Coming into the Country (48 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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A trail leads from his cabin to his post office through a beautiful grove of aspens. To keep in close touch with his home and his bloc, he has a battery-operated field-telephone system of the type that contributed to battle tactics in the Second
World War. As the resident officer of the United States Customs Service, he pretty much lets the business come to him. He is responsible for anything that comes floating or flying out of Canada, but problems are almost nil. Around the turn of the century, there was a certain amount of waltzing with customs. A boat built in Canada with Canadian trees was a “British bottom,” and by the rules of U.S. Customs had to pay a handsome fee to continue downriver past Eagle. The duty on Canadian sawboards was negligible. So Canadian crews arriving in Eagle would unload their boats, unscrew the decks, totally disassemble the hulls, and pay duty on a rick of Canadian lumber. Then they would put it all together again and shove off into Alaska. Monitoring something like that kept customs men busy, but what Borg sees now are mainly homemade rafts, many of which are barely afloat, having disassembled themselves while still in the river. He examines gear, checks identification, asks people where they're from and where they are going. “I don't sit on the riverbank. The people come to me. I've never made a seizure.” Occasionally, the Brainstorm arrives—a small barge that hauls fuel and building materials from Dawson, in Yukon Territory, down the Yukon into Alaska and up the Porcupine River back into Canada, to Old Crow, an aggregate five hundred miles. Borg does the customs paperwork, and says it is no less voluminous than it might have been for the Queen Mary. With regard to aircraft, “most pilots are aware of the fact that they are in bad trouble if they have not reported to customs somewhere along the way.” So they seek him out, too.
(“I have wondered whether the customs collection at Eagle pays for itself nowadays, or whether the salaries and other expenses of collection do not exceed the revenue,” wrote Hudson Stuck, the Archdeacon of the Yukon, in 1917.)
In the small, seventy-five-year-old log-cabin city hall, Borg runs his council meetings with a skepticism (he is now the only member from the bloc) that is muffled toward his colleagues
and less so toward the language of state and federal statutes. “All this government talk is so many big words,” he says. Federal funds are contributing to the restoration of the courthouse, near the center of town. Wearily, Borg explains that careful archeological excavations must be performed with “magic wands and metal detectors” or the federal money will not be forthcoming. He calls it a “federal fiasco.” He refers repeatedly to the Eagle Historical Society as “the Eagle Hysterical Society.” He does not appear to be fond of history, but he is the president of the society. Councilman Horace Biederman, pressing for his dream of a new community center (also to rise on federal funds), mentions HUD and “what they call a blocktype grant.”
“Who is Hud?” asks Borg, and moves on to new business: the dumping of trash. A sign on the wall says “Get Into America.”
At home in his cabin after a long complex day, the Mayor will sometimes relax with cassettes he owns of radio serials from the nineteen-thirties and forties. He leans back, presses a lever. The tape rolls. There is a sound of whistling gales. An announcer, urgent and stirred, says, “Now, as howling winds echo across the snow-covered reaches of the wild northwest, the Quaker Oats Company, makers of Quaker Puffed Wheat [sound of rifle shot] and Quaker Puffed Rice, the delicious cereals shot from guns [sound of rifle shot], in cooperation with the Mutual Broadcasting System presents ‘Sergeant Preston of the Yukon' [sound of howling husky]. It's Yukon King, the swiftest and strongest lead dog of the northwest, breaking a trail for Sergeant Preston, of the Northwest Mounted Police, in his relentless pursuit of lawbreakers. [Voice of Preston:”On, King! On, you huskies!“] Gold. Gold, discovered in the Yukon, a stampede to the Klondike in the wild race for riches. Back to the days of the gold rush and the adventures of Sergeant Preston and his wonder dog, Yukon King, as they meet the challenge of the Yukon.”
There is a sewing machine in the post office. Betty Borg works there when John—hauling wood, plowing gardens—is away. Dark-haired and bright-eyed, she is petite, and as trim as he. They have one child, Barbara, whose advance upon the years of secondary education has presented a dilemma to the Borgs. They feel that the supervised high-school work available to her in Eagle is more than a match for academic programs elsewhere, but they worry that she will be deprived socially, that she will suffer for lack of activities with others. Yet to leave the country in search of a high school is to give up what they have here. “I've got the most secure economic situation in Eagle,” he says. “I've got it made here. To move means cashing it in, means starting all over again.” A boarding school is not, apparently, in the conversation, but how about a high school in Anchorage or Fairbanks, where she might be able to live with friends?
“The life style is unacceptable there,” says Borg.
“Unacceptable?”
“Too much garbage.” He refers to drugs in Anchorage high schools and police having to keep order there, teachers smoking in the classroom, a grade-school teacher using
Playboy
as a textbook—an overall atmosphere “where kids' rights reign supreme.”
“Politically, most of us are conservative,” Borg says of the bloc. “We have a common denominator, the church. We are the largest mutual-admiration society in Eagle. There's some truth in some of the gossip about the group. But we have a basis for conversation, a common spirit about many things. Others are interested in drinking. We are not. They gripe and bellyache. The problem is, so few people here have a steady job. They complain at council meetings, and when I assign them to a committee to look into their own complaints they can't back away fast enough. If you have a solid group, outsiders will chip away at it. When people say we don't want them, it's their rationalization, not ours. We haven't closed doors to anybody, and aren't about to.”
When Borg ran the roadhouse, he tried to get the Common Council to advertise Eagle on the radio. He would hardly do that now. When he had been here four years, the population was thirty-six, and—in the flux that is the way of things with the careers of white Alaskans—he and his family were by then the fifth-longest continuing residents of the town. The river people soon arrived, and the Wallers, and whatnot. In a couple of years, the population more than doubled. “I don't say they'll have to sharpen my head and plow me into the ground to get rid of me,” Borg says now. “Too many people, and I would want to leave. If you double your population, you geometrically square your problems. With a thousand people, Eagle would not be the same.”
“It would be like the eighteen-nineties.”
“Only worse. You don't need a vacation from Eagle to get yourself together again. People are not assigned here. They live here by choice. When the road closes in the fall, we are not snowed in. Other people are snowed out.”
 
 
 
On the twelfth of June, 1950, there was a motion before the Common Council of Eagle, Alaska, that “a mowing machine” be acquired “to clean the streets.” Seconded. Carried. As bush communities in Alaska go, Eagle is a trig town. It has a reputation for grace and beauty. This is not always evident to the eye of the outsider, which tends to alight on yards full of old tires, fencing, caribou racks, dogsleds, snowshoes, lynx pelts, pole wood, fifty-five-gallon drums, cans, kayak frames, kerosene heaters, cast-iron grain mills, tarpaper, fuel cans, six-cell batteries, corrugated roofing material, and rotting fish compost in open pits. The inhabitants have the aesthetic disadvantage of being human beings. Where people exist, things are gross. In Short Hills, New Jersey, and Greenwich, Connecticut, the lovely creatures on the combed lawns are spared their own
grossness because they pay not to see it, they do not picnic at the town dump. There are community dumps in Alaska, too, but much of what might go there lingers in the yard because one day it could be needed. If, to some extent, the people of the bush array themselves in squalor, it surely does not exceed what everyone creates but most don't see.
The center of town, in fact and in function, is the well house, because few people have their own water. It is a white frame blockish structure, taller than wide or deep, with a pagoda roof, and a firebell cupola up against the sky. The windmill standing beside it has a long history of lassitude, a record expressible in revolutions per month. March 26, 1951: “Tank very low but today some wind arrived allowing an extra halffoot of water to be collected.” November 26, 1917: “No wind during past month and tank dry.” In present times, the windmill sings castrato. A Jacuzzi submersible pump, hidden in the well house, tops up the twenty-thousand-gallon cedar tank. Water comes out of a hose and nozzle of the type used for pumping gasoline. Firefighting equipment is piled up in the well house, and so are kerosene pots for mercy flights (for spacing around the airfield to light emergency landings). The outer door opens out, and shuts like a book with an inner door that opens in. After these two comes a small foyer, then another door, which leads to the water. All this to keep back the cold. The deep cold comes in waves, spells, snaps—and really long ones are rare. From late in December, 1917, until early in February, 1918, the air was never warmer than forty-six below. If you want to be very sure of encountering someone, know his habits and meet him at the well house. A prominent citizen of Eagle (the description will not reveal him, because in Eagle there is no other kind) recently did just that, with intent to take advantage of the complex doors. A's wife was in B's cabin. B kept a 12-gauge shotgun, loaded with rock salt, leaning by the door. A knew about the salted shotgun. He studied B's habits, and when B went to the well house A locked
him in with three doors. Then A, picking B's cabin lock, recaptured his wife,
who walked down the street with
him hand in hand,
enjoyin'
the sportin' life.
Killing frosts can come at any time of year. Vegetable gardens will have bonfires along all four sides. Up the Yukon five miles and behind the first bend, the tributary Eagle Creek cuts a wide V into the jagged mountains. One distant peak—without a name, like the others—sits exactly in the trough of the V: a sort of gunsight mountain. Even in the floodings of solstitial light, it will turn, from time to time, pure white. If Eagle is, as it has been said to be, the best-looking town in Alaska, it is infinitely outclassed by its setting—high on its bend in ten visible miles of river, among heathery soft and purplish stands of cottonwood, stream-course white spruce, and, on the uplands, black spruce only eight inches in diameter but two and a half centuries old. Near the summit of Eagle Bluff, soaring fourteen hundred feet above the town, the flag of the United States flies eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours a year. A huge rugged cross was hauled up there and erected, but it lacked the endurance of the flag and lies toppled on a ledge below.
The city's budget this year is thirty-seven hundred dollars. That should mow a lot of streets. There are people, as in any town, who wonder where it all could go. Its highest and best use is self-preservation, for the courthouse (1901), the well house (1903), the old log church (1900) are settling with dignity into their own foundations, and while state and federal money might help with the larger places, any number of cabins and buildings are of similar age. Eagle was the first incorporated city in interior Alaska, and Theodore Roosevelt's picture is on the courtroom wall, because he signed the papers that made it so. Eagle was a city before Fairbanks was a tent.
Anchorage was thirteen years unborn. On the bench in Eagle, James Wickersham, United States District Judge, presided over three hundred thousand square miles of land. Eagle may have an A-frame here and there, two gas pumps, and a couple of picture windows looking out past biffies at the Yukon, but in many of its essentials its appearance is long unchanged. It much resembles itself in, say, 1905.
Leaflets were tacked up around town that year showing a resolute character holding a pistol aimed at the viewer. They were titled “Western Philosophy,” and said, in intimidating black-letter type, “LIVE EACH DAY SO THAT YOU CAN LOOK EVERY DAMN MAN IN THE EYE AND TELL HIM TO GO TO HELL.” The intent may have been to buck up the miners, a few of whom had hearts of gold but in other respects were equally yellow and soft. “OTT & SCHEELE, General Merchandise,” said a big sign over the door of what is now the Eagle Roadhouse. At the top of a post in front was a kerosene lamp. The North American Trading & Transportation Company did business out of a corrugated-tin building put up in 1899. A store of the rival Northern Commercial Company (a structure now vacant) was just up the street from the Riverside Hotel, the Coffee House, the Laundry and Baths, the Olympia Bar, and Henry Raymond's combined Saloon and Chamber of Commerce. On May 22, 1905, there was a motion before the Common Council that women be prohibited from frequenting saloons. Seconded. Carried. The women wore long dresses with full sleeves, pinned their hair up, and sometimes carried parasols. The men, with any sense of occasion, wore ties and vested dark suits. There were many sod-roofed log cabins. Three hundred people lived in the town. The Merlys' place was here, and the Ivys', the Stouts', George Beck's. The hall of the Improved Order of Red Men, which still stands on Third Avenue, was the scene of the gatherings and dances and assorted activities of “acknowledged conservators of the history, the customs, and the virtues of the
original American people.” The Improved Order of Red Men was dedicated to “friendship, brotherly helpfulness, fraternal love, and good fellowship,” and was for whites only. Its charter purpose was that the “memory of primitive red men will be preserved to the latest period of recorded time.” On November 27, 1905, an ordinance was passed by the Common Council “to restrict and regulate the disposition of intoxicating liquors within the town of Eagle.” Everyone voted aye. The community had a handwritten newspaper, the
Eagle City Tribune.
The first typewriter arrived that year. Lumber was cut for the making of culverts. An ordinance forbade throwing garbage over the riverbank. (It remains, by and large, in force.) The Heath Hotel was near the Grotto Restaurant was near the United States Customs House. The customs agent is preserved in a photograph that looks very much like John Borg.

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