Coming into the Country (29 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Jim Dungan comes swinging up the road on his way from his cabin to the urn of coffee at the store, where he can sit on a stool and use up a part of his day. When he leaves, he will go down by the river and stare, leaning forward on his crutches, for as much as an hour at the flamelike, firelike movement of ice. Meanwhile, he greets Sarge. He waves in my direction, too. “Just call me Hopalong,” he says. Visiting Jim's cabin now and again, I will have a drink of Postum or coffee and be let into his present and all but disoriented world, which has no walls of time. “I'll be off these crutches soon,” he says, as if I had not previously heard him say it. “I won't be wearing them all my life, that's for sure.”
When the crutches go, he wants to get out again into the
wild with a suction dredge. Like Sarge Waller, Jim Dungan has dreamed of a life beyond community, a cabin somewhere up a faraway stream, an existence financed (in his case) not with furs but with gold. “Just to get out and live the way I figure a guy should. I didn't buy land here in Eagle because I like the town. I like the country. The dredge gives me a purpose out there. If you're not gettin' good color, you can shut down the dredge, take a pan, and go off prospecting for a couple of weeks. Set up a little lean-to. Find a better place. Get the dredge and work the better place.”
Suction dredges are a modern vogue, and, if any comparison is valid, are miniature versions of the old gold dredges—the shiplike, company-owned floating units that elsewhere in Alaska still eat whole streams. Suction dredges are portable, cheap, irresistible to a certain class of lone, adventuring miner. They are floating units, using inner tubes or Styrofoam blocks. Typically, they will have a seven-horsepower engine and a short, narrow sluice box. The whole unit can be dragged about by someone in a wet-suit, holding a long hose that sucks up stream-bed gravel.
Alaska
magazine advertises a “high-impact Jet Age plastic” sluice box that sells for $39.95, a Gold-Vac dredge for $295. Dungan prefers somewhat better gear, and figures that thirteen hundred dollars would equip him. Generally, the miner kneels in the river, its riffles driving at his chest, but he can go down eight, ten feet, if he knows what he is doing, and draw gravels from crevices in rock. The hoses are usually about four inches in diameter, and can swallow stones almost as large. Rocks, sand, gold, and gravel go into a hopper, then on through the sluice box, which catches the gold. That is what Jim Dungan came into the country to do—in 1968, with a partner called Polack Joe. Dungan was an experienced diver. (“I used to be able to hit sixty feet free-diving with no air.”) The partners first worked the Bottom Dollar, a small tributary in the Birch Creek mining district, upward of a hundred miles west of Eagle. In one six-day period, they got forty-seven ounces of gold, worth about two thousand dollars. They
left Alaska, but came back for good in 1970 and worked the Fortymile River, near Eagle. “We were living all over the Fortymile. We'd find an old cabin, and dry off, and then get back on the river. We caught grayling, shot rabbits. Me and Joe. It's a different way of life, not the rat race you got down there. That's all it is down there that I can see. Up here, a person is as good as he's going to make it. A guy's freer in this country. Down there, you're so restricted. Up here, they ain't gettin' you for spittin' on the sidewalk.”
A flood on the Fortymile for the time being killed the good life. It might have killed the partners. It utterly destroyed their suction dredge. The partnership broke up; Dungan went to Fairbanks and took a job. He planned to work until he had bought a truck, a cabin in Eagle, and a new dredge. First as a cook and later as a jug-hustler, chain man, and shooter, he worked for Geophysical Service, Inc., using seismic instruments in the search for oil. From the air, six months of the year, large parts of the green surface of Alaska appear sutured with seismic trails. A jug is a geophone, and as many as two thousand may be set in the ground, usually in straight lines, to monitor the waves from dynamite blasts as they reflect from underground formations. After each blast, jugs from the rear are moved to the front. Day after day—usually in winter, to reduce damage to the terrain—the procession moves cross-country. Dungan worked on seismic crews from the North Slope to southeastern Alaska—walking a hundred and ten miles once in the Arctic in winter, calling in helicopters to drive off grizzlies in summer, and saving the money he earned. He once worked a line down the Susitna Valley, and on winter nights could see the lights of Anchorage. He went no closer. “Jesus Christ, you go in there and there goes your winter's paycheck. I just stayed in camp.” He saved enough to buy his cabin in Eagle and, later, a three-quarter-ton green Ford pickup. He was about ready to buy his new suction dredge when he came back to Eagle on leave from a job in the Brooks Range, May 14, 1974.
He got drunk that night with a celebrational friend, and the
next morning, feeling drier than the town itself, he decided to take a ride over the mountains to a roadhouse where he could see some friends, drink a beer or two, and buy some booze for fresh reunions. The pickup spat and sputtered. It was just a year old and in powerful shape, but had been idle all through the winter. He reasoned that its engine was full of carbon, so he went into the hills burning it out with speed. He was found two hours later. The truck had rolled three times. He had broken all his left ribs and both legs. The right leg was not so much broken as shattered. Pieces of the bone were never found. Eagle's satellite radio called for help. Thirteen hours after the accident, Dungan reached the hospital in Fairbanks, two hundred miles away. In the years since, he has been given skin grafts, bone grafts, a steel plate, and seven pins that look like wood screws. “They said I didn't have much chance of keeping my leg after the bone graft and the plate, but I fooled 'em. I still have the leg.” The plate is to come out when the bone graft is solid, but the plan is not working well, because a hole will not close in the leg above the plate. “Sometime next winter, I should be working. After the cast comes off, I can walk with a shoepac and a cane. I'll be off these crutches soon. I won't be wearing them forever.”
His cabin, where he does most of his waiting, is eight feet by twelve—not quite three steps by four. He sits at a table, and I sit on his bunk. The stove fills the rest of the room. The previous owners were a family named Waite—trappers, now gone from the country. Four of them—two girls and their parents—lived in the cabin two years. With a tar roof and board siding, it is lined with aluminum foil and looks like a baked potato experienced from the inside. There is one small window, with two panes, presenting a view of stacked cordwood—birch and spruce. When I first called on Dungan, in the course of a trip through the country in 1975, he said he was disturbed about his wood stove, because it was not airtight and had been hard to control. When the temperature outside was sixty below zero, the stove had driven the temperature up to
a hundred and thirty degrees, and Dungan was besaunaed in his own steam. He has since replaced the stove. I remember, too, that he had a glass jar full of king salmon preserved in rock salt. He said he was saving it for his Christmas dinner.
I ask him now about the salmon, and he tells me that it spoiled. He spent Christmas in the hospital. He still has the bad salmon. “When my leg heals, I'll use it for bear bait.”
His green pickup, its roof crushed down, now sits in front of Dan Kees' house, next door. Kees bought it for parts, and the hulk is there for Dungan to stare at, which he often does. Dungan is thirty-nine. His dark hair is receding. He has a quietly modulated voice, and the wide stare of a wounded creature. He grew up mostly in Wisconsin, stepson of a railroad switchman, and went to Cudahy High School, in Milwaukee, and straight into the U.S. Marines. He worked for eight years on the assembly line at American Motors. “That's enough to drive a man completely insane.” It drove him, at any rate, to Vietnam—as a reënlisted Marine. “That's one place I'd rather forget, to tell you the truth. I hear all this petty-ante bitching around here, and I think, They should really have something to bitch about. This town is divided between the outlaws and the do-gooders. I don't give a damn about their stories about each other. I try to stay out of it. This is just like every other bush town. If I could be, I'd be in the high country, or on the Yukon River.”
A quiver of arrows hangs from a rafter. Tacked to another rafter is an emblem that says “GSI ARCTIC OPERATION 1969—70.” A note on a wall calendar under January 17th says “SUN—frist time sence Nov. 21.” There are pictures on the table and the windowsill. One is of his stepfather, recently dead, others of a child or two. There are six pictures in all, of the family of his only, and older, brother. “My brother, Bob, was killed in 1972 in a light airplane in the Lower Forty-eight. That's him. That's his little girl there. She got run over by a car.”
“Have you ever been married?”
“No. I've always been just kind of a bum.”
Joseph Hajec, Polack Joe, also worked for American Motors. Dungan tried decking on car ferries and driving spikes in the railroad yard before the two of them left for Alaska. “We were working the whole god-damned year to get two weeks' vacation. Then we'd head for open country. Then back to work for eleven and a half months to get back to the country. Some people get a good job at American Motors and think they've got it made. If you can go out and enjoy the country—to me, that's the life. My reason for being up here is basically a guy can be an individual. In Milwaukee, we had armed robberies, murders, rapes. There's no crime in Eagle. I didn't feel safe walking a country road in Wisconsin. I feel safe going down here to the store.”
In Dungan's cabin are two pistols, two shotguns, and three rifles. He keeps a pistol and a shotgun always loaded. “Bears come right into town here. You never know. The first night I ever spent in Eagle, I was sleeping in a tent. I had two Eskimo women with me and a case of booze. When I was sleepin', I had a four-hundred-pound black bear lookin' me in the face. Dave Crump, who was there, shot him under the chin with a .30—'06. You never know. Besides, I've got a philosophy. I let the people know the guns are loaded. I've always kept a gun. I kept a .38 in Wisconsin. There are no bears there. But there are jealous husbands. I'm not exactly an angel.”
He lights his pipe. It is long and low and looks somewhat Sherlockian and even more like a toilet bowl. He wears a cotton sweatshirt, corduroy trousers. His toes look like dead wizened tubers protruding from the cast. “I'm hopeful that in a matter of weeks they'll cut this cast off and say, ‘Dungan, put on a shoe.' That damned life goes by too quick. You look back and say, ‘Where'd that go to?' If this hole's healed up by summer, I'm going to go for gold. Everybody says a suction dredge is just a god-damned toy. But I'm going up there as a way of being independent, as a way of making a winter's grub. These guys
who go out trapping—Cook, Edwards, Potts—they could make five times as much on the pipeline. But they're independent. I'll use all the proceeds from dredging first to buy a snow machine to take food and equipment in winter to the dredging sites—spare parts, gasoline, case lots of bacon, beans, and rice. Up in the Fortymile country, I got a couple of places picked out. It's high country, closer to bedrock. I'll stake no claims. I'll just go for the gold.”
“What would you do if you got a hundred thousand dollars' worth of gold?”
“Put it in the bank.”
“How would it change your life?”
“It wouldn't.”
 
 
 
Wyman Fritsch, a conventional placer miner, has a nugget larger than his thumb. He found it in the Discovery Fork of American Creek, some ten miles out of Eagle, and he says it is by no means the largest one he has taken from that stream. He has been mining there for fifty years. He was a boy when he came into the country. He is currently known as The Man with the Big Nugget. He showed it to me the other day, so that I could hold it in my hand and rub the genius of the gold. It was lumpy, pitted, pocked, rough, ugly—an apparent filling from the tooth of a Sasquatch. The marvel of it—as the earth's elements go—is that when Fritsch came to it with his mining equipment, scraping up the deep gravels of American Creek, it was there as nearly pure metal. Gold is not merely rare. It can be said to love itself. In the idiom of science, it is, with platinum, the noblest of the noble metals—those which resist combination with other elements. It wants to be free. In cool crust rock, it generally is free. At very high temperatures, however, it will go into compounds; and the gold that is among
the magmatic fluids of interior earth may be combined, for example, with chlorine. Gold chloride is “modestly” soluble, and will dissolve in water that comes down and circulates in the magma. The water picks up many other elements, too: potassium, sodium, silicon. Heated, the solution rises into fissures in hard crust rock, where the cooling gold breaks away from the chlorine and—in sizes ranging from specks to the eggs of geese —falls out of the water as metal. Silicon precipitates, too, filling up the fissures and enveloping the gold with veins of silicon dioxide, which is quartz.

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