Coming into the Country by John McPhee

In Alaska, the conversation is Alaska.  Alaskans, by and large, seem to know little and to say less about what is going on outside.  They talk about their land, their bears, their fish, their rivers.  They talk about subsistence hunting, forbidden hunting, and living in trespass.  They have their own lexicon.  A senior citizen is a pioneer, snow is termination dust, and the N.B.A. is the National Bank of Alaska.  The names of Alaska are so beautiful they run like fountains all day in the mind.  Mulchatna.  Chilikadrotna.  Unalaska.  Unalakleet.  Kivalina.  Kiska.  Kodiak.  Allakaket.  The Aniakchak Caldera.  Nondalton.  Anaktuvuk.  Anchorage.  Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans.  Its languages extend to English.  Its nature is its own.  Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked "U.S. Mail."

John McPhee's 1976 book about Alaska, Coming into the Country, is divided into three sections.  The first is about canoing the tributaries of the Kobuk River, which begins on the western coast at the city of Kotzebue.  The second is about the attempt, now aborted, to replace Juneau as the state's capital with a new city in somewhere more centrally located.  The third, title essay, and the longest, is about those who live in the bush country of the Yukon River, in old pioneer towns like Eagle and Circle, and out in subsistence-level cabins miles and miles from other human beings.  Where McPhee canoes the Kobuk is about six hundred miles from Eagle, and from Eagle to Juneau is another six hundred.  Coming into the Country is not so much about Alaska but Alaskas, the several landscapes that, when laid over the continental United States, would stretch from Florida to California.

The three essays capture a specific Alaskan moment.  It's been a state for less than two decades.  The Native Claims Act has entitled to the federal government millions of acres for the use of future national parks, none of which has been established yet.  (Two years after the book's publication, that land on the Kobuk River would become part of Kobuk Valley National Park.)  The white settlers in the title essay feel threatened by the parceling of land, and cling to the belief that by building cabins on the remote creeks that lead into the Yukon, they exert more claim to the land than the government that owns it but administers it from five thousand miles away.

McPhee sympathizes with them, and there is a kind of admirable extravagance in the settler who rails about the Fed, "They think they own this country."  In 2018, after the anti-B.L.M. terrorism of folks like Cliven Bundy, however, these views seem less charming.  But in 1976 they are emphasized by the surprising impossibility of the task of finding the perfect site for a state capital: the needs to avoid permafrost, to construct roads, to be centrally located, they eliminate so much of the state that you come away shocked by how precious land is in this wilderness.  In Eagle, a town bordered by nothing for a hundred miles in every direction, you can barely buy a plot of land.

Much has changed in Alaska since Coming into the Country was published.  McPhee's assertion that the Trans-Alaska Pipeline means that "for the first time in human history, it will be possible to drive a Winnebago--or, for that matter, a Fleetwood Cadillac--from Miami Beach to the Arctic Ocean," has proved true.  But his assertion that you would be able to drive also to Kotzebue has not.  I wonder what he would say, or Alaskans would say, about the fear that something is close to being lost with the development of Alaska:

And a very few will then jump free, going deep into the roadless world.  By the time they reach Eagle, their momentum is too great to be interrupted by an act of Congress, even if they know of it and understand what it says.  What the law now calls for is the removal of the last place in the United States where the pioneer impulse can leap from confinement.

It's a cliche, almost, to call Alaska our last frontier, but in doing so, McPhee argues that we claim something psychologically vital to our national character.  He really hates the attempt to bring to Alaska the modes and patterns of urban America, as represented by Anchorage.  He says, not quite fairly, I think: "Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders."

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but I really enjoyed the ease and subtlety of McPhee's style.  He has a knack for sarcasm that's so light, you can almost miss it, and he goes out of his way to trust his reader's intelligence.  There are several moments, like this one, when he discusses a settler's pet dog Tara, who's half-wolf: "She once got out, and slit the throat of Andrea's pet dog, Lazarus.  Lazarus survived."  I love how he refuses to make the irony plain.  I can barely resist doing it now, writing this sentence.  But McPhee is so self-effacing, so eager to get out of the way that he manages to capture the size of the landscape and the peculiarity of the characters living within it with a special grace.  And when he does make himself seen, freaking out about grizzly bears, say, or meditating on the claims of the white settlers against the federal government, it comes as a small, human, surprise.