homesteaders versus the world

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	• Coming Into the Country John McPhee Bantam Books, 1982 average customer review:based on 28 reviews
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highly recommended

Gets better with each read!

We bought this book in Nome, Alaska on a visit there in 2001 (my brother owns a flying service there). I took my time reading it the first time. Coming into the Country is not a book to be read quickly, but, rather, one to be savored, taking time for the details to seep into the crevices of one's memory until they become part of one's knowledge base. Every page holds a vast amount of information that if read too quickly blurs to nothingness and is lost.

McPhee's descriptions of the land, its rivers and mountains, its challenges, its beauty, and its people are thorough and draw the reader into the pages of his book. It takes a certain kind of person to survive in the Alaskan bush. I, for one, am drawn to its splendor, its starkness, its fearsomeness, but am sure I don't have the right stuff to live there long term. The river people and others, who thrive in communities like Eagle and Central (even Fairbanks and Juneau), have remarkable stamina and a strong determination to live the lives they choose in their respective settings, all of which are breathtaking in their beauty. McPhee also writes of the tension between the races (Indian and white)and the human dynamic among community members (the good and the no-so-good)that always accompanies the sharing of space and resources.

Over the past five years, I've picked up CITC now and then to re-read parts of it. Most recently, I re-read the whole of Part III Coming into the Country. This is my favorite section because it focuses on the bush and its people, most particularly on Eagle, Alaska located on the Yukon River and just across the International Boundary from Canada's Yukon Territory. (Incidentally, the term "coming into the country" refers to the arrival of a person into the Alaskan bush with the intent of staying. I may move from Michigan to Ohio or New York or California, but, if I go to Alaska, they call it coming into the country. "Brad Snow and Lily Allen came into the country in 1973." "Joe Vogler came into the country in 1944." "John Borg came into the country in 1966" (and he's still there. Check out the Eagle site. Borg has worn many hats in Eagle and still sits on the board of the Eagle Historical Society and Museum. Borg's wife, Betty, is the board's treasurer).

The original copyright on this book is 1976, thirty years ago. The growth in technology since that time has allowed almost every municipality to have their own website. Eagle is no exception. [...]

Carolyn Rowe Hill

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homesteaders versus the world

"Coming into the Country" is a classic that every visitor to Alaska should read. But the first two sections can be skipped by most people. Section one, "The Encircled River" is about the Kobruk River, and section two, "What they Were Hunting For" is a funny tale of the defunct effort to establish a new Alaskan capital city.

Section three, titled "Coming into the Country" describes the people and region of Eagle, population 100 plus a loose scattering of rural homesteaders. The time is the late 1970s when Alaskan lands are being divided up into national parks, native american, state, federal and private lands. McPhee seems to have interviewed about everybody in Eagle to get a cross section of views -- most of them anti-government and libertarian. He probes deep into the Alaska psyche by simply recording what people told him.

What of the homesteaders? I admire their individuality and hardiness -- but their bulldozers and airplanes seem incompatible with living simply in the woods. Someone once said that the greatest boon to homesteaders was food stamps; thus their lifestyle is more than a bit artificial and dependent upon there being very few people inhabiting large areas of land. On the other hand, do the "posey sniffers" (as they call environmentalists) have the right to dictate to Alaskans how they conduct themselves and what they do with their land? Would New Yorkers on Fifth Avenue resent Alaskan advice on the management of Central Park?

The struggle between the environmentalists and the Alaskans continues to this day. In the little town of Wrangell last summer, the Greenpeace ship "Arctic Sunrise" paid a call and was promptly slapped with a summons for violating environmental laws. Greenpeace fled the scene, but was convicted of failing to have an "oil spill prevention plan," which seems a serious omission by an outfit that protests oil spills for a vocation.

I'd like to see an update of McPhee's book. What's happened to the homesteaders he interviewed? I suspect that most of them have long since abandoned their cabins and returned to civilization, possibly to be replaced by a new group seeking the solace in the wilderness that is the goal of both homesteaders and posey sniffers, each in his own way. This is a good book of objective reporting which both groups can enjoy.

Smallchief

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One of McPhee's best

The only reason this book doesn't rate five stars is because the middle section, "What They Were Hunting For" (about the search for a new state capital) is a bit dated and can't really measure up to the rest of the book. But the first section, "The Encircled River" is an amazing piece of prose. This book was written 30 years ago, and when I re-read "The Encircled River", I feel like I've been given the gift of seeing with my own eyes, what was then one of the last untouched wildernesses in the world. The final section, "Coming into the Country", is absolutely fascinating, a story of people who have sought out and continue to search for a life that few Americans could even begin to imagine.

McPhee is one of the great writers of our time. He can take topics that I might otherwise find dull, and transform them into page-turners. When given the subject of Alaska, he does better than that.

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Alaska for Alaskans

I just finished what I think is one of the true books of Alaska, John McPhee's Coming into the Country. The non-fiction work breaks apart into three subsections, each dealing with an aspect of Alaska that many people who visit for only a short time don't see. Nor should they necessarily; it is clear through the book's 400 plus pages that McPhee, a man from New Jersey, has not only done his homework but gone to great lengths to find the "true Alaska."

The first section, entitled The Encircled River, follows a group of five men (McPhee including himself) as they travel down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range in norther Alaska, whose watershed is "wholly above the Arctic Circle." The men are surveying the Salmon River for possible inclusion in the list of national wild rivers, which would set aside the river and its immediate environs as unalterable wild terrain. At the time of the writing, 1977, Congress was still considering the legislation.

The descriptions of travel down the Salmon merge into a stream of conscious meditation on wildland conservation, the shortage of good fishing in Anchorage, and the native people who live in northwestern Alaska. This section presents the reader with a lay of the land, both physical and emotional, and defines the boundaries of the political, ethical, and moral dilemmas that challenged Alaskans in those pre-pipeline years and that still linger today.

The second section, What They Were Hunting For, is a wonderful snapshot of the original movement in Alaska to move the capital from Juneau to a location closer to Anchorage. Juneau is ringed on all sides by mountains and ocean, providing access for state legislators and the public they represent only via oceangoing ferry or a harrowing and often unreliable plane ride. This isolation was seen as a burden to the represented, a boon to their representitives.

McPhee accompanies the Capital Site Selection Committee as it tours by helicopter potential sites north of Anchorage, most notably near Talkeetna and Juneau. Among the committee members are such famous Alaskans and Arliss Sturgulewski and Willie Hensley. McPhee seems to have an uncanny ability to place himself at the center of the action.

McPhee provides a lengthy history of the naming of Juneau and how the town was founded, suggesting that while its birth and existence may be credited to drunken prospectors' blind luck, this history is as Alaskan as any and justifies naming the town capital.

Better still, McPhee provides some very telling descriptions of Anchorage (my home town) in its 70s heyday. As evidenced here:

"Anchorage is sometimes excused in the name of pioneering. Build now, civilize later. But Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. Anchorage is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Dayton Beach. It is condensed, instant Albuquerque."

McPee appreciates the boom nature of Anchorage, the drive of its citizens to consume. But McPhee is quick to point out this development is not in a vacuum and gives us context in descriptions of the ring of mountains and ocean "stunning against the morning and in the evening light" that surround and cradle the town.

But all of this is building material, foundation for the final and longest chapter whose name also graces the cover of the book itself, Coming Into the Country. The phrase is Alaska backcountry slang for moving into the bush. McPhee spends the bulk of this chapter himself coming into the country, living all four seasons in Eagle, Alaska, nestled in east-central Alaska along the Yukon River. Here, if any feelings of distrust have developed in the reader's mind from McPhee's disparaging remarks about Anchorage or his awkwardness with wilderness travel, all is forgiven. McPhee's portrait of the people who inhabit Eagle as a place and a time is magical. McPhee describes in the words of one Eagle resident the importance of Alaska as a location on the landscape of the American mind:

"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 entioning 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."

McPhee is fair with the local populace - allowing himself to be taken in by a miner's plea upon destroying the ecosystem around a creekbed that the mine is just a "cork in the sea." After rationalizing the destruction in his own head, despite the meager gains of a salt shaker's worth of gold, McPhee declares: "In the ecomilitia, bust me to private."

MePhee also reconciles his fear of bears that manifested itself in the first chapter. Upon his first taste of ursa horibilis McPhee waxes: "In strange communion, I had chewed the flag, consumed the symbol of the total wild, and, from that meal forward, if a bear should ever wish to reciprocate, it would only be what I deserve." In the hands of a less adroit craftsman, this sentiment would risk audience alienation by revealing the author's own still-unrecognized naivetee but McPhee is forgiven and admitted into the fold of his new more wild self.

On such topics as the Alaska state flag, McPhee is equally generous and gives hints at the change Alaska has wrought within his own self.

"The flag, as it happens, was designed by a native. It is lyrically simple, the most beautiful of all American flags. On its dark-blue field, gold stars form the constellation of the Great Bear. Above that is the North Star. Nothing else, as the designer explained, is needed to represent Alaska. It was the flag of the Territory for more than thirty years. Alaskans requested that it become the flag of the new state. The designer was a thirteen-year-old Aleut boy."

While McPhee's painting of the Alaskan soul leaves patches untended, and while the pre-pipeline boom attitude is beginning to feel threadbare at the edges, there is something in McPhee's account that touches bedrock. His myriad anecdotes, woven together with thoughtfully placed historical facts and enlightened yet spare commentary are more than the sum of their parts. There is a feeling upon leaving this book that McPhee somehow got it, got why we are here, and more importantly, what our hopes and visions may lead us to.

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Going Into Alaska

I bought this book as a way to get to know Alaska a little bit before a cruise this summer up the Inside Passage. While it is arguably a little dated - it was written in the 70s - I found the history, background and flavor to be fascinating and valuable. As I was flying over the Susitna River to Mt McKinley, I could see the geological features that made it an unsuitable but still desirable location for a new Alaskan capital.

Alaska is, if nothing else, a big place, and this book, by examing three parts of the state, gives you a sense of the land and the people like nothing - except going there - does.

John McPhee is a wonderful writer, and I would read - and recommend - anything of his. (Do yourself a favor, though, and stay away from Michener's "Alaska." By the time I got from the moving of the landmasses up to the wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers - still about 10,000 years ago - I was so bored I quit.)

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reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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