Coming into the Country (32 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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The snow-obscured road leading on toward Central was—even at its best, in summer—a tortuous trail. In several high places, it traversed the flanks of mountains as a fifteen-foot shelf with no rail of any kind and a precipitous plunge on the outboard side. On the last of these mountain passes, twenty miles from home, Stanley encountered drifts that were thirty feet deep. To keep going, he had to bite into the snow, doze some to the brink, send it avalanching down, then turn and
bite some more—all the while feeling for the road, feeling with his corner bits (the low tips of the blade) for the buried edge where the road stopped and the plunge began. A D9 is in some ways the most difficult Cat to operate. “You've got so much iron in front of you you can't see what you're doing.” It is also his favorite size, because it is so big it does not bounce around. This one weighed a hundred and ten thousand pounds. Its balance point was ten feet back of the blade. Repeatedly, Stanley moved the blade eight feet over the edge. He knew where it was. If he had gone off the mountain, he would have raised one fantastic cloud of snow. Instead, he trimly dismantled the prodigious drifts and dozed on down to Central.
To the pads of the track Ed Gelvin welded ice grousers. They would keep the Cat from sliding. They were small pieces of steel, protruding like hyphens from the tracks. Ed and Stanley had built a steel slick plate and a steel sluice box, and Ed had rearranged them as a huge loaded sled—eight feet wide and twenty-four feet long: I-beams, H-beams, three-sixteenths-inch plate. He had made a thousand-gallon fuel tank. It was full and on the sled. Here and there, he slipped in snowshoes, gold pans, a two-hundred-amp generator, a welding tank and torch. Finally, he secured to the top of the load a plywood wanigan —that is, a small hut, with three bunks, propane, and a cupboard full of food. The rig, composed, weighed about twelve tons. When it was hooked to the D9, Stanley left for the mountains.
He crossed low terrain at first. His mother rode with him. His father hovered in the air. Then he changed passengers, taking on a friend named Gary Powers, and they began to move up Woodchopper Creek. His altitude at the start was nine hundred feet. The highest point on the trip was well above four thousand. They travelled five days, fourteen hours a day. There was plenty of wind. The highest temperature they experienced was zero. They stopped to cut their way through trees with a chain saw (fearing to doze them because the wanigan might be
crushed). The Cat fell twice through rotting ice. With no difficulty, it climbed out of the water. There was some luck in the conditions, but not much. With less ice in Woodchopper Canyon, Stanley might have been stopped. But successive overflows on the creek had built the ice thickness in places to thirty feet. Nearing the head of Woodchopper, he moved the Cat slowly up a steep slope of ice, slid back, crept again, slid back, and thought for a while he wouldn't make it. Without the grousers, the big rig would have been stopped, but they held just enough, and gradually he crawled out of the head of the creek—only to move into snow so deep the D9's steel tracks spun out. Stanley thought it wise to stop for the night. For one thing, all this was happening in a blizzard. Next day, the sky was clear, the air colder, and Stanley moved on a contour through the deep snow until he found an uphill route. Steadily, he climbed ridges, sometimes in little snow, sometimes in seven-foot drifts. At one point, the going was so steep that he disengaged the sled and tried first to clear a trail. “I knew that ridge was too steep to go over, because it was almost vertical. So I went around to the right. Without them ice grousers, the machine would have slid sideways and straight to the bottom as if it was on skates. Gary was scared to death. I went real slow now, and slipped some, and then went down to a dead crawl. I had it idled as low as it would go. I went on a half a mile or so. When I saw it was possible, I went back for the sled.”
Landing on skis, his father would fly him out, and the D9 would sit idle in the mountains until summer. Meanwhile, there was one last ridge to cross. “One side was sheer, and the other had deep snow and was very steep. It must have been forty-five degrees. A guy could have maybe gone around one side—if you'd left the wanigan, dug the snow, and plowed a road. But I didn't want to make a horrible-looking mess. I moved slowly up. The track did spin a bit. I couldn't go straight up. It was too steep. I couldn't go sideways too well. I couldn't go back, because I had the sled. I'd have been afraid to back
down. You can cut a road into the side of a mountain if you want to with a Cat like that, but I just inched up the thing, and over. I didn't want to dig up the country.”
 
 
 
Brad Snow and Lilly Allen came into the country in 1974. They were twenty-six and twenty-one. Their route had begun in New Hampshire and had included Anchorage, where they took jobs to collect enough money to venture into the bush. Like many other young couples who wished to get past the turnstiles of urban Alaska, they studied the map and guessed at the merits of this or that possible destination. Many people they encountered seemed to be headed for McGrath and Bethel and points between on the Kuskokwim River. Allen and Snow therefore looked the other way. “None of those people even knew where Eagle was. We figured it was the place to go.”
They arrived in a pickup—with their axes and hammers, drill bits and drawknife, whipsaw; their new, lovely, seventeen-foot Chestnut Prospector canoe. They were exploring in more ways than the geographical. They were looking for a milieu—and a manner of developing their lives. For necessary money, they could work from time to time in Fairbanks—and, possibly, in Eagle. But they hoped to live much of the year apart from any community. “I reject suburbia,” Snow was not shy to explain. “I reject crowds. I do not want a new car, a fancy house. They are not worth working for. In the Lower Forty-eight, economic pressure made it impossible for me to have the land and space I would like to have without spending twenty years to get it and then being surrounded by box houses. In order to get anything like what I wanted, in New Hampshire, I would have had to deal in large figures. I was unwilling to complicate my life to get those figures.”
What he and Lilly sought was terrain where the individual
spirit might be confined only by the metes and bounds and rules of nature. They meant to go down the Yukon, whose banks were just the beginnings of millions of acres of wilderness. They asked around—of others, like Dick Cook, who had pursued the same idea—and they discovered the country's code of seniority right. Tributary rivers were prime locations. There was someone already living on each incoming stream for a considerable distance below Eagle. The first vacancy was the Nation River, forty-six miles away—a little far, but it would do. Snow had brought with him a sense of impending catastrophe, in large part because he had staked his plans on the character of the Yukon without even knowing if it was safely navigable or a boiling flume of rapids. When he had become assured that for all its great power the big river ran smooth, his confidence improved. He felt expansive as he loaded the canoe with seven hundred pounds of grain.
He was an electrician by trade—a fact of no value on the Nation. He was good at carpentry, though, and he was a sharpshooter—skills enough for a beginning. Seven miles up the Nation, he and Lilly built a ten-by-fourteen-foot cabin of unpeeled, saddle-notched logs. It had two windows, paned with soft clear plastic. It was chinked with moss. Its roof consisted of layers of sod, moss, and plastic. It was a tight, well-made, neatly made cabin. Its door, for some months, was nothing more than a hanging blanket, but even on nights at thirty-five below zero the cabin was so warm that the blanket was kept to one side. They had an airtight heat stove (“a poor man's Ashley”), and their cookstove was a sheepherder's unit, its firebox scarcely a cubic foot. With the whipsaw, Snow made boards for a bench and a table. From dry spruce he made dowels, which he tapped into holes drilled in the wall logs, and on these he set shelves for their pinto beans and bulgur, their whole-wheat-soy ribbon noodles, their cherry butter and corngerm oil, rolled oats, popcorn, brown rice, and wheat berries. He killed a moose, and they hung strips of the meat from the
ridgepole to dry. They preserved blueberries, cranberries, rose hips. In the clear Nation, they fished for grayling and northern pike.
They had only two dogs with them, and one night Miki, a Siberian husky, was off scenting the neighborhood when Snow and Allen heard the nearby howl of a wolf. Snow took a shotgun and walked in the direction of the sound. He came back with Miki on a stick. The wolf had ripped the dog's throat. The winter was otherwise safely uneventful, with the exception that Snow one day decided he had appendicitis and took off for Fairbanks, leaving Lilly Allen behind. For five weeks, she was there alone, more than fifty miles from Eagle, with no idea if he was dead or alive. In the end, it was Snow's woman, and not his appendix, that was inflamed.
Not many months before, they had made a trip to Basking Ridge, New Jersey, to be married. The bride's father wore lilies of the valley. He is an Exxon exxecutive. Lilly went to Ridge High School and for one semester to the University of Arizona. She was working as a waitress on Route 16 outside Conway, New Hampshire, when Snow came into her life. She wanted someday to own fields of sheep, she told him, because she was “into spinning and weaving.” He wanted to go where even fleece would freeze. He was from Reading, Massachusetts, had studied some at the Universities of Massachusetts and Hawaii, and had been to trade school, but he had found a deeper interest working in New Hampshire forests for the Appalachian Mountain Club. A lithe man of middle height, he has a big brown beard, a tumble of shining brown hair, a serious turn of mind. Lilly Allen—handsome, unadornedly feminine—is facially Puritan, sober, with a touch of anachronism about her, as if on Sundays somehow she occupies a front pew, listening to Cotton Mather.
“We came here to get away from lots of people, lots of machines, and into a simpler way of life,” she will say. “Everybody in Eagle says they came here ‘to get away from it all.' We
found ‘it all' in Eagle. We came here to do without unnecessary things, to live out, to deal with the land in a more natural way.”
In the vernacular of the river people, hunting moose, caribou, porcupine, duck, bear, rabbit is known as “getting your meat,” and for Snow the task was complicated from the beginning by more than the problems of stalking and marksmanship. He had trouble, sometimes, pulling the trigger on a wild creature. “I hunt for meat, but I don't really enjoy hunting,” he confesses. “It comes down to having or not having a spirit of predatorship. If Dick Cook or Charlie Edwards sees a goose, he doesn't hesitate. Bang. But I stop and admire the goose, and then I think of the gun. When I shoot a moose, I walk up to it with profound reverence—this beautiful beast that I, a scrawny little thing, am destroying. The last time I shot my moose, I cried. I really sympathized with him. I don't know how to put it. Having shot the animal—and seeing it lying there, dying—shakes me up.”
In their search for ways to make a living in the country, Snow and Allen avoided trapping altogether. “I would do that if I had no other way to get money,” he explains. “But I don't want to kill animals up here to clothe fat whores in New York. I don't mind wearing furs, but I prefer not to sell them.” Meanwhile, there was money to be made fighting fires—in a smoking forest with a water bag on his back—and from two such experiences he earned a thousand dollars, or more than half of what they needed for a year.
They were still tasting their new and more natural life when Lilly's parents arrived for a visit in Eagle. In two canoes, the four went down the Yukon for a few days, just to have a look at the cabin on the Nation. The journey was more than Lilly's mother could complete, but Snow and his father-in-law left the women camped behind and tracked the Chestnut up the stream. It was a laborious effort, and they had been at it several
hours when a helicopter suddenly came over the trees and passed them. Just the sight of it angered Snow, because—fifty miles from civilization—it ruined the wild scene. The two men tracked on, forgot the chopper, and finally arrived at the cabin. It had a door now, and an ingenious Oriental-puzzle sort of lock, which Snow had devised. Scarcely had he brought out some gear to air when the helicopter returned. It circled, landed on a gravel bar. “Let me do the talking,” said Snow.
The pilot got out, and so did a man with a federal patch on his shirt. He was a short, slight, briefcase of a man. “Hello,” he said. “I'm Dave Williams, of the Bureau of Land Management. You're on a canoe trip. I'm very sorry to disturb your wilderness experience. We're just checking here. Do you mind if we look around? This isn't your place, is it?”

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