Coming into the Country (59 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Strewn around the wanigan, which is in effect a plywood tent, are tools, Blazo cans, propane tanks, the welding equipment, the generator—items no more congruous in this wilderness
than the backhoe or the D9. A piece at a time, Ed and Stanley have disassembled the rig that Stanley hauled up here on his April journey over alpine snow and ice. The sled he dragged has become the slick plate—a couple of hundred square feet of half-inch-thick sheet steel, at one end of which Ed has fashioned and welded a steel mouthpiece to guide gravel into the sluice box. To carry water to the plate and box, he welded nine fifty-five-gallon drums end to end, forming a thirty-foot pipe. He used welding rods acquired from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Using a circular drum top, he made a valve for the pipe, and he fitted it with a handle that can regulate the flow of water. After assembling the steel sluice box, which is thirty-six feet long and four feet wide, he began to fill it with “riffles.” Riffles vary considerably, and are the signature of the miner. Their general purpose is to create in the box a confined simulacrum of stream rapids, to intrude upon the flow of water so that it will leap, dive, tumble in souse holes, reverse itself in mid-torrent, rage forward, stack up, back up, and eddy out—just what happens when God welds a river. Prospectors in search of gold would try the deep, quiet pockets of rapids. In like manner, gold will collect in the deep, quiet pockets of the box. Most riffles are lengths of steel set perpendicular to the flow and only a few inches apart, ladderlike. They are set at various angles and spacings according to the theories of the miner. Some miners make riffles with wooden poles, wooden blocks, boulders. They even use slices of rubber tires. After Ed and Stanley had lowered into place all of their seventy calculated riffles—mostly three-sixteenths-inch angle irons, with a channel iron every four feet—they were ready at last to set up their mine.
They had decided to make the first cut half a mile below the airstrip, dozing wholly into the left side of the valley. “Them old-timers in the old days, they covered this country more thoroughly than you can imagine,” Ed explained. “Up here,
they worked only the left limit.” Back from a hundred and fifty feet of stream (the basic dimension of the cut), Stanley scraped off the tundra in a swath that went out to “the width of pay” —to the margin, near the rising slope of the hillside, where a pan of gravel would no longer show colors of gold. His father worked with the pan, which was of a type called a grizzly, fitted with screens of varied mesh to simplify the job. Crouching in pools, he swirled sands and gravels until the pan smiled. In places it smiled wanly, in places not at all. He had found a few rough nuggets, he said. Not worn flat, they could not have travelled far. Adducing such evidence, he hoped to mine coarse gold.
The size of the cut was unusually large, but so was the size of the D9 Cat, with its fourteen feet of blade. For the sluicing operation, a reservoir was needed. Stanley built one, damming and diking the stream so that the reservoir stood beside the cut. He embedded the water pipe in the wall of the reservoir. It poked through to the low end of the cut. The idea was to position the slick plate under the pipe (with the sluice box adjoining), then doze heaps of placer onto the plate and turn on the water. First, however, there was a problem of drainage. The valley's natural gradient was slight, and the stream bed itself would not have been adequate. So Stanley dug a deep ditch and ran it out to contour, some four hundred feet downstream. There was a minor incident when he returned to the cut. He crushed his father's grizzly.
The sluice box should have a slope of exactly ten degrees. The D9—larger than most cabins, lurching over mounds of its own rubble—seemed an unlikely instrument for so precise a job. Stanley—in his high seat, hands and feet in rapid movement among the multiple controls—suggested a virtuoso on a pipe organ even more than a skinner on a Cat. Gradually, a smooth ramp appeared. He had wired a carpenter's level to the deck of the machine and had shimmed one end of it so the bubble would center when the Cat was on a slope of ten
degrees. As he finished, and drove his fifty-five tons of yellow iron up the ramp, from bottom to top the bubble scarcely moved. Clanking off to fetch the sluice box, he hitched it to the rear of the big bulldozer, and pushed it backward down the narrow top of the dike. The sluice box weighs a couple of tons. He gently eased it down the ramp. Then he went and got the slick plate, and backed that down the top of the dike, too. He was grouchy—had been crabby all through the day—because he had no snoose. He was trying to quit, and had been six days without a dip of Copenhagen. Repeatedly, he shook his head in apparent dismay and made despairing remarks about the way things were going—heard mainly by the roaring Cat. The mouthpiece on the slick plate is nearly four feet wide and was designed to fit into the sluice box with very little clearance. Stanley backed the slick plate down the ramp. It weighs three tons, and he moved it steadily—without hesitation, without a pause for adjustment (just ran it downhill backward)—until the mouthpiece entered the box. It had not so much as brushed either side. The clearance was five-quarters of an inch one way and three-eighths of an inch the other. The day's work finished, father and son flew home.
Still no sign of them. The light rain is long since gone and the clouds are breaking. Even so, there is no sound, no distant approaching drone. Perhaps I did not sleep at all. Perhaps I just lay down for an illusory minute, then got up and sprinkled salt in the iron pan for toast. Collecting the only available firewood —the dead stems of dwarf willows, thinner than straws—I make a little blaze for warmth. The temperature is under forty. Once more I scan the mountains, where nothing is passing but the day.
I have fished, cooked, thrown rocks off the airstrip. Now I write a letter home. “ … When the Gelvins departed, I was cleaning some grayling, five in all. I caught one with my fishing rod. The Cat caught the others. When Stanley dammed the river, and diverted it into the pipe, he took it out of its bed for
a couple of hundred yards. Pools remained there, like low tide, and as they slowly drained they revealed the graylings' dorsal fins. I walked from pool to pool, trapping the fish with my hands. This pretty little stream is being disassembled in the name of gold. The result of the summer season—of moving forty thousand cubic yards of material through a box, of baring two hundred thousand square feet of bedrock, of scraping off the tundra and stuffing it up a hill, of making a muck-and-gravel hash out of what are now streamside meadows of bluebells and lupine, daisies and Arctic forget-me-nots, yellow poppies, and saxifrage—will be a peanut-butter jar filled with flaky gold. Probably no one will actually use it. Investors will draw it into their world and lock it in an armored cellar, while up here in these untravelled mountains a machine-made moonscape will tell the tale. Am I disgusted? Manifestly not. Not from here, from now, from this perspective. I am too warmly, too subjectively caught up in what the Gelvins are doing. In the ecomilitia, bust me to private. This mine is a cork on the sea. Meanwhile (and, possibly, more seriously), the relationship between this father and son is as attractive as anything I have seen in Alaska—both of them self-reliant beyond the usual reach of the term, the characteristic formed by this country. Whatever they are doing, whether it is mining or something else, they do for themselves what no one else is here to do for them. Their kind is more endangered every year. Balance that against the nick they are making in this land. Only an easygoing extremist would preserve every bit of the country. And extremists alone would exploit it all. Everyone else has to think the matter through—choose a point of tolerance, however much the point might tend to one side. For myself, I am closer to the preserving side—that is, the side that would preserve the Gelvins. To be sure, I would preserve plenty of land as well. My own margin of tolerance would not include some faceless corporation ‘responsible' to a hundred thousand stockholders, making a crater you could see from the moon. Nor would it
include visiting exploiters—here in the seventies, gone in the eighties—with some pipe and some skyscrapers left behind. But I, as noted, am out of sync with the day. Is it midnight? Is it morning? Is it late afternoon? Where on earth could the Gelvins be?”
The hum of Stanley's Aeronca Champion at last comes into the sky. He goes overhead with the wind, turns, lands, and when he cuts the engine I am under the wing. “I've been wondering what time it is,” I tell him.
“What time do you think it is?”
“You said you were coming soon after eight in the morning. I suppose it is eight-fifteen.”
Stanley smiles and withdraws his pocket watch. “The aircraft inspector showed up this morning. We didn't know he was coming. The time is three in the afternoon. Not a whole lot left of the day.”
At the cut, Stanley shows disappointment with the velocity of the water as it comes through the pipe, falls to the plate, and races on through the box. It lacks power, he says, to move the material at the rate it should be moved. If a guy could expand the intake end of the pipe, where it sticks into the reservoir, the pipe would deliver more water. “Without a funnel effect, only so much will run in there. If a guy could make something like a funnel …” What is needed, as is so often the case, for thousands of purposes in Alaska, is a fifty-five-gallon drum. There are several near the wanigan, and Ed goes to get one while Stanley, with the Cat, opens the dam and lowers the reservoir enough to expose the pipe. With his torch, Ed cuts out the top and bottom of the drum and slits it down the side. At one end of the slit he pries the walls of the drum apart, making a V-shaped gap, which he fills in with scraps of steel. Attached—welded to the pipe—the new end flares like the bell of a trumpet, doubling the intake. Funnel effect.
A fifty-five-gallon steel drum is thirty-four and three-quarters
inches high and twenty-three inches in diameter, and is sometimes called the Alaska State Flower. Hundreds of them lie around wherever people have settled. I once considered them ugly. They seemed disappointing, somehow, and I wished they would go away. There is a change that affects what one sees here. Just as on a wilderness trip a change occurs after a time and you cross a line into another world, a change occurs with these drums. Gradually, they become tolerable, and then more and more attractive. Eventually, they almost bloom. Fifty-five-gallon drums are used as rain barrels, roof jacks, bathtubs, fish smokers, dog pots, doghouses. They are testing basins for outboard motors. They are the honeypots of biffies, the floats of rafts. A threat has been made to use one as a bomb. Dick Cook, who despises aircraft of all types, told a helicopter pilot he would shoot at him if he ever came near his home. The pilot has warned Cook that if he so much as points a rifle at the chopper the pilot will fill a fifty-five-gallon drum with water and drop it on the roof of Cook's cabin. Fifty-five-gallon drums make heat stoves, cookstoves, flower planters, bearproof caches, wood boxes, well casings, watering troughs, culverts, runway markers, water tanks, solar showers. They are used as rollers for moving cabins, rollers to smooth snow or dirt. Sliced on the diagonal, they are the bodies of wheelbarrows. Scavenged everywhere, they are looked upon as gold.
With the dam resealed and the reservoir again full, Stanley, in the D9, lowers the blade into the cut and moves onto the slick plate a dark, high pyramid of gravel and sand. Ed opens the valve. Water thunders from the pipe, crashes onto the plate, seemingly melts the material, and drives it through the box. The lighter gravels roar along. The boulders bounce like balls. Some are so big they stick, attracting piles of gravel behind them, deflecting curtains of water into the air. Ed, with a rock rake, sends them tumbling on their way. To make the rake, he welded a bent reinforcing rod to a strut from his damaged plane. Stanley shuttles the big Cat back and forth
from the top to the bottom of the box, now adding material to the slick plate, now clanking down to the lower end to doze aside the growing heap of tailings. A year in preparation, they are finally mining gold. Stanley is all pessimism, pondering the economics of the Cat. “It's in motion five times as much as it should be,” he shouts as he goes by. He likes even less the proximity of the bedrock (“That shallow ground ain't worth a damn”), and he is down on the volume of the stream (“Another two weeks and we won't have enough water”).
Ed, on the other hand, is obviously pleased. He grins as he works with his strut. “It's an odd way to make a living,” he comments. “Just as it was for the old-timers. In winter, they'd go down in a frozen drift and shovel up gravel in the dark. They'd sluice in the summer, and then head into town with their poke, and some slick would come along and take it away. The same sort of thing happens now—to people coming off the North Slope.”
At the end of the day, Stanley scoops a dark concentrate from the box. He puts it in a pan, partly submerges it, and swirls away the sand. Gradually, the pan's bottom begins to sparkle like a river under sun—flashing pinpoints, flickerings of yellow. Counting thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty flecks of gold.
“Gold is like farming to me,” Ed remarks. “One year, you don't have enough water. Another year, the Cat breaks down. You put more money in the ground than you ever take out. But I like the creeks. I like being out here in the country.”
Stanley looks up from the pan. He says, “It cost fifty thousand dollars to get to this point. I'm sure glad to see that gold.”
 
 
 
The last time I went through the country was in the winter, 1977, and a speakeasy had risen in Eagle. A large building by regional standards, it had blank walls on three sides and, around
back, a single window that was the size of a hand mirror. A naked light bulb was outside the window, and, close by, there was a complicated foyer, wherein arrivals were processed through a double set of heavily hardwared doors. Stools and benches, rough spruce floor. A hundred-dollar bill had been inlaid in the bar. The first high school in Eagle's history had also been established, but the two teachers who had been sent to do the job had discovered an unusual P.-T.A., and had already announced their resignations, explaining privately that “picking on people” seemed to be Eagle's “winter sport.” I saw a sled being pulled by an Irish setter, another by a mongrel collie, a third by a pedigreed scottie. Daniel Boone's descendant Jack Boone had at last set foot in the wild, taking a daughter down the river in summer and hiking in to Kneeland and Cook's. A geologist, about then, had been killed by a black bear up in Potts' trapping land between Eagle and the Charley River. He was using a magnetometer and could therefore carry no additional metal. A partner heard his distant screams and hurried to help him, but found him dead and partly eaten. Fur prices were up—up, for example, to four hundred and fifty for a top-grade lynx. Sarge Waller went out and got himself a top-grade lynx. A good marten was bringing a hundred and ten dollars. It was something of a trapping-world bonanza. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Horace (Junior) Biederman stepped out of his cabin into the snow with his Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun and blasted three holes in the air. He had been listening to KFAR. He wished there were some way to let the new President know that the Indians of Eagle were for him—all the Hungwitchin, the whole Village, en bloc. The white City, with few exceptions, went the opposite way. Some months earlier, at a community fête, Junior attacked Mike Potts with a club, and was himself subdued by Constable Whitaker, who was wearing a lead-filled glove. Now Junior had circulated a petition to the effect that Eagle did not require and therefore could ill afford a constable, and Whitaker was leaving
town. Potts had been belatedly arrested by Alaska Fish and Game for failing to travel a hundred and fifty miles to submit, as the law requires, the skin of the grizzly that came close to killing Oddball. No one knew, for sure, who had turned Potts in. Viola Goggans was gone. Jim Dungan, after an at last successful operation on his leg, was away, working again for G.S.I. Michael David was on the North Slope.

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