The calf was cold and frightened and did not dart or bound from him as I thought it might. The men on our side signaled Peter who lowered another set of ropes. They tangled once on the knobby edge of a rock, jerked free and dropped down. Still, Joseph had to reach out and grab the lines and I held my breath as his bad leg buckled and he slipped, the rope around his middle holding him, strained against the side, as his legs went into the surging water.
A shout from our side signaled Peter who eased the team forward. The ropes jerked Joseph up like a marionette. “Not too far! He’ll hit his head!” someone yelled. We signaled. Peter stopped the team, and Joseph stood bent, head intact, once again.
“Ready!” he shouted when he’d wrapped the calf. He tugged a signal on the rope and those on my side signaled Peter who gave the order to bring the calf on up. It rose, stiff-legged, bawling as it bounced against the side, caught once on the same knobby rock and then was pulled free, settled on solid ground. A cheer rose up as one man carried the calf away from the river’s edge, walking it back to the barn.
“One to go!” Peter shouted and again the crews moved to Joseph’s line. The team pulled. The men watched the ropes strain and tug. The muscles of the fishermen, familiar with the power needed to lift a sixty-pound salmon from the boiling falls, felt the effort and exertion of lifting four times that weight—were glad the team was there to do it.
Coming up was twice as hard. The rope was slippery and even in that short time, showed signs of fraying from the sharp lava rocks. At the point I knew he was safe—men were cheering and clapping him and each other on the back—relief washed over me, then great joy.
His safety gave me pause as I watched the men peel off his ropes, hand him a blanket. Why would my husband risk his life for something that, while dear, did not compare with his worth, his value to me and to so many others?
I asked him that later when I walked with him to the calf barn to check on the other survivor.
“Better than robbing banks,” he said.
I missed his meaning. “No,” I corrected. “I want to know why you did that today, risked dying, just for a calf.”
“Better than robbing banks,” he repeated. “Or driving hell-bent down the ridge road on a wagon load of dynamite. Got the same inside push, same flood of energy that those might bring but with less danger, really gaining something for the risk.”
I was sorting out his words, keeping quiet for a change. “Would you have me take the risk of driving cattle from here to Utah? Suppose that would gain the feeling.” He ran his hands over the calf, checking for bruises, dabbed some liniment on an open wound. “There’s something rich,” he said holding his stomach, “inside. When you can do it together. Have something to accomplish, a goal, and then put your minds and muscles into one track and everyone gets there, together, at the end. Gets there because you were together and knew where you were going. There’s something really good about that feeling.”
Swallows nested in the barn pitch. They swooped and dipped, chattered above us. I was aware of warm animal smells, the presence of my husband. He took my hand and we walked out through the massive double doors left open in August to cool the barn. From the doorway we could see the bridge and the inn, the cliff orchard as we called it now, small trees dotting the red rocks with green. Indians were back on their scaffoldings, women off to the side next to their pink salmon halves turning red on the drying racks. The sun set and a pink glow hovered over the canyon.
“Even this,” he said. “We could have done none of this alone. Without others.”
“Without your energy and vision,” I said. “And God’s plan and blessing.”
“And it’s twice the blessing that he would give us this, all the people and resources we need, and then let us have it not just as paupers, barely scraping by, but richly, able to give to others. ‘Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.’ ” His eyes had a faraway look. “Turners gave me that verse, and I’ve hung on to it.”
At the bridge he stopped, looked up again at the cliff orchard. Alice still tended the sweetgrape arbor. It had become her favorite haunt when she wasn’t fishing. Joseph stared at it. “There’s one more thing,” he said, “that I promised we would do together. And we can now. No reason not to.”
“What?” I asked, not sure I wished to hear the answer. “I already have my family, everything I want.”
“Build that house,” he said, a catch in his throat. “I want to build a grand house to sleep fifty or more. Solid redwood, porches and gables and all the latest conveniences.” I stared at him, shook my head, and smiled. This man with his visions. “Most importantly,” he added, looking down at me with that twinkle in his blue eyes so I knew that it would happen, “I want a room large enough to hold a crowd, one for you and me to dance in.”
THE DANCE
Like spi’lya’s, “coyote’s,” winter fur, his hair has grayed. It’s thinning, and what he’s missing from the top now cascades from his chin, a muffler for his mouth. His eyes droop a bit and his left hand has taken on a shake. But this November, when he turns sixty, I suspect he’ll load his new Winchester Model ’92 and ride the hills above Tygh Valley or scour the ravines of Buck Hollow and bring home another buck. He does so love to hunt. Still wears his red wool vest and turquoise bola for the occasion. Some things have not changed despite the years since first our paths crossed not far from here, near the reptile pile, just beyond these falls. I still marvel at how he has seeped into my life, like the snowmelt of the mountains, spreading new over old.
Challenge is still his constant companion, the very newest being this house or hotel some call it. “Sherar House” it’s known as. It took nearly a year to complete and it stands as a monument to his love of building. Risk, too, times being shaky now, in ’93. But mostly, Sherar House is a symbol of a man’s great love wrapped up in a promise kept.
Joseph began constructing it for real that very evening of the calf rescue. When we finished our walk, he dusted off his sketch book and began drawing. He showed me designs of homes he once admired back east, doodles of ideas of his own.
A big home had always been a fantasy for me, one nurtured that one day of closeness with my mother where I danced alone and thought of marriage and my future children. I had never dreamed I’d see a home large enough to sleep one hundred, though after seeing what my husband could accomplish I should have been forewarned.
I wish that I could see as Joseph does, see the lines and angles set against a backdrop of his choosing. I close my eyes, imagine walls, a porch or roof. They never look the same to me as when the structure’s finished.
“We’ll visit places,” Joseph said. “Make a picnic of it.” And so before we asked the death-defying dynamite crew to blast the basement from the rocks, before Peter’s crew began framing up the walls, we visited other houses in the region. We made an adventure of our search, my husband honoring my need for information, my joy in anticipation almost greater than the thing itself.
A favorite house belonged to John Moore, just north of the Grass Valley country. Californians, they’d sold out an interest in a gold mine and arrived with $100,000 and a wish to stay. They bought land outright, brought their cattle, and built a two-story Italianate home with single bay windows on both stories and gables and a chandelier that would turn an Astor’s head. I especially liked the transoms over each door that twisted on a pin to help circulate the air and heat. Painted with sepia brown, they bore a spider web design and made me think immediately of Sunmiet and her dreamcatchers. They are repeated in our home.
They also planted trees about their house. Guess we all do that here, so few natural trees grow. Mrs. Moore had special problems what with her thirty-five cats and had to wrap the trunks in burlap to protect them. Spirit has left our trees alone so we have expanded our orchards.
Joseph wanted a fifty-room house. Fifty was the critical number for nurturing profits he told me. Fifty hardly sounded like a “home” to me. So we settled
for a house with a basement under dining rooms and kitchens, laundry rooms and pantries, an office and large saloon and guest rooms all with linen closets numbering thirty-three.
“I’ll not have this built as close to the river as your barn,” I said, firm.
“The rimrocks limit us,” he said, showing me as we walked beside the rope-like lava that had been the backdrop for our life. “And we can’t go up much past three stories I don’t believe. Guests won’t climb those stairs; help neither.”
But he agreed, we would not build right at the river’s edge though where the house sits there’s barely a wagon’s width distance from the porch to those turbulent river waters.
It is the largest house between California and the Columbia River, a fact that tickles my husband no end. But then, he does not have to clean it.
I do find pleasure in seeing a building rise from nothing. It is much like watching flowers grow. The ground is cleared, a seed is planted, and we await the push through earth. It appears, fresh with dew each morning, each day having changed it by another leaf or two. Sherar House rose from the flat rocks beside the river in much the same way.
The foundation is of native stones, three feet thick. The basement is the coolest place around on hot summer days though I confess, I always scan it well for reptiles before I step my moccasins on the floor. We keep ice there, under sawdust just as Frederic had, and chip away at it through the year. It serves us well for iced teas, lemonade and the ice-creams we often make. It’s almost too cold to store the peaches and apples in but is a good place to scuttle to during thunderstorms. We still keep the melons in the hay barn sunk into the grass from Finnigan, and when we pluck them out at Christmas time they’re just as pink and fresh as newly pulled.
All the lumber for Sherar House came from Redwood City, California. Joseph ordered horse teams loaded with redwood brought north to build our dream. We encountered our old friend J. W. in the process, passed into his seventies and still traveling, now driving freighters instead of leading mules. “For something to do,” he said, adjusting his smudged spectacles, “since the wife died.”
If we could have constructed the hotel and done nothing else, our life would have been so simple. Why I should have expected such indicates I’m growing older, wanting life to sit beside me on a porch swing instead of pulling me into rough and tumble as it does, like children playing statue on a summer’s eve. Even with the means to pay others to perform the work, the building engaged us. Other constructing did too.
At Finnigan, Joseph built a massive hay barn. It also housed a hundred sheep, as many calves, and stood a team and wagon, too. When that was finished, he built a smaller barn across The Dalles Military Highway. It is my favorite of the barns he built. Twenty cows can stand and chew their cuds in stanchions while calves wear barbed blabs forged up by the farrier to keep them from nursing while we milk. I still consider Finnigan mine and do not mind at all the time it takes for me to ride there, check on cows or calves, confer with Jim Dennis, or eat his famous sour dough biscuits while we talk of bulls and calves. And while I would not change my living in the canyon of the falls, I do enjoy the mountains sparkling in the summer heat or watching the weather roll in across the wheatfields from a distance. These are views afforded only when I leave the river canyon of my belonging and travel up the twisting grade, following the ridgetop on the way to my green river.
Because of my traveling back and forth the fourteen miles or so between Sherar’s Bridge and Finnigan, Joseph decided that a decent road ought to be built up the grade, one that could still use the Buck Hollow bridge but take people north toward The Dalles Road better, let them use a buggy if they choose. Of course, he didn’t expect to be thanking the Lord over that bridge nor rebuilding it either.
Having thought about the road, he began it. A trained engineer from Oregon State came down to see the work my husband did and he was more than complimentary. “As good as with surveying instruments,” he said. “Better in some places where you’ve followed the contours of the ridges but fixed the pitch better for horses and wagons.” He rode up the grade in a buggy, amazed that my husband and his crew of Indian workers had made this winding road ease its way up the ridge above Buck Hollow, rising like a lazy snake two thousand feet upward in just a mile or so. “Sure you’ve had no schooling in surveying?” he asked. My husband beamed.
His schooling has been seeing, walking, watching, learning from the land about him. He looks to work with the rocks and hills and natural grasses, not against them; ponders why a grade’s washed out then fixes it, being always gentle with the land leading to the falls he’s come to love.
So when I make my trips to Finnigan and on to visit Ella, I have the finest road. And two fine bridges to go across to reach Sherar House, though after the difficulty we had last spring I wasn’t sure if I would ever see again those bridges or our fine hotel.
Joseph oversaw construction even while we collected tolls, served meals, and performed those daily drudgeries of living.
Joseph wished the tightest house, so the hotel is held together with fine wood pegs. Redwood glows everywhere. The maids keep it all shiny—inside walls, wainscoting, even the shutters on the dozens of windows, and the porches—of which there are several. During the season, Joseph displays his largest antlers from the second-story porch facing the river. And on the Fourth of July, we shoot flares and Tai’s firecrackers out over the river to the delight of all the children.
At the toll paying end are bay windows. It’s inviting, I like to think, and folks stop and count their toll in the bucket. Some come inside for a shot of C. J. Stubling’s whiskey or a piece of fresh peach pie in season. They all don those buckskin moccasins.
I have weakened in my old age, and now let the setter sleep inside and sweep his tail across the hardwood floors. Spirit has managed to elude the coyotes and still be with us, a cat alone. “We live so far out we need our own tom cat,” my husband says.
We will have Tai cooking here until he dies I’m sure, having added the latest cooking range to the large kitchen, boasting inside running water—enough to steam the plates. Two pantries, one dark one, to keep grains and flours in and all the weevils out. And a second dining room to seat all the help. Especially Anne who now directs their labors.
The water is a convenience found in few hotels. Each floor has a bathing room for tubbing privacy. And the latest in commodes. We’ve moved the outhouse seating in. No more rustling up moccasins for a night walk or creaking about in the dark for a thunder bucket. Most of the guests’ rooms are on the second level and the housekeepers and servers that don’t come across from the summer camps, sleep on the third.
When Joseph first showed me how the cliff orchard would be connected to the house, I was skeptical, but his design is perfect. He’s built a small bedroom with a porch facing the lava ledge. And from the porch my husband has created what has become his trademark: a bridge. We can cross from the hotel to our ledge garden, pick peaches and apples, and in the fall, gather sweetgrapes from Alice’s flourishing arbor.
That man and his bridges! Who could have known how those bridges would impact our lives, taking us from here to there, across difficult waters. Bridges are a part of us, my husband’s dreams, even our hopes for a family. God always provided someone or something along our path to make needed bridges across life’s paths.
At Sunmiet’s mother’s burial not long ago, the elder spoke of bridges, too. At the dressing, Morning Dove’s body was draped in white buckskins and wrapped in a colorful blanket. We mourners then each picked up handfuls of earth and dropped them on Morning Dove’s body, walking by the gravesite, women first, then men. And when we finished, the elder spoke his prayer. “Death is just a bridge between this world and the next,” Indian Peter said. “It is not to fear. We will not be on this bridge for as long as the eagle flies, but only for a moment. Then we will pass over to those waiting on the other side.” I could picture Rachel, Pauline, and Loyal, even Papa, arms outstretched,
waiting.
I thought of those words earlier this June, too, when J. W. and I stood near the Buck Hollow bridge. I’d been at Finnigan with trusty Bandy, my bay gelding. Patsy, the Irish Setter, panted beside me on the buggy’s leather seat, her tongue dripping onto a bouquet of wildflowers that slowly wilted beside me—evidence I’d been dallying along the creek that perfect June day in 1893. High rimrocks lined the river canyon on either side and sliced cleanly into the royal lupine blue sky.
I took a brief midday break beneath the cottonwood trees and let my hat lie in the grassy shade. Even worked my knife on a soft wood block, carving. I didn’t stay long. Joseph would be coming back from the flour mill or perhaps return early from work on the grade and I could meet him at the house for supper if I hurried.
I met J. W. and his freighter at the Buck Hollow bridge, just before the place where the clear stream joins the river, below the twisting, swirling falls and below our own Sherar’s Bridge. Pure coincidence that I should meet him there beside the river. He was ahead of me on the grade. When he saw me behind him, he pulled up, motioned me beside his freighter, and we chatted a bit. He didn’t rub his eyes, not once.
I guess I’d forgotten how kind his leathered face was, how broad his smile. He squinted his sun-hardened eyes at me and I wondered if he still saw a sassy girl sitting beside a dog or if his memory had grown older too and so he saw me as the busy, bony matron I’ve become.
“Good timing, Missus,” he said, touching his fingers to his hat in greeting. “Go on ahead. No reason for you to ride drag.”
“Why, thank you, J. W.,” I said, still somewhat formal as his presence always made me think of Papa, too. “I’ve done my share of tasting dust today. We could certainly use some rain up the hollow, dry as it is.” I shaded my eyes with my hand, aware that the sun prepared to set behind the rimrocks as we spoke.
A Sweetness to the Soul Page 43
