Coming into the Country (26 page)
Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
“It's easy to get out of condition,” Borg remarks. “All you have to do is nothing.”
Bertha Ulvi and Ethel Beck, Indian sisters, come in to mail raingear to Ethel's husband, who is working in the Arctic for the Alyeska pipeline consortium.
A plane goes overhead. Borg, busy at the scales, says it's not the mail planeâjust Jim Layman in his Taylorcraft. A few minutes later, he hears another plane, and says, “No. That's not it. That's Warbelow, coming up from Tok.” Borg doesn't have to go out for a look. From the sound alone, he can usually say where an aircraft is coming from, what kind it is, and who is flying it.
Eagle is a dry community. Its leading bootlegger comes in and posts a letter, followed by his closest competitor. They, in turn, are followed by Elva Scott, Sage Cass, Horace Biederman,
Sarge Waller (an alumnus of the Marine Corps), and Jack Boone. With dark furry hair and a dark furry beard, Boone appears to be part bear and part wolf. “You've got a bunch of weird individuals in this town,” he observes. And he adds, “Me included.”
Sarge Waller (an alumnus of the Marine Corps), and Jack Boone. With dark furry hair and a dark furry beard, Boone appears to be part bear and part wolf. “You've got a bunch of weird individuals in this town,” he observes. And he adds, “Me included.”
On one wall of the post-office lobby is a thick sheaf of notices about fugitives all over the United States who are “WANTED BY FBI.” They include descriptions, fingerprints, and pictures of people who appear to have arrived long since in Eagle.
Roy Miettunen comes in with a letterâa rare public appearance. He likes to talk, but he stays in his cabin; you have to go to him. In the warmer weeks of the year (a short season), he works his claim on Alder Creek, far out in the mountains, sluicing gold. He once prematurely used up his food, and he walked out in eleven days, eating squirrels. It takes more than squirrels to keep Roy Miettunen in form. He lost more than sixty pounds, and came out of the woods weighing two thirteen. He speaks slowly, firmly, attractively. With his great frame and his big head, his unfrivolous jaw, he looks more sergeant than Sarge. He was, long ago, of the Seattle police. In his cabin he has eighteen rifles, thirty-four pistols, and two swords.
A visitor from the state Department of Highways, concerned about the condition of a stretch of local road, comes in and speaks with Borg about the use of his Cat. The term Cat derives, of course, from the Caterpillar Tractor Company, of Peoria, Illinois, and, in the synecdochical way that snow machines in Canada are generally called Ski-Doos and snow machines in the Alaskan upper Yukon are called sno-gos, all bulldozers of any make or size are called Cats. John Borg's Cat is a forty-two-horse John Deere, with a seven-foot blade. Borg mentions forty dollars an hour as the asking price for his Cat âat work with him on it. The State of Alaska hems but does not completely haw. Borg nods at thirty-eight.
Anton Merly appears, and Jack Greene, followed by Ralph
Helmer, who now runs the roadhouse. He has a letter for his grandmother near Spokane. She is in her eighties, and the letter is in acknowledgement of her birthday. He tells Borg that he lived for three years on her farm after his parents were divorced. “That was a very beneficial thing in my life, although I didn't realize it at the time.” Helmer, about a dozen others, and the central buildings of the city of Eagle are supplied with electricity at thirty-five cents a kilowatt-hour by a private power company consisting of Charlie Ostrander and John Borg. They have two diesel generators, which can put out twelve kilowatts over an effective radius of a thousand yards. Borg sells power to the post office. But his home cabin, in the woods far back from the river, is out of range. He has a small generator there to run the washing machine and power tools, but the cabin does not use electric light.
Helmer, who now runs the roadhouse. He has a letter for his grandmother near Spokane. She is in her eighties, and the letter is in acknowledgement of her birthday. He tells Borg that he lived for three years on her farm after his parents were divorced. “That was a very beneficial thing in my life, although I didn't realize it at the time.” Helmer, about a dozen others, and the central buildings of the city of Eagle are supplied with electricity at thirty-five cents a kilowatt-hour by a private power company consisting of Charlie Ostrander and John Borg. They have two diesel generators, which can put out twelve kilowatts over an effective radius of a thousand yards. Borg sells power to the post office. But his home cabin, in the woods far back from the river, is out of range. He has a small generator there to run the washing machine and power tools, but the cabin does not use electric light.
Kay Christensen comes in. She has no letter. She wants to speak to Borg about plowing up her garden with his Rototiller. Borg accepts the job. In the eighteen-nineties, Jack McQuesten, a storekeeper celebrated in the country, used to plow his garden with a moose.
The sky was clear at 7 A.M. Then cumulus built up, and some rain fell, and now, at eleven, comes the dinning sound of hail. Dan Kees, a relative newcomer, talks about the hail in West Virginia, where he is from, and Borg listens. Borg is a member of the Bible Chapel, politically the strongest unit in Eagle, and Kees is his pastor. Kees wears a cowboy-style hat, so widebrimmed it could be looked upon as a stunted sombrero. He is technically a missionary here. That is, the church headquarters at Glennallen, Alaska, pays him. His parishioners are referred to locally as “the bloc,” “the group,” “the Christians,” “the fundamentalists.” They also include the families of Ralph Helmer, Ron Ivy, the Ostrander brothers, and Roger Whitaker, the regional constable. In the spectrum of Eagle society, the fundamentalists are all the way over in the ultraviolet, beyond the threshold of visible light. Dick Cook and the
young people of the river (the wheat grinders, meat hunters, trappersâliberal, certainly, and in some ways lawless) are at the opposite end, deep into the infrared. A few whites are married to Indians. The Indians number less than fifty, and almost all live three miles upriver, outside the plat of the town. Philosophically, they are as close to the river people as they are to anyone else. Across the middle span of the society areâamong othersâdrifters, merchants, visionaries, fugitives, miners, suburbanites, and practitioners of early retirement. There is something of the rebel in everyone here, and a varying ratio between what attracts them to this country and what repels them in places behind. “Never put restrictions on an individual” is probably page 1, line 1 of the code of the bush. But people here encounter restrictions from governments state and federal, from laws to which they do not all subscribe, andâperhaps to an extent just as greatâfrom one another. Compressed, minute, Eagle is something like a bathysphere, lowered deep into a world so remote it is analogous to the basins of the sea. The people within look out at the country. John Borg remembers regretfully when there was more room to move around inside.
young people of the river (the wheat grinders, meat hunters, trappersâliberal, certainly, and in some ways lawless) are at the opposite end, deep into the infrared. A few whites are married to Indians. The Indians number less than fifty, and almost all live three miles upriver, outside the plat of the town. Philosophically, they are as close to the river people as they are to anyone else. Across the middle span of the society areâamong othersâdrifters, merchants, visionaries, fugitives, miners, suburbanites, and practitioners of early retirement. There is something of the rebel in everyone here, and a varying ratio between what attracts them to this country and what repels them in places behind. “Never put restrictions on an individual” is probably page 1, line 1 of the code of the bush. But people here encounter restrictions from governments state and federal, from laws to which they do not all subscribe, andâperhaps to an extent just as greatâfrom one another. Compressed, minute, Eagle is something like a bathysphere, lowered deep into a world so remote it is analogous to the basins of the sea. The people within look out at the country. John Borg remembers regretfully when there was more room to move around inside.
He takes from a wall a photograph of someone in Eagle holding a gold pan full of hailstones the size of eggs, and shows the picture to Kees, possibly to imply that hail like that could destroy a place like West Virginia. The stones falling now are scarcely half an inch thick. Their clatter is considerable, but is not enough to kill the sound of a Cessna 207, up there in the storm with the incoming mail. Borg loads up a van and drives out to the airstrip, which is halfway between the town and the Indian Village. The strip, for the moment, is white as winter. The hail continues, but the skies are broken, and around the gray clouds are wide bays of blue. Borg has collected mail here at sixty below zero, coming out from town on a snow machine for half a ton of Christmas cards arriving one month late. The 207 flares, lands, and taxis up, its wings like snare drums under
the pounding stones. The pilot gets out, catches some hail, and examines it. The stones, in shape, resemble Hershey's Kisses. He looks back into the storm and sees seven geese fighting their way through the same airspace he was in moments before. “How would you like to get
that
in the eyeballs?” he says, with feeling for the geese. The pilot, new in Alaska, is from New Jersey. There is a passenger or two. A small roll of chain-link fence comes off the plane. An Indian family is expecting it, and is on hand to pick it up. Borg stuffs the van with mailbags and cardboard cartons. The wing of the 207 is now coated with slush. “That will raise hell with the airfoil,” says the pilot, and Borg produces a broom. He sweeps three hundred pounds of slush off the airplane, and the pilot returns to the air.
the pounding stones. The pilot gets out, catches some hail, and examines it. The stones, in shape, resemble Hershey's Kisses. He looks back into the storm and sees seven geese fighting their way through the same airspace he was in moments before. “How would you like to get
that
in the eyeballs?” he says, with feeling for the geese. The pilot, new in Alaska, is from New Jersey. There is a passenger or two. A small roll of chain-link fence comes off the plane. An Indian family is expecting it, and is on hand to pick it up. Borg stuffs the van with mailbags and cardboard cartons. The wing of the 207 is now coated with slush. “That will raise hell with the airfoil,” says the pilot, and Borg produces a broom. He sweeps three hundred pounds of slush off the airplane, and the pilot returns to the air.
People throng the post office like seagulls around a piling, like trout at the mouth of a brook. Many, of both races, wear sweatshirts and windbreakers on which are stencilled the words “Eagle, Alaska.” Make what they will of the country, they seem to yearn for contact with the outside world. On days when the mail plane does not come, the human atmosphere is notably calmer than it is now. With a sheet of plywood against his postal window, Borg blocks himself away while he and his wife, whose head tops out at his shoulder blades, do the sorting. As letters go into the boxes, the doors open and slap shut. The babble declines. Many stand and read without dispersing to their cabins. Viola Goggans is baffled by something to do with wheel bearings. Borg gives her a short lesson in their function and potential flaws. Almost gingerly, he hands Lilly Allen a package thatâas he knows from her many inquiriesâcontains a beautifully crafted dulcimer. He is obviously relieved that it has come at last. Sara Biederman, an Indian who lives in the town, is having trouble with the legal phraseology of a letter from Fairbanks. She comes to the window and hands the letter to Borg. “It says there's fourteen hundred and ninety-eight dollars due on your truck and if the money is not paid they will come and get the truck,” he tells her. Michael David collects
mail and packages, for himself and others in the Indian Village. He is young, slim, without expression. A headband holds his long black hair. Michael David is the Indian Village Chief. “He's got an awful uphill grade in front of him,” remarks his counterpart, the Mayor.
mail and packages, for himself and others in the Indian Village. He is young, slim, without expression. A headband holds his long black hair. Michael David is the Indian Village Chief. “He's got an awful uphill grade in front of him,” remarks his counterpart, the Mayor.
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Steve Ulvi wants to know if a fourth crate of bees, shipped from Navasota, Texas, has arrived for Dick Cookâand possibly a queen bee as well, due in from Louisiana. Borg shakes his head. The post office is, for the moment, innocent of bees.Three crates arrived about a week ago, and Cook was here waiting for them, having travelled up the frozen river with his dog team to fetch them. While he waited, breakup came. It was early, and took him by surprise. He had intended to collect the bees and mush back down the Yukon to Donna and the cabin well before the ice would run. But then, one Sunday afternoon, the silent river began to move. Bank to bank fifteen hundred feet, the ice subdivided itself without particular spectacle, and, like an ore in motion on a giant belt, departed for the Bering Sea. The Yukon is a practical thoroughfare in summer and in winter, but during its times of transition it becomes almost unapproachably inimical. Great floes coming on from upriver roll, heave, compile; sound and surface like whales. Many hundreds of millions of tons of ice, riding a water discharge of two hundred thousand cubic feet per second, go by Eagle at a speed approaching ten miles an hour. Looking at the river, you cannot help but recoil. In water that cold, a human being couldn't live much more than a few minutesâa benevolent brevity, the struggle being hopeless anyway against the current and the ice. The river's edges are lined with ice that is stationaryâ“shelf ice,” “shore ice,” the first to freeze at the start of winter and the last to go in spring. It is four feet thick,
but will break apart under a stamping foot, shattering into columnar palisades, untapered icicles known as “needle ice” or “candle ice.” The shore ice rests on rock and gravel, while only a step or two away is the riverborne ice, big masses pounding into one another with a sound like faraway thunder, or, often, like faraway surf. These are muted sounds. For all its weight and speed, the ice moves softly much of the time, fizzing like ginger ale.
but will break apart under a stamping foot, shattering into columnar palisades, untapered icicles known as “needle ice” or “candle ice.” The shore ice rests on rock and gravel, while only a step or two away is the riverborne ice, big masses pounding into one another with a sound like faraway thunder, or, often, like faraway surf. These are muted sounds. For all its weight and speed, the ice moves softly much of the time, fizzing like ginger ale.
The ice run will thin out now and again, nearly disappear. The river becomes clear of all but isolated floes. In another hour, or day, heavy ice is running againâwall to wall, crunching, jamming, lethal as ever. The ice comes segmentally from upriver and from the tributary rivers. The Yukon, even above Eagle, has tributaries four hundred miles long. When ice of the Yukon, ice of the tributaries comes free and begins to run, it does so in big units. People watch for ice from Dawsonâwhich is about a hundred miles away, in Yukon Territoryâand whenever barrels, garbage, foul debris go hurtling by on soiled floes, someone will grunt knowledgeably and say, “Dawson ice.” The White, the Klondike, the Stewart, the Pelly, the Nordenskiöld, the Teslin, the Fortymile let go their ice arrhythmically and give it into the Yukon. Pelly ice. Stewart ice. Teslin ice. Fortymile ice. It takes two or three weeks for it all to go by a single point like Eagle. In weeks thereafter, it forms a temporary, bobbing delta spread miles out to sea.
With the ice comes wood. The breakup flushes out of Alaskan and Canadian uplands many millions of cords of forest debris. Trunks go by that are sixty and seventy feet long. Some ride just beneath the surface. They are called sleepers. The big logs rarely retain their branches, but many still have their root structures, and those that do are sometimes called preachers, because the roots ride down in the water while the upper trunk breaks through the surface at an angle, and bows and rises, bows and rises, as it glides by. Once in a while a big trunk will nosedive and stick like a javelin into the bed of the river. Then
a following ice floe snaps it in half with the sound of a battleship gun. Sometimes the wood in the river seems as voluminous as the ice. The people of Eagle collect logs that have paused in eddies or have otherwise come near enough to shore. Firewood is worth sixty dollars a cord, and twice that in winter. People have to travel considerable distancesâto forest burn areas, for exampleâto get it legally. So it is not just wood but a great deal of cash that is bobbing by on the Yukon. For the most part, the people can't do much, however, but wistfully watch it go. The big river delivers the wood to the Yupik Eskimos of the western coast, where there is no timber to speak of and where for ten millenniaâbefore missionaries, books, schools, and visual aidsâfires were made with fuel from a forest-mountain landscape that the Eskimos had never seen and could scarcely have imagined.
a following ice floe snaps it in half with the sound of a battleship gun. Sometimes the wood in the river seems as voluminous as the ice. The people of Eagle collect logs that have paused in eddies or have otherwise come near enough to shore. Firewood is worth sixty dollars a cord, and twice that in winter. People have to travel considerable distancesâto forest burn areas, for exampleâto get it legally. So it is not just wood but a great deal of cash that is bobbing by on the Yukon. For the most part, the people can't do much, however, but wistfully watch it go. The big river delivers the wood to the Yupik Eskimos of the western coast, where there is no timber to speak of and where for ten millenniaâbefore missionaries, books, schools, and visual aidsâfires were made with fuel from a forest-mountain landscape that the Eskimos had never seen and could scarcely have imagined.
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