Coming into the Country (43 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Vogler is a friend of the Gelvins, and I met him when he
stopped by and exploded with pleasure at the sight of their infant grandson. I have seen a fair amount of ground with him since. He is a roamer, a garrulous companion, perhaps the most active prospector in the country, and least active miner, although he owns several patented claims, including Woodchopper, two hundred and thirty-three acres close to the Yukon. If the Gelvins, in their quiet and straightforward way, exemplify the versatility of people who are long established in the bush, Joe Vogler is a sort of cartoon Alaskan, self-drawn: a part-time politician with strong attitudes and a stronger, not to say incendiary, way of expressing them. In recent years, he has become a figure of some significance not only in the upper Yukon but all across the state—as an advocate of independence for Alaska.
“A colony is any people or territory separated from a ruling power but subject to that power,” he says. “The United States has made a colony of Alaska. When they want something, they come and get it. We are their oyster. They open us when they need us. Under the flag, you've got to have uniformity of laws. They have laws in the Lower Forty-eight that protect their environment, their resources. They need those laws. The laws unfortunately apply to us, and we do not need them. They hinder us. We are a developing nation, like any developing nation in the world, and we cannot develop under American laws. They can take their Fourth of July and go to hell with it. They have their independence from Britain. We do not have our independence from them.”
He is tall, weathered, rangy—now in his middle sixties—his features strong and handsome. His hair is sandy, and his clear blue eyes seem set in a permanent squint. His voice is husky, its register high. He wears khaki work clothes, and a dark visored cap, and on his hip, bouncing in rhythm as he hikes along, is a holstered Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver, which he refers to as “the hog leg.” One day when we were resting from the exertion of climbing a granite-pinnacled hill above his claims on Ketchem Creek, he leaned against a boulder,
wiped his forehead with his cap, and said, “If we ever get a revolution going, I want to import a bunch of guillotines. Lots of black currants up here. If you're dying of thirst, you can get water out of those mossberries. My government is my worst enemy. I'm going to fight them with any means at hand.”
“What are you going to do when the feds take away your hog leg?” I asked him.
“Ever see one of these little fellas?” he said, and he dug down deep in a trouser pocket for a derringer .22 Magnum. It was as small as the palm of his hand but had two barrels, one above the other. “When the bureaucrats come after me,” he went on, “I suggest they wear red coats. They make better targets. In the federal government are the biggest liars in the United States, and I hate them with passion. They think they own this country. There comes a time when people will choose to die with honor rather than live with dishonor. That time may be coming here. Our goal is ultimate independence by peaceful means under a minimal government fully responsive to the people. I hope we don't have to take human life, but if they go on tramping on our property rights, look out, we're ready to die.” (Vogler does not avoid confrontations. For example, he once said to the mayor of Fairbanks, “You son of a bitch, get ready to look at this town for the last time, because I'm going to close your left eye with one fist and your right eye with the other.” Joe's violence was entirely in his rhetoric, though. His difficulty with the mayor led to a courtroom, where the mayor paid a fine.) “The czars exiled misfits to Siberia,” he said. “The Soviets do that, too. The Siberian exiles will eventually break away. Alaska is the place for misfits from the Lower Forty-eight. And we will eventually break away. Alaskans are inheritors of determinative genes that took people out of Europe to the New World. Alaska attracts construction workers who are wild hairs, willing to take a chance. The Gelvins would be misfits somewhere else. They're doers. They don't destroy. They build. They preserve. They are conservationists
in the true sense of the word. They have killed wolves right and left. They are responsible for many moose being alive today. That Ginny—she's a hell of a gunner. She can take a Browning and shoot the hell out of wolves.”
His voice lowering a bit, he said, “Ed is fortunate that Ginny likes it here. This is a hard country on women. That makes or breaks a man here—a woman.” His own wife had left him, and gone outside, some thirty years before. “She did not like this country.” His children were one and three when he put them on a plane with their mother and saw them for the last time. “My daughter, I think, is married to a professor in Manhattan. I would not know my children if I saw them right here on the trail.”
The granite pinnacles were an enlofted Stonehenge, an alpine garden of standing rock. The views were of the local domes and the middle-distant bluffs of the Yukon. There were dwarf spruce and lupine. There were lovely young aspen, their leaves spinning like coins. “What do you think of my little private park? Isn't it nice?” Vogler said, and he called attention to the unusual size of the feldspar crystals in the granite, which could not have become so large unless they had cooled very slowly, so there had once been at least a mile of rock above the place where we stood, of which the pinnacles, with their big crystals, were a slowly uncovered vestige. “To me,” he said, “that is the writing of God.”
He had bulldozed the trail to the summit, on federal land —a mile and a half from his gold claim. He said, “God, I like to move dirt with a Cat. I may make another road up here from one set of pinnacles to another, just for my private use. I could level the top with dynamite, and build a cabin. Wouldn't that be a crow's roost? Parks should not be federal—that's where my bitch comes in. The federal government should have nothing to say. I'd like to have seen the natives get a hundred million acres—anything to get the land away from the federal government. They tie it up. They just set on it, making jobs for
bureaucrats. They're going to destroy private ownership in Alaska.”
He picked up and tossed idly in his hand a piece of dry wolf feces with so many moose hairs in it that it looked like a big caterpillar. “Greedy gut-ripping son of a bitch,” he said. “Stinking dirty cowardly predator. I'd kill the last pregnant wolf on earth right in front of the President at high noon. People who are against killing wolves are sentimental idiots who don't live up here. If they came and lived here, I'd listen to them. If the majority here did not want to kill wolves, I would not want them killed. But the meat the wolves take is needed. I believe in my own kind. I believe in gold, I believe in yellow scrap iron, and I believe in my own kind.”
“Yellow scrap iron?”
“Bulldozers. Cats. Earthmoving equipment.”
Vogler travels the mining district in a big three-axle truck so much the worse for wear it appears to have been recently salvaged after a very long stay at the bottom of the Yukon. He drives it on what roads there are and, where roads do not exist, directly up the beds of rushing streams. Lurching, ungainly, it is a collage of vehicular components—running gear from one source, transmission from another—that Vogler selected and assembled to be “good in the brush.” The front wheels are directly under the cab, and the engine mount (high off the ground) is cantilevered a full eight feet forward to become a projecting snout, probing the way toward gold. The cab and engine are military fragments, artifacts of the Second World War. The frame was taken from a twenty-five-year-old tractor trailer. A long flatbed reaches out behind and is towered over by a winch and boom. There are no fenders. Much of the engine's cowling is gone. The headlights, far out front by themselves, suggest coleopteran eyes. Enfeebled as the rig looks, it has six-wheel drive and, thunking up ledges and over boulders, is much at home in a stream.
With his colleague Wayne Peppler, Joe has been using the
truck to transfer from one claim to another steel pipe to be used in hydraulic mining, and they have taken me with them on their long working days. There is no muffler system in Joe's truck, and most of the bulkhead is missing between the engine and the cab, so the full detonations of the engine come directly to the ears, enough to mask the sound of any roaring stream, to blot out everything but Joe, shouting, as he did one day, “Jefferson got away with the purchase of Louisiana. Seward did the same thing here. The purchase of Alaska was unconstitutional. There are only two clauses whereby Congress can purchase lands—for a seat of government, or for military forts, docks, arsenals, and magazines—unless you go to the common defense and general welfare, which is the trash bin of the Constitution. Since the Congress had no authority to buy Alaska, they in effect held the land in trust for the first legally constituted government to come along. The federal government should now, therefore, yield all the lands of Alaska to the state.”
Since it seems unlikely that the United States will pursue such a course, Vogler would like to advance his cause by suing the federal government for violation of the statehood contract. In the Statehood Act of 1958, Alaska was given twenty-five years to select a hundred and three million acres, he pointed out, but thirteen years later, to clear the path for the removal of oil, Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and gave forty million acres to the natives, while setting aside eighty million more as proposed federal wildlife and recreational reserves. The State of Alaska had by that time chosen only a small fraction of its promised land. Now, suddenly, its latitude of choice had been drastically narrowed, and he meant to sue. He would ask the court to set aside the statehood contract for substantive violation. After the case was decided, he said, he would like to see certain choices on the next Alaska ballot: (1) a return to territorial status; (2) reaffirmation of statehood, with appropriate damages; (3) commonwealth status; (4) independence.
Generous by habit, Joe brought lunch for the three of us in a brown paper bag, and as we gathered convivially he spilled the lunch onto the bed of the truck—Hershey bars, Butterfingers, Mounds, Bit-O-Honey. These candy bars were all we ate in seventeen working hours. Tearing off a Bit-O-Honey wrapper, he released it into the wind, saying, “We are totally controlled. We can't even kill our own wolves. The posy-sniffers yelp too loud. With statehood, we were supposedly given management of our game. Now they won't even let us do that. Our sole desire is, we'd like to run the show.”
When I felt myself becoming sick on Butterfingers, I ate an antidotal Hershey bar, while Joe stayed with the Bit-O-Honey —agglutinated, Pre-Cambrian corn syrup that seemed peculiarly appropriate to the effort it was serving, which was, after all, the removal of gold.
“This ain't part of America. This is a foreign country,” Wayne Peppler said.
“Just as removed as the Colonies were three hundred years ago,” said Joe.
“People up here are running scared and bewildered,” Peppler said. “They're afraid they ain't going to be free anymore.”
Peppler is a lean, sinewy young man with dark, swept-back hair and a face that makes an angular silhouette. He came to Alaska more or less directly from a Los Angeles high school, because—as he remembers imagining—“the little guy could count for something here.” In Alaska's 1974 gubernatorial election, he was the Alaskan Independence Party's candidate for lieutenant governor, a nominee by petition. The Party's candidate for governor was Joe Vogler, and his name appeared on the ballot with those of William Egan, the Democratic incumbent, and Jay Hammond, a Republican. In implication and influence, the results of Vogler's campaign were more sizable than anyone might have guessed. All told, just under a hundred thousand votes were cast. The number by which Hammond defeated Egan was only two hundred and eightyseven.
Almost five thousand people voted for Joe Vogler and his declarations of independence.
 
 
 
Vogler and I stopped by one morning, some fifteen miles up the road from Central, to say hello to Fred Wilkinson, a soft-spoken and retiring bachelor, whom Joe described as “a working fool.” Wilkinson's grandfather staked claims to four miles of Miller Creek in 1903. His father and uncle also mined there, and Fred now works the same claims, living alone in isolation, with five pieces of heavy equipment, including two D8 bulldozers and a D9, with which he moves not only the gravels of the stream bed but also the gravels wherever the stream, in the shifting courses of its geologic history, has been. In a process analogous to the separation of isotopes, he goes through roughly forty thousand cubic yards of pay dirt a season and from it removes a handful of beautiful teardrop nuggets and several pints of flaky dust worth tens of thousands of dollars.

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