Well-Done Alaska

By Paul Gray

COMING INTO THE COUNTRY by John McPhee

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 438 pages; $10.95

Airlines and communications satellites foster the impression that the rest of the world is just around the corner. Many people derive cozy feelings from this notion of a shrinking globe. But in others, the concept gives rise to claustrophobia. They need a planet that still holds inaccessible places, both beautiful and stubbornly impervious to the designs of man. Author John McPhee has good news for these true believers. He has discovered such a place, and this book is his report.

Coming into the Country is actually three lengthy bulletins about Alaska, glued together like aerial reconnaissance photographs. The first describes a canoe trip that McPhee and four companions took down an unspoiled river in the northwestern reaches of the state, well above the Arctic Circle. Second, McPhee tells of a helicopter ride with a committee looking for a site on which to build a new state capital. The last and longest section covers some wintry months spent in Eagle, a tiny settlement on the Yukon River just west of the Canadian border--"a community deeply compressed in its own isolation," McPhee writes, with cabin-fever feuds so sharp that "a cup of borrowed sugar can go off like a grenade."

McPhee was clearly awed by what he encountered in Alaska ("It is in no way an extension of what I've known before"), and his stories strive not to dictate that response but to duplicate it. Rather than stepping smartly from A to Z, his plots tend to pick up casually with N and then meander back around to M. The apparent informality is a ruse. McPhee consistently works like a reverse pickpocket, slipping facts deftly and painlessly into the folds of his narrative: "There are nearly twice as many people in the District of Columbia as there are in the State of Alaska. In ten square miles of the eastern state I live in [New Jersey] are more people than there are in the five hundred and eighty-six thousand square miles of Alaska."

"Alaska runs off the edge of the imagination," McPhee writes, and he relies on attentive reportorial methods to keep himself and his story firmly planted on the icy ground. He carefully provides the dimensions of the Yukon River cabins he visits, often numbering and describing the items of furniture in them. He lists some 30 uses that Alaskans have found for 55-gal. drums, describes how contemporary miners pan for gold and tells how to operate a dog sled up a hill. The dozens of Alaskans he sought out and listened to come trailing clouds of particulars. McPhee can capture a character with the economy of a good short story writer: "Harry is the kind of man who shakes Tabasco on his beans."

Far from grounding McPhee's book, all this luggage helps it soar. Those who think they know quite enough, thank you, about Alaska are wrong. Not only is the area one of the last and largest stretches of true wilderness left on earth (and hence of atavistic concern); it is also the arena where the last act in a long American drama is being played out. McPhee characterizes the struggle as "the Dallas scenario versus the Sierra Club syndrome"--developers versus conservationists, with many conflicting interests between them. McPhee is no reflexive ecologist; he compares the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to "a thread laid across Staten Island." Neither is he sanguine about the many ways man can find to make a vast space less wondrous. Discussing the psychic need for a frontier, he writes: "People are mentioning outer space as, in this respect, all we have left. All we have left is Alaska."

Coming into the Country may encourage some people to travel or settle in the state. That would not necessarily be a good thing for Alaska. But the book's more likely effect will be to satisfy those who have dreamed of striking out afresh but who never will. Like travel writers of old, McPhee has acted as the antenna in a far-off place that few will see. He has brought back a wholly satisfying voyage of spirit and mind. -- Paul Gray

Far from the Alaskan wilderness he sings of in Coming into the Country, John McPhee paces about his small, comfortable office just above a bank on the main drag of his home town, Princeton, N.J. He is on the verge of another project--and apprehensive. Directly across the street sits Princeton University's Firestone Library, the object of McPhee's window gazing. With 13 books to his credit in the past twelve years, the author seems determined to keep the neighboring library cataloguers working nights. "A great stream of ideas goes by," McPhee says, turning from the window. "The problem is how to pick one out that you want to spend a year or more working on."

Some readers have found McPhee's past choice of subjects eclectic to the point of anarchy: basketball, breeder reactors, canoes, conservation, oranges, Scottish lairds. McPhee points out the skein that links all this apparent disparity: "Just about everything I've written touches on subjects that interested me as a kid." The third child of a doctor who worked regularly with Princeton athletes, McPhee heard about sports as far back as he can remember. His passion for games grew, but his physique failed to keep pace; the aspiring basketball star topped out at 5 ft. 7 in. Summers were spent outdoors, camping and canoeing. McPhee also learned that he liked to tell stories. "Not made-up ones," he recalls. "I tried to find dazzling things to say about things I'd noticed during the day, so that my siblings would listen to me."

In a small town that has housed such notable transients as Albert Einstein and Svetlana Alliluyeva, McPhee is an oddity: a celebrated Princeton native. "I wouldn't stay here if my work didn't take me away for such extended periods," he says. "This place is my fixed foot." A staff writer at The New Yorker ("The job translates as 'unsalaried freelance'") since 1965, McPhee enjoys a freedom from deadlines that would tempt most journalists into sloth and several other deadly sins. Not McPhee. Reporting completed and notes arranged, he marches into a routine now familiar to members of his extended family (four daughters from his first marriage live near by; his second wife Yolanda also has four children). He goes to his office each morning at 8:30 and leaves twelve hours later. He may take a lunch break at a nearby restaurant or run six miles--but not both on the same day. Some working sessions yield up only one typewritten page.

McPhee brushes off suggestions that such dedication is exemplary. "I've got discipline because I've got nowhere else to go," he says. "I elected to be a writer, and now that I'm 46 it is simply what I do." In his work habits and careful craftsmanship, though, McPhee resembles the outdoor loners, the cerebral athletes, the prickly eccentrics who regularly pop up in his books. "I don't consciously seek out subjects for their expertise," he says. "But people who are experts at something put a lot of effort into becoming experts. I am attracted by their single-minded drive." In pursuit of his own expertise, McPhee has become an ideal McPhee subject.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.