Coming into the Country (47 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Coming into the Country
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Eagle has upward of fifty registered voters. Roughly twenty are in the bloc. Not long ago, when the population was smaller and the bloc was proportionately larger, most of the city council was of the religious group. Eagle was their town. The landscape is what lasts around here. The people huddled upon it are—in the long span of things—as rootless as the wolves. The religious bloc, already losing its political grip, has been a factor in the town for less than a decade—its existence dating to the arrival in the late nineteen-sixties of Betty and John Borg. Other couples soon moved to join them, their common affiliation being a relationship with the Central Alaskan Mission, in Glennallen, with which the Eagle group has since relaxed its ties. While the rugged individualists went on being rugged and individual, the people of the bloc helped each other in the finding and swapping of jobs, and they cornered the job market: fire-control officer, school-bus driver, school custodian (the grammar school is three miles away, in the Indian Village), teacher's aides, preschool program, and on down a list that attained to much length through the many positions—postmaster, weatherman, customs officer, and so forth—of John Arthur Borg, the mayor. The group's minister, for a time, was Roger Whitaker, who resigned to become constable. “The whole bloc is a Communist front,” commented one resident observer. “First, they get to the kids. Then, when they feel the time is right, they take over the police power.”
Resident observers have a great deal to say about the bloc, which has harvested in Eagle the timeless fruits of hegemony, the ripest of which is gossip:
“They feel threatened at every turn. They are frightened, terrorized.”
“They came not with a sense of mission but to seek a protected enclave. Religiously, they keep to themselves. Politically,
they want to control the town. They preferred it here when everybody knew everybody—knew what everyone was up to. Everybody let everybody else know what they were doing. Now they see rigs going through town and they don't know who is in them. They don't like that.”
“They have dug a hole in the world and are trying to stay in it.”
“They have a map of Eagle with flags on the cabins of sinners. They invite one sinner a week to dinner, and attempt a conversion.”
“On the school bus, their children sing hymns, recite the Twenty-third Psalm, and tell other children, who are not ‘saved,' that they are damned forever to Hell.”
(On December 12, 1917, at a meeting of the Eagle Common Council, a citizen complained that Miss Owen, the teacher, was compelling her pupils to pray in school.)
“Neither the religious people nor the river people have any interest in seeing Eagle develop economically. In that one respect, we see eye to eye.”
“They were against the federally funded alcohol program, because there was nothing in it for them. The money bought a pool table, card tables—alternatives to booze.”
“It was all for the natives. Alcoholism is widespread among the whites, too. But they don't show up as well against the snow, you see, as these buggers with the dark skin.”
In 1898, in Eagle, small building lots sold for a thousand dollars. In 1947, thirty dollars would buy an entire acre—a price that reached two hundred by 1967 and two hundred and fifty by 1971. By then, however, some outsiders were beginning to ask not so much about the price of land as about the legality of the manner in which lots were sold.
“If you went to their church and were one of their kind, you could buy land. But if you were a drinker—that is, not one of them—they wouldn't talk to you. You couldn't get nothing.”
“They were five out of seven on the city council. It was the
city council that sold the undeveloped city lots. If you were not acceptable to them, you were turned down.”
“Man named Carr, from Anchorage, owned eight or ten lots here, and wanted to sell them. He arrived one day with letters he'd received from people in Eagle. He went into the roadhouse—some Christians were in there, and Sarge Waller—and asked where he could find Jo and David Barnett. The Barnetts were living in a tent, hoping to get land for a cabin. No one said a word. The man repeated his question. Where could he find the Barnetts? Finally, Sarge said, ‘Well, God damn it, I know where they are if nobody else does.' And he went and got the Barnetts.”
In the fall of 1973, a majority was elected to the city council which was—in the adroit parlance of this community—unchurch. Within a year, the town held its first public-land auction of modern times—and now the way was open to the Greenes, the Boones, the Vandals, the Visigoths. The invaders had to pay, of course. Here in a wilderness that reaches out beyond comprehension, two thousand dollars became a going price for less than an eighth of an acre.
“The do-gooders used to control the town, but at last they are being outvoted.”
“They really blowed their cools when I got this place.”
While other things erode, John Borg remains the focus of Eagle. Because of his power and positions, he is the focus of the tattle as well. In a community of palavered reputations, no one is so thoroughly discussed as Borg. First, there are the usual and expectable patterns:
“Borg is confused, conservative.”
“He professes to be quite Christian, but his religion is shallow.”
“He's an opportunist.”
“He hasn't missed any bets around here to date, but he is basically honest.”
“He gravelled his road at the city's expense.”
But even more of what is said about him is confided almost in whispers:
“I don't want you to say who said this. Do you promise not to mention my name?”
“Yes. Tell me what you like. It will not be attributed to you.”
“Is that a promise?”
“So help me.”
“Well, I think he's one of the finest persons in town. He's always willing to help anyone. He's friendly. He keeps his likes and dislikes to himself. His religion is his personal concern. He doesn't try and force it on anyone else. He is one of the few people in Eagle who is willing to do things. He keeps the well house going. He tills people's gardens.”
“He is the one person in his group that tolerates the river people.”
“In general, he has tried to help us, has tried to help the Indian community.”
“He has a lot of energy, and he lives in a place where there are limited outlets for such energy, and that's why he holds so many jobs.”
“He is a leader, a goer, a doer. At thirty below zero, he will get on his snow machine and go fifty miles—for a reason. At zero, he will go for no reason. During the winter we lived at Gravel Gulch, he was the only one who came to pay a visit. John could live in this country on his own. He could do it without the group. Most of the others never leave their stoves in winter.”
“Even if I don't like their ways, I still talk to him. He's good.”
 
 
 
Borg insists that he has no ambition to run the town he runs. He implies that he does so by default. “I would be tickled to
death if someone would take over some of these jobs—
and
do them,” he told me one day when I was helping him lug cartons off the mail plane. “I'm certainly not trying to build a kingdom around me. I have accepted these responsibilities not because I think no one else can do them. I do the weather job, and the U.S.G.S. river job, and the U.S. Customs work because they interest me. People say I'm trying to build me an empire in Eagle, but I don't think they'd be breaking down the door to ask for these jobs if I were to leave.”
Like Boston and Chicago, Eagle seems to foster strong central figures. Bob Steele, whose daughter Roberta still lives in town, once ran the roadhouse and the post office and was, as well, United States Commissioner and United States Deputy Marshal. Esther and Anton Merly, now for the most part retired, preceded Borg in various positions, including the weather, the customs, the roadhouse, and the post office.
“When the Merlys turned their jobs over to John, they were looking for someone they could control.”
“Borg wouldn't say yea, boo, or nay without consulting the Merlys.”
“In this town, they are the puppeteers, Borg the puppet.”
“The Merlys began the ‘right people' idea long before the Borgs came into the country. Anton once said to me, ‘It used to be so good when everybody thought alike here.' I said to him, ‘How dull life must be for you.'”
Anton Merly is a tall man, bald, approaching seventy at apparent full strength. Esther has a shrewd and watchful look. She is dour and apronly and has a warm smile not easily won. For all the gossip they draw in parts of the white community, it is worthy of note that they enjoy high respect—for their understanding and compassion—among the Indians. When they were children, the Merlys grew up five miles apart on homesteads in North Dakota. Their parents had arrived there in wagons. “The winters we remember in North Dakota were worse than any we have known here,” Esther has told me, and
Anton explained: “In North Dakota, it blows pretty near all the time. Here, the wind doesn't blow. In North Dakota, we had thirty-five-mile winds at thirty below. Here, you go out and you can see where you're going, and there is no danger. There, if you went out and a blizzard came up you were lost, unless you had a fence or a good horse that could take you home.”
They came to Alaska in 1949 and to Eagle in 1955. “We could see there was a future here, with places so cheap—as low as a hundred and fifty for a cabin and a lot.” They bought seven lots and four cabins as a start. “You're crazy,” an old-timer said to them. “The town is dying.” In 1959, the year of statehood, the population of Eagle was nine. Almost the entire city was on the city council. The Merlys took turns as mayor. Inevitably, they all but cornered the paying jobs, and were only too glad, they say, to pass them on, when they could, to Borg.
“Borg may be independent of the Merlys by now.”
“No. The Merlys are the land barons here, the manipulators of everything that goes on behind the scenes.”
“When I came into the country, I asked the Merlys if they knew of a cabin for rent. They said no. We talked awhile, and discovered we had a mutual acquaintance in Tok. The Merlys suddenly remembered a cabin that was vacant. It was far out of town and had no door. We talked some more, and it turned out I knew a friend of theirs who lives somewhere near Big Delta. Anton then remembered an empty cabin close to Eagle with a door but no windows. Later, when we hit on the name of a really good friend we have in common, I ended up with a fine cabin in the heart of town.”
“Make no mistake—the seat of government of Eagle, Alaska, is Esther Merly's kitchen.”
It is a spotless room, a Midwestern farm kitchen with a big wood stove and, of all things, a big white refrigerator. Anton established the first generator in Eagle, and later sold it to Borg. The Merlys now buy their power from him.
Borg has no specific trade or skill, but he feels that he could
support his family anywhere, because “jobs exist if you are willing to do the work.” Among his constituents are those who may sit around and disagree, but no one, at least, will ever say of Borg that, given a task to do, he is not willing. He is up at 6 A.M., twiddling shortwave dials. He listens, some days, to news on the BBC. His cabin is on Third Avenue, in deep woods. A fresh black bearskin is nailed to an outside wall. Borg does not welcome the bears that come to town. He shot one not long ago on Jefferson Street, near the post office, after children came running to tell him it was there. This one was near his own door. He seldom goes out of town to hunt, and describes himself as “not much for fishing.” He gets a few grayling each year. Neat as he is in person, his yard is a scavenger heap of fuel drums and machine fragments—a true Alaskan ornamental garden. He has three snow machines, a pickup, and a Mercedes-Benz, which appears to have left Germany during the Weimar Republic and to have been driven across Canada without reference to roads. There is a hutch of rabbits, which he calls his Arctic chickens—two fat bucks and a bordello of does. “This type of life style isn't all that severe,” he says. “The severity of it is a state of mind. You have your basic cabin, and you need water and wood. It is easy to get wood. Certain people, that's all they do. They live on money they earned elsewhere. When I have absolutely nothing to do, I'm just driven up the wall. I don't know what I'd do if I didn't have something to get me up in the morning. So I open my mouth and get another responsibility.” Some people in Eagle don't even haul wood. Borg hauls it for them—for twenty dollars an hour or fifteen per cent of the wood. He takes his Cat across the river ice, two bobsleds riding behind him, and goes three miles through the spruce to the site of an old forest burn.

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