3 for the Road: John McPhee's "Coming into the Country"

This is the second in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll review Coming into the Country.

John McPhee’s Coming into the Country chronicles his travels in Alaska in the 1970s. It consists of three separately structured compositions. The first, titled “The Encircled River,” describes a canoe-and-kayak trip he took with a five-man study team down the Salmon River of the Brooks Range. The team is trying to determine whether the Salmon should be part of the wild-river proposal before Congress, a proposal that would set aside the area as unalterable wild terrain. McPhee says of the Salmon, “In a lifetime of descending rivers, this was the clearest and the wildest river.” He writes,

Paddling again, we move down long pools separated by short white pitches, looking to see whatever might appear in the low hills, in the cottonwood, in the white and black spruce – and in the river, too. Its bed is as distinct as if the water were not there. Everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon. They have moved the gravel and made redds, spawning craters, feet in diameter. They ignore the boats, but at times, and without apparent reason, they turn and shoot downriver, as if they have felt panic and have lost their resolve to get on with their loving and their dying. Some, already dead, lie whitening, grotesque, on the bottom, their bodies disassembling in the current. In a short time, not much will be left but the hooking jaws. Through the surface, meanwhile, the living salmon broach, freshen – make long, dolphinesque flights through the air – then fall to slap the water, to resume formation in the river, noses north, into the current. Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins.

The strangeness and beauty of that last sentence verge on the surreal. McPhee’s images often have surreal elements. Later in the same piece, describing the team’s camp grub, he writes,

Breakfast in the frying pan – freeze-dried eggs. If we were Kobuk people, one of us might go off into the watery tundra and find fresh eggs. Someone else might peel the bark from a willow. The bark would be soaked and formed into a tube with the eggs inside, and the tube would be placed in the fire. But this is not a group of forest Eskimos. These are legionaires from another world, talking “scenic values” and “interpretation.” These are Romans inspecting Transalpine Gaul. Nobody’s skin is going to turn brown on those eggs – or on cinnamon-apple-flavored Instant Quaker Oatmeal, or Tang, or Swiss Miss, or on cold pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. For those who do not believe what they have just read, allow me to confirm it: in Pourchot’s breakfast bag are pink-icinged Pop-Tarts with raspberry filling. Lacking a toaster, and not caring much anyway, we eat them cold. They invite a question. To a palate without bias – the palate of an open-minded Berber, the travelling Martian – which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye?

That passage makes me smile every time I read it. Who besides McPhee would think to combine freeze-dried eggs, Pop-Tarts, forest Eskimos, Romans, Transalpine Gaul, Berber, travelling Martian, and “the fat gob from behind a caribou’s eye” in one paragraph? No one. He’s one of the most imaginative factual writers in all of literature. “The Encircled River” is one of his masterpieces. I’ll have more to say about its artistry in future posts.

The second section of Coming Into the Country is called “What They Were Hunting For.” It’s about the search for a new capital of Alaska. The primary means of travel in this piece is by plane and helicopter. McPhee describes wonderful aerial views of Alaskan landscape. This one, for example:

The truly immense glaciers might be down in the southeast, but the glacier that was off to our right just now was in no sense modest. The helicopter had crossed Shulin Lake, and had circled it, tilting far over so the committee members could hang by their seat belts for a plan view, its big rotor blades biting the air with the sound of a working axe. Level again, it was proceeding west toward the Kahiltna River, the source of which, off to the north, was almost as preëminent as the mountains above. It came down out of the Alaska Range like a great white tongue. It came – the Kahiltna Glacier – from eleven thousand feet, from a high saddle between the peaks of Foraker and McKinley. And two, three, four miles wide all the way, it flowed fifty miles south into the valley, where it finally turned into a river at an altitude of scarcely a thousand feet. This was the big glacier the climbers land on – and the fact that they land at the seven-thousand foot contour has nothing to do with the strategies of the sport. They do so because airplanes are not permitted to land in Mount McKinley National Park, and the park boundary happens to cross the glacier at that level. The river below us was the product of the sun, and even in autumn and from the helicopter’s high perspective it was awesome to see. Most fast rivers are white, smooth, white, smooth – alternating pools and rapids. This one was white all the way, bank to bank, tumultuous, torrential, great rushing outwash of the Alaska Range. With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep. The color of the water, where it was flat enough to show, was actually greenish-gray, and its clarity was nil. It carried so much of what had been mountains. Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice. The colors of the outwash rivers are determined by the diets of the glaciers – schist, gneiss, limestone, shale. 

Of the many pleasures of that passage – the definite, specific, concrete language, the originality of the figuration (“With so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep”), the interesting facts (“Glacier milk, as it is called, contains a high proportion of powdered rock, from pieces broken off and then ground by the ice”) – the most piquant, for me, is the sonic description of the helicopter (“its big rotor blades biting the air with the sound of a working axe”).

The book’s third section, “Coming into the Country,” is its longest, and perhaps its richest. It describes the people and terrain of Eastern Alaska, principally around the tiny bush community of Eagle, on the upper Yukon River. For example, here’s McPhee’s sketch of trapper Dick Cook:

Cook is somewhat below the threshold of slender. He is fatless. His figure is a little stooped, unprepossessing, but his legs and arms are strong beyond the mere requirements of the athlete. He looks like a scarecrow made of cables. All his features are feral – his chin, his nose, his dark eyes. His hair, which is nearly black, has gone far from his forehead. His scalp is bare all the way back to, more or less, his north pole. The growth beyond – dense, streaked with gray – cantilevers to the sides in unbarbered profusion, so that his own hair appears to be a parka ruff. His voice is soft, gentle – his words polite. When he is being pedagogical, the voice goes up several registers, and becomes hortative and sharp. He is not infrequently pedagogical.

And here’s McPhee’s description of the Yukon River, as he personally experienced it, canoeing the hundred-and-sixty-mile stretch between Eagle and Circle:

From the hull, meanwhile, came the steady sound of sandpaper, of sliding stones, of rain on a metal roof – the sound of the rock in the river, put there by alpine glaciers. Dip a cupful of water and the powdered rock settled quickly to the bottom. At the height of the melting season, something near two hundred tons of solid material will flow past a given point on the riverbank in one minute. Bubbling boils, like the tops of high fountains, bloomed everywhere on the surface but did not rough it up enough to make any sort of threat to the canoe. They stemmed from the crash of fast water on boulders and ledges far below. Bend to bend, the river presented itself in large segments – two, three, six miles at a stretch, now smooth, now capped white under the nervously changeable sky. We picked our way through flights of wooded islands. We shivered in the deep shadows of bluffs a thousand feet high – Calico Bluff, Montauk Bluff, Biederman Bluff, Takoma Bluff – which day after day intermittently walled the river. Between them – in downpourings of sunshine, as often as not – long vistas reached back across spruce-forested hills to the rough gray faces and freshly whitened summits of mountains. Some of the walls of the bluffs were of dark igneous rock that had cracked into bricks and appeared to have been set there by masons. Calico Bluff – a sedimentary fudge, folded, convoluted in whorls and ampersands – was black and white and yellow-tan. Up close it smelled of oil. It was sombre as we passed it, standing in its own shadow. Peregrine falcons nest there, and – fantastic fliers – will come over the Yukon at ballistic speed, clench their talons, tuck them in, and strike a flying duck hard enough (in the neck) to kill it in midair. End over end the duck falls, and the falcon catches it before it hits the river. As we passed the mouth of the Tatonduk, fifteen ducks flew directly over us. Brad Snow reached for his shotgun, and quickly fired twice. Fifteen ducks went up the Tatonduk. Above the Nation, steep burgundy mountainsides reached up from the bright-green edges of the river, then fell away before tiers of higher mountains, dark with spruce and pale with aspen, quilted with sunlight and shadow. Ahead, long points of land and descending ridgelines reached toward one another into the immensity of the river, roughed now under a stiff wind. Filmy downspouts dropped from the clouds. Behind the next bend, five miles away, a mountain was partly covered with sliding mist. The scene resembled Lake Maggiore and might have been the Hardanger Fjord, but it was just a fragment of this river, an emphatic implication of all two thousand miles, and of the dozens of tributaries that in themselves were major rivers – proof and reminder that with its rampart bluffs and circumvallate mountains it was not only a great river of the far northwestern continent but a river of preëminence among the rivers of the world. The ring of its name gave nothing away to the name of any river. Sunlight was bright on the mountains to both sides, and a driving summer rain came up the middle. The wind tore up the waves and flung pieces of them through the air. It was not wind, though, but the river itself that took the breath away.

So many brilliant, artful touches here – the evocation of the sound of the river against the canoe’s hull (“sound of sandpaper, of sliding stones, of rain on a metal roof”), the precise naming of the bluffs (“Calico Bluff, Montauk Bluff, Biederman Bluff, Takoma Bluff”), vivid description (“sedimentary fudge, folded, convoluted in whorls and ampersands”), capture of light, color, wind, rain, geography, geology, wildlife – all in dynamic interplay with the action of the canoe moving down the river. Coming into the Country brims with such passages. I enjoy it immensely. 

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss various aspects of Coming into the Country – its action, structure, imagery, point of view, sense of place, use of figuration – in more detail. But first I want to introduce the third book in my trio – Ian Frazier’s superb Great Plains. That’ll be the subject of my next post in this series.