Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
Coming into the Country (44 page)
For a man who works in the summer sun, he looked remarkably pale this day, and in his rubber boots and torn brown denims seemed to have come out of a coal mine and not from a stream of placer gold. Solidly built, rugged, attractive, he seemed above all else grim. He soon told us he was feeling lonely and scared. Vogler, out of sheer good nature, had brought along some sandwiches and pie, and Wilkinson, as he sat at his table and ate, said that an International Scout belonging to the federal government had appeared there yesterday, with four men in it, one of whom had handed him some papers, which he now shoved across the table past the pie. They were from the Region X headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in Seattle, and were titled “In the Matter of Fred Wilkinson, Alaska. Findings of Violation and Compliance Order.”
“Somebody's got to go, Fred,” said Joe.
Although Wilkinson had been advised nearly a year before of the requirements of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, he had not applied for a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, the documents said, and he was forthwith to apply for one or incur fines up to ten thousand dollars a day. He was to dig settling ponds for all the mud stirred up on his claims. If the water five hundred feet downstream at any time contained more than twenty-five Jackson Turbidity Units above normal background levels, he was subject to penalties also at the rate of ten thousand dollars a day. If he had questions, he should call Area Code 206, in western Washington, 442â1275, and speak with an attorney there. The nearest telephoneânot that Wilkinson would have hurried to pick it upâwas more than a hundred miles away.
“The government swine,” said Joe. “Hate 'em, hate 'em, hate 'em, Fred.”
“Three of them were from the state,” Fred went on quietly. “The federal man's name was Lamoreaux. He told Del Ackels, up Gold Dust Creek, that sulphides uncovered by his Cat were polluting the stream.”
“I wonder what Lamoreaux is going to do when I jab him in the belly with my .357.”
“He was just the man the government happened to send,” Wilkinson said.
“If you step on a rattlesnake, does the rattlesnake go for you or for the man who sent you?” said Joe. “I am a rattlesnake, and I will sink my fangs into the ones that come. They're taking our country away from us, Fred. They're taking our country away. They're taking private property without due process of law.”
Nearly all mining claims are on public land, but under the Mining Law of 1872, which remains in force, miners not only own a hundred per cent of the gold they extract but have traditionally been able to do almost anything they wished on
the land, just as if they, and not the people of the United States, were the owners of the property. The pick-and-shovel miners of the gold-rush days started out with that understanding. Across the decades, hydraulic miners, dredgers, and Cat miners have all had a sense of uninhibited franchise, too. And now, after more than a century, Bill Lamoreaux, of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Jeff Mach and Lance Elphic, of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and Bob Fedeler, of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, had come to say that things had changed. Fedeler was worried about the grayling in the stream. The fish could not spawn up a tongue of mud. Wilkinson was ordered to “ensure that the receiving stream is not blocked to fish passage,” or risk heavy fines for that, too.
the land, just as if they, and not the people of the United States, were the owners of the property. The pick-and-shovel miners of the gold-rush days started out with that understanding. Across the decades, hydraulic miners, dredgers, and Cat miners have all had a sense of uninhibited franchise, too. And now, after more than a century, Bill Lamoreaux, of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Jeff Mach and Lance Elphic, of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and Bob Fedeler, of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, had come to say that things had changed. Fedeler was worried about the grayling in the stream. The fish could not spawn up a tongue of mud. Wilkinson was ordered to “ensure that the receiving stream is not blocked to fish passage,” or risk heavy fines for that, too.
“Ten thousand dollars a day,” Vogler repeated. “You've got to kill for that.”
(Vogler has actually taken a shot at a man only once in his life, but that was long ago in Texas and he missed.)
To Wilkinson's considerable surprise, there was a stir of arrival outside, and Bob Littlefield appeared in the door. Gold miners work backbreaking hours, seven days a week, and it is most unusual for oneâlet alone twoâto appear on another's claim in the middle of a day. Littlefield is a short, pleasant, round-faced man with a beard and tortoiseshell glasses and a ready smile that was not ready just now. He had come over from his claim on Harrison Creek, about eight miles away, because he wondered if some government people had been to see Fred.
Wilkinson had thought he was aloneâsingled out by the government as an example to other miners. He felt some relief, he said, and his pallor began to recede. “What did you say to them?” he asked.
“I said, âI ought to shoot the four of you and bury you with your car,'” Littlefield told him. “The fed, Lamoreaux, bragged that he was going to close down all miners who do not comply.”
Vogler said, “I'm going to run over him with a Cat and turn mosquitoes loose on him while he dies.”
“We're not polluting,” Littlefield went on. “We're creating turbidity with what is already presentâwith rock, mud, and dirt. We don't do more than what Mother Nature does in spring or after a rain.”
“It's the nationalization of gold.”
“The mining law says the man below you has to put up with what comes down from above. Settling ponds won't work. They'll silt up in a week's time. Wildlife will get mired in them. The E.P.A. says we have to push the silt out, but that is unreasonable, expensive, hard on the equipment. In five feet of silt, most Cats would sink out of sight.”
“It's a tragedy that we must live by their laws.”
And now another figure appeared in the door (Joe Green, of Mammoth Creek), and another (Bob Sherwood), and another. Miners' meetings, at the turn of the century, were the courts of the country. They heard cases of every kind, and decided the fate of the accused. Whether they “blue-ticketed” an offender, exiling him or her forever, or merely levied a fine, it was a system of justice that worked. In Fred's place now, there was an iteration of the old way, and as the miners presented their cases to each other they made up in spirit what they had come to lack in authority.
“We're just trying to make a decent living, and the government won't let us.”
“The reason they're after us is because they've received complaints from canoers on Birch Creek. They complain that the fish can't see the hook. Canoers stay a week and contribute nothing to the economy.”
“They got a package, they throw it in the creek. They're here today, gone tomorrow. We're here. It's our way of life.”
“Thomas Jefferson said you need a revolution every twenty years to keep the country in balance.”
“These government people coming around amounts to harassment.”
“I said to them, âI'm going to go on miningâand mining here. Meanwhile, get your ass off this claim.'”
“Murder! Kill! Burn! Torture!”
“I've been working the same creek fifty years, and when I shut down for the day I always caught grayling for dinner until tourists started coming and fished out the stream.”
“Settling ponds have to hold a full day's run through the box, which is impossible.”
“They say miners resist change.”
“Anyone's going to resist getting his head bashed in.”
“They can't really pinpoint what damage we're doing.”
“We're not damaging anything.”
“We're not dumping acidsâwe're only stirring up what's there. The same laws that apply to Homestake and Kennecott apply to us.”
“The posy-sniffers are behind all this.”
“When John Seiberling, the congressman, came to the country, he saw the tailings at Woodchopper and Coal Creek, and he said, âWhat a mess.' He's the same one that would ban all handguns in the United States. His family is from Akron, Ohio, and makes tires. His family has probably released more pollutants than have ever been released in all Alaska.”
“He probably feels guilty about that.”
“We are
improving
the creeks from the standpoint of game. After the bulldozer has cleared the overburden, redtop grasses grow up that harbor mice and small rodents. Ermines and foxes come in to eat the rodents. Then comes your willow brush, and that brings in your moose. Before, there were alders, which moose don't eat. So I say we are improving the creek.”
improving
the creeks from the standpoint of game. After the bulldozer has cleared the overburden, redtop grasses grow up that harbor mice and small rodents. Ermines and foxes come in to eat the rodents. Then comes your willow brush, and that brings in your moose. Before, there were alders, which moose don't eat. So I say we are improving the creek.”
“Kill!”
“It's an independent life. We keep our bills paid. We make a little money. We hurt no oneâexcept maybe finer sensibilities who don't like to look at our tailing piles.”
“We've left some passable road. We've left something to make up for the âdestruction' of the creeks.”
“Henry Speaker has a lawyer in Portland. He's up in years, but he's good. He specializes in mining laws and defends small miners.”
“I'll put in a thousand dollars for a lawyer,” Wilkinson volunteered. “I'll go along with the rest of you. I'll do what the lawyer says, and I'll hope he's on the right side of the law.”
When the others, including Vogler, prepared to disperse, Wilkinson, still far from relaxed, decided to go over to the North Fork of Harrison Creek for an audience with Henry Speakerâthe richest and oldest working miner in the district. I asked if I could go with him, and Wilkinson said he would be glad to have the company.
At speeds as low as five miles an hour, we moved south through the mountains in Wilkinson's pickup on a road roughly scraped into the tundra. It led first up Mammoth Creek to Independence Creek and Mastodon Creek, past huge hills of tailing gravel, where the C. J. Berry Dredging Company had mined in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Wilkinson pointed up Mastodon as we went by its mouth, and said that the 1893 discovery, first in the district, had been just up there â“only one reef away.” He noted, too, that wherever a creek would “rib in” to another the names of both tended to change. In the early days, miners could stake only one claim per creek, so they divided the waters with semantic abandon. Mammoth Creek was actually Independence below Mastodon; Crooked Creek was actually Mammoth below Porcupine; and the whole lot of them emptied into Birch Creek. We followed Independence Creek until it was a rivulet, and then moved up into high terrain and crossed a dome of alpine tundra that gave panoptic views of higher domes and more tundra, yellow and purple with avens and saxifrage. “Once you scrape it, it takes aeons to grow back,” Wilkinson said. The tundra was in places moving on its own. Down the steep treeless mountainsides the surface soils
were creepingâwet now in summer, heavy-liddedly sliding over the permafrost, forming semicircular folds like bunting on a bandstand. Solifluction. We crossed a divide and descended steeply to the North Fork of Harrison Creek, still another Birch Creek tributary, which had been evaluated by some professor, Fred said, at a million and a half dollars a mile. Henry Speaker was down there now, proving the professor right. Unhindered by the constant upkeep of bulldozers, unencumbered by a need to stockpile many drums of fuel, moving just as much gravel per season as the Cat miners and with a cost overhead ninety-seven per cent lower than theirs, he is a hydraulic miner, one of the last in the country of his kind. The drawback of the method is the need for ample water, which is not always there. Speaker had begun his operation by building a reservoir a mile and a half upstream. Then, with a little Cat, he had cut a beautifully engineered minutely inclined ditch along one steep side of the V-shaped valley of the stream. The ditch, being almost on a contour with the reservoir, would carry water to a point some three hundred feet of altitude above the segment of the North Fork that he meant to mine. The water would then plunge down the mountainside from the ditch through iron pipe of decreasing diameter and come out through a giant nozzle with such force that from one established hosing position it could tear to bedrock more than a hundred thousand square feet of land. The giant, as such nozzles are in fact called, has the appearance of a naval cannon, is attached to the pipe with a ball socket, and is counterbalanced with a “jockey box” full of small boulders, the result being that, for all its power, it can be controlled with one hand. Speaker, a hand on the giant, stood almost literally astride the stream. Behind him, in the direction of the reservoir, open spruce forest ran down the steep slopes and across the valley floor, all but concealing the as yet unmined, meandering stream. The banks were still shelved with thick blue ice. In the other direction, in the range of the working giant, the valley
had been torn apart from wall to wall. Every vestige of what had been there beforeâforest, tundra, soil, gravelâhad been driven asunder, washed over, piled high, and completely changed. It was an exposed boulderfield, all its overburden flushed away. The nozzle opening was five inches, less than the spread of a hand. At a hundred and twenty-five pounds of pressure per square inch, though, the column of water shooting out of it had the hard, compact appearance of marble. Its great arc of power, as it trajectoried over the stream, seemed to subdivide into braided pulse units hypnotic to the eye. And where it crashed at the end of its parabola it sounded like a storm sea hammering a beach.
were creepingâwet now in summer, heavy-liddedly sliding over the permafrost, forming semicircular folds like bunting on a bandstand. Solifluction. We crossed a divide and descended steeply to the North Fork of Harrison Creek, still another Birch Creek tributary, which had been evaluated by some professor, Fred said, at a million and a half dollars a mile. Henry Speaker was down there now, proving the professor right. Unhindered by the constant upkeep of bulldozers, unencumbered by a need to stockpile many drums of fuel, moving just as much gravel per season as the Cat miners and with a cost overhead ninety-seven per cent lower than theirs, he is a hydraulic miner, one of the last in the country of his kind. The drawback of the method is the need for ample water, which is not always there. Speaker had begun his operation by building a reservoir a mile and a half upstream. Then, with a little Cat, he had cut a beautifully engineered minutely inclined ditch along one steep side of the V-shaped valley of the stream. The ditch, being almost on a contour with the reservoir, would carry water to a point some three hundred feet of altitude above the segment of the North Fork that he meant to mine. The water would then plunge down the mountainside from the ditch through iron pipe of decreasing diameter and come out through a giant nozzle with such force that from one established hosing position it could tear to bedrock more than a hundred thousand square feet of land. The giant, as such nozzles are in fact called, has the appearance of a naval cannon, is attached to the pipe with a ball socket, and is counterbalanced with a “jockey box” full of small boulders, the result being that, for all its power, it can be controlled with one hand. Speaker, a hand on the giant, stood almost literally astride the stream. Behind him, in the direction of the reservoir, open spruce forest ran down the steep slopes and across the valley floor, all but concealing the as yet unmined, meandering stream. The banks were still shelved with thick blue ice. In the other direction, in the range of the working giant, the valley
had been torn apart from wall to wall. Every vestige of what had been there beforeâforest, tundra, soil, gravelâhad been driven asunder, washed over, piled high, and completely changed. It was an exposed boulderfield, all its overburden flushed away. The nozzle opening was five inches, less than the spread of a hand. At a hundred and twenty-five pounds of pressure per square inch, though, the column of water shooting out of it had the hard, compact appearance of marble. Its great arc of power, as it trajectoried over the stream, seemed to subdivide into braided pulse units hypnotic to the eye. And where it crashed at the end of its parabola it sounded like a storm sea hammering a beach.
Henry Speaker is a little over five feet tall. Clear-eyed, firmly put together, in his seventies and obviously in fine condition, he appeared to have figured out how to extend beyond previous limits the so-called prime of life. The skin of his face was hickory brownâtight skin, across sharp peregrine features, wrinkled only with a welcoming grin. He wore hip boots, overalls, and gold-colored monkey-fist gloves. On his watchband were rubies embedded in an egglike field of placer gold. On his head was a brown Stetsonâthe only Stetson I've ever seen that was made of hard plastic. It had a crack in it that was patched with grout.
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