Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
Coming into the Country (25 page)
In winter on the trail, he wears a hooded cotton sweatshirt, no hat. He does use an earband. He has a low opinion of wool. “First off, it's too expensive. Second off, you don't have the moisture problem up here you have in the States.” He wears Sears' thermal long johns under cotton coveralls, and his feet are kept warm by Indian-made mukluks with Bean's felt insoles and a pair of wool socks. He rarely puts on his parka. “You have to worry up here more about overdressing than about underdressing. The problem is getting overheated.” Gradually, his clothes have become rags, with so many shreds, holes, and rips that they seem to cling to him only through loyalty. Everything is patched, and loose bits flap as he walks. His red chamois-cloth shirt has holes in the front, the back, and the sides. His green overalls are torn open at both knees. Half a leg is gone from his corduroy pants. His khaki down jacket is quilted with patches and has a long rip under one arm. His hooded sweatshirt hangs from him in tatters, spreads over him like the thrums of a mop. “I'll tell you one thing about this country,” he says. “This country is hard on clothes.”
Cook is somewhat below the threshold of slender. He is fatless. His figure is a little stooped, unprepossessing, but his legs and arms are strong beyond the mere requirements of the athlete. He looks like a scarecrow made of cables. All his features are feralâhis chin, his nose, his dark eyes. His hair, which is nearly black, has gone far from his forehead. His scalp is bare all the way back to, more or less, his north pole. The growth beyondâdense, streaked with grayâcantilevers to the sides in unbarbered profusion, so that his own hair appears to be a parka ruff. His voice is soft, gentleâhis words polite. When he is being pedagogical, the voice goes up several registers, and becomes hortative and sharp. He is not infrequently pedagogical.
A decade and more can bring deep seniority in Alaska. People arrive steadily. And people go. They go from Anchorage and Fairbanksâlet alone the more exacting wild. Some, of course, are interested only in a year or two's work, then to
return with saved high wages to the Lower Forty-eight. Others, though, mean to adapt to Alaska, hoping to find a sense of frontier, a fresh and different kind of life. They come continually to Eagle, and to Circle, the next settlement below Eagle down the Yukon. The two communities are about a hundred and sixty river miles apart, and in all the land between them live perhaps thirty people. The state of New Jersey, where I happen to live, could fit between Eagle and Circle. New Jersey has seven and a half million people. Small wonder that the Alaskan wild has at least a conceptual appeal to certain people from a place like New Jersey. Beyond Circle are the vast savannas of the Yukon Flatsâanother world. Upstream from Circle are the bluffs, the mountains, the steep-falling streamsâthe country. Eagle and Circle are connected only by river, but each of them is reachable, about half the year, over narrow gravel roads (built for gold mines) that twist through the forest and are chipped out of cliffsides in high mountain passes. If you get into your car in Hackensack, Circle is about as far north as you can go on North America's network of roads. Eagle, with its montane setting, seems to attract more people who intend to stay. In they comeâyoung people in ones and twosâfrom all over the Lower Forty-eight. With general trapping catalogues under their arms, they walk around wondering what to do next. The climate and the raw Alaskan wild will quickly sort them out. Some will not flinch. Others will go back. Others will stay on but will never get past the clustered cabins and gravel streets of Eagle. These young people, for the most part, are half Cook's age. He is in his middle forties. He is their exemplar âthe one who has done it and stuck. So the newcomers turn to him, when he is in town, as sage and mentor. He tells them that it's a big but hungry country out there, good enough for trapping, maybe, but not for too much trapping, and they are to stay the hell off his traplines. He does not otherwise discourage people. He wants to help them. If, in effect, they are wearing a skin and carrying a stone-headed club, he suggests that technology, while it can be kept at a distance, is inescapable.
“The question,” he will say, “is how far do you want to go? I buy wheat. I use axes, knives. I have windows. There's a few things we've been trained to need and can't give up. You can't forget the culture you were raised in. You have to satisfy needs created in you. Almost everyone needs music, for instance. Cabins may be out of food, but they've all got books in them. Indian trappers used deadfalls onceâpropped-up logs. I wouldn't want to live without my rifle and steel traps. I don't want to have to live on a bow and arrow and a deadfall. Somewhere, you have to make some sort of compromise. There is a line that has to be drawn. Most people feel around for it. Those that try to be too Spartan generally back off. Those who want to be too luxurious end up in Eagleâor in Fairbanks, or New York. So far as I know, people who have tried to get away from technology completely have always failed. Meanwhile, what this place has to offer is wildness that is nowhere else.”
return with saved high wages to the Lower Forty-eight. Others, though, mean to adapt to Alaska, hoping to find a sense of frontier, a fresh and different kind of life. They come continually to Eagle, and to Circle, the next settlement below Eagle down the Yukon. The two communities are about a hundred and sixty river miles apart, and in all the land between them live perhaps thirty people. The state of New Jersey, where I happen to live, could fit between Eagle and Circle. New Jersey has seven and a half million people. Small wonder that the Alaskan wild has at least a conceptual appeal to certain people from a place like New Jersey. Beyond Circle are the vast savannas of the Yukon Flatsâanother world. Upstream from Circle are the bluffs, the mountains, the steep-falling streamsâthe country. Eagle and Circle are connected only by river, but each of them is reachable, about half the year, over narrow gravel roads (built for gold mines) that twist through the forest and are chipped out of cliffsides in high mountain passes. If you get into your car in Hackensack, Circle is about as far north as you can go on North America's network of roads. Eagle, with its montane setting, seems to attract more people who intend to stay. In they comeâyoung people in ones and twosâfrom all over the Lower Forty-eight. With general trapping catalogues under their arms, they walk around wondering what to do next. The climate and the raw Alaskan wild will quickly sort them out. Some will not flinch. Others will go back. Others will stay on but will never get past the clustered cabins and gravel streets of Eagle. These young people, for the most part, are half Cook's age. He is in his middle forties. He is their exemplar âthe one who has done it and stuck. So the newcomers turn to him, when he is in town, as sage and mentor. He tells them that it's a big but hungry country out there, good enough for trapping, maybe, but not for too much trapping, and they are to stay the hell off his traplines. He does not otherwise discourage people. He wants to help them. If, in effect, they are wearing a skin and carrying a stone-headed club, he suggests that technology, while it can be kept at a distance, is inescapable.
“The question,” he will say, “is how far do you want to go? I buy wheat. I use axes, knives. I have windows. There's a few things we've been trained to need and can't give up. You can't forget the culture you were raised in. You have to satisfy needs created in you. Almost everyone needs music, for instance. Cabins may be out of food, but they've all got books in them. Indian trappers used deadfalls onceâpropped-up logs. I wouldn't want to live without my rifle and steel traps. I don't want to have to live on a bow and arrow and a deadfall. Somewhere, you have to make some sort of compromise. There is a line that has to be drawn. Most people feel around for it. Those that try to be too Spartan generally back off. Those who want to be too luxurious end up in Eagleâor in Fairbanks, or New York. So far as I know, people who have tried to get away from technology completely have always failed. Meanwhile, what this place has to offer is wildness that is nowhere else.”
A favorite aphorism of Cook's is that a farmer can learn to live in a city in six months but a city person in a lifetime cannot learn to live on a farm. He says of newcomers, “A lot of them say they're going to âlive off the land.' They go hungry. They have ideas about everythingâon arrival. And they've got no problems. But they're diving off too high a bridge. Soon they run into problems, so they come visiting. They have too much gear and their sleeping bags are too heavy to carry around. They are wondering where to get meat, where and how to catch fish, how to protect their gear from bears. You can't tell them directly. If you tell them to do something, they do the opposite. But there are ways to let them know.”
Cook seems to deserve his reputation. In all the terrain that is more or less focussed on the post office at Eagle, he is the most experienced, the best person to be sought out by anyone determined to live much beyond the outermost tip of the set society. He knows the woods, the animals, sleds, traps, furs, dogs, frozen rivers, and swift water. He is the sachem figure. And he had long since achieved this status when a day arrived in which a tooth began to give him great pain. He lay down
in his cabin and waited for the nuisance to pass. But the pain increased and was apparently not going to go away. It became so intense he could barely stand it. He was a couple of hundred miles from the most accessible dentist. So he took a pair of channel-lock pliers and wrapped them with tape, put the pliers into his mouth, and clamped them over the hostile tooth. He levered it, worked it awhile, and passed out. When he came to, he picked up the pliers and went back to work on the tooth. It wouldn't give. He passed out again. Each time he attacked the tooth with the pliers, he passed out. Finally, his hand would not move. He could not make his arm lift the pliers toward his mouth. So he set them down, left the cabin, andâby dogsled and mail planeâheaded for the dentist, in Fairbanks.
in his cabin and waited for the nuisance to pass. But the pain increased and was apparently not going to go away. It became so intense he could barely stand it. He was a couple of hundred miles from the most accessible dentist. So he took a pair of channel-lock pliers and wrapped them with tape, put the pliers into his mouth, and clamped them over the hostile tooth. He levered it, worked it awhile, and passed out. When he came to, he picked up the pliers and went back to work on the tooth. It wouldn't give. He passed out again. Each time he attacked the tooth with the pliers, he passed out. Finally, his hand would not move. He could not make his arm lift the pliers toward his mouth. So he set them down, left the cabin, andâby dogsled and mail planeâheaded for the dentist, in Fairbanks.
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John Borg came into the country in 1966. He was a mailman, on vacation, and he pitched his tent by American Creek a mile out of Eagle. The Army had brought him to Alaska in the nineteen-fifties-just before Alaska became a stateâand (in his phrase) “plain opportunity” was what had caused him to stay. He carried letters around Anchorage for a number of years while opportunity in other forms withheld itself. And then he found Eagle. From birth he had been at home among low populations in open settings. He had grown up in Spirit Township, in the hills of northern Wisconsin, and had gone to Rib Lake High School, thirteen miles away. Now here was a town smaller by far than any he had knownâsome log cabins and a few frame buildings aggregated on a high bank above a monumental river. It seemed to him beautiful in several respects. “The quality of the people who lived here at the time is what made it particularly attractive.” In 1968, he and his wife, Betty, took over the Eagle Roadhouse, providing bunks and board for exploration geologists, forest-fire fighters, and anyone else who might happen into Eagle. Before long, theyhad the propane franchise; and Borg became, as well, the regional Selective Service registrar, and president of the Eagle Historical Society, and the local reporter for the National Weather Service, and the sole officer (at this river port of entry) representing the United States Customs Service, andâon the payroll of the United States Geological Surveyâthe official observer of the Yukon. Borg had left Anchorage because half of the people of Alaska lived there and that was “just too many.” Now, hundreds of miles distant in the bush, he was on his way to becoming a one-man city. Inevitably, with his postal background, he also became the postmasterâof Eagle, Alaska 99738âand, as such, he is the central figure in the town. He is a slim, fairly tall man, who looks ten years younger in a hat. He was born in 1937. He has a narrow-brimmed cap made from camouflage cloth that, once on his head, is unlikely to come off, indoors or out, and gives him a boyish, jaunty air as he cancels stamps, weighs packages, and exercises his quick, ironic wit. There is a lightness about him, of manner, appearance, and style, that saves him from the weight of his almost numberless responsibilities. One place where the hat comes off is in the small log cabin called Eagle City Hall. Inside are a big iron stove, benches for interested observers, and a long table, where Borg sits with the Eagle Common Council. His bared forehead is a high oneâan inch or two higher than it once was. His eyes seem lower beneath it. His regard is uncommonly stern. Shadows come into his mustache, which turns into an iron brush. The youth in the post office has been returned to sender. Behind the heavier demeanor at the head of the Council table is John Borg the Mayor.
The post office is in a small cabin about a hundred yards from the riverbank at an intersection of unpaved streetsâthe heart of town. Borg owns the building and rents it to the United States. He arrives there by eight in the morning, after checking the height of the river (when the river is liquid). Because this is where the Yukon enters Alaska, its condition at Eagle is of considerable interest to the two dozen villages in the
thirteen hundred river miles between the Canadian boundary and the Bering Sea. Borg also reads instruments that react to the weather, and he turns on the Weather Service's single-side-band radio to attempt to send facts to Anchorage. Eagle is not in perfect touch with the rest of the world. Signals get lost. Fairbanks, urban center of the northern bush, would be the more appropriate place to call, because, among others, the bush pilots of Fairbanks want the information. But the radio gets through to Fairbanks only about one time in five. Success in reaching Anchorage is about eighty per cent. So Borg calls Anchorage, toward four hundred miles away, and the wordâof the river, of the weather, of an emergencyâis relayed back north to Fairbanks.
thirteen hundred river miles between the Canadian boundary and the Bering Sea. Borg also reads instruments that react to the weather, and he turns on the Weather Service's single-side-band radio to attempt to send facts to Anchorage. Eagle is not in perfect touch with the rest of the world. Signals get lost. Fairbanks, urban center of the northern bush, would be the more appropriate place to call, because, among others, the bush pilots of Fairbanks want the information. But the radio gets through to Fairbanks only about one time in five. Success in reaching Anchorage is about eighty per cent. So Borg calls Anchorage, toward four hundred miles away, and the wordâof the river, of the weather, of an emergencyâis relayed back north to Fairbanks.
“KCI 96 Anchorage. KEC 27 Eagle. Clouds now, six to eight thousand feet. Visibility, fifteen miles. Winds, calm. River, thirty-eight and falling. Water temperature, thirty-six degrees.” The air in the night went down to twenty-eight. Yesterday's high was fifty. Right now, the air is at forty-five on an uncertain morning under volatile skiesâMay 13, 1976. It is mail day, the country's substitute for organized entertainment, but there is no guarantee that the plane will come through. It comes two, three, occasionally four times a week. The weather is inconstant, mutable. Squalls of snow may be shoved aside by thunderheads that are soon on the rims of open skies. Borg's records show that on a July day in the nineteen-sixties the thermometer reached ninety-six. During a night in January, 1975, the column went down to seventy-two degrees below zero. Borg says the air was even colder by the river. While this is the coldest part of Alaska, it is also the hottest and among the driest. Less than four feet of snow will fall in all of a winter, and about a foot of total precipitation (a figure comparable to New Mexico's) across the year. There is a dusting of new snow, Borg comments, on the mountains down the river.
The foyer stirs. The post office has a miniature lobby, a
loitering center, with a small grid of combination boxes, public notices, and a wicketless window framing Borg himself. Camouflage hat. Faded plaid shirt. “What can I do for you?”
loitering center, with a small grid of combination boxes, public notices, and a wicketless window framing Borg himself. Camouflage hat. Faded plaid shirt. “What can I do for you?”
Lilly Allen (in her twenties) has a cartful of textbooks to ship back to the University of Nebraska. High school in Eagle is by correspondence, and is controlled from filing cabinets in Lincoln. The teachers are in Nebraska. Lilly is the resident supervisor.
Jim Dungan comes in, slowly, hands Borg a letter, and makes no move to go. He leans forward on his crutches and draws on his pipe. Dungan has more time even than his fellow-townsmen do this year, as a result of an accident. He says, often, “I'll be off these crutches soon. I won't be wearing them all my life, that's for sure.” There are lead weights on the crutches today. Borg asks about them, and Dungan says they are divers' weights, and that when his leg gets better he will slip them into pockets in his wet-suit when he dives for gold. One on each crutch, the weights total fifty pounds. They are not there to create a vanity of muscles but to build his stamina, to keep him in condition.
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