Summary of John McPhee's Coming into the Country , livre ebook

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48 pages

English

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Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The river was the clearest, purest water I had ever seen flowing over rocks. It had been forty-six degrees, and the Arctic sun did not seem to shine so much as to strike. The water was refrigerant, and I felt relief against the temples.
#2 I camped next to the Salmon River in Alaska. The sun had been up for fourteen hours, and the river had hours to go before it set. It was a good campsite, and the river was a fishing site.
#3 The salmon in the Salmon River have been fished out, but the grayling remain undisturbed. We fish for them, and in nine minutes, we have five. They are seventeen, eighteen inches long. We clean them in the Kitlik, with care that all the waste is taken by the stream.
#4 The myth of Alaska is that there is a fish on every cast, a moose behind every tree. But the fish and the moose aren’t there. People go out with high expectations, and are disappointed.

Informations

Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	26 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669367093
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Insights on John McPhee's Coming into the Country
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The river was the clearest, purest water I had ever seen flowing over rocks. It had been forty-six degrees, and the Arctic sun did not seem to shine so much as to strike. The water was refrigerant, and I felt relief against the temples.

#2

I camped next to the Salmon River in Alaska. The sun had been up for fourteen hours, and the river had hours to go before it set. It was a good campsite, and the river was a fishing site.

#3

The salmon in the Salmon River have been fished out, but the grayling remain undisturbed. We fish for them, and in nine minutes, we have five. They are seventeen, eighteen inches long. We clean them in the Kitlik, with care that all the waste is taken by the stream.

#4

The myth of Alaska is that there is a fish on every cast, a moose behind every tree. But the fish and the moose aren’t there. People go out with high expectations, and are disappointed.

#5

The general drift has people like John Kauffmann on their feet and off to the river. He assembles his trout rod, threads its eyes. 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, but to certify that it is there.

#6

The sun, which was behind the apex of a spruce two hours ago, is now far to the right of that and slightly closer to the ground. The light is of the rich kind that is found in more southern places at evening, heightening walls and shadowing eaves.

#7

The author and his team measured the largest spruce tree they found, which was 22 inches in diameter, breast high. The spruce in this country looked like pipe cleaners. The better ones looked like bottle washers.

#8

The bottom of Snake Eyes intersects the bottom of the river, which is shallow at many of the riffles. The Grumman canoe is wider, longer, and more heavily loaded than Snake Eyes, but it rides higher and draws less water than the latter.

#9

The Salmon River is a tributary of the Kobuk River, which is part of a proposed national monument. The river and its environs are unaltered from how they have been for centuries, save for the occasional human presence.

#10

The central paradox of Alaska is that it is as large as it is small. It is a immense landscape with so few people in it that language is strained to call it a frontier, let alone a state.

#11

The Native Claims Settlement Act, of 1971, was a major piece of legislation that changed the status and structure of native societies. It opened the way to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which is only the first of many big-scale projects envisioned by development-minded Alaskans.

#12

Congress gave the agencies seven years to study and select each national-interest land. The park and refuge proposals were a sop written into the Native Claims Settlement Act to hush the noisome ecomorphs.

#13

The temperature is in the low seventies. We have our usual Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, peanut butter, jam, and a processed cheese that comes out of a tube. We have come down through mountains and are now on a wide pebble beach on the edge of a tremendous river.

#14

The salmon were swimming upstream, away from the river. Pourchot followed them, catching a salmon of his own. He was well over six feet tall, and the fish was barely larger than his leg.

#15

The Eskimos living in the five small villages on the Kobuk River do not think in landscape terms that are large. They see a river not as an entity but as a pageant of parts, and every bend and eddy has a name.

#16

The Kobuk River is no less absorbing than the salmon river. It is gravelled and lightly covered with silt. In shallow places, salmon leave trails in the silt, like lines made by fingers in dust. Eskimos know that one school of salmon will follow the trails of another.

#17

The temperature of the Kobuk is fifty-seven degrees, and it is still warm after the river in the mountains. The salmon is excellent, and the sound of an airplane crossing the edge of hearing goes out again.

#18

The proposals up here are for the future, as Yellowstone was. It will be impossible to protect this wilderness artificially in the future, so we must preserve it now, even if it means suffering from mosquito bites.

#19

The Kobuk River is a mesmerizing sight, but after two days, we begin to get bored with it. We move downstream a little more than twenty miles one day, only sixteen the next, in part because of stiff western headwinds. We pitch our tents far out on a gravel point, on a dry part of the riverbed, two hundred yards from the nearest blade of vegetation.

#20

There are about once an hour boats traveling up the Kobuk River with at least three people in them. Four have returned and passed us again during the evening. It seems to be the rhythm of the Kobuk that Eskimos go by about once an hour.

#21

The Eskimos on the Kobuk never seem surprised when they come across us, as if nothing could be less extraordinary than the Grumman canoe, the small blue single kayak, and Snake Eyes - all afloat under five white faces.

#22

The people of the Kobuk are among the few Eskimos in Alaska who are well within the tree line. They have a culture that reflects their cousinship with Eskimos of the coast and that borrows from the Indians of the Alaskan interior.

#23

The caribou herd in the Kobuk valley, which the Eskimos depend on, has been decreasing in numbers since the 19th century. The Arctic cycle of dearth to plenty and back again seems to take around 60 to 100 years.

#24

The rise and fall of such cycles has always been a part of the life of the people of the Kobuk River. They have never thought of their homes as permanent in location, and have always built new houses on sites that were shiftingly appropriate.

#25

The Native Allotment Act of 1906 allowed any Alaskan native to claim a hundred and sixty acres of Alaska. However, few people bothered to file claims, and when the Native Claims Settlement Act came along, a final deadline was set for native allotments. Many people decided to register claims after all.

#26

The relationship between the Eskimos and whites has made them dependent on goods that need to be paid for: nylon netting, boat materials, rifles, ammunition, motors, gasoline. If subsistence living were to be denied to them through regulation, they would not be able to support their families.

#27

The author and Fedeler were the losers of the lottery who were supposed to go downriver in the Grumman. They were so cold that they had to stop and build a fire.

#28

We camped three miles away from Kiana, and the village spread out in front of us. The most prominent structure in the town was the sheet-metal high school on the edge of town. The river’s edge was mostly unoccupied.

#29

The children of Kiana were unself-conscious and offered me pieces of sweet blueberries. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the voices of the children were audible.

#30

The last mountains of the range before they disappear into the Chukchi Sea, the ridgelines of Alaska’s Interior were gorgeous. They were not as sharp and knife-edged like the peaks of the central Brooks, but they were still intimidating.

#31

The Salmon River was the third river that Parrish and his team went searching for. They flew low over the river, upstream, looking for the glint of the canoe. But nothing ever is guaranteed in Alaska. Nothing is guaranteed.

#32

The pipeline charters have also led to pilots being siphoned off to fly them, which has led to inexperienced pilots taking over bush flights.

#33

Alaska is the land of the bush pilot, and it is a myth that bush pilots are dirty and unprofessional. However, some pilots are afraid of being embarrassed than they are of death.

#34

The state of Alaska has a higher percentage of people who fly than any other part of the United States. However, if you get into an airplane in Alaska your chances of not coming back are greater than they would be in any other part of the country.

#35

We were on an island with the transparent Salmon River on one side and a small slough on the other. Deeper pools were above us and below us. We built our fire on the lemon-sized gravel of what would in higher water be the riverbed, and we pitched the tents on slightly higher ground among open stands of willow.

#36

There was a sixth man with us, Jack Hession, the Sierra Club’s only salaried full-time representative in Alaska. He was not going to die on the Salmon River. Pressures from Anchorage had traveled with him, and they would get the better of him soon.

#37

I had a difficult time walking up the hills with Fedeler. I preferred canoes on rivers, and I had a limited experience walking. The country was wild to the limits of the term. It would demean such a world to call it pre-Columbian. It was twenty times older than that, having assumed its present form ten thousand years ago.

#38

The tundra is not topography, but a mat of vegetation. It runs up the sides of prodigious declivities as well as across the broad plains. There are three types of tundra: wet, moist, and alpine.

#39

The leaves of Labrador tea, when crushed in the hand, smelled like a turpentine. The cranberries were early and sweeter than they would be six months later, when they freeze on the vine. Bears like overwintered berries.

#40

The land is fragile, but it is also unpeopled and extremely rugged. It covers tens of thousands of square miles and is so vast that if anyone could figure out how to steal Italy, Alaska would be a good place to hide it.

#41