Coming into the Country (60 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

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The Hungwitchin had written to the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska asking for a minister, and the church had sent John Four Bear and his wife, Sandi. He is a ruggedly handsome man with a wide, strong build, and is only twenty-eight. He holds his services in the small drafty church in the Village, with its wooden benches and its rusted barrel stove, and he turns it into a cathedral. Danny David, Edward David, Isaac Juneby, Archie Juneby, Benny Juneby, Adeline Potts, Sonny Potts, Sara Biederman read together from the Book of Common Prayer. Firelight shows through a hole in the stove. In a congregation of thirty, perhaps a third are white—a fresh counterbalance for the Eagle Bible Chapel. John Four Bear has some regrets for the Indians of Alaska. He wishes that in their history they had chosen to resist the invader. He wishes they had a more compelling affection for their own culture and would not allow themselves to be bought white. John is a full-blooded Hunkpapa Sioux, who comes from Standing Rock, South Dakota. It is said of him in the Village, “He is the smartest Indian in Eagle, and he has to be a Sioux.”
“I did not come here like a white missionary to rescue the heathen from the clutches of the Devil,” he told me. “I came here to tell the word of God, and if they don't want to hear it that is up to them. It took some time, but the Village people have at last put a claim on me. They have said, ‘This is our preacher.' When they said it a third time, I knew they meant it. I think I can help them some in the city. At least, I can deal with the white man on his own terms—which is not difficult in Eagle.”
In a small cabin on the Seventymile River, I had a long talk with Brad Snow—nothing much to do, with time on our hands, but work out the fate of Alaska. He agreed that it is sheer foolishness to approach Alaska in terms of the patterned traditions of the Lower Forty-eight, and that this basic consideration—Alaska seen as a largely different country—should be Square One, should be the beginning of any plan made for Alaska by the federal government. Where this is not the case at present, the government should be urged to go back to Square One. In the society as a whole, there is an elemental need for a frontier outlet, for a pioneer place to go—important even to those who do not go there. People are mentioning outer space as, in this respect, all we have left. All we have left is Alaska, which, on the individual level, and by virtue of its climate, will always screen its own, and will not be overrun. If I were writing the ticket, I would say that anyone at all is free to build a cabin on any federal land in the United States that is at least a hundred miles from the nearest town of ten thousand or more—the sole restriction being that you can't carry in materials for walls or roofs or floors. Brad said he appreciated the thought but that specific numbers and written restrictions —however few or well-intentioned they might be—were anathema to him.
Mike and Adeline Potts were expecting a baby. Jack Boone's neighbor Jack Greene, worrying about the possible collapse of the economy, was investing his savings in gold. The Gelvins' D9 Cat, meanwhile, was collecting snow in the mountains. They planned to bring it out. It had made two cuts, and when the hundreds of tons of gravel had passed through the box the cleanup both times was disappointing. They had hoped for coarse gold, but were getting only fine. Mining money, they were not quite making it. They had no intention of quitting the claims. They would keep them, and bide their time, and watch the price of gold. Meanwhile, taking into account the current price, the cost of equipment and fuel, the amount of
water, the quantity of ground to be moved, they folded their mountain show. A helicopter, taking off in Circle, tilted crazily and flew sidewise into Frank Warren's Citabria. The Gelvins —opportunistic—bought it from the insurance company for seven thousand dollars. They were fixing it to sell for fourteen. On an ice-fishing trip, Ed and Ginny, in their own repaired Citabria, were forced down by weather and, in “a squirrelly wind,” smashed into a stand of trees. Well over a hundred miles north of home, they camped for three days and nights, wreckbound. When they did not come back, Frank Warren went out and found them. They meant to salvage that plane, too.
Of the people I had seen coming into the country—particularly the young ones arriving in summer to seek the mountains and the river—the one I remembered best was an immense young man in a blue parka and blue rain pants and a widebrimmed black hat, who walked up to me, total stranger, and said he had heard I had maps. Sure, I told him, and I took him into my cabin to a topographical stack. His beard was about a foot deep and his eyes were diamond blue. He was from southern California, he said, and he had “overwintered” down in southeastern Alaska—a preliminary and orientational kind of shakedown experience—and now he was ready for the Yukon. No one much remembered him in the winter. Not even John Borg had an idea where he might be. He was just one of the annual dozens who come into town preparing to try the country. He had been to the Eagle General Store, where he bought a standard gold pan and a length of gold nylon rope, which was coiled around his shoulder. He told me he had talked with someone named Cook and found him prickly. He took a close long look at the maps. He was as amiable as he seemed determined, and his manner suggested momentum—suggested that this was his time and his place and, from Doyon, Ltd., to the federal government, whoever didn't like it could step out of the way. Stuck in the band of his big black hat were a tall eagle
feather and the dogtooth jaw of a salmon. I asked him where he meant to go.
“Down the river,” he said. “I'll be living on the Yukon and getting my skills together.”
I wished him heartfelt luck and felt in my heart he would need it. I said my name, and shook his hand, and he said his. He said, “My name is River Wind.”
Irons in the Fire
The Ransom of Russian Art
Assembling California
Looking for a Ship
The Control of Nature
Rising from the Plains
Table of Contents
La Place de la Concorde Suisse
In Suspect Terrain
Basin and Range
Giving Good Weight
Coming into the Country
The Survival of the Bark Canoe
Pieces of the Frame
The Curve of Binding Energy
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
Encounters with the Archdruid
The Crofter and the Laird
Levels of the Game
A Roomful of Hovings
The Pine Barrens
Oranges
The Headmaster
A Sense of Where You Are
 
The John McPhee Reader
The Second John McPhee Reader
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1976, 1977 by John McPhee
All rights reserved
 
 
Published in 1977 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
 
 
Designed by Cynthia Krupat
 
 
eISBN 9780374706074
First eBook Edition : April 2011
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-522
87
-1
 
 
First paperback edition, 1991
Maps by Tom Funk
The text of this book originally appeared in
The New Yorker,
and was developed with the editorial counsel of William Shawn and Robert Bingham.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McPhee, John A.
Coming into the country.
1. Alaska
2. McPhee, John A. I. Title.
F910.M29 1977 917.98′04′50924 77-12249

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