Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place

by Annie Proulx

  It was a golden day of great silence, the wind quiet, the river a dark reflecting surface showing the buffy cliff. A large stone above the west end tower looked as though it might soon fall. All colors were pale yellow, faded ocher, dry-grass beige, pepper-seed white. There was snow high on the Sierra Madre around the source of Jack Creek. It wouldn’t be long. As always I was overcome by the beauty of the place and by the turning of the great wheel of seasonal change.

  On the first of November the forms came off the concrete. Now the house had a floor, but the framing lumber was not on the job site. Dennis headed back to Alaska until the framing work was ready to start. On the fourth of November it snowed off and on all day and the next day was cold, but not too cold to backfill the foundation. Somewhere in those chilly days the James Gang put a combination lock on the front gate. They gave me the combination but when I drove from Centennial to the site the long way round and dialed the combination the lock would not open. I didn’t realize one had to shove the lock hoops up into the works for the final click. I was not happy about the lock but supposed that the Gang was concerned about thievery, a problem with construction sites. The blame always falls on “kids” but there was at least one grown man in town who was observed at a party boldly stuffing an entire cold salmon under his jacket.

  November kept sliding by. Gerald and Jim constantly discussed how post and sill plate had to come together, how to join the trusses and floor. The roof, the trusses, the beams all were tricky, load-bearing crucial parts that had to join perfectly. And Gerald needed the floor beams which were somewhere in transit. Suddenly everything stopped. Harry’s roof engineer, J. Horne, decided that someone at the truss builders had miscalculated the load where the beams tied together. So now J. Horne and Jim were rethinking which beams must be used. Jim told Gerald that he would let him know the next day whether we could order and wait for the beams, or whether the beams were in Denver, or whether we had to have the beams manufactured. For once Gerald was upset but Jim, “my hero,” said Gerald, resolved the floor problem and calmed the combatants. The floor package would be at the site on the second of December. The roof package still hung fire. Now the time had come to ask Doug Ricketts down in the Texas Panhandle about his ideas for the kitchen and powder room cabinets.

  I met Doug Ricketts in the late 1990s when I was doing research in the archives of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas, for the novel That Old Ace in the Hole. I was interested in everything about the panhandle, and, as I often do, had fallen in love with the big cranky place. I was hungry to learn more. It was December and I came downstairs into the main hall of the museum to find everything in an uproar with people rushing back and forth, dragging boxes, moving tables and generally setting up booths and spaces for a Christmas fair sale. I took a quick walk through the exhibits although the event had not officially opened, seeing blown glass, ceramics, knitting, aprons, paintings of local landscapes, tree ornaments, bird carvings. Then, around one corner, I saw some wonderful furniture, elegant but sturdy, sensible but with a sense of humor and obviously made of old bits and pieces. I very much liked a dark green sideboard with a metal latticework on the doors. There was a tall cabinet with skinny legs and a round red metal top that looked like a young, redheaded dancer ready to clog—the piece was even called “barn dancer.” The maker of this furniture was nowhere around, but I wanted to buy the sideboard. Finally the director of the fair found him and I met Doug, lanky and tall, mild, soft-spoken. I bought the sideboard and we managed to get it into the back of my truck. I was headed for Wyoming and it seemed sensible to get it while I had transportation. But it didn’t stop there. I became friends with Doug and his newspaperwoman wife Kathy, both of them helpful in every way in showing me panhandle history and mores. Later their daughter Lindsay worked for me at Bird Cloud, helping put the bookshelves together, moving, sorting, cataloging and shelving my many books, doing research, keeping up with the office minutiae and giving me time to write. I was able to write the collection of stories Fine Just the Way It Is because Lindsay handled the day-to-day problems and did some research for me.

  December arrived cold and snowy. From early morning until dark between the chunk! chunk! of nail guns and the scream of power drills Gerald was drenched in a waterfall of details of wall finishes, hinges, straps, colors, jambs, shoji panels, tatami mats and Polygal windows. The roof, truss and floor beam assembly was still not resolved as the truss company representative said she had not received okays from all the players. Apparently the roof engineer was the holdout. No one knew why. We all pictured him as a wizened, crotchety old man who enjoyed making life difficult for others.

  The Warmboard was tentatively scheduled for delivery through the local lumber yard. Nothing in the construction world can be done directly between supplier and contractor; everything must go through a middleman which slows up the work and adds expense and another layer of bureaucratic confusion. Warmboard was to be the integral part of our radiant heating system. It would conduct heat from warm water in subfloor tubes to the floor surface—silent, efficient and even. The Warmboard itself also served as sub-flooring.

  On Pearl Harbor Day, it was thirty below zero and clear; the floor package was delivered. The next day the James Gang came over to Centennial for dinner and I made decisions on the bathroom tile, grey stone, nixed knotty pine as trim or anything else, having a dislike of it as reminiscent of moldy New England motels going for the antique look. My father liked knotty pine which struck him as old Yankee. It was time to choose the wood for the upstairs floor and Gerald had brought along Jim Petrie’s sample book. I thought that Alaskan yellow cedar, a rich golden color in the book, would be beautiful. I had bought some wrought-iron hinges in Santa Fe earlier expecting they could be used but Gerald said they would not work on house doors. They were better for outdoor gates. And although Catfish was a fine concrete worker he had not done a large colored and polished floor. At my request we would use Mr. A, a Fort Collins man, for the ground-level concrete floor. Two years before he had made a beautiful polished concrete floor in my oldest son’s house and we expected a similar result.

  Gerald and crew put up walls all through December in fluctuating weather. The tatami mats in the master bath area caused headaches in figuring the floor height, the set depth of the Japanese ofuro tub and the shower drop so that everything would come out level.

  Although the cold snap let go and the weather warmed up, the roof engineer and the truss company were still not in agreement. Dave was trying to track down sources and prices for Alaskan yellow cedar to use in the upstairs floors, stair treads, trim, doors. The truss company was still waiting for the roof engineer “to send detail on section 3 where hip line hits trusses.” The engineer apparently wanted to notch the cross-plied laminated veneer lumber (LVL) board to sit on the ledger board, but the truss company rep told Gerald that if he beveled the ledger board and added some bracketing to support, she would stamp plans & build. This was what Gerald had been waiting for and he said: “Don’t notch LVL.” But Jim Petrie agreed with the roof engineer about the notching. Gerald wrote, “I told him I’m going to do it [the truss company’s] way. We’ll see what I get away with.” Snowy, blowy days halted the work and after the snow stopped, the Gang had to plow and sweep and shovel before the nail guns could bang again. On December 30 the stamped and approved trusses arrived.

  A few days before Christmas Mr. Penn’s helper ran over the septic system’s inspection pipes. The Gang wasted the next day fixing the septic break and billed the fencer for it but waited two years to be paid. That’s a typical country habit, too.

  So ended 2005.

  CHAPTER 6

  When the Wind Blows

  2006

  When the wind blows in summer the entire landscape sways, grasses lean and twist, the willows thrash dementedly. In winter hurricane winds, loose snow loops sidewise in a grinding haze and the whole sky rolls like the ocean, hurling birds like rocks. At seventy, eighty, and one hun
dred miles an hour the winds pack concrete-hard drifts across the road. Feathers of snow curl off the top crests like the streamers off Everest. Only the cliff holds steady. It did not move through the winter of 2005–2006 though powerful gusts made it seem possible that great slabs of rock might shear off like icebergs from a calving glacier.

  The framing continued through cold and windy January and every few weeks the entire Gang went to the chiropractor—“the bone bender”—to have their bodies realigned. Some days were too cold for them to work. On my occasional visits to the site I watched the skeleton of the house grow ever higher, a bony structure like dinosaur bones against the cliff.

  The invisible curmudgeon, Harry’s roof engineer, called to say he found the James Gang’s detailed construction photographs on their Internet site extremely helpful, an innovation in the construction world. The yellow cedar floor samples were still to come and I was anxious to see them, but the weeks passed and they did not arrive. By the end of January, Gerald was thinking about the Polygal windows, a narrow row of blue along the upper story that would make the house look like an ocean liner. He planned to put some Polygals together to see if the real dimensions matched the specs, suspecting the real windows would be a quarter inch larger, a huge discrepancy in his book. We were all thinking about the downstairs polished concrete floor, and how great it would look.

  Early in the design process Harry and I had talked about shadow and sunlight. One of Harry’s specialties is the play of interesting luminosities. I very much like oddly shaped slivers of sunlight and moving shadows in a building, a kind of architectural calendar in the way the Chaco Canyon ruins indicate solstice and season. On the north side of the house Harry designed a long, second-story metal pan to catch rainwater and drain it away. After rain or snowmelt the reflection of water in the pan shimmered on the upstairs ceiling like liquid moiré. The play of light throughout the house became an ever-changing pleasure.

  In mid-February Gerald worked on the roof of the fishing room entryway in twenty-below-zero weather. That old enemy, the wind, rose and gusted to sixty miles an hour. The wind kept coming. And in the hurricane days the yellow cedar samples arrived. I bucked a hundred miles of strong gusts on I-80 to see them. They were a disappointing muddy grey, very unlike the shining gold in Jim’s sample book. We returned to Harry’s original suggestion of recycled southern pine.

  Brief runs of the painfully bright and cold Wyoming days that burn your eyes out of their sockets gave way within hours to new snowstorms. Heavy snow again stopped construction and brought back the sport of shoveling. Between storms Gerald and Dave worked on making the walls, hip roof, west window and metal pan.

  A few good days turned into a midmonth blizzard, but then came an unprecedented run of eleven sunny, warm days. The county road was still a mess of drifted ruts and somehow Gerald cajoled the plow operator into clearing the road as far as our gate. The Gang did prodigious amounts of work in this warm interlude sweeping snow away, building walls, framing the metal pan and milling a big log from their private stock to use as a tie beam in the family room. They put the beam in place and wrapped it in brown paper.

  In mid-April everyone associated with the house design and construction gathered to see what had been done. Uphill Bob and I drove over from Centennial. Doug Ricketts brought samples for the cabinet doors. We were all delighted by the bright stain colors, silky finish, metal of various shades and textures set in brilliantly stained wood frames, colors that complemented the variegated granite countertop. Rather than restrict the cabinets to one set of colors we decided on an assortment for a very high-colored kitchen. I loved the colors then and I love them now but they are not the prevailing market taste of bland monochrome cabinets featured in home moderne magazines. I thought I wanted a topaz- or ocher-colored floor, perhaps to echo the golden-grassed landscape, but Doug’s cabinet door samples sat uneasily beside yellow hues. Harry suggested a terra-cotta red and he was right.

  During the visit, as always, the site was spotless—no piles of rebar, no heaps of wood scraps, no mounds of dirt, no strew of nails and screws. Scrap wood went into a barrel as soon as it was made, the building was swept daily, all was remarkably tidy producing an atmosphere of control and calm, in marked contrast to the messy, noisy confusion of most building enterprises. The James Gang seemed to read each other’s minds and operated in a Zen-like cloud of quiet concentration.

  Harry and Jim liked what they saw. The construction was of high quality, every joint true and fair, the top of the house not an eighth of an inch off from the base. The window openings enclosed the magnificent views of the cliffs and the clerestory windows brought softened light. Everyone took turns climbing into the recess for the Japanese tub and imagining how it would be. The view from the tub recess was yellow cliff, gliding birds, wind-driven cloud.

  Betty, Dennis’s wife, who had worked hard carpentering since October, went back to Alaska and on the next day Deryl and I flew to Scottsdale for a visit to the Mayo Clinic. Deryl had some mysterious disease for which he had been given four or five different frightening diagnoses, depending on which Wyoming clinic or doctor he visited. Not knowing what was wrong must have been nerve-wracking. And I had a problem with my right hip and wondered if it was arthritis or worse. The advantage of going to the Mayo was that everything from tests to surgery could be done on-site; in Wyoming medical care involved a tremendous amount of driving with test centers scattered over hundreds of miles, bad weather often canceling appointments.

  Deryl and I rented a red car in Scottsdale. The Phoenix-Scottsdale area was difficult to reconnoiter, with endemic highway construction, and a tangle of similarly named streets, avenues and roads. The first evening we discovered a good place with a large tree-shaded patio for dinner and margaritas in Scottsdale’s Old Town section. It was warm, with a slight breeze instead of a freezing Wyoming gale. Deryl was anxious, not wanting to hear what he thought he was going to hear.

  I saw a doctor who said my hip problem was bursitis, which would likely respond to treatment and care. X-rays showed the joints were fine. Deryl discovered he did not have bone cancer with six months to live, but probably a problem with certain nerves; the medications he had been given up north were slowly killing him. He took a massive battery of tests over the next few days, including a visit to the Smoking Doctor, who did not harangue him about smoking but expressed calm disapproval. Deryl claimed many doctors have congratulated him on not smoking, and remarked that his lungs show no signs of deterioration.

  As soon as we returned to Wyoming the weather worked itself up, buffeting the site with seventy-mile-an-hour winds. The weather bureau’s definition of a hurricane wind is seventy-four miles per hour, but such violent weather is so common in Wyoming everyone just says “really windy” and lets it go at that. The next day it snowed too heavily for roof work and the Gang spent a warm day in Gerald’s shop shaping tie beams and making the never-ending phone calls for shipping dates and materials inquiries.

  The wind kept coming for the rest of the month, but the windows arrived and were roped to the walls awaiting installation. With the help of a rented boom truck and operator the beams for the family room went in place.

  Gerald in particular, but all the James Gang, had a way with wild animals. Indeed, rabbits were more or less living in the still-open house. On the first day of May 2006 they (the Gang, not the rabbits) started putting plywood on the roof, a big job, dangerous when the wind picked up. I constantly worried that skinny Gerald would be carried miles away clinging to a sheet of plywood. They set a date for the wizened curmudgeon, J. Horne, to visit the site. Every day they shifted objects, trailers, piles of material to make room for incoming. The resident jackrabbits rolled their eyes seductively at Gerald and lay on their backs like cats.

  Everything was blue board, sleepers, brackets, plywood and work on the pan. On the appointed day for the roof engineer’s inspection visit, the sun was shining and the air balmy. We all expected a grouchy old bald head but h
e turned out to be young, magazine-model handsome, and very open and cooperative. He said all that he inspected was good. He even asked for constructive criticism and Gerald was pleased to show him “a better system of rafter soffit tails, that he can use on other sites.” After these pleasant days the weather did a Wyoming thing and flared up, so hot that clouds were a relief. I headed for New York to talk about Jackson Pollock and the influence of the southwest Indians on some of his early work. When I got back the steel-clad exterior doors were in, very handsome and giving the house a feeling of solid strength that went well with its massive, sculptural personality.

  I planned a trip to the Haystack Mountains in the Red Desert at the end of May and invited the James Gang to take a break and come along. The geologist Charles Ferguson came over and met the James Gang while we were packing for our camping trip. The photographer Marty Stupich was already out in the Red Desert and we would meet him at a prearranged place. Uphill Bob joined us.

  We threaded the cat’s cradle of roads and obscure tracks and reached the Haystacks around noon. We set up camp, then explored, looking for minerals and fossils before cooking dinner and building the campfire. A wild stallion showed up in an aggressive mood. He snorted a few times, then galloped away. Overnight the wind began to rise and by the next morning we could look south toward Colorado and see great plumes of dust bowling along the ground like desert djinns. There was an uneasy, ghost-ridden feel to the place. These dust devils were not uncommon in the desert, but had increased in number as gas energy drill rigs and work trucks broke up the cryptobiotic crust that holds the fine soil in place. We escaped from the wind by going down into a huge wash framed by sandstone towers topped with pink hats and continued to explore. The wash was packed with eroded caves, strange formations, pebbles and domes, gullies and pale walls. I saw a parent hawk carry a rabbit to its nest behind one of the towers.