Coming into the Country (51 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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He was born in Appleton, Minnesota, on the Pomme de Terre, commencing a lifelong passion for rivers. It culminates
now with the Yukon. The river is why he is here. He has a twenty-foot Chestnut freighter canoe. He has been a canoeman from his earliest youth—on the Pomme de Terre, the Red River of the North, the Minnesota, the Otter Tail. He was in Alaska as a bachelor before the war. Elva, just graduated from Berkeley and a registered nurse, met him when he went through California on his way—as things eventuated—to Britain and France with the Army. Since his return, they have lived in Alaska.
He worked for the Bureau of Land Management, but does not adopt a B.L.M. attitude toward the river people, who are, by and large, his friends. He is, in his way, as vehement as they. He says he had hopes for the work and future of the bureau in the days of President Kennedy (the B.L.M. has caretaker responsibility for most of the land of Alaska), but things later slid in an erosive way, and now the B.L.M., by his description, “has reverted to being a national grab bag surrounded by people in sharkskin suits.” Scott is nothing if not verbal. He loves, and sometimes makes, words. He rolls words on his tongue with such savor that certain ones—“gymanastics,” “mythyology”—would appear to have an extra syllable; he seems to like them so much that he is reluctant to let them go without a bonus.
He despises exploitation of the mythology of Alaska. When he is in the summer Arctic and sees Eskimos hurrying in parkas and mukluks to beat drums before tourists, he wishes he had enough money to pay them all to stay home. He is a xenophile. He is interested in high-latitude peoples, and has travelled from one country to another completely around the Arctic world. The State Department has sent him abroad, exporting his knowledge of northern vegetation. He praises the way things are ordered and organized in Lapland, Iceland, Finland, Soviet Siberia. For Russian conservationists he has particularly admiring praise. “And they are the supposed barbarians. We are the ones who are barbaric.”
“He's a Communist. He's an out-and-out Communist.”
“Show me the card.”
He describes the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline as “a frenetic exercise, reactionary in character,” and explains, “Ten per cent of the world's population is using sixty per cent of the world's resources. The inevitable result of that is conflict. Whenever a society puts all its chips on depletables, it's in trouble. We should socialize base minerals and hydrocarbons. It's the only way the public interest can in truth be served.”
“I'll buy Socialist.”
He says that the deals and the legislation that enabled the construction of the pipeline “constitute a scandal exceeding Teapot Dome—so corrupt and immoral it beggars description.” The eighty million acres of proposed parks and reserves which were a “tradeoff” for the petroleum industry's exploitation of the land are not only an example of “national vanity” but collectively a poor one at that, because “the best parts of Alaska” (from an economic as well as an aesthetic point of view) are not marked for preservation. He has in mind, among other places, sections of the Wrangells, of Wood River, of the Brooks Range. “They have been sold out, and the people of the United States sold short, to the merchants.”
By the terms of the Statehood Act, Scott remembers, the hundred and three million acres that the state was to choose as its share of the land were meant to be entirely below a line formed by the Porcupine, the Yukon, and the Kuskokwim Rivers—the so-called PYK Line, a bend sinister across interior Alaska. North Alaska was to be a national-defense zone. “Anxious to please mercantile interests, the government ignored the PYK Line, but it was never revoked, and Prudhoe Bay really belongs to all the people. The merchants got the pipeline without much of a god-damned ripple, really. They'll get anything else they want, too—through cheap tradeoffs among politicians. All high-latitude areas are seen as places to be exploited. It fries my fanny.” It would seem to be—chop—enough to pale the Pope.
One sometimes gets the impression that Scott lives in Eagle so he can contemplate Canada. His picture windows look east
across the Yukon into Yukon Territory. “That's God's country there,” he says, with a sweeping gesture over his home-caught, homegrown, homemade American dinner—his king salmon, his tomato salad, creamed corn, lowbush-wild-cranberry sauce on yogurt, cranberry brandy. In the view's right-middle ground is Eagle Creek, where he and I once fished for grayling. It is in the United States, and if it is not God's country, God should try to get it, a place so beautiful it beggars description—a clear, fast stream, which on that day was still covered on both sides and almost to the center with two or three feet of white and blue ice. The steep knobby hills above were pale green with new aspen leaves; there were occasional white birch, dark interspersed cones of isolate spruce, here and again patches of tundra. Overhead was a flotilla of gray-hulled, white-sailed clouds. Fresh snow was on the mountains in the distance. The Scotts have all that framed in their Thermopane—a window that could have been lifted from a wall in Paramus and driven here, to the end of the end of the road. The window is synecdoche, is Eagle itself—a lens, a monocular, framing the wild, holding the vision that draws people up the long trail to the edge of things to have a look and see.
Out the other way, past my place, is the town. Scott is its conscience, if no longer its mayor. He does not miss the Council meetings or any opportunity to pull the trigger of his .45-calibre principles. Tonight is not an exception. All are present: Borg, with his toothpick; Sarge Waller, hatless, his fringe of hair cut crew; Junior Biederman; Dave McCall; Taiwan Richert, with his cigarette papers, his corncob pipe; Dave Roy; Steve Casto. The Common Council of Eagle, Alaska. Louise Waller sits as city clerk. A dozen observers fill the benches by the walls: Diana Greene, crocheting; Elva Scott, doing needlepoint; Viola Goggans, with her headband and her thermos. T. J. Voithoffer calls attention to the town's bank account, which is above fifteen thousand dollars. He says that Eagle has become “a regular greedy overtaxed municipality, like all the ones we escaped.” The figure has long since irritated Scott, for
in the most recent tax assessment Scott's assessment proved to be a full twelfth of the town's budget. (“You can imagine how this titillated my Celtic sensitivities,” Scott told me. He went to the tax-assessment-equalization meeting and made no comment about his own situation but inquired into the criteria the assessor had used. When he found that there were no criteria —except what the town thought the payer could pay—his Celtic sensitivities went critical, and his tax bill atrophied as well.) Voithoffer's complaint is noted. Scott lets it pass.
Waller takes the floor. “In the minutes, April 26, which I was not here,” he begins … . Jim and Elva Scott had said they wanted it recorded that they saw a conflict of interest in Sarge Waller's being a Council member while Louise Waller was a city clerk, and in Sarge Waller's being a Council member and also being given a job in the courthouse restoration, where jobs are awarded by the Common Council. Just what is the problem, Waller wants to know—what do the Scotts want to prove?
“Who hires the workers on the building—the city or the B.L.M.?” Scott asks.
“The city.”
“How many applications were there beyond the number hired?”
“Three.”
“Therefore, Sarge voted for a job for himself, and that is conflict of interest. The state has a conflict-of-interest law. Eagle is big enough not to have a councilman whose wife is clerk, a councilman who is employed as a result of a Council vote. We wish to have that point recorded in the minutes. There are no personalities in this.”
“I think there are personalities!” Louise Waller shouts, and delivers a statement of the devotion to the United States felt by the Wallers, with undertone implications that the Scotts are Communists.
Sarge is shouting. Scott is repeating himself, also in high throat: “The
state
has a conflict-of-interest law.”
Sarge now bellows out, “You came here saying you were retired and were just going to build your house, and you have been doing nothing but stir up trouble ever since.”
The debate has gone up out of the larynx and into the bulging eyeball. An Eagle mayor once died in Council meeting. Through it all, Elva Scott is as calm as a gavel. When the Wallers shout questions at her, they get polite, quiet replies, without interruption of her moving needle. She is sharp, forensic, clever—politically very able. She is a medical person, interested in the damage, not the fight. Gradually, with a few references to Scott's memorable mayoralty, the thunder recedes.
The Scotts and the Wallers are next-door neighbors. Walking home, I ask Elva how such a great and angry confrontation will affect Jim's relationship with Sarge. “Jim doesn't have a relationship with Sarge” is Elva's reply. “Therefore, it can't be affected.”
Elva has long-lashed gray-blue eyes that are as smiling as they are shrewd. Her insights seem to begin where many people's bottom out. Decades ago, she was diagnosed as having Hodgkin's disease, from which her oldest son, who shared it, is dead. She does not seem to be much affected by the tumult of the world. She is above average in height and in the strength of her frame, and she has the open, handsome face, the look of reposed affection that one associates with the exemplar Scandinavian women. Her name was Nelson, and she grew up in San Fernando. She has a master's degree in education from the University of Alaska. For many years, she ran the school-district health program in Anchorage. In Eagle, she runs, in effect, a clinic in her kitchen. She does preventive work that is paid for by the state, but most of her effort is donated. With a health aide in the Indian Village, who has had six weeks' training, Elva has all of the medical experience that is available in Eagle. The hospital in Fairbanks is three hundred and eighty miles away by road, an hour and twenty minutes through the
air. When Charlie Juneby, in the Indian Village, had an emergency last year that resulted in a kidney transplant in Seattle, a red signal was sent out of Eagle on the medical satellite system, interrupting an agricultural program coming in from New Zealand. Fairbanks failed to catch the signal, but someone in Hawaii did, and telephoned Alaska. In the black of night, a plane came from Fairbanks, and Eagle was ready with flares all around the landing strip and headlights at either end. Juneby was in Seattle nine hours after the signal.
People like to sit and listen to the satellite—to the medical problems of all of Alaska. Their own they take to Elva. Her couches and chairs are often filled with fundamentalists, river people, bootleggers, and Indians. Old Sarah Malcolm sits there —with moosehide in her lap, sewing—absorbing at least ten times what she pretends to understand. Louise Paul, short and solid, saying nothing, is said to be the matriarch of the Indian Village. Archie Juneby—tall, slender, handsome, with a dark ponytail—drank too much last night with his brothers and smashed up Max Beck's boat. They come to Elva. Elva goes to them. She knits her day through the Village and the City. Mental health and alcoholism are the principal problems. “In the Village, children's ears run so much the people once thought that was normal and healthy,” she has told me. “People come in off the river with blood infections, red streaks up their arm. They get cystitis from not enough water. They come down from Dawson with v.d. We don't have laboratory tests. We treat on symptoms. An outboard motor chewed on a guy's legs awhile. We sewed him up. I tell everyone, ‘I don't mind helping you out. Just don't use me.' We don't want to be awakened for nothing, for someone who is merely drunk. For gunshot wounds and stabbings I of course get up. Oh, we have enough of that sort of thing. Yeah. You betcha. We're getting ready to have dinner with company and they come in and bleed all over the sink. Who needs TV in Eagle? We've got action enough in the streets.”
Guns blazed in Eagle a short time ago—a row at Y's, big pistols cracking in the night; no casualties.
G's first wife died giving birth to H. G married N, who died in two years. G then married W, who was half his age. H, now fourteen, became pregnant, no one knows by whom, and gave birth to Z. Z is now one year old. Her mother has gone to Fairbanks and has disappeared. W has left G. He approaches sixty. He is alone with the infant Z.
When D's cabin caught fire, D was out of the country. Half the town—Christians and drinkers alike—came out to fight the fire and loot the cabin. There were individual piles of loot, and fights over the piles. “That's my pile.” “The hell it is, it's mine.”
M has requested that if his cabin ever smolders in his absence people please stay away and let it burn to the ground.
C drinks gin, Listerine, rubbing alcohol, and vanilla extract.
A's wife went off with X to one of Billy Mitchell's old telegraph cabins forty or fifty miles into the mountains. Writing out a false but wholly effective message, A chartered an airplane and dropped the message near the cabin: “Your brother is dead. The funeral is on Friday. Come in.”
TV.
 
 
 
By a campfire near the boundary—the north-south Canadian boundary—Michael John David reads aloud to me and to his brother from “Lame Deer Seeker of Visions.” It is one of several books he carries in his pack. Around us are tall spruce that Michael means to cut and float six or eight miles down the Yukon to become the walls of his new cabin. He is the chief of Eagle Indian Village. “‘I think white people are so afraid of the world they created that they don't want to see, feel, smell, or hear it,'” he reads. He has turned with no searching
to what is obviously a favorite passage. “‘The feeling of rain and snow on your face, being numbed by an icy wind and thawing out before a smoking fire, coming out of a hot sweat bath and plunging into a cold stream, these things make you feel alive, but you don't want them anymore.'” He pauses to chuckle, to flash a grin. “Do you like this?”

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