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Authors: John McPhee

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BOOK: Coming into the Country
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He said the horsepower of a D9 Cat was about half the horsepower he had coming out of that hose—look out, you could burn your fingers on the water. To be burned by water seemed irresistible. I put my fingers on the solid ice-cold projectiling cylinder a few inches out from the nozzle tip, and pulled them away in an instant, burned. Speaker suggested that I toss a rock into the water jet to see what would happen. I lobbed up a big one. It intersected the jet about a foot from the nozzle, shot through the air like a discharged ballistic shell, and smashed into a pile of tailing boulders several hundred feet away. There was an eternal rainbow under the jet. The air around it swirled with mist and spray. Speaker said he had been
operating giants for sixty years—in Oregon before Alaska—and he had once seen a jet of water (out of control) go straight through the body of a distant grazing cow.
Nearly three hundred feet from the nozzle was a sluice box with wide wooden “wings” that helped funnel the gravels through. The art of the giant, Speaker said, was to clean all the gravel off the bedrock without digging into it holes that could entomb the gold. With only a slight miscalculation, an error of timing and the eye, the jet could destroy the wooden sluice box, which was forty-eight feet long and five feet wide. To build up water for the sluicing, he drove gravels before the hose, causing them to heap up and dam the stream. He waited twenty minutes for a pond to fill. Then he aimed the giant at the dam, played the jet up and down, and cut a deep aperture directly in front of the box. Water and gravels roared through —a roiling brown inferno.
Speaker soon built another dam, swishing the jet carefully from side to side, piling up gravel and rocks. Certain small boulders struck by the jet leaped ten feet into the air. While he waited for the pond to fill again, he went up his pipe to check his ditch. The whole mountainside system consisted of four thousand feet of steel pipe, eleven inches in diameter at the lower end, increasing up the slope to twenty-two inches at the top, where it came out of the ditch. “Notice how much harder it is underfoot near the bottom,” he said as he briskly walked up the pipe in perfect balance, his voice as pantless as if he were sitting in a chair. I had to run to hear him—struggling the while not to fall. Near the top, he said, “The pipe is not quite full up here, you can feel it jumpin' yet.” It was studded with pressure valves and ringed with slip joints. Without the valves, he said, changes in pressure could “suck the pipe flat.” Without the slip joints—sleeves made from fifty-five-gallon drums—the pipe could expand and buckle in the sun. He had taught himself to weld, and had built the system alone, for less than twenty thousand dollars. At the top,
he checked the level of the water in the ditch, the rate of its flow into the orifice of the pipe. “This ditch is seven thousand six hundred feet long, and I built it in eight days,” he said. “How's that for bulldozin'? I guess that's the record, ain't it? See the grass here. Moose and caribou come to this ditch and graze here, the full length of it. This ditch is just a flower garden when the flowers are in bloom.”
Speaker had crawled across the mountains with his wife, Lora, in a twenty-thousand-dollar Winnebago—his cabin. He winters in Oregon. Rejoining Fred Wilkinson, we went into the Winnebago for a cup of coffee. On the door was a decal that said “Sheriff's Posse Comitatus,” and one with a sketch of a Colt .45 over the message “Warning. Intruders and Trespassers Beware. This Property Protected by Armed Citizen.” Speaker sat Wilkinson down and told him not to worry about the government invaders, with all their compliance orders and threats of fines, because what they were doing was unconstitutional. “The Constitution protects you and I,” he said. “Our forefathers saw to it that our government, just like the King of England, can't harass the citizens. The government cannot harass the individual. I've been studying the Constitution now for two years. The people is the master, Fred. The government thinks they are. They've just turned that right around and they've made the people believe it. The Bureau of Land Management and the Office of Environmental Quality say they are concerned here, but two branches of government enforcing the same law is unconstitutional. In fact, government agencies are unconstitutional, because they infringe on your constitutional rights. They're trying to kill private enterprise, but don't worry. Your livelihood is guaranteed by the Constitution.”
Wilkinson wanted to know what Speaker had said when the four men in the government Scout appeared on his claim. “I said to them, ‘You go harassing me and I'll be looking at you through bars. I will put you in jail.'” To back up his threat, he had handed them a printed document with big block letters
that said “LEGAL NOTICE: To federal officers of the IRS, HEW, HUD, Environmental, Health, and other unconstitutional agencies … WARNING! If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution … they shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years.”
“Their complexion just changed when they saw that,” Speaker reported. “I told that Lamoreaux he should be ashamed of himself, for he was killing private enterprise, and when it is dead, people will accept Communism. No law is constitutional that says you're guilty before you do something. The people on their property's got the right to choose to do as they please. Now government agents are coming to tell us what we can't do, but don't worry, the laws they are going by are in violation of the Constitution and are therefore ultured virus and not law. Now, that's right in the god-damned book. That's the law.” He picked up a copy of the United States Constitution and held it out for Fred and me to see. “Boy, this is exciting to read,” he went on. “It's too bad when our own people wants to sell our country out. Pretty near every law in the books is unconstitutional, because they conflict with protected rights. I'm afraid we're going to have to fight now for our freedom.”
Lora Speaker, who lacked her husband's lean, smiled amiably, nodded agreement, and, at a gesture from Speaker, brought out of a cupboard an economy-size Jif creamy peanut-butter jar in which was twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of gold. It was so heavy I thought it would break the glass. It was all dust and small flakes, and had with the greatest of patience been separated—most of it by Lora—from the black and ruby sands (magnetite, hematite, scheelite, garnet) that are heavy enough to stay down with the gold all through the sluicing and the cleanup. Some miners nudge the sand aside by letting the mixture fall through the wind. Some use electric fans. Most
wash it free with water in a gold pan. Some gold is so fine that on the water's surface tension it will float. Wilkinson mentioned that he sprays his gold with Windex as a means of keeping it down.
Speaker said he was “ratholing” the Jif jar. He was not ready to pay the Internal Revenue Service any portion of the gold's value (his privilege until it is sold). Cradling the jar like a sixteen-pound shot, he said, “The United States government has two ships out on the ocean right now looking for new sources of gold. They got a source of gold right here, and they want to shut it down. How god-damned crazy can those god-damned guys get? According to the Constitution, our money is supposed to be gold and silver. That's the way our forefathers set it up. Paper backed by paper is worth nothing. With gold from California we paid our debts to England—gold that came from our soil. It should be like that yet.”
Some days later, I met Bill Lamoreaux, of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and I asked him about his trip in the Scout to see the recalcitrant miners. Lamoreaux seemed easygoing and calm. Sandy hair. Brown beard. Twenty-nine years old. He had degrees in sanitary engineering from San Jose State. He said he had found the miners, on the whole, an amiable and agreeable lot—not bristly and tough, as he had expected them to be. In his travels among them, there had never been a threat of violence. He had found Wilkinson confused but apparently eager to do right. Littlefield had said he would soon build settling ponds. Speaker had been friendly and polite, even while explaining to Lamoreaux that “everything since the 1872 mining act is unconstitutional” and saying that he was going to take the case to court and personally fine Lamoreaux ten thousand dollars a day for trying to enforce unconstitutional laws. Most of the miners in the country had applied for permits. “They can appeal permits. They can work within the law. They have real good attitudes generally. That Joe Vogler keeps his mind right on what he's talking about.
There's a hell of a lot of nice people out there. I enjoy them. They're some of the most straightforward people you'll ever meet. They don't beat around the bush.”
 
 
 
Earl Stout, who was teen-age and full-grown before Henry Speaker was born, is too old to be concerned with settling ponds or enforcement orders or turbidity units in any form. He worked Sly Creek, Fourth of July Creek—and in 1959 he retired to his cabin on Crooked Creek, in Central. He eats potatoes. They are the fundaments of his breakfasts, his lunches, and his dinners. “I ain't too heavy on the meat situation. I never was. I get my outfit in the fall of the year. Potatoes.” He is in ruddy health, white-haired, of medium height, a little stooped—eighty-five years old. He smokes a pipe. In his cabin are three calendars and three clocks. He gets up at exactly five-thirty every morning. Evenings, just before he goes to bed at nine, he goes to the calendars and crosses off the day.
This is a Friday in winter, as it happens. Sometime this morning, he filled his gas lantern. That is about all he has accomplished today. “In fact, I ain't done a whole lot since I retired in '59;” he says, and in the silence that follows the ticking of his clocks sounds like the puffing of locomotives. There is an iron bed, a couple of chairs, and a big galvanized tub full of melted stream ice. When he needs more, he will cut it out of Crooked Creek and haul it on a go-devil behind his old Oliver Cat. In his Bean's boots, open wool shirt, and gray trousers, he sits and sleeps and reads—
Newsweek, Popular Science, National Geographic, Prevention.
On a shelf beside him is a book called “Upper Tittabawassa Boom Towns,” in a couple of which (Hope and Sanford, Michigan) he grew up. He came to the upper Yukon fifty years ago.
On Fridays now, at precisely four o'clock, he goes down the
road to collect his mail. He could run this errand at almost any time and on almost any day. In good weather, the mail plane arrives three times a week. But Earl Stout likes to gather mail in weekly units. “What's the use of getting it,” he explains, “before it's all in?” Saturday nights, he used to play pool at the Central store—stick in hand, cigar in mouth, brandy on the cushion. “That was until the old Chevy went out. Now I stay home. All the years I was on the Yukon, there was no place to go. The nearest person was five miles away. You got to get used to staying home.” He sorely misses Bob. A black, short-haired mongrel, Bob was for many years Earl's only companion. Five wolves running on the creek overtook Bob not long ago. They left his collar and a small piece of his tail. After finding the blood and the fragments, Earl drank a bottle of rum. It is 3:45 P.M. He gets up and pulls denim overalls over his trousers. He ties strings around the ankles. He puts on mittens and a wool cap, and he says, “I can't take the cold the way I used to.” The air outside is ten below zero. I make a move to leave. “You don't have to go,” he says. “It isn't time yet. There's still ten minutes.” He waits until the clocks say four. “Now,” he says, “it's time to go.”
 
 
 
For all its miners and trappers and conjugal units on the river, the country seems to have an even higher proportion of people who prefer to be surrounded by but not actually to be in the wilderness. To describe Eagle, for example, the last word that I would once have imagined ever coming to mind is the one that comes to mind now: Eagle, in its way, is suburban. This remote cluster on the Yukon, two hundred air miles from Fairbanks, is as good a place as any to avoid being too much on your own if you wish at the same time to draw a circle around yourself a very great distance from the rest of your life.
In all directions from Eagle are tens of thousands of square miles of deep and total wild, into which a large part of the town's population—living in dependence on supplies from cities—rarely sets foot.
BOOK: Coming into the Country
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