McPhee went north in the mid-seventies, right as the Land Claims Act carved the state up and everybody was fighting over what would be park, what would be Native, what would stay open. The book comes in three parts. First, a canoe trip down a clear river in the Brooks Range with a survey crew, where a grizzly walks up on them and the whole trip reorganizes around bears. Then a rambling search for a site for a new state capital, which is really Alaska arguing with itself. Then the long one, out in Eagle on the upper Yukon, a town of maybe a hundred people, where he lets miners, trappers, and back-to-the-landers explain why they came and what it costs to stay.
Coming Into the Country