Summary of John McPhee's Coming into the Country

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669367093

IRB Media

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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