BREAKFAST

  
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