Coming into the Country (16 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Earl Cook, of Fairbanks, did not seem to relish being up in the air—a sane reaction in this machine, which shivered and lurched like a long-since-depreciated railroad car, occasionally spilling everybody sidewise for selected glimpses of prime terrain. The cockpit was partitioned off, and for the passengers there was no view forward. Cook's smile had thinned with altitude. He was a slim man, with receding hair combed straight back, a real-estate man, who somehow seemed formal in a Levi jacket and Levi pants and hiking boots. He had been in Alaska thirty-seven years. He was an advocate of the capital move, and he still held hopes for a site on the Fairbanks side of the Alaska Range. Among his six children was a young accountant who, opposing the move, had helped organize the Fairbanks chapter of Alaskans United. Like father and son, Fairbanks as a whole had split on the issue, and Fairbanks' vote on the initiative was almost a balance, with a slight tip toward the proponent side.
Austin Ward—more or less a unit vote with Cook—was the other Fairbanksan on the committee. He came from Pontiac, Michigan, and had lived in Alaska twenty-two years. Light and compact, a haberdasher (and now wearing bright-red-and-gray checked slacks), he looked jaunty—if anyone could, shaking in the air—and a great deal jauntier after the helicopter touched down for recess near the summit of a long loaf of tundra called Little Peters Hills. The committee and its consultants—Barry Quinn, a planner; William Pyle, a geologist—bent their heads under the rotors and ran away from the machine a hundred yards or so, to a swale of relative quiet, although the constant roar of the vehicle was practically inescapable, even with the help of a mountain wind. The altitude was two thousand feet, and the view to the east, toward Talkeetna, was over moist green tundra and high red alpine tundra, with gray bedrock sticking through. To the north, the big white peaks were now partly visible, but only careful study of the sky would suggest what was cloud and what was mountain. Over broad miles of
nearby tundra, isolated spruce stood like incense cones. On the low eastern slope of the hill were a couple of homesteads, neat in appearance, neatly sculptured out of the forest, and a clear rainbow stream—Peters Creek—with the core of a capital city in contemplation beside it. The committee was not contemplating much of anything, though. Voluble after their release from the helicopter, the people smoked and chattered and took one another's picture eating bearberries and blueberries. Some of the tundra blueberry plants were so small that an entire bush might consist of one short stem, like a golf tee, with a single blueberry, much larger than the bush itself, resting upon it. “You stay out of my berry field,” said Arliss Sturgulewski, and Bill Pyle—short, dark, bearlike—shifted his forage.
Pyle had been assigned to the capital project by Dames & Moore, international experts in geophysics. Looking up from time to time and across the valley, he offhandedly indicated moraines that had been bulldozed by advancing ice, silt deposits in what had been lakes, the pitted outwash plains of melted glaciers. He was like a radiologist reading a picture. There were in this area some beautiful sites, he said, for vegetation and topography, but there were problems, too: an uncomfortable level of seismic risk, for one thing, and a few too many bogs, and possibilities of permafrost. We were beyond the area that was usually free of it. Pyle had been in Alaska fifteen years. With his bald pate and handlebar mustache, he appeared to have been there since the discovery of gold. He spoke not just with knowledge but with ample affection for the Alaskan land. He had worked for a time in Chicago, and when he left for Alaska someone asked him why he was going. He said, “If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.”
Louise Kellogg, of Palmer (thirty-five miles northeast of Anchorage), had been a vigorous proponent of the capital move —unlike most of the committee. And now she smiled and said to me, “Has Willie brainwashed you yet?”
I said, “How would I know?”
Beyond the big Huey, on down the ridge, Willie Hensley stood alone, looking southeastward over the valley. In time, I left the berry-picking and went to join him. In his Western boots, his dungarees, his bright-red down jacket with bluebanded shoulders, he seemed somewhat incongruous there—an Eskimo, many miles from home, dressed apparently for a rodeo or a basketball game in which he might star. He was slender, physically adroit, and his high Mongolian cheekbones, his soft black hair ruffling in the wind, his Asian-myna-bird look all seemed to suggest that he had recently walked across the land bridge to have a look around. Willie in the committee was first among equals. The others had long since made him their chairman.
 
 
 
Willie Hensley was born in Kotzebue, in Arctic Alaska, and grew up some ten miles out of town in a kind of family commune, with uncles, aunts, and cousins all around him as well as his immediate family. In winter, they lived in an
ivrulik,
which was an
iglu
made of sod.
“Iglu”
means “house”—any kind of house—and the kind that is made of blocks of snow in the shape of a dome was unknown to Willie, the nearest one being in Arctic Canada, more than a thousand miles away. Kotzebue was distant, too (“It seemed like a thousand miles”), and during Willie's early youth the whole family went there only twice a year, at Thanksgiving and at Christmas, for dinners, pageants, and the communal opening of what he remembers as “a mountain of gifts.” All this took place in Friends Church—a mission derived from Whittier, California—and Willie grew up a titular Quaker, but the most lasting impression he took away with him was of the great amounts of food there: seal oil, piles of frozen fish to dip into the seal oil, and
pyramids of berries—altogether “so much you took it home.” The sod house was across an arm of Kotzebue Sound of the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean, two hundred miles from Siberia, six hundred miles from Anchorage. In chicken-wire traps the family caught whitefish in the late fall, and stored them in gunnysacks outside for the winter. Later on, they netted sheefish under the ice and stacked them up frozen, like cordwood. In summer they moved upriver—up the Noatak—and lived in tents, and hunted ducks and muskrats. In early fall, toward the end of August, they gathered berries and took them by the barrel back home.
They had no radio, no magazines, and, in Willie's words, “formal education was not that critical.” There was a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Kotzebue, and when Willie learned about it he decided, on his own, that he wanted to go there. He remembers his mother saying, “Go ahead. Go ahead, then. Go to school.” He stayed with relatives in Kotzebue, and worked his way through what he has called “a highly sporadic primary education”—as little as a month a year. As he grew up, he became the family scribe.
Kotzebue is in an election district that is larger than most of the states of the United States, yet its population warrants only one representative in Alaska's forty-member House. In 1966, Willie—age twenty-five-was elected to the job. Two years later, he was head of the Democratic Party in Alaska. In 1970, he was elected to the Alaska Senate. In all, he spent eight years—eight legislative sessions—in Juneau. He emerged with certain goods. He brought high schools to his district, and a radio station (KOTZ) to Kotzebue, and an old people's home. He made himself unpopular with the liquor lobby by sponsoring legislation that created municipally owned liquor licenses, with the idea that communities could derive money from liquor sales and use it to pay the costs that liquor incurs. He brought electric generators to small villages in the north. But with all this, he seldom brought himself. Juneau was a thousand
miles from Kotzebue, and he could rarely afford the trip. Nonetheless, when the initiative to move the capital came along he decided that in the interests of the Alaskan treasury the capital should remain in Juneau.
In 1974, he ran for Alaska's single seat in the United States House of Representatives. The capital-move initiative had been on the primary ballot, and Hensley had spoken against it wherever he went. He thought that Alaska, whose budget had more than quadrupled in a few years' time, was heading for failure and could ill afford to crown it with a billion-dollar capital city. Privately, he regarded his achievements in the legislature as “crumbs” begged for and sent back to his people. If so much money were to go for a capital, he feared for the faraway villages. There would be funds not even for crumbs. “When there is a budget crunch, the bush loses,” he said. He compared the capital-movers to a young couple whose eyes shine at the prospect of a new house but who find themselves unable to cope with the terms of the mortgage. A federal building then projected for Anchorage was going to cost at least a hundred million dollars. So how much would an entire city cost? If Alaska were to build a capital, state-federal sharing money would be applied to the airport, utilities, highways, housing—money that would otherwise go to existing communities. The capital-move prevailed, but Hensley lost. Before long, he found himself on the Capital Site Selection Committee, the lone native, the lone northwestern member.
I had met him for the first time some months after the election, quite by chance, in Kotzebue, where he was trailing a cone of dust from his Chevrolet pickup, in a town whose streets—four hundred miles from the nearest highway—were connected only to themselves. He stopped at the airfield to complete an errand, and I talked with him briefly and wondered if his attitudes about the capital had changed since the election. He said that, like everyone else on the committee, he had become caught up by the inherent excitement in the idea
of creating a new town, but he was still a pessimist about the financial future of Alaska, and nothing had happened to alter that view. Kotzebue was almost painfully decibelled, Yamahas and Hondas ratchetting the air. I was struck, the more, by the lilting modulation of Hensley's voice, calm as (that day) the Chukchi Sea. Detached humor played across his eyes. He said he would like to see a new referendum on a future ballot presenting to Alaskan voters a more extensive set of choices. Choice No. 1: Juneau. Choice No. 2: Anchorage. Choice No. 3: A wholly new capital city, its cost realistically estimated and included on the ballot. Cost—the essential factor—was being too widely ignored, he said. “In Alaska, too many people seem to think they are floating to Heaven on a sea of oil.”
 
 
 
If Boston was once the most provincial place in America (the story goes that after a six-megaton bomb exploded in Times Square a headline in a Boston paper would say, “HUB MAN KILLED IN NEW YORK BLAST”), Alaska, in this respect, may have replaced Boston. In Alaska, the conversation is Alaska. Alaskans, by and large, seem to know little and to say less about what is going on outside. They talk about their land, their bears, their fish, their rivers. They talk about subsistence hunting, forbidden hunting, and living in trespass. They have their own lexicon. A senior citizen is a pioneer, snow is termination dust, and the N.B.A. is the National Bank of Alaska. The names of Alaska are so beautiful they run like fountains all day in the mind. Mulchatna. Chilikadrotna. Unalaska. Unalakleet. Kivalina. Kiska. Kodiak. Allakaket. The Aniakchak Caldera. Nondalton. Anaktuvuk. Anchorage. Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked “U.S. Mail.” Alaskans talk and talk about
their pipeline—about the big welders from Tulsa (“Animals, sheer animals”), whose power showdowns with the Teamsters so terrified the Teamsters that the Teamsters turned to petroleum jelly. Years in advance, they talked about the royalties the pipeline would bring them, and, to some extent, about the devastation it could bring to Prince William Sound, which, starred with islands, is one of the marine splendors of the subarctic.

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