Coming into the Country by John McPhee

Author:John McPhee
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

To stories of such nature Stanley and Ed Gelvin have not always been immune. Son and father, deep-rooted in the country (the one by birth, the other since long before statehood), they live in Central, a community with a Zip Code and a population of sixteen, so named because it was the point on the Birch Creek supply trail from which the miners fanned out to the gulches. Some went surprisingly far. Both Stanley and Ed Gelvin are, among other things, pilots, familiar with the country from the air; and some years ago they became more than a little interested in certain conjunctive stream courses in high remote terrain, where they saw aging evidence of the presence of miners. The site is—they request that I not be too specific —somewhere in the hundred-plus miles of mountain country that lies between Eagle and Central. Along a piece of valley floor more than three thousand feet high they noticed, among other things, a wooden sluice box weathered silver-gray, a roofless cabin, a long-since toppled cache. The old-timers did not build cabins, caches, and sluice boxes just in hopes of finding worthwhile concentrations of gold. Having found it, however, they lacked the means to remove anything like the whole of what was evidently there, even when they dug down in winter into places where flooding would stop them in warmer weather —thawing frozen deep gravels with fires and hoisting it up in buckets for sluicing in the spring. Under the stream beds were soaked unfrozen depths known as live ground, where the old-timers could not have worked at all. While some Alaskan streams freeze solid, most continue to run all winter under phenomenally increasing layers of ice and snow. The phenomenon is overflow, which has so often been lethal to people travelling streams on foot—soaking themselves, freezing to death. Water builds up pressure below the ice until it breaks through a crack and spreads out above. When the pressure is relieved, the flow stops and the water becomes a layer of ice. Before long, snow falls, and compacts. More pressure builds, and water again flows out on top. Through a winter, these alternating layers of snow and ice, white and blue, can build up to great confectionery thicknesses—but the stream below remains liquid to bedrock. With appropriate earthmoving equipment, Stanley pointed out, a guy could go into that live ground and scrape up what lay on the rock. No such machine had ever reached these alpine streams, as a glance at their unaltered state confirmed. They were much too far from the mining road and the dredged and bulldozed creeks of the district. It was almost too bizarre to imagine—a bulldozer in the roadless, trail-less wilderness of those mountains. The price of gold, on the other hand, had lately quintupled. Maybe going in there was worth a try. Over the Gelvins’ kitchen table, father and son kept talking, and a program gradually evolved. Attention became focussed on the family backhoe. The first necessity would be to sample the deep gravels and see what was there.

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