Coming into the Country, John McPhee
He cut a short piece of tape and laid it over a particularly open break in the hull of Snake Eyes, then put a longer strip over that. "These trips are not fail-safe," he went on. "You can get hurt and not get attention for several days. There's nothing you can do, short of staying home all the time."
"You come to the place on its terms," Kauffmann put in. "You assume the risk."
"When people come to Alaska, there's a sifting and winnowing process that follows," Pourchot said. "Some just make day trips out of Anchorage into the bush. Others go out for more than one day - fishing or whatever - but they stay in one place, at an established camp or lodge. After that come the hikers and canoers, and from them you get many stories of, say, the boat that breaks up and the guy who sits on the gravel bar for two weeks and walks out in five miserable days. He makes it, though. It's a rare day when somebody starves or bleeds to death. You're just not going to make a trip perfectly safe and still get the kind of trip you want. There are no what-if types out here. People who come this far have come to grips with that problem."
"You come to the place on its terms," Kauffmann put in. "You assume the risk."
"When people come to Alaska, there's a sifting and winnowing process that follows," Pourchot said. "Some just make day trips out of Anchorage into the bush. Others go out for more than one day - fishing or whatever - but they stay in one place, at an established camp or lodge. After that come the hikers and canoers, and from them you get many stories of, say, the boat that breaks up and the guy who sits on the gravel bar for two weeks and walks out in five miserable days. He makes it, though. It's a rare day when somebody starves or bleeds to death. You're just not going to make a trip perfectly safe and still get the kind of trip you want. There are no what-if types out here. People who come this far have come to grips with that problem."