Coming into the Country (31 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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New miners come into the country every year—from Nevada, Montana, Oregon, wherever. They look around, and hear stories. They hear how Singin' Sam, on Harrison Creek, “hit an enrichment and took out nuggets you wouldn't believe.” They hear about “wedge-shaped three-quarter-inch nuggets just lying there where water drips on bedrock.” They hear about a miner in the Birch Creek district pulling nuggets from the side of a hill.
“I have always been mining, always preparing ground. I'm not telling you how much money I've got ready to dig up. She's in the bank. Trouble is, there's too much gravel with it.”
In tailing piles left behind by dredges, people hunt for nuggets that were
too big
to get stopped in the sluice boxes and went on through the dredge with the boulders. People reach into their shirt pockets and show you phials that are full of material resembling ground chicken feed and are heavier than paperweights. Man says he saw a nugget big as a cruller tumbling end over end in the blast from a giant hose. It sank from view. He's been looking for it since. Man on Sourdough Creek, working for someone else, confessed he had seen a nugget, and reached to pick it up, and found it was connected by a strand of wire gold to something much larger and deeper. He broke off the nugget and reported nothing. He could hardly mark the spot. Later, he went back to try to find what was there—he knew not where.
 
 
 
To stories of such nature Stanley and Ed Gelvin have not always been immune. Son and father, deep-rooted in the country (the one by birth, the other since long before statehood), they live in Central, a community with a Zip Code and a population of sixteen, so named because it was the point on the Birch Creek supply trail from which the miners fanned out to
the gulches. Some went surprisingly far. Both Stanley and Ed Gelvin are, among other things, pilots, familiar with the country from the air; and some years ago they became more than a little interested in certain conjunctive stream courses in high remote terrain, where they saw aging evidence of the presence of miners. The site is—they request that I not be too specific —somewhere in the hundred-plus miles of mountain country that lies between Eagle and Central. Along a piece of valley floor more than three thousand feet high they noticed, among other things, a wooden sluice box weathered silver-gray, a roofless cabin, a long-since toppled cache. The old-timers did not build cabins, caches, and sluice boxes just in hopes of finding worthwhile concentrations of gold. Having found it, however, they lacked the means to remove anything like the whole of what was evidently there, even when they dug down in winter into places where flooding would stop them in warmer weather —thawing frozen deep gravels with fires and hoisting it up in buckets for sluicing in the spring. Under the stream beds were soaked unfrozen depths known as live ground, where the old-timers could not have worked at all. While some Alaskan streams freeze solid, most continue to run all winter under phenomenally increasing layers of ice and snow. The phenomenon is overflow, which has so often been lethal to people travelling streams on foot—soaking themselves, freezing to death. Water builds up pressure below the ice until it breaks through a crack and spreads out above. When the pressure is relieved, the flow stops and the water becomes a layer of ice. Before long, snow falls, and compacts. More pressure builds, and water again flows out on top. Through a winter, these alternating layers of snow and ice, white and blue, can build up to great confectionery thicknesses—but the stream below remains liquid to bedrock. With appropriate earthmoving equipment, Stanley pointed out, a guy could go into that live ground and scrape up what lay on the rock. No such machine had ever reached these alpine streams, as a glance at their
unaltered state confirmed. They were much too far from the mining road and the dredged and bulldozed creeks of the district. It was almost too bizarre to imagine—a bulldozer in the roadless, trail-less wilderness of those mountains. The price of gold, on the other hand, had lately quintupled. Maybe going in there was worth a try. Over the Gelvins' kitchen table, father and son kept talking, and a program gradually evolved. Attention became focussed on the family backhoe. The first necessity would be to sample the deep gravels and see what was there. That long steel arm and big steel bucket could reach many feet into the bottom of a stream. If a guy wanted to have a look at what was lying on the bedrock, that backhoe would be the thing. Maybe a guy could fly it up there. The backhoe was a modified tractor that had once belonged to the United States Air Force and had hauled bombers around in Fairbanks. It weighed five thousand seven hundred pounds. A guy could take it apart. Reduce it to many pieces. Fly it, in the family airplanes, like birds carrying straws, nut by bolt in fragments into the hills.
When I first met the Gelvins, in the early fall of 1975, pieces of backhoe were strewn all over the ground beside the airstrip behind their cabin. The machine itself was still recognizable but was fast melting away under the influence of the wrench. The airstrip looked like a dirt driveway scarcely ten feet wide, with weeds upgrown on either side almost to the level of a Cessna's wings. The runway had a dogleg. Every so often, Stanley or Ed would stuff some parts into an airplane, roll off in a plume of dust, disappear around the bend, and reappear eventually, rising, to clear a backdrop wall of spruce. Stanley —tall, lanky, still in his middle twenties—being of the country, was a gold miner almost by nature. His father, Ed Gelvin, was more diversified. Over the years, he had become, it seems safe to say, as much as anyone in Alaska an example of what Steve Ulvi has in mind when he speaks so admiringly of “the man of maximum practical application.” Mining, as it happened,
was what first drew Ed and his wife, Ginny, into the country. In the early nineteen-fifties, he worked some claims on Squaw Creek, near Central. He moved a lot of gravel but not a lot of gold. They liked the country, turned to other things, and stayed. Trapper, sawyer, pilot, plumber, licensed big-game guide, welder, ironworker, mechanic, carpenter, builder of boats and sleds, he suffered no lack of occupation. I once asked him if there was anything that could go wrong around his place that would cause him to seek help from elsewhere. He looked off into the distance and carefully thought over the question —this compact and gracefully built man of fifty or so with thick quizzical bifocals, a shy smile, a quiet voice. Finally, he said no, he guessed there wasn't. Ginny hunted with him, and ran the traplines as well. They raised a son and three daughters, who were so fond of moose and caribou they never much cared for beef. Over all the years, meanwhile, and despite the multifarious activities which followed that first attempt at mining, Ed had more trouble getting gold out of his mind than he had had getting it out of Squaw Creek. He had contracted gold fever, the local malaria; and he passed it on to Stanley.
If they were teased by the sight of the old relics they saw in that high nameless valley, there were stories around that were stimulating, too. Old miners in the district said they had always heard it was shallow ground up there, with good colors near the surface—and not much developed by the real old-timers. It had been the valley of, among others, Pete the Pig. That would be his cache lying on its side. Pete the Pig Frisk was a savvy prospector, an efficient miner, not one to waste his time where there was no pay. He found a good pay streak there, and not a few bears. He was a clean, attractive man, Pete the Pig—but he grunted while he worked, while he rooted for gold. When he opened his mouth to speak, he grunted first. When he got old, he went to the Sitka Pioneers' Home. From time to time, the miners out in the country saw a published list of who was there. One year, Pete Frisk's name was gone from the list. In
1962, a man named Brown—from Oregon or “somewhere down near there”—had had himself flown to Pete Frisk's valley in a helicopter. He had a partner with him, two pet Airedales, and a set of miniature sluice boxes that were innovative and effective as tools for prospecting. He also had a .357 Magnum for grizzlies, of which he killed three. When the partners left, they attempted to walk out, by crossing mountains to the Yukon. Because the creeks and streams of Alaska have a geminate quality that can fool even people who know them well, the two men thought they were on Coal Creek headed for the big river when in fact they were on Hanna Creek headed somewhere else. Brown's partner came out weeks later, with an injured leg, floating on a raft he had made on the Charley River. Brown, for his part, “stayed” in the high country; that is, he apparently died there. He was never heard from again. His partner said they had separated after the injury, as Brown went on for help. All that was ever found was the carcass of an Airedale, butchered out as for the table, but uneaten. Possibly, a bear ate Brown. His widow suspected something worse. She thought there had been more than just colors found up there in Pete Frisk's valley.
A dozen years later, Stanley Gelvin, in his Aeronca Champ with its dunebuggy tundra tires, flew so low he skimmed the dwarf willows, hunting the valley for a place to land. Thirteen treeless summits, each about the height of the high Adirondacks, surrounded the three confluent streams there, and down from this nippled coronet ran sweeping tundra fells deceptive to view. They appeared to be as smooth as fairways, but with their sedge tussocks and fissured soils they were in fact as rough as boulderfields. Flying near stallout speed, Stanley followed one creek and another, studying the ground. Finally, he saw a place he thought he could get out of if he were to set the plane down. The walk would be long if he couldn't—not to mention what to do about the plane. Rising, circling, returning, he gingerly put his wheels on the ground and jumped back at once
into the air. Felt pretty good. He circled again. He rolled his wheels on the tundra twice more. It was thumping rough, but it seemed negotiable. He set the Aeronca down.
Taking off successfully, he went home and told his father, and they began to advance their plans. First, they should improve the landing place. They had a little Ranger—a diminutive tractor, like a Cub Cadet—which they had used to like purpose when they built a cabin on the Charley River years before. Ed cut the Ranger in half. They flew it to the mountains, and he welded it back together. The backhoe before long followed, and when it was at last reassembled they scooped into the center of a stream. Bedrock was eight feet down. Even at six, they panned the colors they had hoped to see.
They had intended to spend the whole of the following season ranging with the backhoe around the claims they had made, trying out pieces of seven miles of streams, but early results were so encouraging that they sharply foreshortened the tests. To put it conservatively, a pay streak appeared to be there, and what was needed now—since the backhoe was just a fifty-seven-hundred-pound shovel—was a means of moving gravel in a major way. The Caterpillar Tractor Company produces the eponymous Cat in seven sizes—styled D3, D4, and so on to D9. Most gold miners use something less than the largest, but the Gelvins—forming a partnership with two friends in Fairbanks—decided to go all the way. The supreme Cat, twenty-seven feet long, eleven feet high, with a blade of fourteen feet, could sweep forty yards of gravel before it—possibly a hundred dollars a shove. Ed Gelvin went to Los Angeles to shop for a used D9.
With his partners in Fairbanks putting up the money in return for a half interest in the claims, he paid forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars for a ten-year-old machine—D9, Series G. In the fleets of general contractors, it had spent its lifetime ripping raw California land, making freeways, and preparing building sites on beaches and deserts. Who, watching
it there—clanking, dozing, wheezing, roaring, grunting like Pete the Pig—could ever in farthest-fetched imaginings have guessed where it would go? It went to Seattle by train, and by barge to Whittier, in Prince William Sound. There the Alaska Railroad picked it up and took it to Fairbanks, where, in early April, a lowboy hauled it up the dirt road north. Forty miles from Central, the haul stopped—blocked by the still unbroken winter snows. The road had been smothered since October. Ed Gelvin, who was observing from the air, landed on the road and with Stanley put the blade on the Cat. The weather in a general way was warming. Snow was melting. Ice was beginning to rot. If the D9 was going to move up frozen stream beds and climb into the mountains, it had to keep going now. If the road was closed, the Cat would open it.
When Stanley Gelvin was a small boy and did his elementary-school work by correspondence from the kitchen table in Central, he was from time to time required to draw a picture. When the choice of subject was his to make, he always drew a Cat. He operated one before he drove anything else. Now, with a Cat all around him, he knew where things were. He sensed like an athlete the rhythm of the parts—the tilt cylinders, the blade-lift arms. A good Cat skinner is a Cat mechanic, and, from the torque converter to the sun-and-planet gears, he knew what was making the moves. “I know what's inside the thing—everything—and what makes it work. My father knows how the stuff goes together, too. If the thing needs work, we do it.”

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