Coming Into The Country

John McPhee is such a great writer that it doesn't really matter which particular topic he chooses for a book or essay.  It's going to be interesting regardless.  However, this set of three long essays about different aspects of Alaska in the late 70's is one of his most fascinating.  

In the first, he describes a canoe trip down the Salmon River, which drains part of the Brooks range to the Kobuk River.  Since the trip takes place almost entirely North of the Arctic Circle the only things he and his companions meet along the Salmon are bears.  It's only when they reach the Kobuk that they bump into a few Eskimos from Noorvik.  This gives McPhee a chance to introduce a theme that reappears in all of the essays -- the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.  I didn't know anything about this piece of legislation, but it appears to be by far the largest "reparations" the US government has ever made to a group they fucked over.  McPhee's episodic way of telling a story means that in this first essay, we mostly get a few details about the circumstances of its enactment (Alaksa's Native tribes sued when Exxon tried to build the oil pipeline).  But by the end of book he accumulates a variety of perspectives on it.  These ranges from Native voices (both pro and con), to the homesteaders, to State government officials.  As always, McPhee creates is a journalistic perspectivism without any pretense to objectivity; we read him because he actually thinks about his reporting.  

The second essay is a relatively short one devoted to the theme of urban Alaska.  Apparently about half of the (fewer than 1 million) souls who live in Alaska live in the suburban hell that is Anchorage.  Perhaps given the amount of land dedicated to Natives and conservation, this should not come as a surprise.  By contrast, Juneau, located way down along the Alexander Archipelago has a tenth of this number.  It seems that at the time McPhee was writing, the state had recently decided in a referendum that they would move the capitol somewhere closer to the center of population.  But because of a rivalry between the two largest cities, Anchorage and Fairbanks, the plan was to relocate the capitol to a newly created town somewhere halfway between the two.  So McPhee spends much of the essay flying around in a helicopter with the politicians in the Committee to Relocate the Capitol looking for a good spot near Talkeetna.  The absurdity of the whole situation is certainly not lost on him.

The final, and longest, essay describes life out on the final frontier of America -- the area along the Yukon River between Eagle and Central.  At the time (perhaps still, who knows) this area was sparsely populated by off-grid homesteaders and a few Natives who survived mainly by trapping, fishing, hunting, mining, and a double serving of DIY.  It's a colorful description of a group with a lot of different personalities linked only by the fact that none of them fit into life in the lower 48.