Coming into the Country (17 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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“There
is the real problem—not the possible spills on land but the spills that could happen in Prince William Sound.”
In recent time, the entrenched, traditional boomers of Alaska, the develop-it majority, have been challenged by a growing body of people who wonder if the boom philosophy is good for the state. Fairbanks, under the impact of the pipeline, has become (in Willie Hensley's word) “scroungy”—prostitutes, Texans, ticky-tacky. Maybe Alaska should take a more circumspect look before entering such arrangements again. This was the novel body of thought that helped to produce the 1974 election victory of Governor Jay Hammond —fisherman, homesteader, wilderness man. Hammond was hardly a fierce and fighting conservationist. Alaska had not molted. But Hammond's prudent, balanced approach to things was an attempt to reconcile what his first Commerce Commissioner, Langhorne Motley, once called “the Sierra Club syndrome and the Dallas scenario.” In the ongoing debate about the new capital, among all the varied reasons for and against the move, those two strands were prominently braided.
“The new capital will be a growth center for Alaska. It will take the pressure off Anchorage.”
“In a state this size, if you put everything in one area you detract from the reasons we're all here. The new capital won't be all that far from Anchorage. You put all the people in one place, you create an unattractive state, and you pull out the employment from people who would like to live in the Juneau area.”
“Juneau will die.”
“The people of Alaska have mandated this, and the people of Alaska have darned good judgment.”
“I don't think anyone is smart enough to plan a place like that. In Valdez, after the '64 earthquake, up we went and moved the city. Four or five miles, to a safer place. What a mess! The new Valdez is full of cul-de-sacs. What do you do with twenty-five feet of snow at the end of a cul-de-sac? A mess. And I was the mayor.”
“Places like that are sterile. Salt Lake is the only planned city worth a damn. Have you ever seen a town planned by an American planner?”
“Savannah was sketched out in England.”
“The purpose is better government. Move the seat of government to the Susitna Valley and seventy per cent of the population is within driving distance.”
“Legislators could drive home for the weekend to Fairbanks, Homer, and anywhere between. To Anchorage they could drive home evenings.”
“You want to drive home evenings at fifty below?”
“Try flying to Juneau. Socked in. You end up in Seattle.”
“Lobby groups have an advantage in Juneau. They can afford to stay there, and they are unhampered by people coming down and butting in. They have the legislators to themselves.”
“The highway people down there have to fly five hundred miles to see the roads they're working on.”
“People voted for the move because they thought the money would be coming in. It won't be there. We have virtually already spent the money from the pipeline. To me, it's that bleak. The state has been taking in about three hundred million a year—from petroleum revenues, highway-fuel revenues, income tax—and it is spending five hundred million. By 1980, Alaska's annual expenditures will be around one billion. The legislature spends money faster than they can get it, and nobody
sees where it goes. To try to cover themselves, they hit the oil companies. They enacted a reserves tax on oil that is still in the ground, deductible from future royalties. I guess it's legal, but it sure doesn't sound moral.”
“The state parking garage in Fairbanks cost four and a quarter million—or fourteen thousand dollars a parking slot. So who can pay for a city?”
“Having Juneau the capital provides one more reason for tourists to travel around the state.”
“Putting it up here near Anchorage is like putting the barn close to the fields. Better, more responsible people would agree to be legislators. Doctors and lawyers are out of business when they're in Juneau.”
“The new city would grow here, grow naturally, the way Alaska will grow.”
“Not so fast! The flow of oil will not do everything. We'd better sit back and look at our hole card.”
 
 
 
There are those who would say that tens of thousands of barrels of oil erupting from a break in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline would be the lesser accident if, at more or less the same time, a fresh Anchorage were to spill into the bush. While the dream of the capital city plays on in the mind, Anchorage stands real. It is the central hive of human Alaska, and in manner and structure it represents, for all to see, the Alaskan dynamic and the Alaskan aesthetic. It is a tangible expression of certain Alaskans' regard for Alaska—their one true city, the exemplar of the predilections of the people in creating improvements over the land.
As may befit a region where both short and long travel is generally by air, nearly every street in Anchorage seems to be the road to the airport. Dense groves of plastic stand on either
side—flashing, whirling, flaky. HOOSIER BUDDY'S MOBILE HOMES. WINNEBAGO SALES & SERVICE. DISCOUNT LIQUORS OPEN SUNDAY. GOLD RUSH AUTO SALES. PROMPT ACTION LOCKSMITHS. ALASKA REFRIGERATION & AIR CONDITION. DENALI FUEL …
“Are the liquor stores really open Sundays?”
“Everything in Anchorage is open that pays.”
Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.
“You can taste the greed in the air.”
BELUGA ASPHALT.
Anchorage is sometimes excused in the name of pioneering. Build now, civilize later. But Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. Anchorage is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Daytona Beach. It is condensed, instant Albuquerque.
PANCHO'S VILLA, MEXICAN FOOD. BULL SHED, STEAK HOUSE AND SONIC LOUNGE. SHAKEY'S DRIVE-IN PIZZA. EAT ME SUBMARINES.
Anchorage has developed a high-rise city core, with glass-box offices for the oil companies, and tall Miamian hotels. Zonelessly lurching outward, it has made of its suburbs a carnival of cinder block, all with a speculative mania so rife that sellers of small homesites—of modest lots scarcely large enough for houses—retain subsurface rights. In vacant lots, queen-post trusses lie waiting for new buildings to jump up beneath them. Roads are rubbled, ponded with chuckholes. Big trucks, graders, loaders, make the prevailing noise, the dancing fumes, the frenetic beat of the town. Huge rubber tires are strewn about
like quoits, ever ready for the big machines that move hills of earth and gravel into inconvenient lakes, which become new ground.
FOR LEASE. WILL BUILD TO SUIT.
Anchorage coins millionaires in speculative real estate. Some are young. The median age in Anchorage is under twenty-four. Every three or four years, something like half the population turns over. And with thirty days of residence, you can vote as an Alaskan.
POLAR REALTY. IDLE WHEELS TRAILER PARK. MOTEL MUSH INN.
Anchorage has a thin history. Something of a precursor of the modern pipeline camps, it began in 1914 as a collection of tents pitched to shelter workers building the Alaska Railroad. For decades, it was a wooden-sidewalked, gravel-streeted town. Then, remarkably early, as cities go, it developed an urban slum, and both homes and commerce began to abandon its core. The exodus was so rapid that the central business district never wholly consolidated, and downtown Anchorage is even more miscellaneous than outlying parts of the city. There is, for example, a huge J. C. Penney department store filling several blocks in the heart of town, with an interior mall of boutiques and restaurants and a certain degree of chic. A couple of weedy vacant lots separate this complex from five log cabins. Downtown Anchorage from a distance displays an upreaching skyline that implies great pressure for land. Down below, among the high buildings, are houses, huts, vegetable gardens, and bungalows with tidy front lawns. Anchorage burst out of itself and left these incongruities in the center, and for me they are the most appealing sights in Anchorage. Up against a downtown office building I have seen cordwood stacked for winter.
In its headlong, violent expansion, Anchorage had considerable, but not unlimited, space to fill. To an extent unusual among cities, Anchorage has certain absolute boundaries, and
in that sense its growth has been a confined explosion. To the north, a pair of military bases establish, in effect, a Roman wall. To the west and south, fjordlike arms of the Pacific—Knik Arm, Turnagain Arm—frame the city. Behind Anchorage, east, stand the Chugach Mountains, stunning against the morning and in the evening light—Mount Magnificent, Mount Gordon Lyon, Temptation Peak, Tanaina Peak, Wolverine Peak, the Suicide Peaks. Development has gone to some extent upward there. Houses are pushpinned to the mountainsides—a Los Angelized setting, particularly at night, above the starry lights of town. But the mountains are essentially a full stop to Anchorage, and Anchorage has nowhere else to go.
Within this frame of mountains, ocean, and military boundaries are about fifty thousand acres (roughly the amount of land sought by the Capital Site Selection Committee), and the whole of it is known as the Anchorage Bowl. The ground itself consists of silt, alluvium, eolian sands, glacial debris—material easy to rearrange. The surface was once lumpy with small knolls. As people and their businesses began filling the bowl, they went first to the knolls, because the knolls were wooded and well drained. They cut down the trees, truncated the hills, and bestudded them with buildings. They strung utility lines like baling wire from knoll to knoll. The new subdivisions within the bowl were thus hither and yon, random, punctuated with bogs. Anchorage grew like mold.
WOLVERINE ALUMINUM SIDING. ALASKA FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE. JACK BENNY'S RADIO-DISPATCHED CESSPOOL PUMPING.
Low ground is gradually being filled. The bowl has about a hundred and eighty thousand people now, or almost half of human Alaska. There are some in town—notably, Robert Atwood, of the
Times
—who would like to see Anchorage grow to seven hundred thousand. Atwood is a big, friendly, oldfootball-tackle sort of man, with whitening hair and goldrimmed glasses. Forty years on the inside, this impatient advocate of the commercial potentialities of Alaska is said to be one
of the two wealthiest people in the state, the other being his brother-in-law. “Idealists here in town see a need for a park in every housing development,” Atwood told me one day. “They want to bury utility lines, reserve green belts, build bicycle paths. With these things, the bowl could only contain three hundred and fifty thousand. They're making it very difficult for man, these people. They favor animals, trees, water, flowers. Who ever makes a plan for man? Who ever
will
make a plan for man? That is what
I
wonder. I am known among conservationists as a bad guy.”
In Anchorage, if you threw a pebble into a crowd, chances are you would not hit a conservationist, an ecophile, a wilderness preserver. In small ghettos, they are there—living in a situation lined with irony. They are in Alaska—many of them working for the federal government—because Alaska is everything wild it has ever been said to be. Alaska runs off the edge of the imagination, with its tracklessness, its beyond-the-ridgeline surprises, its hundreds of millions of acres of wilderness—this so-called “last frontier,” which is certainly all of that, yet for the most part is not a frontier at all but immemorial landscape in an all but unapproached state. Within such vastness, Anchorage is a mere pustule, a dot, a minim—a walled city, wild as Yonkers, with the wildlife riding in a hundred and ninety-three thousand trucks and cars. Yet the city—where people are, where offices are—is perforce the home address of wilderness planners, of wildlife biologists, of Brooks Range guides.
The first few days I spent in Alaska were spent in Anchorage, and I remember the increasing sense of entrapment we felt (my wife was with me), knowing that nothing less than a sixth of the entire United States, and almost all of it wilderness, was out there beyond seeing, while immediate needs and chores to do were keeping us penned in this portable Passaic. Finally, we couldn't take it any longer, and we cancelled appointments and rented a car and revved it up for an attempted breakout from town. A float plane—at a hundred and ten dollars an hour—
would have been the best means, but, like most of the inmates of Anchorage, we could not afford it. For a great many residents, Anchorage is about all they ever see of Alaska, day after day after year. There are only two escape routes—a road north, a road south—and these are encumbered with traffic and, for some miles anyway, lined with detritus from Anchorage. We went south, that first time, and eventually east, along a fjord that would improve Norway. Then the road turned south again, into the mountains of Kenai—great tundra balds that reminded me of Scotland and my wife of parts of Switzerland, where she had lived. She added that she thought these mountains looked better than the ones in Europe. Sockeyes, as red as cardinals, were spawning in clear, shallow streams, and we ate our cheese and chocolate in a high meadow over a torrential river of green and white water. We looked up to the ridges for Dall sheep, and felt, for the moment, about as free. Anchorage shrank into perspective. It might be a sorry town, but it has the greatest out-of-town any town has ever had.

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