Coming into the Country (33 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Snow was noncommittal, but he became increasingly irritated as Williams went into the cabin and rummaged among its goods. The pilot said, “Really nice place here—nice, wellbuilt cabin. This your place?”
Brad and Lilly own a framed copy of a celebrated photograph made by Dorothea Lange in Kern County, California, in the nineteen-thirties, which shows a compressed-air pump at a rundown rural filling station and two prominent signs—one saying “AIR,” the other saying “This is your country. Don't let the big men take it away from you.”
“Yes, it's
my
place,” Snow blurted.
Williams reappeared like a genie. “Did you say
your
place?” he asked.
“Those are my things in the cabin,” Snow said. “I'd rather you didn't go through my things.”
“I said, ‘Is this your place?'”
“You seem to think it's yours.”
As he left, Williams said, “The cabin is in trespass. Very likely you'll be hearing from me in a short while. This is now
the twentieth century. You can't just do what you want to do. You cannot play with the wilderness.”
 
 
 
Snow was shortly given written notice that the cabin was on federal ground, that its presence conflicted with “the necessary and appropriate use of said land,” and that if he left his personal property there it would be removed and stored at his expense. Lilly Allen was mentioned only as “any and all other persons.” Alaska had attracted them. The United States had rebuffed them. Sarge Waller got a notice, too, about his cabin at the Kandik. Other notices went down the river. In the hundred and sixty miles between Eagle and Circle, the exact small number of people living on or near the Yukon had always been indeterminate, and as the scrutiny of the Bureau of Land Management drew closer the number became even less determinate than before. Under blue wisps of smoke separated by pieces of land the size of Eastern counties, people did what they could to remain invisible, knowing they were in trespass on federal land.
From time immemorial until the nineteen-seventies, anyone who had the drive and spirit to build a cabin in this northern wilderness was not restrained from doing so. For a long time, gold was the almost exclusive draw, and, as Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka had observed when he was sent to scout the region in 1883, “the discovery of gold in paying quantities is probably the only incentive for men to enter the country, and were it not that indications are seen all along the river, white men would probably never venture in.” In more recent times, though, as the pressure of population in the Lower Forty-eight increased toward critical levels, a quite different incentive presented itself as well. Some of the hardiest people in the society were drawn to bush Alaska in search of a sense of release—of
a life that remembered the past. The Alaskan wild was, as advertised, the last frontier—where people willing to combat its cold and run its risks could live an existence free from supererogatory rules as long as they did no harm to one another. The government did not interfere, and through the Homestead Act and other legislative provisions it even assisted this dream; but, with the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, events began to occur that would change, apparently forever, the use and demarcation of Alaskan land. Meanwhile, certain long-established forms of freedom would disappear—the sort of freedom that drew a family like the Gelvins a generation earlier into the country, the sort of freedom envisioned by young people who set off to live in the wild of the upper Yukon. If the oil had never been discovered, there would not have been an eviction notice prepared for Brad Snow.
The discovery of the oil was in 1968, and after it became clear that there would be no pipeline until the land claims of the natives were satisfactorily extinguished, the United States Congress (attempting to satisfy not only the natives but at the same time the conflicting ambitions of conservationists and developers; attempting to promote the economy, protect the ecology, and respond multifariously to the sudden demand for this long-ignored but now prime segment of American national real estate) got together in a single bill the mighty ziggurat of legislation within which the catalytic pipeline would seem, while important, almost minor. Long after the publicity had receded and the pipeline had become as little discussed as the Big Inch, the social and political effects of its progenitive congressional bill would still be poignantly felt. Everyone of any race in all Alaska would be affected by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. In elemental respects, the character of Alaska would change.
The natives would be afforded some variety in the choosing of their forty million acres of land, but much of it would be
close to established villages. Included, meanwhile, among the epic consolations given the conservationists—the big pieces of land that were to be set aside for consideration as national parks, forests, rivers, wildlife refuges—were more than two million acres along the Yukon between Eagle and Circle. Many millions of additional acres—including the valley where the Gelvins legally staked gold claims—were to be closed to all but those in pursuit of “metalliferous minerals.” Meanwhile, the State of Alaska was still choosing the hundred and three million acres awarded to it in the Statehood Act. It had until 1984 to complete the selection, and for the time being the land under scrutiny would remain—to the individual—beyond reach. When one adds in the existing parks, government forests, and wildlife refuges and a vast federal petroleum reserve in the north, not much remains, so it is one of the ironies of Alaska that in the midst of this tremendous wilderness people consider themselves fortunate to have (anywhere at all) a fifty-by-a-hundred-foot lot they can call their own.
Meanwhile, down below, outside, people who sit on sidewalks wearing Italian hiking boots and machine-faded jeans imply an extremity somewhere else. Surely, some of them will stand up and leave town, and when they leave they will go toward the wild—probably to the nearest mountain. Some will keep going to an even wilder place. Some will go farther than that. The logical inevitability for this chain of beings is that the ultimates will appear in Eagle (or Circle or Central or somewhere else in Alaska)—where civilization stops. And a very few will then jump free, going deep into the roadless world. By the time they reach Eagle, their momentum is too great to be interrupted by an act of Congress, even if they know of it and understand what it says. What the law now calls for is the removal of the last place in the United States where the pioneer impulse can leap from confinement. It is in the character of the impulse that the impulse will leap anyway—so the Bureau of Land Management, custodian of all the huge acreages under shift and selection, is charged with driving the trespassers
away. Whites feel sold out and shoved under by the settlement of the native claims. Reticence has never been a characteristic of people attracted to this kind of terrain. They howl their upset, its focus the B.L.M.
“You can't go out and build a cabin and live in the god-damned woods, which people have been doing since the country was founded. Nobody argues with a few parks, but such a big percentage of the land is too much.”
“It's not as if we're building fifty-thousand-dollar houses with asphalt driveways and stinking cesspools.”
“Our cabins are more like tents than like most people's homes. They are made with native materials—white spruce, earth, moss. They are biodegradable. When they are abandoned, trees thirty feet high grow up out of the sod on their roofs. Eventually, the cabin collapses and disappears into the ground.”
“Most people felt if we became a state we'd get rid of some of this federal control, and actually it's got worse.”
“Alaska's ruined by this native-land deal that's went through. You could build a cabin anywhere, and mine anywhere, when I came. Now Alaska is going to be just like every other state.”
“What bugs me is that when decisions are made about Alaska, people from Texas and Ohio, California and New York carry more weight than people from Alaska.”
“Why should people be hassled for building cabins out here? What harm are they doing? Why should they be bothered? Why destroy a life simply because it exists? Slap a mosquito, yes. But if a life is not harming, why destroy it? Every species of animal has a wide genetic base, or they don't exist. Our living out here is a widening of the genetic base. I think the government people are fools to wipe us out.”
“It's public land. We're the public.”
“Down at the North Fork are twelve cabins. Mostly, the sites have been in use since the turn of the century, maintained and repaired by trappers and prospectors. Now the B.L.M.
wants to kick these people out. It tells them they can never go to those cabins.”
“Why should they drive us away? They ought to pay us to be out here—just to keep these places in good shape and well supplied.”
“There are emergencies in this country, and when they happen sometimes cabins are needed.”
“More than one life has been saved when someone in trouble has come upon a cabin.”
 
 
 
The country is full of stories of unusual deaths—old Nimrod Robertson lying down on a creek in overflow and letting it build around him a sarcophagus of ice; the trapper on the Kandik who apparently knocked himself out when he tripped and fell on his own firewood and froze to death before he came to—and of stories also of deaths postponed. There are fewer of the second. I would like to add one back—an account that in essence remains in the country but in detail has largely disappeared.
On a high promontory in the montane ruggedness around the upper Charley River lies the wreckage of an aircraft that is readily identifiable as a B-24. This was the so-called Liberator, a medium-range bomber built for the Second World War. The wreckage is in the dead center of the country, and I happened over it in a Cessna early in the fall of 1975, during a long and extremely digressive flight that began in Eagle and ended many hours later in Circle. The pilot of the Cessna said he understood that the crew of the Liberator had bailed out, in winter, and that only one man had survived. I asked around to learn who might know more than that—querying, among others, the Air Force in Fairbanks, the Gelvins, various old-timers in Circle and Central, some of the river people, and Margaret Nelson, in Eagle, who had packed parachutes at
Ladd Field, in Fairbanks, during the war. There had been one survivor—everyone agreed. No one knew his name. He had become a symbol in the country, though, and was not about to be forgotten. It was said that he alone had come out—long after all had been assumed dead—because he alone, of the widely scattered crew, was experienced in wilderness, knew how to live off the land, and was prepared to deal with the hostile cold. Above all, he had found a cabin, during his exodus, without which he would have died for sure.
“And the government bastards try to stop us from building them now.”
“Guy jumped out of an airplane, and he would have died but he found a cabin.”
If the survivor had gone on surviving for what was now approaching thirty-five years, he would in all likelihood be somewhere in the Lower Forty-eight. When I was home, I made a try to find him. Phone calls ricocheted around Washington for some days, yielding only additional phone numbers. The story was just too sketchy. Did I know how many bombers had been lost in that war? At length, I was given the name of Gerard Hasselwander, a historian at the Albert F. Simpson Historical Research Center, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. I called him, and he said that if I did not even know the year of the crash he doubted he could help me. Scarcely two hours later, though, he called back to say that he had had a free moment or two at the end of his lunch hour and had browsed through some microfilm. To his own considerable surprise, he had found the survivor's name, which was Leon Crane. Crane's home when he entered the Army Air Forces had been in Philadelphia, but Hasselwander had looked in a Philadelphia directory and there was no Leon Crane in it now. However, he said, Leon Crane had had two brothers who were also in service—in the Army Medical Corps—during the Second World War. One of them was named Morris. In the Philadelphia directory, there was a Dr. Morris Crane.

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