Coming into the Country (57 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Cook's approach to high-latitude agriculture is detailed and scientific. His garden is twenty-five hundred square feet, and he has planned it to the half inch. He carries a thick notebook. The notes reflect research on the chances and characteristics of many hundreds of varieties of berries, vegetables, and flowers. A Norman monk would not have styled a neater arrangement. Asters, pansies, cress, nasturtiums, burdock, dill, sage, cabbage, savory. Some are this year's experiments, some are tried and sure. The soil is black silt. Oriental poppies, beets, marigolds, grass, broccoli, endive, kale. Strawberries. Four kinds of peas. Potatoes. Lettuce. Cook is a one-man experiment station. Instead of hunting him down and trying to kick him out of here, the federal government should come and farm his genius. Subsidize him. Not that he would accept. Parsnips, cabbage, parsley, beans, onions, horseradish, Jerusalem artichokes, corn, clover, alfalfa, rhubarb. The evening is extremely feverish. The garden is close by the rushing stream, above a steep and mucky bank. I scramble up and down filling buckets with water. A thousand gallons may do. Sunflowers, calendula,
radishes, rutabaga, shallots, turnips, tomatoes. Between buckets, I shovel compost, most of which is malamute-Siberian mongrel turd. Cucumbers. There is a small plastic-covered greenhouse, built by Donna, near the cabin. Cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers are greenhouse crops in Alaska, as is Hubbard squash. Going away for a few days recently, Donna hid flats of green shoots in the cellar, so bears would not knock them over. Mice ate the young tomato plants and most of the Hubbard squash—next winter's “pumpkin” pies. Ermine, frequently, will inhabit the cabin like mice. Cook once had a pet weasel named Harriet that used to run on his table and knock off dishes and look at him with a weaselly smile. Harriet accidentally died in one of his traps.
Donna and I plant together, sliding opposite down the rows. We must slow up and be careful, or Cook, with his notebook, will find us at fault. Donna, in her generosity, seems as sensitive to my goals as to his, to feel my desire to get the seeds into the earth. Turnips form a four-inch grid. Radishes next. Beets. There is a delaying search through the packet box for the right succession of varietal carrots. Cook advances to the new strawberry bed, at the far end of the garden. Donna and I talk. She mentions her honeymoon. When she married Bill Kneeland, an architect in Fairbanks, they went off to a cabin in the bush near Livengood that had been given her as a present. Her employer soon flew in after them. He said he was desperate, she had to come away and work. He ran an air-charter service in Fairbanks, and he needed her as a stewardess on a big, important job. What could she do, she wonders, giving a shrug, dropping carrot seeds into the ground. Leaving Kneeland in the cabin, she flew off with her boss.
After the honeymoon, she and the architect moved into a big house in Fairbanks, where she “was supposed to look pretty.” She had nothing else to do. If she fulfilled the requirement by nature, she did not by predisposition. “That life was just not my style. I like it more here. It's more worthwhile. The
satisfaction is in making your own living, as opposed to making money and buying your living—to have the garden all planted and a year's supply of salmon hanging on the racks. I get a lot of pleasure, too, out of having a nice piece of skin. When I tan it right, I feel good. I have sure learned a lot, stumbling around. In my first year, I broke two plates and several cups. I wouldn't do that now. I have a long way to go, though. I'm still not comfortable in boats.”
To get over to their cabin when we arrived, we used Dick's canoe, which he had left in the mainland woods. First, we lined it up the shelf ice to a point opposite the island, where we would try to angle down the heavy rapids and get a purchase on the island side. The dogs, meanwhile, jumped in and swam. One was a seven-month-old pup, swimming a current for the first time in her life. The choppy torrent was sparkling with sun, and her head was hard to follow. She tried to swim straight upstream, and the river—thirty-three degrees—kept moving her backward. At best, she just held even. I thought she was going to die. Finally, a bit at a time, she ferried on the current, moved sidewise, and, after a very long baptismal swim, went shaking onto the bank. Now, in the canoe, we human beings shoved into the rapid. Dick had a pole and wanted no help. We bucked on into the haystacks. “That pup was really working,” I said to Donna. “Quiet!” she replied. Her hands were wrapped around the center thwart, the knuckles white.
“I do worry a lot,” Donna admits. “I worry about Dick. I worry about him and the river. I worry a whole hell of a lot when he is gone for weeks. I try to work on new skills. I'm learning to work with wood. I worked two months on a small wooden car for my son.” The axles were of birch, the wheels of red alder, bound to the chassis with rawhide. The wheels had spokes of spruce. The body was cottonwood. The bumper was moose bone. The surface was finished with beeswax. Edward, Donna's son, is two. He lives in Oklahoma. His stepmother could not stand Alaska. Donna wrapped the finished car with
extraordinary care and mailed it to Edward from Eagle, wondering to what extent he might sense that it had not come from a store.
It is 11 P.M. We have one section planted—roughly half a dozen to go. The strawberry bed is under way, and I help Dick there. It is his notion that strawberries in a depressed bed can survive a penarctic winter. So this bed will be six inches deep. A lot more than six inches has to be shovelled up and lugged away, though, because he has tons of compost for the bed.
By midnight, with half the excavation done, Dick straightens up and says he is ready to quit. He doubts he'll finish in the morning. So why not quit now? He enters a debate—with himself—aloud. Vegetables versus bees. Participation by others is not invited. He flings pros into the air like skeet, and one by one he shatters them with cons. He finally announces that he is not going to leave in the morning.
He has at least given me an evening off from my imagination. We go inside for a late dessert—cranberry shortcake with milk and sugar—and I pick at it while he reviews the sterner facts of nature. “In New York,” he says, “people separate the concepts of life and death. In this country, their whole view of life and death would change. The woods are composed of who's killing whom. Life is forever building from death. Life and death are not a duality.”
“These concepts aren't earthshaking,” says Donna. “It's just that you can see it all here.”
“You look at this country, it hits you in the face,” Dick continues.
“What hits you in the face?”
“That life and death are not a duality. They're just simply here—life, death—in the all-pervading mesh that holds things together. Less than five minutes after a wolf stops chasing a moose, the moose is browsing. The wolf chases the moose again. Stops. Five minutes later, the moose is browsing. The moose does not go on thinking—worrying—about the wolf. Death is as much a part of life as breathing. People in cities seem
to want life and death to remain at a standstill. Most people who are against killing are horribly afraid to die. They seem to think you can have life without death, and if so they have withdrawn from life. They seem to think the animals up here are smelling flowers. They use the word ‘ecology' for everything but what it means. It means who's eating whom, and when.”
I ask him what, if anything, makes him afraid.
“Uncontrolled fear and deep respect are two different things,” he answers. “In one sense, there is nothing out here for me to fear. I'm going to die someday. I'll be food for somebody else. There are a lot of things up here that can kill you. You've got to have a healthy respect for the country.”
I am supposed to meet Sarge at two in the afternoon. At ten-thirty in the morning, I ask Dick for a ride off the island. It took us four and a half hours to get up here, but I am sure I can get back in three, and I want some extra time in case I go astray. He poles me to shore. I jump out, thank him, and go up the bank. I go on up a rise, circle a swamp on a contour, and drop down among cottonwoods near the stream. I made notes coming in. “Go through sphagnum boggy open area after point of rock, hills to left, then into woods half a mile, then a quarter mile of tussocks, then by stream half a mile over gravel dry slough, then get up on bank and into willow.” I attempt to follow this in reverse, and see nothing whatsoever that is mentioned in the notes. I am moving right along, though, finding here and there a bit of travelled path, here and there a sight of the stream. Animals use the same routes people do, especially where the way is narrow. The way is so narrow at times that the willow trunks simultaneously rub both ends of the rolled pad on the top of my pack.
Like an explosion in my face, a grouse starts up, two feet away, whirring. I break out in muskeg, back to heavy woods. I have a metal cup. I tap on it with a spoon. I pass bear scat, old and familiar. Tap. Now another mound. I have not seen that one before. Tap. Tap. In other words, never surprise a bear. One or two
must
be here somewhere. To make myself
known, I deliver lectures to them in a voice designed to clear the hall. “Uncontrolled fear and deep respect are two different things,” I explain to them. “You've got to have a healthy respect for what comes through the country.”
An hour goes by, and more-fast-moving. I lose my way now, in dense alder. A path was clear before, but it is suddenly gone. With a couple of taps on the cup, I stand and wonder what to do. I go back, or what I think is back, but have lost where I have been. The brush is so dense I can't see the hills. I try moving laterally, toward and away from what I guess to be the direction of the stream. Now for some minutes I slowly walk in a rectangle, breaking branches to mark it, then build a larger one on that, and, while building a third one, come to beaten trail. In it is a mound of spoor. I recognize it as if it were a friend. It was the nearest defecation to the Yukon. Tap.
The trees finally end. I am pleased to see the big river. I make a bench of driftwood, eat cashews and apricots, and wait for Sarge. The walk took a little less than two hours. I don't feel elevated by that journey, nor am I shy to describe it—just happy that it is complete. I scarcely think I was crazy to do it, and I don't think I was crazy to fear it. Risk was low, but there was something to fear. Still, I am left awry. I embrace this wild country. But how can I be of it, how can I move within it? I can't accept anymore the rationale of the few who go unarmed —yet I am equally loath to use guns. If bears were no longer in the country, I would not have come. I am here, in a sense, because they survive. So I am sorry—truly rueful and perplexed —that without a means of killing them I cannot feel at ease. A punctual speck appears on the river. Staff Sergeant James Waller, United States Marine Corps, Retired. Tap.
 
 
 
I have been hired as scribe to Mike Potts. My ancestors in Scotland were scribes to the likes of Potts, so I feel an atavistic
rightness in accepting the position. I won't take pay. He feeds me instead—a meal here and there, a little bread and moose. I enjoy Potts. Like Dick Cook, he has a certain picture of himself and he paints it every day—another daub, another skill, becoming more and more of what he once only dreamed. With John Gaudio, he now wishes to offer two-week dog-team trips to anyone willing to travel this far and pay him enough, and he needs, in effect, a brochure. He is a skillful editor. “Verbal” is not the word that Potts first brings to mind, but he senses how language might be cut to fit him. Taking hold of the text, he roughs it up. “Day 10: Cross over the divide into the Seventymile River drainage and camp at the headwaters of Mogul Creek (tent).”
The stipend on Potts' table tonight was perhaps more than I had bargained for. What we consumed, in the main, was fresh shoulder of grizzly—giving a new, unexpected, and grimly ironic turn to my evolving approach to this creature. Potts and Gaudio took a canoe down the Fortymile a few days ago. The Fortymile goes into the Yukon thirty miles above Eagle, in Canada. Heading back from there, they got into their sleeping bags in the canoe and drifted through the night. One woke the other when he saw the bear. It was on the right bank and close to the water. The canoe moved silently upon it. The bear was walking upwind, downriver, looking the other way—just on the Canadian side of the border. The two raised their rifles, fired, and knocked it into the United States. Halved at the waist, it has been hanging in Potts' butchery, a few steps from his cabin. The butchery, merely a roof on poles, is also his fish cache, and the shelter for his dog pot—half a fifty-five-gallon drum that sits like a caldron above a fire and is a pot-aufeu for huskies. Fish parts, bear gut, the voluminous udder of a moose—what goes in there is “anything you got,” lamb's-quarters, too (“for roughage”). I have once or twice helped him feed the dogs, carrying buckets to their stakes behind the cabin. They scream and leap in frenzy and plunge their noses into the buckets and swallow gobs of viscera at a gulp, then sit
down and pass the hours, bored at the ends of their chains. Burgundy is the color of the grizzly's flesh. With the coat gone, its body is an awesome show of muscular anatomy. The torso hangs like an Eisenhower jacket, short in the middle, long in the arms, muscles braided and bulging. The claws and cuffs are still there. A great deal of fat is on the back. The legs, still joined, suggest a middle linebacker, although the thought is flattering to football. The bear was two years old.

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