Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
Coming into the Country (41 page)
The spruce in their millions are thick with snow, but not heavy snowâa light dry loaf on every bough, with frost as well, in chain crystals. Just touch one of these trees and all of its burden falls, makes craters in the snow of the ground. The load is so delicately poised a breath can break it, a mild breeze denude the forest. Day after day, the great northern stillness will preserve this Damoclean scene, while the first appearance of each February dawn shoots pink light into the trees, and colors all the blanketed roofs, the mushroom caps on barrels and posts. Overhead, sometimes, a few hundred feet above the ground stillness, the wind is audibly blowing.
I have flown with Ed in winter to this place and that, in his Bellanca Citabria, landing on frozen rivers and sloughs. The first time he set down, I did not know the plane had landed. The snow was so deep and so dry there was no feel of the skis touching. When we ran into some unseasonably warm air one dayâa williwaw blowing over the mountains from the south âthe Citabria's oil temperature began to climb toward an unacceptable level. He landed on the Yukon, got out, opened the engine cowling with a Phillips screwdriver, and removed a sheet of cardboard. He had put it there to block off the oil cooler, to keep it from doing too good a job. “When you bring an airplane into this country, you have to modify it in various ways,” he said. “You prepare it for our kind of cold. Block off the oil cooler. Cut a bigger hole in the breather tube so it won't freeze up and blow your nose seal. Partly cover the bugeyesâthe air intakesâon the cowling. You adapt for summer, too.
When a new plane comes into the country, people say, âIt's still in wheel pants,' because wheel pants are the first things to come off. You put on tundra tires, and a big Scott tail wheel.” The Citabria is built for short takeoffs, but, even so, when he bought it he replaced its fixed prop with a constant-speed prop, and he drooped the ailerons and adjusted the gap seals so he could get off the ground in two hundred feet (unloaded). “That's the way it is out hereâyou adapt things to the country. If something breaks down, you tear it apart and learn that way. Stanley is way better than I on airplanes. He built the new bungee-cord landing gear for his Champ. It originally had a sixty-five-horsepower engine. He took a ninety-five-horse engine from a wrecked 140, rebuilt it, replaced parts, put it in the Champ, and took off. Stanley can listen to an airplane from a distance and tell its horsepower, and with one glance he knows if it has a PA18 rudder, a PA11 horizontal stabilizer. I'd rather have him working on my airplane than just about any licensed mechanic I know.” We got back into the Citabria and prepared to lift off from the river, but the snow was soft, the skis stuck, and the plane at full power plowed along well below takeoff speed. We were glued to the Yukon. Ed, though, had had this possibility in mind and had therefore chosen to land on a smoothly frozen segment of the river many miles long. He turned around and taxied back to where he had started, completing a large oval imprint, which suggested a race track. Then he went around and around it, packing and smoothing the surface until the plane began to move with increased speed and the skis at last came off the snow.
When a new plane comes into the country, people say, âIt's still in wheel pants,' because wheel pants are the first things to come off. You put on tundra tires, and a big Scott tail wheel.” The Citabria is built for short takeoffs, but, even so, when he bought it he replaced its fixed prop with a constant-speed prop, and he drooped the ailerons and adjusted the gap seals so he could get off the ground in two hundred feet (unloaded). “That's the way it is out hereâyou adapt things to the country. If something breaks down, you tear it apart and learn that way. Stanley is way better than I on airplanes. He built the new bungee-cord landing gear for his Champ. It originally had a sixty-five-horsepower engine. He took a ninety-five-horse engine from a wrecked 140, rebuilt it, replaced parts, put it in the Champ, and took off. Stanley can listen to an airplane from a distance and tell its horsepower, and with one glance he knows if it has a PA18 rudder, a PA11 horizontal stabilizer. I'd rather have him working on my airplane than just about any licensed mechanic I know.” We got back into the Citabria and prepared to lift off from the river, but the snow was soft, the skis stuck, and the plane at full power plowed along well below takeoff speed. We were glued to the Yukon. Ed, though, had had this possibility in mind and had therefore chosen to land on a smoothly frozen segment of the river many miles long. He turned around and taxied back to where he had started, completing a large oval imprint, which suggested a race track. Then he went around and around it, packing and smoothing the surface until the plane began to move with increased speed and the skis at last came off the snow.
Ed did not know how to fly when he came into the country but inevitably took it up as an important skill of the bush. Since there are so few people in all Alaska, the coincidence is more commonplace than remarkable that he was taught by Don Jonz. Jonz, whose name had once been Jones, instructed in Fairbanks, and Ed remembers him as “a flippant, cocky sort of guy.” He was the pilot of the Cessna 310 that disappeared on
its way to Juneau in 1972 with Alaska's Representative Nick Begich and his Louisiana colleague Hale Boggs. The plane apparently iced up and fell into the Gulf of Alaska. As it happened, the issue of
Flying
magazine that was on newsstands at that time contained an article called “Ice Without Fear,” by Don Jonz. “The thought of inflight structural icing inspires the crazies in a lot of airmen,” he wrote. “In my opinion, most of it is a crock ⦠. It's hard to convince some people that the sun is always shining on top ⦠. If your bid for blue sky is unsuccessful, you have a monkey on your back. The trip down won't be pleasant ⦠. Ice can be, and is, consistently deadly. An aircraft under severe ice loads suffers on both ends of its speed range. Stall goes up. Cruise goes down. When the two meet, the world comes to an end.”
its way to Juneau in 1972 with Alaska's Representative Nick Begich and his Louisiana colleague Hale Boggs. The plane apparently iced up and fell into the Gulf of Alaska. As it happened, the issue of
Flying
magazine that was on newsstands at that time contained an article called “Ice Without Fear,” by Don Jonz. “The thought of inflight structural icing inspires the crazies in a lot of airmen,” he wrote. “In my opinion, most of it is a crock ⦠. It's hard to convince some people that the sun is always shining on top ⦠. If your bid for blue sky is unsuccessful, you have a monkey on your back. The trip down won't be pleasant ⦠. Ice can be, and is, consistently deadly. An aircraft under severe ice loads suffers on both ends of its speed range. Stall goes up. Cruise goes down. When the two meet, the world comes to an end.”
The Gelvins never fly anywhere without leaving a note on the kitchen table saying where they have gone and at what time, and giving a flight plan. They are known as people who will go out of their way to fly over someone's remote cabin to be sure that smoke is visible there, but the cabin will be in their flight plan. On long trips, if something of surprising interest attracts their attentionâsome digression they would like to makeâthey resist the temptation. They stay with their plan, because if searchers had to look for them they might look in the wrong place. Their planes have emergency-locator beacons, and each contains survival gearâan axe, a week's food, flares, a tent, two sleeping bags. Snowshoes are strapped to the wing struts. They haven't had much trouble. Stanley once had a rough landing at the family's cabin on the Charley River. The “airstrip” there is so short it looks like a helicopter pad, with a surface of grapefruit gravel. The plane came down short and hard, bending a strut to the point of fracture. The propeller was bent, too. Stanley and his father cut a spruce and wired it, as a splint, to the damaged strut. They removed the propeller and laid it across two big logs. With a third log, they pounded the prop until its gross disfigurement essentially disappeared. They put it back on the airplane, revved up, and flew away.
Ginny worries now and again about her husband and son. I remember her pacing around one day when they were two hours overdue from the mountains, where they had gone to work on the airstrip that would service the development of their gold claims. They were using Stanley's Champ. She kept watching the dogs outside, waiting for them to herald the plane, for they always hear it long before she does. She spoke of going to Circle, thirty-five miles away, to ask Frank Warren to fly reconnaissance with his plane to see if there was trouble, but first we would wait a bit longer, with a glass of MacNaughton's Canadian. “I'm not really worried,” she said. “But I always get to thinking about it when they don't come home when they say they're going to.” Tara at last delivered an annunciating howl. The other dogs joined in.
After the plane arrived, Stanley opened the cowling with a penny, poured in some oil, gassed up from a gravity-feed tank, got a towel and some soap, spun the prop with one hand to start the engine, ducked under a wing, climbed aboard, and flew eight miles to the Springs to take a shower. The planes are used more than the VW and the pickup. Flying is the talk of the table, when the talk is not about gold. Weather, parts, loads, structuresâStanley flips through aviation magazines and tells his father about stall-spin accident rates in various aircraft per thousand hours. Stanley was once cruising in the mountains looking for a place to fish, Ed has told me. He saw a gravel bar that looked negotiable, so he set the plane down, but the bar was rougher and shorter than he had thought. It was Mistake No. 1 to risk landing there. Now he made Mistake No. 2: he went fishing. The sun came out. The day warmed up. Warm air is less dense than cold air, and provides less lift. The warmer the air, the longer the run for takeoff. When Stanley tried to leave the gravel bar, he went off the end of it and almost into the river. The tail of the plane dragged in the water as he barely lifted away. “His legs were shaking,” said his father. “He learned judgment there.”
Ed is a careful and skillful pilot unendangered by bravado,
and I would rest on his judgment wherever he thought he could goâall of which, I feel, is an essential preamble to going on to say that on the day I arrived from upriver, by canoe from Eagle, he cracked up the Citabria. The word the family used was “dinged.” He dinged the airplane. Patricia Oakes, down the road, said “pranged.” In a place where flying is in many situations the only means of travel, people are careful how they land certain words. Whatever happened, no one said that the plane had crashed. He had been up in the gold-claim valley, where still there was unmelted snow, on which he landed (with wheels). Rolling to a stop, he set the hand brake, so the plane would not slide in the breeze. When eventually he took off, he forgot the hand brake. Like skis, his oversize tundra tires, locked and rigid, slid along the snow. The Citabria got up all the speed it needed to lift into the air. Ed flew home with the brake still on. At the lower altitude of Central, the gravel runway was bare and dry. He came in on final, flared, and made a three-point full-stall landing. When the wheels touched, they grabbed the ground. The Citabria did a forward flip. Ed hung there for a moment in a ganglion of straps. Then he disengaged himself and finished his trip on foot. The extent of his physical injury was a cut on one hand, but his pilot's pride was pranged. For the plane's part, the prop was bent, the windshield was smashed, a wing member was cracked, a strut was gone, the fuselage was dented, the tail was crumpled. Ed got out his Buck knife, his welding torch, his hacksaw. He cut away fabric. Carrying parts into the shop, he repaired the plane. He figured the job would cost at least six thousand dollars in Fairbanks, so clearly he was making money. A guy seizes an opportunity when it comes, in the bush. “Drive a car long enough and you'll have both minor and major scrapes,” he said, straightening with force of muscle the rudder's tubular steel.
and I would rest on his judgment wherever he thought he could goâall of which, I feel, is an essential preamble to going on to say that on the day I arrived from upriver, by canoe from Eagle, he cracked up the Citabria. The word the family used was “dinged.” He dinged the airplane. Patricia Oakes, down the road, said “pranged.” In a place where flying is in many situations the only means of travel, people are careful how they land certain words. Whatever happened, no one said that the plane had crashed. He had been up in the gold-claim valley, where still there was unmelted snow, on which he landed (with wheels). Rolling to a stop, he set the hand brake, so the plane would not slide in the breeze. When eventually he took off, he forgot the hand brake. Like skis, his oversize tundra tires, locked and rigid, slid along the snow. The Citabria got up all the speed it needed to lift into the air. Ed flew home with the brake still on. At the lower altitude of Central, the gravel runway was bare and dry. He came in on final, flared, and made a three-point full-stall landing. When the wheels touched, they grabbed the ground. The Citabria did a forward flip. Ed hung there for a moment in a ganglion of straps. Then he disengaged himself and finished his trip on foot. The extent of his physical injury was a cut on one hand, but his pilot's pride was pranged. For the plane's part, the prop was bent, the windshield was smashed, a wing member was cracked, a strut was gone, the fuselage was dented, the tail was crumpled. Ed got out his Buck knife, his welding torch, his hacksaw. He cut away fabric. Carrying parts into the shop, he repaired the plane. He figured the job would cost at least six thousand dollars in Fairbanks, so clearly he was making money. A guy seizes an opportunity when it comes, in the bush. “Drive a car long enough and you'll have both minor and major scrapes,” he said, straightening with force of muscle the rudder's tubular steel.
“That's the sort of thing they say in Eagle,” I told him. “They say about the pilots there, âYou can't learn to ski without falling.'”
On a wall of the shop is a museum of trapsâa catalogued collection of about a hundred and fifty, of various types and ages. Hanging opposite are some dozens of fursâwolf, fox, wolverine, lynx. Most will go to markets outside, but Ed and Ginny also sell quantities of wolf ruffs to regional Indians. Their snow machineâSki-Doo Alpineârests on the floor below the furs. It goes ten miles an hour on the trail, and the two of them ride it. Ed took me out with him once, and as we chugged along among the laden spruce at least a thousand trees thanked us for coming by dumping on our heads a tumult of snow. We collected a marten that had climbed up a pole-set for a grouse wing and was now hanging by a leg in a lifelike pose, frozen stiffer than taxidermy, its forepaws stretched as if leaping for prey, its eyes, at fifteen below zero, like white chick-peas. The coat was toast brown. We saw the scant remains of a wolf-killed moose, and a bowl in the snow full of feathers of grouse. A springing lynx had killed and eaten it. Amazingly, for a cat of such sizeâbig as an ocelot, thirty pounds, with long dangling legsâits tracks were shallow in the deep dry snow. The pads of a lynx are like pancakes.
Ginny wears a one-piece snow-machine suit with a sewed-on wolf ruff, Ed a down parka with a wolf ruff and an Eddie Bauer down cap that he has trimmed with mink. Both wear mukluks with felt liners and felt insoles inside the liners and more felt between the liners and the soles. (Mukluks, with their soft moosehide bottoms, thin leggings, and layered contents of felt, are the lightest, driest, warmest, most comfortable things I have ever had on my feet. Water is their nemesis, so they function only in cold snow.) The Gelvins make their sets for the most part near lakes east of Central. They use single and double long-springsâthe sort of trap that has a “pan” held by a “dog” (trigger), which releases snapping jaws. They use coilspring traps and jump traps. They use Conibearsâtraps made of rectangles of heavy steel rods that are brought together with enough force to destroy vertebrae. The Gelvins might cut a
hole in lake ice and dangle a snare that is baited with cottonwood. A beaver, caught in the snare, drowns. Most of their trap sets are cubbies, thoughâcontrived shelters of cut boughsâwith a grouse wing or a piece of lynx or beaver inside. They make rounds every three days. When they find, say, a lynx in a trap, the cat is generally just sitting there, patiently waiting for another surprise. They choke it with rope or wire. If a fox is alive, they rap the snout with a stick. The fox loses consciousness. Standing on its chest will cause its heart to stop. Mink and marten ordinarily freeze, but if one is alive it is taken in hand and squeezed. Caught in a Conibear, a wolverine or a fox is usually dead. If not, it is shot with a .22. (Some trappers shoot everything.) Wolves, standing in their double long-springs, are shot in the ear. Owls, hawks, and ravens occasionally get into the traps. Ginny tried to trap a bear once, within a few feet of their cabin in Central. She strewed grouse carcasses in a tempting circle. The bear sat on the trap, leaped six feet in the air, and ran off defecating cranberries. Despite such failures, the take of a typical recent season has been ten thousand dollars' worth of fur.
hole in lake ice and dangle a snare that is baited with cottonwood. A beaver, caught in the snare, drowns. Most of their trap sets are cubbies, thoughâcontrived shelters of cut boughsâwith a grouse wing or a piece of lynx or beaver inside. They make rounds every three days. When they find, say, a lynx in a trap, the cat is generally just sitting there, patiently waiting for another surprise. They choke it with rope or wire. If a fox is alive, they rap the snout with a stick. The fox loses consciousness. Standing on its chest will cause its heart to stop. Mink and marten ordinarily freeze, but if one is alive it is taken in hand and squeezed. Caught in a Conibear, a wolverine or a fox is usually dead. If not, it is shot with a .22. (Some trappers shoot everything.) Wolves, standing in their double long-springs, are shot in the ear. Owls, hawks, and ravens occasionally get into the traps. Ginny tried to trap a bear once, within a few feet of their cabin in Central. She strewed grouse carcasses in a tempting circle. The bear sat on the trap, leaped six feet in the air, and ran off defecating cranberries. Despite such failures, the take of a typical recent season has been ten thousand dollars' worth of fur.
Ginny looks through
Alaska
magazine, where her attention is arrested by letters from the Lower Forty-eight. “âThere was a time when man was justified in taking wildlife,'” she reads aloud, “âfor then man's survival was at stake, but that time is long gone. What is left of wildlife now belongs to all of us, and not to a few.'
Alaska
magazine, where her attention is arrested by letters from the Lower Forty-eight. “âThere was a time when man was justified in taking wildlife,'” she reads aloud, “âfor then man's survival was at stake, but that time is long gone. What is left of wildlife now belongs to all of us, and not to a few.'
“âThe Kodiak bear is brought back to the Lower Forty-eight to be mounted as lifeless trophies on rich men's walls.'
“âThere is absolutely no defensible position for trapping.'
“âI would hope the day will come when men no longer want to kill everything that moves.'”
She slaps the magazine down on the table. “They don't understand,” she says. “Trophy hunters go for big boars. That gives younger grizzlies a chance to breed, and makes for better breeding stock. These people who write these letters are not
even rational. They say we're out to kill everything. People in the Lower Forty-eight do not understand Alaska.”
even rational. They say we're out to kill everything. People in the Lower Forty-eight do not understand Alaska.”
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