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Soon after the Alaska
Native Claims Settlement Act was passed, in 1971, which
resulted in the reorganization of Alaskan land on a vast and
complex scale, I developed a strong desire to go there, stay
there, and write about the state in its transition. When I
asked William Shawn, The
New Yorker’s editor, if he would approve and underwrite
the project, his response was firm and negative. Why? Not
because it was an unworthy subject, not because The
New Yorker was over budget, but because he didn’t want
to read about any place that cold. He had a similar reaction
to
Newfoundland
(“Um, uh, well, uh, is it cold there?”).
Newfoundland
, like
Florida
, is more than a thousand miles below the
Arctic Circle
, but Mr. Shawn shivered at the thought of it. I never went to
work in
Newfoundland
, but, like slowly dripping water, I kept mentioning
Alaska
until at last I was in
Chicago
boarding Northwest 3.
The first
long river trip I made up there was on the Salmon and the
Kobuk, on the south slope of the
Brooks Range
. At some point, I learned and noted that the forest Eskimos
of that region valued as a great delicacy the fat behind a
caribou’s eye. Pat Pourchot, of the federal Bureau of
Outdoor Recreation (in recent years
Alaska
’s commissioner of natural resources), had organized the
river trip and collected the provisions. Pourchot’s fields
of special
knowledge did not include food. For breakfasts, he brought
along a large supply of Pop-Tarts encrusted in pink icing and
filled with raspberry jam. This caused me, in the manuscript
ultimately delivered to the magazine, to present from the
banks of the
Kobuk
River
a philosophical choice:
Lacking a toaster, and
not caring much anyway, we eat them cold. They invite a
question. To a palate without bias – the palate of an
open-minded Berber, the palate of a travelling Martian –
which would be the more acceptable, a pink-icinged Pop-Tart
with raspberry filling (cold) or the fat gob from behind a
caribou’s eye?
There was
in those days something known as “the Shawn proof.” From
fact-checkers, other editors, and usage geniuses known as
“readers,” there were plenty of proofs, but this austere
one stood alone and seldom had much on it, just isolated
notations of gravest concern to Mr. Shawn. If he had an
aversion to cold places, it was as nothing beside his
squeamishness in the virtual or actual presence of uncommon
food. I had little experience with him in restaurants, but
when I did go to a restaurant with him his choice of entrée
ran to cornflakes. He seemed to look over his serving flake by
flake to see if any were moving. On the Shawn proof, beside
the words quoted above, he had written in the wide, white
margin – in the tiny letters of his fine script – “the
pop tart.”
-- John McPhee, “My Life List,” The
New Yorker, Sept. 3 & 10, 2007
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