Coming into the Country

Fifth Printing.
Coming into the Country is about Alaska and Alaskans-contemporary, for the most part, with occasional expeditions into Alaska’s past.
It is an unforgettable blending of vivid character sketches, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of “the bush.”
Book I, “The Encircled River,” takes the reader on an adventuresome journey by canoe and kayaks down a primal river in the western Brooks Range, at and beyond the northern tree line, among alpine tundra mountainsides where grizzlies graze. It is a world that has been used only by forest-Eskimo hunting parties. “This is America’s ultimate wilderness, remarks one person on the river trip. “It goes no farther.”
Book II, “What They Were Hunting For,” describes, with not a little playful wit, the efforts of an officially appointed group of Alaskans (under the leadership of an Eskimo who at age twenty-seven was head of the Alaskan Democratic Party to select a site for a new state capital. The story of the capital move serves as a kind of catalyst for a whole spectrum of impressions of a society all but apart in the world and almost totally absorbed with itself. “In Alaska,” the author writes, “the conversation is Alaska.” Meanwhile, to many Americans “outside,” Alaska seems almost a foreign country, and McPhee’s evocations of Alaskan people and Alaskan terrain in no way alter that impression.
Book III, “Coming into the Country,” is focused on the region of the upper Yukon and brings together a memorable company of people, Indian and white—the latter a collection of trappers, gold miners, cat skinners, welfare recipients, practitioners of early retirement, burghers of tiny isolated towns, who at one time or another have abandoned the security and predictability of life in the “Lower Forty-eight” to confront the challenges of creating new lives in an unknown world. Why did they go there? What were they seeking? What in the end did they find?
The central paradox of Alaska is that there are so few people in so much land—a full sixth of the United States (375 million acres) with a population (every Eskimo, Aleut, Indian, white native, and incomer included) a little more than half as large as the population of Washington, D.C. Any Alaskan, however, is lucky to be able to buy, as a building lot, a fraction of an acre. The relationship of the people to their immense terrain is a theme that underlies virtually everything that has happened in Alaska–and in the present era large bodies of land are being redesignated in ways that are changing Alaska for-ever. (“The squares seemed to be moving as well as the checkers.”)
Readers of McPhee’s carlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined into an organic whole. But in the course of this volume we are made acquainted with material as diverse as the lore and techniques of placer mining, the habits and legends of the barren-ground grizzly, the outlook of a young Athapaskan chief (and of his father as well), and takes of the fortitude of settlers-ordinary people compelled by extraordinary dreams. Coming into the Country unites a vast region of America with one of America’s notable literary craftsmen, singularly qualified to do justice to the scale and grandeur of the design.