Coming into the Country (40 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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The mining season ordinarily is short. It can be even shorter when a stream remains “glaciered” until the middle of July. A bush Alaskan—miner, trapper, whatever his interests may be —is particularly secure if he carries a union card and can go out part of the year for extra money. Stanley belongs to 302 —the Fairbanks local of the Operating Engineers' union. In Fairbanks, in the cabs of cranes, he sometimes sets steel for ironworkers—an extremely delicate job. “One slip and you can kill someone. You work in fractions of an inch, making bolt holes line up. You're swinging all the time. It's harder to operate equipment than to fly.” After growing up on the seats of Cats—plowing snow, skidding logs—he went out to work on the Chandalar Shelf, the Dietrich River, Galbraith Lake, running his first D9s, building the pipeline road. He prefers to be in Central. In 1975, in Greenhorn Gulch, ten miles up a creek from home, he set up a twenty-four-foot wooden sluice box that took in nearly a hundred and fifty dollars' worth of gold in every hour it ran. Unfortunately, it ran only twenty-four hours (an aggregate of short bursts), because water was scarce in the gulch. The experience, however, was anything but discouraging. Thirty-five hundred dollars will fuel a fair amount of living in the bush. With his infant son, Jimmy, and wife, Andrea, who is the daughter of a Fairbanks contractor, Stanley lives in a new cabin on his parents' property. He would have liked to build somewhere else, off in the hills or out near the Yukon, in an unneighbored place he could call his own, but, in the vastness of all the surrounding country, land was not available. That, for Stanley, has been a bewildering disappointment. When he was born, in 1950, the country was open and free. Expectations were that when he grew up he could live where he pleased. Then Alaska became a state. Oil was discovered. Homesteading ended. In the great reapportionment of Alaskan
land, the squares seemed to be moving as well as the checkers. Stanley, who had always been at ease with all aspects of this place and latitude, now found himself feeling more than uneasy. A government many thousands of miles away had “frozen” the land with printed words. It was settling forty million acres on Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians, but for his future it offered little more than atrophy, a narrowing of what he once might have looked upon as his birthright opportunities. He could not comprehend this. He was a native, too.
When Stanley's mother was a girl, she lived in urban Pittsburgh, and she often said, “When I grow up, I'm going to live in a log cabin with a wolf hide on the wall.” She read Louise Dickinson Rich (“We Took to the Woods”), Willa Cather (“O Pioneers!”), Jack London (“White Fang”), and works of Peary and Byrd. Her father, a carpenter, had a cottage about ninety miles north of the city. He took her there to fish for bass, perch, and bullheads, and to hunt rabbits, squirrels, and ducks. Driving home, she could smell Pittsburgh long before its stacks came into view, and she would begin thinking of the next trip to the cottage.
Ed Gelvin grew up on a small dairy farm a mile and a half out of Hartstown, Pennsylvania, in the northwestern corner of the state. There were eighteen cows, a hundred and some acres. Four generations of Gelvins had lived there. Ed's father, Stanley Gelvin, liked horses so much he did not buy a tractor until 1939, when Ed was fifteen. As a twelve-year-old, Ed plowed behind a team, and planted corn, wheat, and hay “in a little valley of real rich sandy loam.” He milked, he fed the stock, and when his chores were done he hunted and he trapped. A skunk pelt was worth eight dollars, a muskrat three. He mailed them to Sears, Roebuck in Philadelphia, who sent him a check or credited the furs against items he ordered from their catalogue. He got to know Ginny when he was still in his teens. “Her Dad had this little cottage in a swamp, about a mile from our farm.”
Ginny talked of “going somewhere”—a place where “you could make your own life.” The Second World War interrupted the conversation. Ed apprenticed himself as an ironworker, helped build a defense plant near his home, and went into the Navy, which trained him as a shipfitter in Newport News. She joined the Women's Army Corps. They were married in 1946, and he went back to “putting up iron,” while Ginny went back to thinking of a place where they could be more on their own. “I noticed a lot about this keeping up with the Joneses. Look-alike houses were starting. I couldn't see living like that. I couldn't see straining and striving to make a better can opener when all it does is open a can.” She wrote a letter, and Ed signed it. “Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. Dear Sirs: Would you please mail me any information you have on the Territory of Alaska.”
They bought a new sedan (a naive beginning) and started out in June, 1949. Neither of them had ever been west of the Mississippi. In Montana, they saw, for the first time, high mountains topped with snow. In Alberta, they began seeing moose racks on barns and houses. In British Columbia and Yukon Territory, they saw mud, and rain, and spruce. On the nineteenth of June, they crossed the hundred-and-forty-first meridian, and now “the roads were like crick beds, the rocks were like grapefruit”—Alaska! Not that they needed further proof of where they were, but they got it forthwith when they stopped at a roadhouse, three in the afternoon, and everyone in it was drunk. In Fairbanks, hungry, they cruised around looking for a place to eat, but all they could afford was soup and coffee, for two dollars and fifty cents. There were no hotel rooms. They slept in the car. Of the many hundreds of people they would come to know whose arrivals were similar to theirs, most—within days, a month, a year—would turn and go. The Gelvins sold the car and bought a pickup. Ed got a job in the railroad yard, and before long was building a school. One day in July, they went up the long dust trail to Central, to the
domes of the Tanana Hills. Their purpose was to see caribou, and they stood on high passes and swept with their eyes the tundra fells. The nearest caribou was somewhere else. All they saw was the country.
If gold first drew them to settle here, the country itself is what kept them—the rivers, the mountains, this immense wild range lying open to anyone who could meet its climatic terms. In their first mining season on Squaw Creek, they made expenses and then some. After that, because of slow-melting stream ice, they barely made expenses. That is when they would have left if gold had been all they wanted, but they had chosen the country in the way that someone else would choose a career. Sense of place registered higher with them than a sense of accumulating wealth. They went to work at almost anything that might support them, and tried to stay where they were. They first lived in Circle Hot Springs, a clump of buildings around a natural phenomenon that fogged the winter air with warm steam and coated the spruce with ice. Central was eight miles away. It appealed to them because it was “less junky than most Alaskan towns.” It was scarcely a town at all, had never had a school or a church—just a few cabins around the T in the road where a spur went off to the Springs. They took on the local mail run. They cut and sold cordwood and lumber. They ran the roadhouse for a year and a half. They shot wolves for the bounty, which was fifty dollars. The price of fur was too low at first to make other animals worth trapping, but as the price went up their lines went out, and fur eventually became their primary source of money. Meanwhile, Ed went off to construction jobs—a month here, six weeks there. In Arctic Alaska, in winter, he helped build stations of the DEW line. He built oil-drilling platforms in Cook Inlet and rigs on the North Slope. He was gone, in aggregate, no more than three months a year. Since 1970, the family has lived almost wholly on the possibilities of the country, and Ed has gone out for work only twice.
Stanley and then Betsy went to grammar school at the kitchen table. The material came by mail from Baltimore, and in the season when the sun was gone for upward of a month the children worked by kerosene light (or gasoline-generated electric light), while their mother watched over them and licked the stamps. When Stanley reached junior high, he went to school in Fairbanks, and was ahead of his peers by a couple of levels. Education as a whole, though, was a patchwork affair, a hazard of the bush—correspondence, boarding homes, shuttlings to an apartment in Fairbanks. The Gelvins' twins, Carol and Colleen, six years younger than Stanley, went to grade school in Fairbanks and high school by correspondence from Central—under the program run by the University of Nebraska. The course was “cattle-oriented,” according to Ginny. While they might better have been studying, say, aviation and geology in addition to fundamental subjects, they sat at the table in their log cabin at fifty degrees below zero in the penarctic twilight studying animal husbandry. Colleen stayed the course, but Carol went off to Colorado to finish high school from the home of an uncle. Stanley matriculated at the University of Alaska, intending to become a mining engineer. He stayed two weeks, leaving when he discovered that he had to study English, too. Only Betsy, the middle child, went on through college. There was no television in Central. The children could watch it in Fairbanks if they wanted to—and, in their mother's words, “see the foolishness of it.” But Ginny always felt relieved that Central was, as it still is, beyond TV's frontier. She had seen TV in a bar in Ohio in 1949 and had sensed what it could do to children.
For years, she kept a diary of the meals the family ate. Grouse, which she hunted with a .22, occasionally appeared in it, and beaver, lynx, mountain sheep, grayling, and pike, not to mention king salmon. But the main staple of the house was always moose, as a flip of the pages reveals. These were the features of consecutive winter nights:
Spaghetti with mooseburger.
Moose steak.
Omelet.
Moose steak.
Moose roast.
Pinto beans and cabbage.
Toasted cheese sandwiches.
Moose stew.
Moose meatloaf.
Leftover moose.
Leftover moose.
Sandwiches.
Spaghetti with mooseburger.
Swiss moosesteak.
Leftover moose.
Roast moose.
Moose steak.
Moose sandwiches and soup.
Mooseburgers.
Mooseburgers.
Clam chowder.
Fried moose liver.
Swiss moosesteak.
Ground moose in Spanish rice.
Looking up from this list when I read it, I asked her, “What are we having tonight?”
“Swiss caribou,” she said.
With fair regularity, the family would listen—as they still do —to programs like “Tundra Topics” on KFAR, “Pipeline of the North” on KIAK, and “Trapline Chatter” on KJNP (King Jesus North Pole). As a public service in the absence of telephones, Alaskan radio stations spray messages around the bush. “To Brenda Carter. I'll be in late tomorrow night. I love you. John.” “To Mr. O at Eagle from J.R. at Fairbanks. Please clean
the snow off my roof.” “To Martha Malcolm in Eagle. Angela Harper is in Fairbanks and O.K.” “Passed police exam. Love, Jim.” “Planning to have baby born at Lynette's cabin. Ellen and Jim Frazier. Eagle.” “To Jan and Seymour on the Yukon from Mom in Anchorage. Are you there?” “To all my brothers and sisters in Anaktuvuk Pass …” “Please, Isaac, don't drink. We'll be getting married next week.” “Chris is still hoping to make it out before breakup.” These one-way communications are the only device to beat the mail. In recent times, the Gelvins' daughters have been working as bookkeepers and bull cooks on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and when they go out of Fairbanks to a new assignment or are coming home on leave they let their parents know by “Trapline Chatter.” “Even when there's no message for us,” their mother says, “it's a good way to keep up with what is going on around the bush.”
The Gelvins bought their cabin from an old-timer who had once worked claims on Mastodon Creek. Gradually—as they added a room, razed a woodshed, built a porch—a new cabin evolved. It ate up and spit out its predecessor. In their sawmill, they cut their own lumber. Ed designed a gravity-feed system featuring the first flush toilet in the history of Central. It works much of the time. There is a supportive outhouse that is not always redundant. He dug Central's first year-round well. The kitchen sink is fed by a hand-cranked iron pump. Dishwater is heated on the stove. Ed designed and built the all-metal shopgarage, the one-plane hangar. He works with sheet metal like a tailor handling flannel, and has been called the best welder in Alaska. There are beautiful sleds in the shop and on the ground outside—Yukon sleds, basket sleds, racing sleds, freight sleds, bobsleds. He built them. He is the author of a laconically written booklet called “How to Build an Alaskan Dog Sled.” The team is staked near the cabin. His lead dog, Tara, is fifty-per-cent wolf.
Gelvin is soft-spoken, clean-shaven. His construction shoes, his dark poplin work clothes, his visored cap do not suggest the
extent to which he stands out against the landscape. Had he remained in the Lower Forty-eight, he would have gone on being an ironworker of the highest ability, but the geometry of his life, which in the far-northern bush is an ever-changing set of interlocking polygons, would have been less discernible—more like a faint straight line. Shy, quiet, admirably unassuming—whatever else he is up here, he is not anonymous.
“I worked with him on the Colville River. He knew what he was doing. Everything he did he did well and quickly. He is the most efficient man I've ever met.”
“A lot of these bush Jacks-of-all-trades just want things to work out. Ed wants them right.”
“He is the most capable man I've ever known. Every move he made he was doing something. There were no dead moves.”
“The Gelvins are here thirty years and they attack any project with the enthusiasm of a newcomer.”
“They leave a situation better than they found it.”
“They are modern-type pioneers. They do things the old way, they do things the new way. They are the kind that built the country.”
Ginny Gelvin is of middle height, with dark hair, dark quick eyes, and a skeptical corner-mouth grin. She wears jeans, usually with a wool shirt. She is comfortable in her surroundings, and is made nervous if she has to visit a populous place—even Fairbanks, a hundred and twenty-seven miles away, which she calls “town.” She does not like, among other things, being dependent for water and power on sources outside her family's control. She has endured a flood in town, and the threat of earthquakes. At such times, she yearns for home. “Out here, anything can happen and it doesn't bother you. We have our own power system, our own well. We have double systems generally. We have kerosene and propane light when we don't want to run the generator.” With temperatures that snap toward seventy below, they also have snows that close the road six months a year and bears that visit in summer. She looks up
sometimes and sees wolves in the yard. She says, “In town, I always feel insecure.”
Operating a sewing machine, her husband is, if anything, more able than she, at least when tailoring moosehide. With a rifle, she is the better shot. In two big gardens and a greenhouse, they grow most of their vegetables—tomatoes, peppers, cabbages, lettuce, kohlrabi, beans, cauliflower, celery, rhubarb, blood-red turnips a foot in diameter that resemble the hearts of bulls. They smoke salmon. They fly to Arctic lakes, drill holes in the ice with an auger attached to a chain saw, and pull out northern pike. Hunting game not just for food but for profit as well, Ed is the region's only registered big-game guide. For sums upward of two thousand dollars, he will take some cheechako up into the hills and glass and glass until he shows him a full-curl Dall ram or a grizzly big enough to carpet a hall.
The Gelvins have ten acres of land, an extraordinary spread for a family to own up here in ironic Alaska. A stream, Crooked Creek, runs along one side. Their compound has grown to sixteen buildings, nearly all of which are extremely small by any but local standards. Considerable safety is in these numbers—always somewhere to go, at fifty below zero, in the event of fire. There is a guest cabin, an eight-by-fourteen-foot wanigan (which is a habitable cabin in itself), a meat cache, a smokehouse, a toolshed. A “warehouse” contains sugar, flour, cornmeal, paper goods, coffee (things that can ignore the cold). Even the family's “attic” is a small freestanding building. Most of these structures are made from logs, and the scene might suggest an Eric Sloane book on Early American cabins were it not that the compound is for the most part arranged around one end of an airstrip. Your eye also rests on the fibre-glass greenhouse, not to mention the hangar and workshop. There are no anachronisms. All of it meshes in this place and time. The main cabin is L-shaped, and its long sides are eighteen and thirty-two feet. Floor to ceiling, its height inside is ten courses of logs. There are many dozens of books, a core sample of
which would be “Scotty Allan, King of the Dog Team Drivers,” “Mining Engineers' Handbook,” “Developing Gold Properties with Airplane Placer Drills,” “The Home Physician and Guide to Health,” “Yukon Women,” “Fifty Years Below Zero,” “Ancient Men of the Arctic,” “The Call of the Wild,” “The Wilderness Trapper,” “The Trail Eater,” “Grizzly Country,” “Notorious Grizzly Bears,” and “Return of the Alaskan.” A waist-high bookshelf separates the kitchen area from the living room, where a couch and a couple of chairs—the walls, too—are draped and decorated with the long soft pelts of timber wolves. A full basement is below. There are five rooms in all. The wolf bitch Tara was not named for this house, but there is more analogy than meets the eye, for it is as handsome a cabin as there is in the country, and could be a setting to remember if the life here were to vanish with the wind.
 
 
 
When I have stayed with the Gelvins, I have for the most part occupied a cabin toward the far end of the airstrip—a place they acquired not long ago from an old-timer named Curly Allain, who was in his seventies and went south. He had no intention of returning, but he left his cabin well stocked with utensils, food, and linen—a tin of coffee close to the pot, fifty pounds of flour, five pounds of Danish bacon, firewood in three sizes stacked beside the door. Outside, some paces away, I have stood at a form of parade rest and in the broad light of a June midnight been penetrated in the most inconvenient place by a swarm of indecent mosquitoes, and on the same spot in winter, in a similar posture at the same hour, have stared up in darkness from squeaky snow at a green arch of the aurora, green streamers streaming from it all across the sky. At home, when I look up at the North Star I lift my eyes but don't really
have to move my head. Here, I crane back, lift my chin almost as far as it will go, and look up at the polestar flirting with the zenith. The cabin is long and low, and its roof is loaded white —mantled eighteen inches deep. Its windows are brown-gold from the light of burning lamps. The air is so still I can hear the rising smoke. Twenty-two degrees below zero. Balls of ice are forming in the beard. I go back inside and comb it off, and jump into a bag of down.

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