The Ragged Edge

ALASKA's not just a pipe-welder's dream. Writers, too, have trekked North, seeking new horizons and best-selling gold in an unexplored territory. Those who care to learn what life in Alaska is really like will have to end their leather-upholstered musings about the wilds with Joe McGinnis' Going to Extremes.

McGinnis's idea is not totally original; the New Yorker's John McPhee, perhaps the most highly-praised non-fiction writer in America, travelled above the Arctic circle to find the subject matter for Coming Into the Country, his account of the Alaskan wilderness. There have been others, but McPhee was the most notable. His account was of the wild North and the wild people who lived there, full of mines and surveyors and lumberjacks and fishermen and bears.

Yet somehow, the older, tamer forests of the Berkshires and the Adirondacks suit McPhee better than the wild barren extremities of the 49th state, America's last frontier. McPhee is too much the Princetonian descendant of the painstaking Yankee silversmith. He crafts nice pieces for nice people to read in their nice New Yorkers when they're through looking at the cartoons, inferring polite, understated meanings with a precise style and weightless control. But one knows his Alaska is an idealized one to read about in front of the fire on a cold Greenwich, Conn. night accompanied by 12-year-old bourbon. One knows his flawless Alaska book, while making lyrical, profound reading, misses much of Alaska, for few there give a damn about art, and fewer still have any particular use for politeness.

Unlike McGinnis, best known for his classic, The Selling of the President 1968, McPhee is not a journalist. He is rather an impeccable craftsman, a quiet, careful worker whose pieces are intricate productions of exemplary quality. He is patient, willing to wait until surfaces dissolve and deeper meanings emerge. McPhee never really raises his perfectly modulated voice.

But McGinnis, like a Studs Terkel of the Arctic, fills his latest book with the words and appearances of people: the restless, the desperate, the shifty-eyed, the rowdy, the stupid, the tough, the stubborn, the stoned and the drunk. He listens to the beery yarns, life histories, and why-we-came-to-Alaska expoundings of a motley assortment of fast dealers, Dangerous Dan McGrews, crazed clergymen, plain folks, hippies keeping warm and dry and happy snorting cocaine, bartenders, flinty newspaper editors, pipeline workers, various well-and-not-so-well-intentioned politicians, naturalists and whores. All of them seem to lean close and talk confidentially to McGinnis the outsider.

WHILE McPhee subtly leads one to gentle meditation and an appreciation of sanity in even the wildest frontiersman, McGinnis plunges into the underside of the Alaska myth, where the American Dream in its last pure expression rips rapidly across the forests and tundra in an oily fever of seedy opportunism, watching, listening, talking, poking around. He observes everything, and lets it all accumulate. He records demythologized Alaska more obnoxious and squalid than it is majestic and forbidding. Along with the peaks, glaciers, freedom and big bucks, he gives us the alcoholic cabin fever of the Arctic winter, the grimy linoleum floors of numberless joints like the Northern Saloon in Nome where half the boozers sling .357 Magnums as equipment for late night poker, and the glazy-eyed dissolution of the Eskimos who can only watch the white conquest from the alleys while hanging around getting tight and quietly hysterical.

McGinnis is not the writer McPhee is. Going to Extremes is little more than hastily scrawled notes on paper wrinkled from being stashed in the author's backpack during a year's travel. It's all grubby and tough, rambling along with McGinnis as he trudges and airlifts back and forth across Alaska. The style is rough, unfluent, and unpolished, with sentence fragments and single words often strung together or chopped up in an outdoorsy gruffness that is quite suitable for the ramshackle and breathtaking world McGinnis explores, though too often it sounds like plain old bad writing. But throughout there is ruddy, workmanlike honesty. Most importantly, McGinnis' rich reporting presents the whole picture with unblinking insistence on things as they are.

MCGINNIS stuffs the book with telling snapshots. Though he doesn't travel with any particular theme in mind, the pictures in his montage, realized in great, often tragic detail, are shrewdly observed. There is the casually inhuman toughness of the last frontier, where, when a drunk, drooling Indian lurches and almost collapses on the author's table in a diner his companion barely looks up as he says "Fuck off, partner." There is the disturbing impact of the short-sighted greed of the oil industry:

(Prudoe Bay) was just a lot of machinery hauled up and plopped down on the permafrost to make as much money as possible as quickly as it could. And the men were there only to make sure the machinery did its job. Alaska was not part of their dream. It had never been, for them, a goal, a destination, a frontier for them to explore as they explored new levels of themselves. It was just like Saudi Arabia Indonesia, East Texas, the North Sea--a place under which oil happened to be. They were an occupying army, bloodless mercenaries.

He shows us the majestic sights, the paralyzing winter, and the ever-present threat of loneliness and boredom that can drive a quiet little clergyman to publish a newsletter containing the sentence, "And what this INSANE crypto-Jewish riff-raff has planned for Homer and its citizens is no less than what the same antichrist Jewish riff-raff did to Russia. "He gives us details like a bar sign reading, "TAKE OFF YOU GODDAMNED BOOTS."

He has a wryly detached wit. He says a man's lips scarcely moved, "as if he were keeping them poised for the next sip of alcohol, which, it seemed, was never more than a few seconds away," and describes a group of a "new strain of flower child...these were flower children who wanted to get rich. Hippies with Rotarian hearts." He asks, "Wasn't uncouthness--or at least the option of being uncouth--the whole point of living in Nome?"

McGinnis' book, like its subject, is unfinished. He packs it with the energy, diversity, and extremity of our last frontier, but he leaves it too raw. It becomes construction noise and restless people passing through. Alaska has not made any sense of itself yet, and neither has McGinnis. There is too little attempt to understand what he has recorded. Nevertheless, he presents the real scene, the graceless complete one. It has the robust glow and toughness of the Alaska that is one huge ragged edge of America.