Coming into the Country (46 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Jack Boone came into the country in 1973. “Basically, I'm a square,” he says, and in Eagle he has built an octagonal cabin. He makes no effort to conceal his justifiable pride in his work. The cabin is a log structure of clean lines and apt proportions —as apparently durable as it is imaginative. “I have the ability to earn my living completely with my brain, but I don't want to,” Boone remarks, making an instant friend of the visiting writer.
He sits at dinner, three children around him—Margaret, Cindy, and Daniel Boone. His wife, Jean, is in Anchorage, five hundred miles away, with a fourth child, who was in need of medical attention. Lacking money to pay for the journey, Boone went down by the river to the cabin of Jim Scott, explained the situation, and sold Scott two cords of firewood as yet uncut. “I don't believe in welfare, in assistance of any kind,” Boone says. “There have been times when economic circumstances have forced me to take a small amount of it. Some people here make it a way of life. The poverty level for a family of six is eight grand. I made four grand last year. I do not constitute the way I am living as poor.”
He is a big man, whose woolly beard and woolly crewcut surround pale-blue penetrating eyes. There is often a bemused smile. His voice is smoothly rolling and timpanic. He seems to drive it, like a custom-built car, to play it like a slow roll of drums. “You may have noticed my speech is not perfect,” he says. “That is deliberate. My language was once a distinct liability. I have had to alter it over the years to get along with the people I have worked with.”
I remark that in his conversation there is an indelible aura of culture and education, whether he likes it to be there or not.
“I am putting that on for you,” says Boone, opening a quart
of homemade beer. “Fifteen years ago, I spoke perfect English. I deliberately destroyed that capability. Every beer drinker in this town has drank this product, admired it, tried to duplicate it, and failed. I can still write perfectly, with no difficulty.”
“Why have you come here?”
“The advantages of modern civilization do not impress me.”
He grew up in Oroville, in northern California, and for a time studied electronics at Caltech, but had no desire to join the surrounding society. “I do not like the forcing of the individual toward a high-expense manner of living,” he explains. “I do not like restrictions placed on one's life just because of close proximity to several million people.” He is a direct descendant of Daniel Boone, on what he refers to as “the squaw side.” First, he migrated to Juneau, and set up a marine-electronics business, but, as small as Juneau is, even Juneau was too restricting for him. So he chose a town on the Alaskan Yukon, where there was more elbowroom than he would ever care to explore, and not a great deal of employment opportunity. “Those who are trying to live an independent life style in the country are paying a very high price for it,” he says. “Unless one's name is John Borg, it is difficult to find much of a job —indeed, any job—in Eagle.” Boone eventually found one—as a seasonal laborer with the local road crew. And so did his neighbor Jack Greene. Working together all day, the two scarcely speak. It is a feud of buried origins, apparently deep, a feud not dissimilar from all the countless crosshatching cabinfever feuds of Eagle, in some measure having to do with the general fierceness of competition for the few available jobs, in some measure with rivalry over the building of their cabins, but mainly as a casualty of place—a community deeply compressed in its own isolation, where a cup of borrowed sugar can go off like a grenade. The Boones and the Greenes live on Ninth Avenue, a euphemism for a pass a bulldozer once made through woods at the uphill end of town, about half a mile from the Yukon. Outside Boone's cabin is a sign that reads
“Welcome to Those Who Wish Us Well, and the Rest of You Can Go to Hell.” Boone means what it says. “Anyone who walks past that sign is probably broadminded enough that I can get along with them,” he explains. “Diana Greene will not walk past that sign.”
Diana Greene is a doctor of philosophy in classical literature, her husband an electronics engineer. Their awareness of Boone's sign is in the sub-basements of subliminal. They came into the country in 1974—on a ten-thousand-mile journey in search of a place to build—to create a life exotic to the ones they had known before, and a cabin to contain it. He was from Greene, New York, she from Long Island. They had met in Boulder, where she was in graduate school and he with the National Bureau of Standards. He was her first husband, she his second wife. In the course of their quest, Eagle seemed the only choice. (“Everywhere else we went in Alaska, people were really rowdy—no couth.”) By mail from Colorado, they later bought a building lot at auction, and, starting with a big woodsided flatbed Chevrolet truck, began assembling things for Alaska. They bought a two years' supply of food—fifty pounds of rice, fifty pounds of rye, two hundred pounds of wheat, a hundred pounds of salt, and so on to twelve pounds of almonds and twenty-five pounds of black-eyed peas. They packed up their cellar of homemade wines. He built five cabin windows. Each was three panes thick, all quarter-inch glass, heavy as a desk top, set in a redwood frame. The first and third panes were sealed with synthetic rubber, while the inner one gapped an eighth of an inch from the bottom, so air could circulate to either side. This would be a tight cabin. They also piled onto the truck a double bed, a couch, chairs, a rolltop desk, two stoves, chain saws, a generator, a washing machine, a Louis Quatorze boudoir dresser with a mirror that might once have framed Marie Antoinette. With this altitudinous load, they backfired downhill into Eagle one spring day, and braked to a halt at the roadhouse. “I'm embarrassed to say this,” said
Greene to Ralph Helmer, “but I've come here to build a cabin and I don't know where my land is.” Helmer pointed back up the hill.
Greene is as good with his hands as Boone. Their cabins were begun at about the same time, with exchanges of beer and wine. There was a tacit race—to the ridgepole, to completion. The Greenes won, three months to seven. Between them, the two families cut upward of three hundred logs, finding them dead on an old burn forty miles down the road, where the Bureau of Land Management would permit the cutting. The Greenes' cabin is eighteen by twenty-four, with attached foyer, long-lash eaves, and big overhangs at either end supported by a ridgepole thirty-eight feet long. Greene's brother-in-law was with him at the time, and the two of them twitched the big logs out of the forest with rope and brute effort. Boone concluded that he could not do that. He decided that logs twelve feet long were all his daughters could manage. Therefore, he would build an octagonal cabin.
For ceiling poles, the two families cut and peeled an aggregate of five hundred three-to-four-inch green spruce. Each of them also set ten fifty-five-gallon drums, filled with gravel and punctured at the bottom, gingerly into the ground—twenty separate excavations, dug carefully so as not to melt or break away the permafrost. Building his floor, Greene used the shiplapped boards from his truck body—and two kinds of insulation. Boone chinked his walls and insulated his floor and ceiling with moss collected by his children, planning to supplement it with cement and lime, while the Greenes used fibre glass between their logs. With their heating stove and cooking stove, the Greenes had powerful defenses against the coming cold, almost enough to drive them out into the snow, because if their cabin was handsome, it was ten times as snug. A lighted match could make it warm. The Greenes burn wood at the rate of four cords a winter. The Boones, with their larger cabin, use fifteen.
Jack Greene has built an efficient cistern, with an adroit
plumbing system that services a kitchen sink and a solar-heated shower. His cabin's interior, while not as soaringly airy as Boone's, is spacious and, like the Greenes themselves, is amply touched with elegance. He is blond, with a strong and handsome face that would not be out of place on an old coin, she light and slim, with brown, quick, smiling eyes. Around their table pass sparkling cherry wine, additional wines from varietal grapes, wines they have made from berries in Eagle, wild-cranberry ketchup, baked salmon, mincemeat made from moose. From under the gable at one end of the cabin protrudes a pair of moose antlers fifty-six inches tip to tip, truly a mighty rack. Greene was humming along in his orange Volkswagen bug one day when the moose stuck its nose out over the road. He has shot spruce grouse from the VW, opening the door and firing a .22. In like manner, with a .30—'06, he dropped the big moose.
“They will not live long here,” Boone says of the Greenes. “You have been there. How would you describe their cabin?”
“Very nice.”
“It is very fancy, I would say. They serve gourmet meals. No one in Eagle will ever appreciate that. None of us slobs will notice. She's a Ph.D. Between her and this town there's a sociocultural gulf.”
Boone rolls himself a smoke while I make a trip to his outhouse. On its interior walls are a set of rules for displaying the flag of the United States. Boone's octagonal cabin, from the outside, has enough grace of line to be saved from resembling a military blockhouse. He is building an identical structure close by, as a garage and shop. The ceiling of the main cabin is eighteen feet high, and there are two balconies, with two children bunked on each balcony. A footbridge runs between. From window to window, the logs of the walls are horizontal, while above and below the windows the logs are vertical, creating an unusual and effective symmetry. “I'm kind of anti-money,” Boone says. “I don't hardly believe in the stuff,
but in Auke Bay, near Juneau, I built a place for two thousand dollars that was appraised when I left at forty-three. I'm an accomplished scrounger.” He and his tall, sharply intelligent wife are also accomplished teachers. Their children are educated at home, and in national testing place as high as five years ahead of their ages.
He opens another quart of beer. It is brewed in a plastic garbage can, in which the Boones mix twelve gallons of water, ten pounds of sugar, a tablespoon of yeast, and forty-eight ounces of hop-flavored extra-pale malted barley syrup, yielding the equivalent of a six-pack a day, or a little over five cases every three weeks, saving themselves approximately two thousand dollars a year against the twenty-four dollars a case charged by Eagle bootleggers. Moreover, it is fine beer. One would have to bypass Milwaukee and St. Louis and scour Europe to find its peer. It may be getting to me. Boone says not to worry: “I have drank it for years and never had a hangover.” Close by him is a gun rack with three rifles. He sees me looking at them and says they are loaded. “Hunting season comes in the fall, and the fall is the busiest time of year for anyone who is trying to live any kind of subsistence life style,” he says, apropos of nothing much, since the season just now is spring.
“Do you hunt a lot?” I ask him.
“No. I cannot say I am a hunter. I have not hunted anything in the three years since we came to Eagle. The purpose of the rifles is protection.”
“Do you fish?”
“We buy our salmon.”
“Do you use the river?”
“We have a small boat and a kicker but have not yet been out on the Yukon. We have not had time.”
“Have you travelled some on foot in the country?”
“Since I've been here, I've done very little that did not have a purpose. I'm not really sure that I could enjoy trekking ten miles without a goal. I don't think I would defend that position.
It's probably wrong. It's how I am. I know I'm a freak. That's why I moved to Eagle.” He rolls another cigarette. He lights it thoughtfully. He spreads a screen of smoke through the octagon. “If you live in this country awhile,” he says at last, “you really get to appreciate a stove and four walls.”
 
 
 
Boone's forked message of warning and welcome—the sign on the path to his cabin—is by his report an effective deterrent to virtually every member of the Eagle Bible Chapel, known to the laity as the fundamentalist bloc. “They are here for the religious climate,” says Boone. “I don't go to church. I'm not a religious man. I wouldn't go to church
here
if I was. We are moving closer to anarchy now, but the bloc still controls every winter paying job but schoolmaster. Eagle is excellent for unemployment, incidentally. If you work part of the year, it's a good place to be sure of not being offered a job. On public assistance, people can live quite well here. Even members of the bloc take food stamps, unemployment, and welfare, in various combinations. They are very social. They have dinners, prayer meetings, men's Bible study and women's Bible study once a week. They have a sewing circle that is open to Indians. Indians do come. Social relationships between the bloc and the Indians are good but condescending. To the best of my knowledge, no one in the bloc touches alcohol. In Eagle, there is one lush. Also, there are five or six people who live in the town because it is dry—who go out of their tree when a bottle appears. None of these are in the bloc. Those of us who are not in the bloc are rugged individualists, and we can't get along with each other. When I was elected to the city council a couple of years ago, I had eight friends. After six months, I had two. This does not happen among the Christians. They sit down and pray about it and decide it isn't worth it. In Eagle,
there are many arguments, many short-term enemies, but few permanent enemies. The bloc will forgive and forget—the day after they have screwed you.”

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