Read Coming into the Country Online

Authors: John McPhee

Coming into the Country (21 page)

“East of Talkeetna, the cost impact will be impacted.”
“The planning aspects are far more important than whatever the megastructure may turn out to be.”
The prime consultant was CCC/HOK, an international planning and architectural firm, whose planners and architects —Ed Crittenden, Anne Kriken, Barry Quinn, Dan Gale—came from the company's Anchorage and San Francisco offices but had about them a certain quality of Eastern tweed. They, in turn, reached out for help to engineers, hydrologists, economists, botanists, biologists, meteorologists, geologists (notably Dames & Moore); and the general procedure was set up and coordinated by Leonard Lane, the Capital Site Selection Committee's full-time executive director.
“With McHargian geophysical determinants, we factor in the transportation and utility infrastructure.”
“The approach, overall, is essentially McHargian.”
Ian McHarg, the absent master, is a landscape architect and regional planner who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and developed some years ago a technique for selecting the best new site or alignment for anything from a doghouse to a city of ten million. McHarg's method, in crude summary, was to take all relevant information—developed by his own research and that of his staff and consultants—and express it in the form of markings and shadings on clear plastic overlays that could be placed upon a map. One overlay might deal with, say, drainage, ground water, and additional hydrological considerations; another would shade in the extent of vegetation. Each criterion could be individually considered, then literally piled atop the others until an expert, peering down through the
layers of plastic, could see on the map the best and worst sites for construction. McHarg had presented this to the world in a fountainhead treatise called “Design with Nature.” McHarg was not connected with CCC/HOK, but when his name was mentioned its people tended to swivel and face Philadelphia.
They had buried the map of central Alaska under layers of acetate, and had eventually eliminated everything on it but the Susitna Valley. Under more overlays, the valley itself was graphically analyzed. The Land Status Acetate showed, in various colors, state ownership, borough ownership, federal ownership, and private ownership. The Natural Limitations Acetate showed, in various patterns and colors, floodplains, bogs, muskeg pockets, swamps, steep slopes, alpine tundra, moose habitats, bear habitats, salmon spawning areas. “To develop our extensive sensitivity to wildlife,” Leonard Lane reported, “we talked to thirty-one people in the Department of Fish and Game.” The Existing Transportation Acetate showed two-lane roads, gravel roads, dirt roads, airstrips, railroad, airport sites. The Elevation Acetate included twelve altitudes. The Capital City Footprint Areas Acetate presented the regions of the valley that had shown up best under earlier fathoms of acetate. Within each footprint, or generally buildable area, was a “centroid”—the spot where buildings would most likely rise. Following this came more plastic, neatly sketched upon, plotted, shaded—criterion after criterion, layer upon layer: the View Aspect Acetate, the Degree of View Acetate, the Water Features Acetate, the Vegetation Types Acetate, the Landscape Features Acetate, the Background Features Acetate. The committee had to develop a talent for peering down through the plastic. The committee was like a crane standing on one leg staring into a pond.
Meanwhile, to make new photographic mosaics of the valley, the consultants ordered and the committee paid for twelve thousand dollars' worth of aerial pictures. Dames & Moore defended the need for this by pointing out—to some people's
astonishment—that certain features of the topographic maps of the United States Geological Survey were only about sixty per cent accurate. Stream courses, for example, were often out of date. A stream course in Alaska, writhing like a firehose, can rapidly put a map out of date.
The consultants had been hired to envision a setting, not a city. The design of the community was specifically excluded from their procedure. They could not help but consider it, though, in the light of the question that was always with them: Is it possible to create an unsterile community that has only government there?
“I sure hope so,” Barry Quinn said one day. “The capital has a lot going against it. Its economic base is government. There will not be much secondary employment. And diversity makes a community healthy.” Quinn, from East Rochester, New York, had been working in Alaska off and on for nine years. He was young, with dark longish hair parted in the middle, his manner gentle, engaging. “It is difficult to initiate the incentives that create diversity,” he went on. “They tend to evolve naturally. And industry is simply not going to spring up here. It's cheaper to process oil and timber elsewhere. The town's overall development will depend on the development of Alaska. It may not work for this generation but for the next. You can't create a Friday-night spot in a brand-new town.”
Ed Crittenden, president of CCC/HOK, is an architect and city planner, trained at Yale and M.I.T., who has been in Alaska twenty-six years. Five of his six children were born in Alaska. His hair is graying and as long as the times. There is a pipe, a sports jacket, a blue button-down shirt, a knitted tie. I asked him one day how he saw the new city, and he said he deliberately tried to avoid thinking of that in order to play his role as written. Crittenden had done the new Federal Building, the BP Building, the Union Oil Building—some of the high-rising glass of Anchorage. Pressed to describe the new capital as it might appear in his private thought, he finally said, “Well,
to tell you the truth, I would reverse all of the things that people come to Alaska to get away from. I would not go along with the I'll-build-my-cabin-where-I-damned-well-want-to syndrome. I would apply ideas from the Eastern United States—a central core, a central walking mall, a controlled environment. Living structures would be concentrated, and in modules of enclosed space. There would be modules for state and local government, and commercial modules, all concentrated, with plenty of open space around them—plenty of undisturbed, or almost undisturbed, Alaska.” So saying, and in a cloud of pipe smoke, Crittenden departed for Siberia. An honored figure in the field of Arctic construction and Arctic community development, he was going there to participate in the first Soviet-American exchange on human environment in the north.
 
 
 
In recent years, certain construction has enhanced the weight of Juneau. Along Gastineau Channel, for example, runs a four-lane divided highway, engineered with the breadth and grandeur of an interstate—implying New York at one end, Chicago at the other. The road cost sixteen million dollars, and runs from Juneau out to Juneau Municipal Airport, and back —there being nowhere else to go. The new State Office Building, edificial focus of the town, has been complemented by a new courthouse and a multilevel parking garage. It is not a coincidence that so much construction came about at a time when Juneau was threatened by the movement to move the capital, and no one will argue about the fact that all this effort can be traced to one man. His name is Bill Ray. Nearly forty years ago, he turned up in Juneau after sleeping in his own blankets in the hold of the S. S. Baranof. From Wallace, Idaho, he had been driven north by the Depression, and had come to Juneau with his father to look for work. He began as a longshoreman,
and, moving from job to job, he did about all there was to do in southeastern Alaska. He worked in canneries, on fishing boats, and as a deckhand on a canning tender. After the Second World War, he bought a liquor store in Juneau. He helped defeat the capital-move initiatives of 1960 and 1962. In 1964, he was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives, and eventually became chairman of its Finance Committee. In 1970 and 1974, he was elected to the Senate, where he also became chairman of the Finance Committee. As one of his constituents has said of him, “Hands down, Bill Ray brings home more bacon than anyone else in the legislature.”
“They call me the lovable bandit,” Ray told me one day, in his office in the Capitol. “I take everything that isn't nailed down. I admit it. Aren't you supposed to do what you can for your district? They say I have the guts of a second-story man and the brains of a Mafia chieftain.” The second-story-man part was protruding under the hem of a jade-green polo shirt. Life had been good in Juneau. Ray appeared to be in his middle fifties. He had heavy eyelids, and was a little figgy in the jowls. Through his office window he gazed contemplatively at the State Office Building, whose eleven stories of airy glass were more than framed by ponderous abutments of sandstone, turreted and crenellated so that it looked something like a greenhouse prepared for war.
“That's my building there,” he said. “They call that Fort Ray. It's no secret—it cost fifteen million dollars. We have thirty-five hundred government employees. That means more than ten thousand people—well over half the town—depend directly on the government. And now powerful forces are at play to kill us, all set in motion by a little clique in Anchorage.”
“Clique?”
“Atwood, at heart. Atwood was here once, in Juneau, and didn't make it. Atwood has had gubernatorial ambitions, senatorial ambitions. When he looks in the mirror, he sees God. He's a brilliant man, but he has insulated his mind against
reality. He misrepresents the truth. What they really want to do—the little clique that has been forcing this issue—is to put a legislative hall thirty miles outside of Anchorage, and that would be the head of the state government, but the heart and guts would be in Anchorage. What they sold the people was that the head, guts, and feathers—everything—would be in one place, and you can't do that thirty miles from Anchorage. They've done nothing but sell it on a lie. Lie No. 2: It won't hurt Juneau. They say Juneau has its cruise boats, and so on. Cruise boats? People get off the boat, look around, take a bus out to the glacier, and go back to the boat. They're visitors, not tourists. A tourist stays a week and drops four hundred dollars. A visitor comes with a shirt and a twenty-dollar bill and doesn't change either one.”
“Shouldn't the state capital be near the population center?” I asked him.
“That argument doesn't hold. The spectrum of public pressure is larger where the people are. Can you imagine a march of
welfare
people? In Juneau, you don't have pressures like that. You can sit with a clear head and do your work.”
I mentioned that Jan Koslosky, of Palmer, had told me that during his six years in the legislature he only went home once during a session. He said he had been a pilot for thirty years but did not like the flight into Juneau. He had had too many close calls trying to get in.
“Koslosky is a cautious man. I'll tell you this. You are safer coming into Juneau than elsewhere, because when you come into Juneau the pilot is flying the plane. The
captain
is flying the plane. He wants to be sure he gets here.”
As an aircraft feels its way down toward an airport in weather, the pilot reads an instrument-approach chart, which indicates the distance and altitude from which the runway should be visible or the approach has been missed and the plane must climb out and perhaps have another try. For most airports, the missed-approach point is close to the runway, or
even just above it. For Juneau Municipal, the missed-approach point is three and a half miles from the runway and fourteen hundred feet in the air. If you can't fly in visually from there, you immediately turn and rapidly climb. In all directions from the airport are mountains, and certain ones are close. As the Juneau approach chart presents the situation, “Any go-around commenced after passing the published missed-approach point will not provide standard obstruction clearance.” In the legislature, quorums can erode when flights approach Juneau, fail to see the runway, and go off and land somewhere else.
An Alaskan pilot once advised me never to fly to Juneau. “It's a one-way shot,” he said. “Once you get lined up on final, you're looking right at the rocks. Mountain goes straight up and down in back of it. The weather is notoriously poor. You have to have supreme confidence in all your instruments and in the F.A.A.'s instruments. The approach is relatively steep. You go from five thousand feet to sea level in fourteen-pointseven nautical miles. If you miss, you do a very steep, sharp climbing turn to avoid hitting something. An airplane is most inefficient when making a sharp turn and climbing. A mile from the runway you go over a five-hundred-foot hill, and the top has been cleared of trees so that planes will not hit them. Now, is that or is that not a little hairy? After crossing the hill, you have to make a dogleg to the right before touching down.”

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