Read Coming into the Country Online
Authors: John McPhee
Coming into the Country (15 page)
The Roadhouse was a good place to stay. Climbers on the mountain had returned to the glacier, and were waiting day upon day for clear enough sky to get off; meanwhile, the Roadhouse, except at mealtime, was quiet. It was run, somewhat stringently, by Carroll Close and his wife, Verna, with an unnegotiable ten-thirty curfew, and signs here and there to remind you that you were not in your own home. “DON'T TOUCH.” “NOTICE: In meeting the public the proprietors of this Roadhouse do not employ profane or obscene language. We ask you to display similar restraint while quartered here.” At seven in the morning in an upstairs room, cracks in the floorboards become fumaroles of coffee, and the scent draws you down from the summit. In the kitchen, under racks of utensils, is a big wood stove, and Verna Close is sprinkling salt on its hot iron surface. She is dour, silent, stolid as a ceramic cat. She places thick slices of bread over the salt to toast. Each day, she bakes forty-six loaves of bread. Carroll Close, who is in his seventies and has been out splitting spruce, brings a load of it in and commits some to the fire. He is thin, thewy, with snowy hair and eyes that flash. With his wife, he makes and serves the standard breakfast: a mound of potatoes fried in white lard, scrambled eggs, four thick hunks of buttered toast, juice, coffee, ham, jam. Only a long-distance run at fifty below zero could work down such a meal, but the temperature outside is in the easygoing seventies and for the future there is no hope. There is dinner. No one is allowed to be late for dinner, so throughout the hour beforehand, in twos and threes, people drift in. They come from Talkeetna and from down the valley. Weekends, they come from Anchorage. They wait quietly in the sitting room before the unlighted face of the television, gray like the river (“DON'T TOUCH”), and at six they file to the table, and Carroll Close tells them where to sit. Eighteen
is the capacity. Eighteen are thereâaround an oilcloth-covered table. They will make friends quickly. They are, for the most part, long in Alaska. But they are relatively silent in the early minutes of the meal, passing platters and bowls of potatoes, rice, meat-loaded gravy, beans, salad, corned beef, fried chicken, carrots, peas, bread, jam, and butter, leaving room for cake. And all the while Close circles the table, alert, attentive.
is the capacity. Eighteen are thereâaround an oilcloth-covered table. They will make friends quickly. They are, for the most part, long in Alaska. But they are relatively silent in the early minutes of the meal, passing platters and bowls of potatoes, rice, meat-loaded gravy, beans, salad, corned beef, fried chicken, carrots, peas, bread, jam, and butter, leaving room for cake. And all the while Close circles the table, alert, attentive.
He came to Alaska from Oregon when he was in his thirties. I asked him, one afternoon, why. “Poverty,” he said. When the war came, he found work around Anchorage, and eventually he had enough money to move north and, with his who, buy the original part of the Roadhouse. He had built the extensions. “People voted five to one for statehood,” he said. “You weren't a good citizen if you were against it. It was a lost cause.”
“You were against statehood?”
“Oh, sure. Oh, sure. Before then, three-quarters of the people here weren't here. Eight or nine hundred people ran the Territory. Ten thousand now run the state. Where it used to take one person to investigate you, it now takes two to four. The state spends too much. If a tree blows down, two guys from the state come with a chain saw. The state has sold the state out. To the unions. To the oil companies. The oil companies have more power than the legislature. The capital move is a lot of talk. That's all it is, a lot of talk. What we need is not a new capital but better legislators than we have. I'd say leave the capital where it's at. The state can't afford it. There
is
no economy. They're dreaming about all this oil money. You do more good with a letter into Juneau than going there, anyway. Up here, we have the severest winters this side of the range. This is no place for a capital. If it does move, the proper place for it is in Anchorage.”
is
no economy. They're dreaming about all this oil money. You do more good with a letter into Juneau than going there, anyway. Up here, we have the severest winters this side of the range. This is no place for a capital. If it does move, the proper place for it is in Anchorage.”
He opened the stove and flung in some spruce. Spruce tends to be tough, stronger than most people who try to split it. “Since statehood,” he said, “this country's went sour.”
The unofficial mayor of Talkeetna was Evil Alice Powell. She
did not seem to mind her nickname. She had worked, years ago, for the Alaska Territorial Department of Health in Anchorageâinspecting bars, bakeries, groceries, private sewage systemsâand the doctor she worked for gave her the title because she scoured Augean Anchorage as few people have ever done. Her husband had come to Alaska as a highway- and railway-bridge engineer, and they moved out to Talkeetna in 1960. She ran a sort of roadhouse up the road from the Roadhouse, but she had attempted to upgrade it with the word “motel.” I found her there, ironing linen, and she said, “It's reached the point now where if someone wants to see an old-timer they come to me.” She looked the part and she didn't âin slacks and a sweater, white hair streaked blond. She was small, gentle, amiable, accommodating, grandmotherly. Evil Alice. She said yes, the capital should move, and move up here to the valley. On various private and public missions, she had had it with Juneauâtoo hard to get there, too much chance of being weathered in there. Anybody in Talkeetna with a little property was for the capital move. The people who were not for it were “food-stampers” and “welfarers” and some of the hippies up the track, in cabins in the woods north of town. “They have Mary Jane and hard stuff up there,” she said. “Some of them are on welfare, too. If the capital came, there might be a job and they'd have to go to work. Some are on the God Squad. They got religion a while backâMickey Mouse religionâand they spun off from the others. A number came down to Talkeetna to live. A few work for me. They're O.K. I don't have to worry. They won't rip off the cigarettes and the booze.”
did not seem to mind her nickname. She had worked, years ago, for the Alaska Territorial Department of Health in Anchorageâinspecting bars, bakeries, groceries, private sewage systemsâand the doctor she worked for gave her the title because she scoured Augean Anchorage as few people have ever done. Her husband had come to Alaska as a highway- and railway-bridge engineer, and they moved out to Talkeetna in 1960. She ran a sort of roadhouse up the road from the Roadhouse, but she had attempted to upgrade it with the word “motel.” I found her there, ironing linen, and she said, “It's reached the point now where if someone wants to see an old-timer they come to me.” She looked the part and she didn't âin slacks and a sweater, white hair streaked blond. She was small, gentle, amiable, accommodating, grandmotherly. Evil Alice. She said yes, the capital should move, and move up here to the valley. On various private and public missions, she had had it with Juneauâtoo hard to get there, too much chance of being weathered in there. Anybody in Talkeetna with a little property was for the capital move. The people who were not for it were “food-stampers” and “welfarers” and some of the hippies up the track, in cabins in the woods north of town. “They have Mary Jane and hard stuff up there,” she said. “Some of them are on welfare, too. If the capital came, there might be a job and they'd have to go to work. Some are on the God Squad. They got religion a while backâMickey Mouse religionâand they spun off from the others. A number came down to Talkeetna to live. A few work for me. They're O.K. I don't have to worry. They won't rip off the cigarettes and the booze.”
She knew where the capital should be, she said. She had the spot picked out. It was just a few miles east of town. Talkeetna's air facilities could be expanded. Road and rail service already existed. Hydroelectric power could come from Devils Canyon, up the Big Su. Money had already been appropriated for a study of a dam there. The capital site she had in mind
was up near the headwaters of Montana Creek, in a lovely world of birches, on elevated ground, with an unimpeded view of the mountain.
was up near the headwaters of Montana Creek, in a lovely world of birches, on elevated ground, with an unimpeded view of the mountain.
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Alice Powell might have been holding a forked stick that had just swung down. The terrain she described had become prominent on a list of what the Capital Site Selection Committee called “footprints”âfeasible, desirable places to build. The capital would be a footprint in the wilderness. On an earlier outing, the committee had flown in a helicopter to the top of Bald Mountain, seven miles east of Talkeetna, and there, from a vantage altitude of thirty-six hundred feet, had looked down on everything that had been ordered but a gold dome. It was heavily wooded country with few muskeg pockets and good soil. Divisioning the woodland, clear streams ran down out of the mountainsâSheep Creek, Montana Creek, Sheep River, Talkeetna Riverâand at the time they were viscous with salmon. One stream was interrupted by a three-mile lakeâLarson Lakeâwhich was only six hundred feet above sea level, was surrounded by spruce-and-birch forest, and had behind it a rising slope that yielded a view over the lake to the big river valley overtowered by the imminent Denali. The mean January temperature at Larson Lake is nine degrees; July, fifty-seven. Here and there in sight was a strip of homestead plowing, but virtually all the land in the immediate area was still untouched. This was fine moose range, too. Moose are up in the mountains in the summer, and they go down toward the Susitna in winter. Whatever a capital might do for people, it would surely repel wolves and thus, to an extent, be good for moose. As had been learned when oil wells were drilled south of Anchorage, in the Kenai National Moose Range, moose get along with progress.Now, off to the left of the Twin Otter, the Talkeetna Mountains,
behind Larson Lake, were topped with a dusting of snow, and along the whole range the snowline was drawn absolutely level somewhere near five thousand feet, as if someone painting a wall had carefully cut in with a brush to whiten just the high part. Gradually, through the autumn, the level line comes downâdown the sides of the Alaska Range, down the Talkeetnas, down the Chugach Mountains in view of Anchorage. It is watched like a river gauge: six thousand feet, five thousand, four thousand, three. Day by day, it is somewhat lower, until the mountains are totally white. The snow then comes over the people. Six months. Then Alaska turns green again: green in the Susitna Valley, green in the Interior, the Arctic green and reddish and buff. The snow stays only in the high cols of most of the mountain chains but all over the peaks of the Alaska Range.
behind Larson Lake, were topped with a dusting of snow, and along the whole range the snowline was drawn absolutely level somewhere near five thousand feet, as if someone painting a wall had carefully cut in with a brush to whiten just the high part. Gradually, through the autumn, the level line comes downâdown the sides of the Alaska Range, down the Talkeetnas, down the Chugach Mountains in view of Anchorage. It is watched like a river gauge: six thousand feet, five thousand, four thousand, three. Day by day, it is somewhat lower, until the mountains are totally white. The snow then comes over the people. Six months. Then Alaska turns green again: green in the Susitna Valley, green in the Interior, the Arctic green and reddish and buff. The snow stays only in the high cols of most of the mountain chains but all over the peaks of the Alaska Range.
The Twin Otter, some minutes later, gave up altitude toward the southwest and approached the gravel airstrip at Skwentna. Some forty miles from the highway over streams and muskeg bogs and island patches of black spruce, Skwentna was an air and river stopping place, remote, unconnected. Willie Hensley said, “When these people find out who we are, they will probably run us off. They don't want their homesteads ruined.” But the population of Skwentna, Alaska 99667 (fifteen people), was otherwise occupied, and the airstrip, when the Twin Otter engines shut down, was a silent clearing in the forest. A large percentage of a moose, reduced to bloody chunks, with flies on the chunks like cloves in ham, lay waiting on the ground for its hunter to return and fly it away. By prearrangementâthe better to present certain landscapes for scrutinyâa big Bell Huey, a kind of helicopter that carried troops in Vietnam, was waiting for the committee. Its transmission was in the middle of the fuselage and resembled a home oil-burner of the vertical type, covered with heavy padding. The ceiling and interior walls were covered with the same padding, as if heavy furniture were about to go up in an elevator.
Passenger seats were in two benchlike rows, facing one another. The committee compacted itself into the chopper, knees touching: Cook, Bettisworth, Ward, Hensley, Sturgulewski, Kellogg, Corbus. A flying quorum. Only two members had failed to join the dayâGuy Martin, Alaska's Commissioner of Natural Resources, and Dwayne Carlson, an Anchorage carpenter who had reached a high position in the Alaska State Federation of Labor. The big Huey took off in its own din, and headed miscellaneously east and north, tilting now and again to circle a footprintâa site by a lake on the valley floor, a site on a high slope, a site by a gold-claim creek. Much of the way, great fingers of muskeg reached through the spruce like fairwaysâsoft, morassic, mosquito muskeg, virtually construction-proof. Someone cried out above the engine noise, “Corbus, you're looking better all the time! There's not enough land suitable for building!” William Corbus did not disagree. His home was Juneau. For the better part of two years, he had concentratedly fought the capital move. He had helped found, and was chief financial officer of, Alaskans United, a statewide organization dedicated to snuffing out the idea. And now that the state had voted to move the capital, Corbus, paradoxically, had become a member of the committee to pick the new site. The initiative required that two members be from Southeastern Alaska, and one of these could hardly
not
be from Juneau. So Corbus had agreed to serve. He saw himself as a kind of monitor, attempting to make sure that the committee as a whole was “straightforward as to how much it's really going to cost the state to make the move.” A modest, self-effacing manâwith a young face, wide-eyed, blue-eyed, and with bits of an almost-crew haircut sticking up here and thereâhe was given to gray suits and striped ties, and carried himself in a manner that suggested an Ivy League athlete still in shape twenty years after college. He had gone to the Tuck School of Finance, at Dartmouth, and had worked for Stone & Webster Securities Corporation, in Manhattan, before deciding,
in 1970, that he wanted to move to, as he put it, “a place where you could feel you were playing a bigger role.” The roles he was playing in separate aspects of the capital situation caused no apparent conflict within him; and, like everyone on the committee, he actually enjoyed the work andâall other considerations asideâfelt caught up in “an interesting intellectual exercise.”
Passenger seats were in two benchlike rows, facing one another. The committee compacted itself into the chopper, knees touching: Cook, Bettisworth, Ward, Hensley, Sturgulewski, Kellogg, Corbus. A flying quorum. Only two members had failed to join the dayâGuy Martin, Alaska's Commissioner of Natural Resources, and Dwayne Carlson, an Anchorage carpenter who had reached a high position in the Alaska State Federation of Labor. The big Huey took off in its own din, and headed miscellaneously east and north, tilting now and again to circle a footprintâa site by a lake on the valley floor, a site on a high slope, a site by a gold-claim creek. Much of the way, great fingers of muskeg reached through the spruce like fairwaysâsoft, morassic, mosquito muskeg, virtually construction-proof. Someone cried out above the engine noise, “Corbus, you're looking better all the time! There's not enough land suitable for building!” William Corbus did not disagree. His home was Juneau. For the better part of two years, he had concentratedly fought the capital move. He had helped found, and was chief financial officer of, Alaskans United, a statewide organization dedicated to snuffing out the idea. And now that the state had voted to move the capital, Corbus, paradoxically, had become a member of the committee to pick the new site. The initiative required that two members be from Southeastern Alaska, and one of these could hardly
not
be from Juneau. So Corbus had agreed to serve. He saw himself as a kind of monitor, attempting to make sure that the committee as a whole was “straightforward as to how much it's really going to cost the state to make the move.” A modest, self-effacing manâwith a young face, wide-eyed, blue-eyed, and with bits of an almost-crew haircut sticking up here and thereâhe was given to gray suits and striped ties, and carried himself in a manner that suggested an Ivy League athlete still in shape twenty years after college. He had gone to the Tuck School of Finance, at Dartmouth, and had worked for Stone & Webster Securities Corporation, in Manhattan, before deciding,
in 1970, that he wanted to move to, as he put it, “a place where you could feel you were playing a bigger role.” The roles he was playing in separate aspects of the capital situation caused no apparent conflict within him; and, like everyone on the committee, he actually enjoyed the work andâall other considerations asideâfelt caught up in “an interesting intellectual exercise.”
Natchez and other towns were, in turn, the capital of Mississippi until a three-member site-selection committee chose the place where Jackson was cleared in the woods. Columbus, Ohio, was a forest, too. Detroit, for many years, was the capital of Michigan. Villages in the Michigan interior feared and resented what was known as the “Detroit influence.” People were jealous, and thought Detroit had enough. Someone in the legislature proposed moving the capital to the township of Lansing. This was regarded as a joke.
Lansing?
“Amid choking miasma ⦠where the howl of wolves and the hissing of massaugas, and groans of bull frogs resound to the hammer of the woodpecker and the solitary note of the nightingale?” Lansing? “A howling wilderness?”
Lansing?
“Amid choking miasma ⦠where the howl of wolves and the hissing of massaugas, and groans of bull frogs resound to the hammer of the woodpecker and the solitary note of the nightingale?” Lansing? “A howling wilderness?”
The other member from Southeastern Alaska was C. B. Bettisworth, who came from Ketchikan, which is about as close to Seattle as you can get and still be in Alaska. Bettisworth represented Southeastern, but he had a particular interest in Fairbanks, because Fairbanks was his home town. When votes were taken in committee meetings, his tended to follow the Fairbanks view. A young man with a beard and boots and wide-wale trousers and tumbling light-brown hair, he had a backpackery, environmental look, a suggestion in his face of early Lincoln. (Young Lincoln's first successful activity as an Illinois legislator was the moving of the capital from Vandalia to Springfield.) By training, Bettisworth was an architect and planner, and he seemed much absorbed in the selection process, the sheer excitement of pressing the land and releasing a city.
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