5 McPhee Canoe Trips: #3 "The Encircled River"

Illustration based on photo from Canoeguy Blog

This is the third post in my series “5 McPhee Canoe Trips” – my homage to New Yorker great John McPhee. Today I’ll review “The Encircled River” (The New Yorker, May 2 and 9, 1977; Book I of McPhee’s wonderful Coming into the Country, 1977).

“The Encircled River” is one of McPhee’s most famous pieces, and deservedly so. It chronicles a nine-day canoe-and-kayak trip he took in August, 1975, with a five-man study team, down the Salmon and Kobuk Rivers in northwestern Alaska. The team is trying to determine whether the Salmon should become a national wild river – to be set aside with its immediate environs as unalterable wild terrain. 

The piece consists of eight untitled segments. In the first segment, the group is already five days into the trip. Here’s the opening paragraph:

My bandanna is rolled on the diagonal and retains water fairly well. I keep it knotted around my head and now and again dip it into the river. The water is forty-six degrees. Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving. This has done away with the headaches that the sun caused in days before. The Arctic sun – penetrating, intense – seems not so much to shine as to strike. Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good. Meanwhile, the river – the clearest, purest water I have ever seen flowing over rocks – breaks the light into flashes and sends them upward into my eyes. The headaches have reminded me of the kind that are sometimes caused by altitude, but for all the fact that we have come down through mountains, we have not been higher than a few hundred feet above the level of the sea. Drifting now – a canoe, two kayaks – and thanking God it is not my turn in either of the kayaks, I lift my fish rod from the tines of a caribou rack (lashed there in mid-canoe to the duffel) and send a line flying toward a wall of bedrock by the edge of the stream. A grayling comes up and, after some hesitation, takes the lure and runs with it for a time. I disengage the lure and let the grayling go, being mindful not to wipe my hands on my shirt. Several days in use, the shirt is approaching filthy, but here among grizzly bears, I would prefer to stink of humanity than of fish.

That’s one of my favorite passages in all of literature. I love the use of the present tense. I love the first-person perspective. I love the detail, especially that lifting of the fishing rod “from the tines of a caribou rack.” I love the way temperature is tangibly indicated. McPhee not only tells us the river is cold (“The water is forty-six degrees”); he puts us in physical contact with it (“Against the temples, it is refrigerant and relieving.... Even the trickles of water that run down my T-shirt feel good”). 

The next paragraph is equally transfixing. McPhee 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.

Like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins – what an incredible image! A double simile: river like sky; salmon like zeppelins. Looking over the side of the canoe, we see their oval shapes floating there. The sentence is brilliantly visual – the perfect finish to an extraordinarily evocative paragraph.

Segment one introduces us to four of the five-member study team: Bob Fedeler, Stell Newman, Pat Pourchot, and John Kauffmann (yes, this is the same John Kauffmann who was in “The Keel of Lake Dickey”). The fifth member, Jack Hession, doesn’t appear until segment five. McPhee says of Fedeler, “He is compact, sturdy, not particularly tall, with a wide forehead and intelligent brown eyes. He would resemble Sigmund Freud, if Sigmund Freud had been a prospector.” 

In another bravura passage in this segment, McPhee describes Kauffmann fishing:

Something in the general drift now has John Kauffmann on his feet and off to the river. He assembles his trout rod, threads its eyes. Six feet three, spare, he walks, in his determination, tilted forward, ten degrees from vertical, jaws clamped. He seems to be seeking reassurance from the river. He seems not so much to want to catch what may become the last grayling in Arctic Alaska as to certify that it is there. With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river. His shirt is old and red. There are holes in is felt hat and strips of spare rawhide around its crown. He agitates the settled fly. Nothing. Again he waves the line. He drops its passenger on the edge of fast water at the far side of the pool. There is a vacuum-implosive sound, a touch of violence at the surface of the river. We cheer. For two minutes, we wait it out while Kauffmann plays his fish. Adroitly, gingerly, he brings it in. With care, he picks it up. He then looks at us as if he is about to throw his tin star in the dust at our feet. Shame – for our triple-hooked lures, our nylon hawsers, our consequent stories of fished-out streams. He looks at his grayling. It is a twenty-five-ounce midget; but it will grow. He seems to feel reassured. He removes the fly, which has scarcely nicked the fish’s lips. He slips the grayling back to the stream. 

That “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river” is very fine, as is “He agitates the settled fly,” and “There is a vacuum-implosive sound, a touch of violence at the surface of the river.” McPhee is a master describer.

Segment one ends with the group camping for the night at the confluence of the Kitlik and Salmon Rivers. McPhee writes,

I look up through the mesh of the tent window past spruce boughs and into the sky. Twilight sky. The sun is down. It is falling nine minutes earlier per day. In three months, it will have ceased to rise. Now though, in the dead of night, the sky is too bright for stars. I cannot quite read by the light at two.

Segment two tells about the Kobuk Valley National Monument proposal, the Alaska Statehood Act, and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which opened the way to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, but also provides for the preservation of some eighty million acres of “national-interest lands.” In this segment, the group travels to the mouth of the Salmon, where it joins the Kobuk. The men stop to fish. McPhee describes Pourchot fishing: 

He borrows Fedeler’s rod and sends the lure on its way. He reels. Nothing. He casts again. He reels. Nothing. Out in the river, there may be less water than salmon, but that is no guarantee that one will strike. Salmon do not feed on the spawning run. They apparently bite only by instinctive reflex if something flashes close before them. Pourchot casts again. Nothing. He casts again. The lure this time stops in the river as if it were encased in cement. Could be a boulder. Could be a submerged log. The lure seems irretrievably snagged – until the river erupts. Pourchot is a big man with a flowing red beard. He is well over six feet. Blonde hair tumbles across his shoulders. The muscles in his arms are strong from many hundreds of miles of paddling. This salmon, nonetheless, is dragging him up the beach. The fish leaps into the air, thrashes at the river surface, and makes charging runs of such thrust that Pourchot has no choice but to follow or break the line. He follows – fifty, seventy-five yards down the river with the salmon. The fish now changes plan and goes upstream. Pourchot follows. The struggle lasts thirty minutes, and the energy drawn away is almost half Pourchot’s. He wins, though, because he is bigger. The fish is scarcely larger than his leg. When, finally, it moves out of the water and onto the gravel, it has no hook in its mouth. It has been snagged, inadvertently, in the dorsal fin. Alaska law forbids keeping any sport fish caught in that way. The salmon must take the lure in its mouth. Pourchot extracts the hook, gently lifts the big fish in his arms, and walks into the river. He will hold the salmon right side up in the water until he is certain that its shock has passed and that it has regained its faculties. Otherwise, it might turn bottom up and drown.

That is quintessential McPhee – precise, vivid, rhythmic, kinetic. It’s one of my favorite passages of the piece.

In segment three, the group travels down the Kobuk. They see wolf tracks. They see a cow moose. They encounter forest Eskimos coming up the river in outboard-powered boats. McPhee discusses the Eskimos’ subsistence way of life, pointing out, among other things, their dependence on caribou: “They use the whole animal. They eat the meat raw and in roasts and stews. They eat greens from the stomach, muscles from the jaw, fat from behind the eyes. The hide goes into certain winter clothing that nothing manufactured can equal.” That “fat from behind the eyes” memorably reappears several paragraphs later in the form of a question. Describing the breakfast the he and the rest of the group are having at their campsite, McPhee 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 legionaries from another world, talking “scenic values” and “interpretation.” These are Romans inspecting Transalpine Gaul. Nobody’s skin is going to turn brown on these 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 palate of a 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?

I nominate that last sentence as one of the most surreal, inspired lines McPhee has ever written. (And he’s written more than a few of them.) It makes me smile every time I read it.

Segment four is the key structural component of the entire piece. It’s both an ending and a beginning. It completes the present-tense narrative of the last four days of the trip. The group arrives in the river village of Kiana – the endpoint of their journey down the Salmon and the Kobuk. The trip seems done. But the narrative isn’t. In the breath of one sentence, time shifts, the narrative flashes back to day one and begins an account of the journey’s first four days. Here’s the sentence: “Children were fishing when we were here before.” Note the past tense. From here to the end of the piece, McPhee will write retrospectively. 

The remainder of segment four tells about the group’s helicopter ride from Kiana to the gravel bar on the upper Salmon River, where they intend to start their journey. The ride does not go well. The pilot loses his way. McPhee writes, 

He turned one-eighty and headed downstream. Spread over his knees was a Nome Sectional Aeronautical Chart, and he puzzled over it for a while, then he handed it to me. Maybe I could help figure out where we were. The map was quite wonderful at drawing straight lines between distant airstrips, but its picture of the mountains looked like calves’ brains over bone china, and the scale was such that the whole of the Salmon River was only six inches long. The chopper plowed on to the south. I held the map a little closer to my eyes, studying the blue veiny lines among the mountains. The ludicrousness of the situation washed over me. I looked back at Kauffmann and the others, who seemed somewhat confused. And small wonder. A map was being handed back forth between a man from New Jersey and a pilot from Louisiana who were amiss in – of all places – the Brooks Range. In a sense – in the technical sense that we had next to no idea where we were – we were lost.

Eventually, after much searching, with fuel running low, they find their landing spot. They unload their boats and gear. The helicopter takes off. McPhee writes, “Now we were alone between fringes of spruce by a clear stream where tundra went up the sides of mountains. This was, in all likelihood, the most isolated wilderness I would ever see, and that is how we got there.”

Segment five contains the dramatic high point of the piece – an encounter with a grizzly. It’s day two of the trip. The men are still encamped on the gravel bar, where the helicopter deposited them. They spend the morning assembling their kayaks. After lunch, they set off on foot for a look around. McPhee goes with Fedeler and Hession. They hike north up the river some miles and then up the ridges to the east. Making their way down a hill dense with blueberry bushes, they come upon a grizzly just ahead of them. McPhee writes,

Fedeler stopped walking. He touched my arm. He had in an instant become even more alert than he usually was, and obviously apprehensive. His gaze followed straight on down our intended course. What he saw there I saw now. It appeared to me to be a hill of fur. “Big boar grizzly,” Fedeler said in a near-whisper. The bear was about a hundred steps away, in the blueberries, grazing. The head was down, the hump high. The immensity of muscle seemed to vibrate slowly – to expand and contract, with the grazing. Not berries alone but whole bushes were going into the bear. He was big for a barren-ground grizzly. The brown bears of Alaska (or grizzlies; they are no longer thought to be different) do not grow to the size they will reach on more ample diets elsewhere. The barren-ground grizzly will rarely grow larger than six hundred pounds.

McPhee’s description of the grizzly encounter is masterful. He weaves his response to the bear’s presence with arresting facts about what grizzlies are like, how they kill, what they eat:

If a wolf kills a caribou, and a grizzly comes along while the wolf is feeding on the kill, the wolf puts its tail between its legs and hurries away. A black bear will run from a grizzly, too. Grizzlies sometimes kill and eat black bears. The grizzly takes what he happens upon. He is an opportunistic eater. The predominance of the grizzly in his terrain is challenged by nothing but man and ravens. To frustrate ravens from stealing his food, he will lie down and sleep on top of a carcass, occasionally swatting the birds as if they were big black flies. He prefers a vegetable diet. He can pulp a moosehead with a single blow, but he is not always lusting to kill, and when he moves through his country he can be something munificent, going into copses of willow among unfleeing moose and their calves, touching nothing, letting it all breathe as before. He may, though, get the head of a cow moose between his legs and rake her flanks with the five-inch knives that protrude from the ends of his paws. Opportunistic. He removes and eats her entrails. He likes porcupines, too, and when one turns and presents to him a pygal bouquet of quills, he will leap into the air, land on the other side, chuck the fretful porpentine beneath the chin, flip it over, and with a swift ventral incision, neatly remove its body from its skin, leaving something like a sea urchin behind him on the ground. 

McPhee writes, 

Like pictures from pages riffled with a thumb, all of these things went through my mind there on the mountainside above the grazing bear. I confess that in one instant I asked myself, “Wha the hell am I doing here?” There was nothing more to the question, though, than a hint of panic. I knew why I had come, and therefore what I was doing there. That I was frightened was incidental. I just hoped the fright would not rise beyond a relatively decorous level. I sensed that Fedeler and Hession were somewhat frightened, too. I would have been troubled if they had not been. Meanwhile the sight of the bear stirred me like nothing else the country could contain. What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominant thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same kind of country all around that. He implied a world. He was an affirmation to the rest of the earth that his kind of place was extant.

This whole segment – from the men’s first sighting of the grizzly, to their retreat up the hill, to their long hike back to camp – is amazing! In detail after glorious detail, McPhee evokes a world that is “wild to the limits of the term.”

In segment six, it’s day three on the Salmon, and the group embark on their trip downriver: “Pool to riffle, pool to riffle, we rode a little and then got out and walked, painters in our hands. The boats beside us were like hounds on leashes, which now and then stopped and had to be dragged.”

In the afternoon, they stop to fish. McPhee describes catching an Arctic char:

I tossed a small Mepps lure across the stream, size zero, and bringing it back felt s big one hit. The strike was too strong for a grayling – more power, less commotion. I had, now, about ten pounds of fish on a six-pound line. So I followed the fish around, walking upstream and down, into and out of the river. I had been walking the kayak all day long, and this experience was not much different. After fifteen minutes or so, the fish tired, and came thrashing from the water. I took out my tape and laid it on him, from the hooking jaw to the tip of the tail. Thirty-one and a half inches. Orange speckles, crimson glow, this resplendent creature was by a long measure the largest fish I had ever caught in fresh water. In its belly would fit ten of the kind that I ordinarily keep and eat. For dinner tonight we would have grilled Arctic char, but enough had been caught already by the others. So, with one hand under the pelvic fins and the other near the jaw, I bent toward the river and held the fish underwater until it had its equipoise. It rested there on my hands for a time, and stayed even when I lowered them away. Then, like naval ordnance, it shot across the stream. The best and worst part of catching that fish was deciding to let it go. 

There are many wonderful touches here: the naming of the lure (“Mepps”); the immediacy (“now”); the fish’s action (“came thrashing from the water”), the detail (“hooking jaw,” “orange speckles,” “crimson glow”), the vivid figuration (“like naval ordnance, it shot across the stream”), the compelling first-person perspective (“I tossed,” “I took,” “I bent,” “I lowered”).  

The men move on downstream. They stop for the night below a bedrock pool. They eat steamed Arctic char. They see another bear:

Looking up from dinner, we saw a black bear, long and leggy, crossing a steep hillside at a slow lope. It stopped to graze for a time, and then, apropos of nothing, suddenly ran and took a crashing leap into a stand of willow and alder, breaking its way through, coming out the other side onto a high plain of pale green caribou moss.

Segment seven, and its onwards down the Salmon. McPhee and Kauffmann are paddling the double Klepper (“somewhat less maneuverable than a three-ton log”), which the group have dubbed Snake Eyes. Kauffmann talks about designating the Salmon as a national wild river. He favors locking it up for conservation purposes. He says, “This is the last big piece of magnificent mountain wilderness we have left. First it was the Appalachians, then the Rockies, then the Sierra Nevada, then Alaska, and this is the last part of Alaska. This is America’s ultimate wilderness; it goes no farther. This is our last opportunity to provide, admittedly in a contrived way, the chance to go adventuring in country so wild that valleys and mountains are without names.” 

They come to a curve in the river – “a bending chute with a cut bank on one side and an apron of gravel on the other. Over the cut bank a sweeper had recently fallen, a spruce whose trunk reached into the river. Its green boughs spread over the white water.” They try to skirt the sweeper, but end up hitting it. McPhee writes, 

Kauffmann was still reminding me that this was our last opportunity to save the final American wilderness when Snake Eyes bought the river. The thought occurred to me as I pitched head first into the rushing water that I had not often involuntarily overturned on a river trip, and that on almost all the occasions when I had the last thing I had seen on my way to the bottom was Kauffmann. Tact restrained me from mentioning this to him until he had come up out of the river. Meanwhile, I jumped to my feet. The water was waist deep, cold as a wine bucket. I retrieved Kauffmann’s hat. Under the gin-clear water, his head, with its radical economy of hair, looked like an onion. Snake Eyes was upside down. I wrenched it right side up, then took its painter and hurried out of the river. From the moment we spilled until I was standing on dry gravel, scarcely fifteen seconds went by. Kauffmann was soaked, but I was not. My rain gear had been drawn tight at the neck and had elastic cuffs. I was half wet – in harlequin patches, and not much on the chest or the back. A piece at a time, we floated our duffel out of Snake Eyes – sleeping bags, clothes, bags. Then we dumped out the water, repacked the duffel, and got back onto the river.

Segment eight concludes the piece, ending where segment one began. It contains another memorable bear encounter:

Rounding bends, we saw sculpins, a pair of great horned owls, mergansers, Taverner’s geese. We saw ravens and a gray jay. Coming down a long, deep, green pool, we looked toward the riffle at the lower end and saw an approaching grizzly. He was young, possibly four years old, and not much over four hundred pounds. He crossed the river. He studied the salmon in the riffle. He did not see, hear, or smell us. Our three boats were close together, and down the light current on the flat water we drifted toward the fishing bear.

He picked up a salmon, roughly ten pounds of fish, and, holding it with one paw, he began to whirl it around his head. Apparently, he was not hungry, and this was a form of play. He played sling-the-salmon. With his claws embedded near the tail, he whirled the salmon and then tossed it high, end over end. As it fell, he scooped it up and slung it around his head again, lariat salmon, and again he tossed it into the air. He caught it and heaved it high once more. The fish flopped to the ground. The bear turned away, bored, He began to move upstream by the edge of the river. Behind his big head his hump projected. His brown fur rippled like a field under wind. He kept coming. The breeze was behind him. He had not yet seen us. He was romping along at an easy walk. As he came closer to us, we drifted slowly toward him. The single Klepper, with John Kauffmann in it, moved up against a snagged stick and broke it off. The snap was light, but enough to stop the bear. Instantly, he was motionless and alert, remaining on his four feet and straining his eyes to see. We drifted on toward him. At last, we arrived in his focus. If we were looking at something we had rarely seen before, God help him so was he. If he was a tenth as awed as I was, he could not have moved a muscle, which he did, now, in a hurry that was not pronounced but nonetheless seemed inappropriate to his status in the situation. He crossed low ground and went up a bank toward a copse of willow. He stopped there and faced us again. Then, breaking stems to pieces, he went into the willows.

That “His brown fur rippled like a field under wind” is inspired. The whole passage is inspired – a superb piece of action description.

Writing this review, I strongly sense I’m assessing a classic. “The Encircled River” is built to last. Sublime subject, exquisite structure, ravishing writing – it’s triple bliss.