran low, and Sarge's hunting, much of the time, failed to make it up. On rabbit tacos, his waist shrank and shrank to a low of thirty-four. He trapped with some success. Meanwhile, his “womenfolks,” as he lumps them, were not affectionate toward the cabin. They were lonesome, for one thingâmiles from the nearest human beingâand, for another, the cabin had not been designed by a heating engineer. The warmth of the wood stove collected against the roof, and the overall insulation was not adequate to keep much
heat on the ground floor. The family was in the cabin all winter, 1970â71, and spent much of it up in the loft. There were timesâtoo many times for the womenfolksâwhen the stove could not raise the temperature of the ground floor any higher than forty degrees below zero. In this situation, Sarge's vision, the dream of his life, froze solid. He saw himself as a man of the wild, but his family did not. Whatever else might happen to him, though, he was not about to lose his spirit de corpsâand the corps, now, was his family. He retreated from the deep wild and settled with them back in Eagle. Louise, more at home, became the clerk of the city and in some ways its leading politician. Gracefully, she will still say of her husband, “He does not have blood in his veinsâhe has Yukon River water.” Sarge has set himself up as a charter boatman, taking hunters and geologists downriver. He has established traplines near town. For the most part, though, he seems to enjoy himself talking; and he likes to say, “I did not come up here to work anyway. I don't work. And my family is happy.”
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