Coming into the Country Read Online Free Page A

Historical Park and the Cape Cod National Seashore. Transferring to Alaska, he built a house in Anchorage, and soon cornered as his special province eight and a third million acres of the central Brooks Range. When confirmed by Congress, the area will become Gates of the Arctic National Park. It is a couple of hundred miles wide, and is east of the Salmon River. For five years, he has walked it, flown it, canoed its rivers —camped in many weathers below its adze-like rising peaks. Before he came up here, he was much in the wild (he has been a ranger in various places and is the author of a book on eastern American rivers), but nonetheless he was a blue-blazer sort of man, who could blend into the tussocks at the Metropolitan Club. Unimaginable, looking at him now. If he were to take off his shirt and shake it, the dismembered corpses of vintage mosquitoes would fall to the ground. Tall and slim in the first place, he is now spare. After staring so long at the sharp, flinty peaks of the central Brooks Range, he has come to look much like them. His physiognomy, in sun and wind, has become, more or less, grizzly. Any bear that took a bite of John Kauffmann would be most unlikely to complete the meal.
    Now, resting on a gravel island not far from the confluence of the Salmon and the Kobuk, he says he surely hopes
Congress will not forget its promises about the national-interest lands. Some conservationists, remaining bitter about the pipeline, tend to see the park and refuge proposals as a sop written into the Native Claims Settlement Act to hush the noisome ecomorphs. Those who would develop the state for its economic worth got something they much wanted with their eight hundred miles of pipe. In return, the environmentalists were given a hundred and thirty words on paper. All the paragraph provided, however, was that eighty million acres could be temporarily set aside and studied. There was no guarantee of preservation to follow. The Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, and other conservation organizations have formed the Alaska Coalition to remind Congress of its promise, of its moral obligation, lest the proposed park and refuge boundaries slowly fade from the map.
    The temperature is in the low seventies. Lunch is spread out on the ground. We have our usual Sailor Boy Pilot Bread (heavy biscuits, baked in Tacoma), peanut butter, jam, and a processed cheese that comes out of a tube—artifacts of the greater society, trekked above the Arctic Circle. Other, larger artifacts may be coming soon. The road that has been cut beside the Trans-Alaska Pipeline will eventually be opened to the public. Then, for the first time in human history, it will be possible to drive a Winnebago—or, for that matter, a Fleetwood Cadillac—from Miami Beach to the Arctic Ocean. Inevitably, the new north road will develop branches. One projected branch will run westward from the pipeline to Kotzebue and Kivalina, on the Chukchi Sea. The road alignment, which Congress could deflect in the name of the national-interest lands, happens to cross the Salmon River right here, where we are having lunch. We are two hundred and fifty miles from the pipeline. We are three hundred and fifty miles from the nearest highway. Yet here in the tundra plain, and embedded
in this transparent river, will stand perhaps, before long, the piers of a considerable bridge. I squeeze out the last of the cheese. It emerges from the tube like fluted icing.
    There is little left of the river, and we cover it quickly—the canoe and the single kayak bobbing lightly, Snake Eyes riding low, its deck almost at water level. The meanders expand and the country begins to open. At the wide mouth of the Salmon, the gravel bottom is so shallow that we get out and drag Snake Eyes. We have come down through mountains, and we have more recently been immured between incised stream banks in the lower plain, and now we walk out