by Annie Proulx
There was a small cemetery on the bluff above the crossing, fenced to provide some protection from the ever-present vandals. Something there is in the human character that burns to destroy the past or carry it home. A few hundred yards from the trail was a steep and narrow declivity like something out of a Tony Hillerman story. We inched our way down and walked along the overgrown trail below the bluff, then returned along the riverbank. Archaeologist Dudley, who was with us, looked closely at the bank where the river had eaten away the soil and found a handsome stone knife. Later, in the Red Desert, we found stone tools and an exquisite Eden projectile point of deep red stone, a rarity, the continent’s most beautful prehistoric point. I found several fossilized bones. The University of Wyoming had no paleontologist, so I took them to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History; the largest piece was the toe bone of an Eocene mammal, impossible to identify without a tooth.
On a Saturday in early June, when the wind was unaccountably calm, we drove up to the top of the Bird Cloud cliff. There were plenty of mosquitoes. Prairie dogs sat straight up, one foot in the burrow, watching us warily. The cushion plants along the edge of the cliff and down a sloping section of its face bloomed thousands of puffy mounds of tiny flowers, white, blue, yellow, deep pink. I especially liked the Eriogonums, wild buckwheat. Indian paintbrush was everywhere in profuse four-color blossom, goldflower and yellow stonecrop, miner’s candles and phlox, white forget-me-nots and intense purple-blue lupines. On the way back down to the house in late afternoon we passed the great horned owl’s favorite log, the owl dozing until it would be time to get up and terrorize the night.
We sat by the river slapping mosquitoes that ignored our smudge fire smoke and cheered on the swallow ballet pursuing the insects over the river corridor. Knots of bird exploded, coalesced, twisted in ribbons, doubled and slid sideways, mounted in loose circles, became winged bobbins hurtling through a random warp of mosquitoes. Their numbers increased until, in the orange afterglow of sunset, thousands and thousands were gliding past the cliff’s vertical canyons and crevasses.
The next day Uphill Bob from Centennial came over and we put up the bluebird houses he had made, rather fancy, one with an inset glass eye that reminded me of the nineteenth-century whaling ships that had heavy glass prisms set flush in the decks (flat side up) to admit light to the crews’ quarters below. At dusk I went up again to the top of the cliff. The sky was filling with clouds trailing long fingers like rake tines. A golden eagle flew past at eye level, a limp prairie dog in its talons.
Lindsay continued to work on cataloging and shelving the books, two systems that did not match up very well. Now, years later, I wish we had cataloged the books differently. The database is awkward to use. Categories blur and overlap, and it is difficult to find the book I want unless I remember the author’s name or the exact title. I often do not, looking instead for a book I remember as having a pale blue cracked spine and standing near a volume on raptors. One of my dreams, not likely to be realized, is to have the library recataloged by a librarian who will ignore my wrongheaded ideas about shelving categories.
The summer quickly heated up and, as usual, no one could remember the bitter winter storms. In mid-June, when the river was high and galloping along, we floated it with my wildlife habitat friend Ron Lockwood and the ornithologist Andrea Orabona who was doing an eagle count. Ron’s truck’s U-joint had seized up on the way in and while we looked for eagles Dave and Deryl got it repaired.
Hot, hot, hot, edging into the nineties, days for cold watermelon down by the river. And when night fell the heat trapped inside the house was terrific. The south-facing Polygal windows invited the burning rays in and the walls held the heat. It didn’t seem to cool off at night until Harry said to open the downstairs windows on the north side and the upstairs south windows every evening. This started a column of deliciously cool air moving through the house. The Polygal windows had another annoying feature: the frames expanded in the morning and contracted at night with sudden loud pops and snaps as though someone were trying to break in with a pry bar. Harry said the cure was to loosen the frames which were likely too tight. So once again Gerald climbed up and loosened the frame screws a little. The violent snapping subsided to soft coughs but never completely disappeared. On hot sunny days the Polygal frames still make a slight shifting sound as if they were trying to stretch.
Day after day siding went on, the constant pow! pow! of the nail gun more familiar than the wind. Gerald kept on working through the heat and four days after the July Fourth parades and fireworks the siding was finished. It was time for the chinkers to come and fill in the interstices between the planks. And Lindsay, after four months of pain, finally had surgery on her broken arm which had not healed.
The electrician discovered that Mr. Solar had committed a code violation in the mechanical room, and repaired it. When Gerald called Mr. Solar he tried to brush it off with a comment to the effect, So what, it’s Wyoming, isn’t it? The belief many outsiders have is that anything goes in a place with a rough-and-tumble reputation, but that only applies to the cow business. Many Wyoming entities and businesses are punctilious about rules. A few weeks later the electrician asked the state inspector to check the solar installation work and his repair. Everything passed.
Chink, chink, chink, chinking, chink some more, chink on, chink from ten until six, chink in the moonlight, chink, order more chink material, clean the chink gun, chink, chink, chink. Ye gods, chink on, ever on. If the guys were sick of chinking I was desperate for them to get done even though there was no noise in the work. It seemed eternities had passed since Catfish had poured the slab. The chinking seemed the longest and most tedious part of the entire construction menu, but in late July it was truly finished. Almost.
Gerald, in one of his flourishes, had put up a yardarm extending out from under the eaves at the east end of the house—a sheltered vantage point for an owl. The owls liked the house but they spurned the yardarm in preference to the roof ridge above my bedroom. The resident great horned owls disappeared the next year and a pair of barn owls moved onto the island to make the nights hideous with their croaking calls. One twilight evening, watching the resident jackrabbit gobbling clover, I noticed one of the owls teetering on the top strand of a wire fence around the front “sharp” garden (so called because it had a dozen yuccas in it). Then the owl launched itself at the rabbit, twisting down on it, and from the roof ridge came the owl’s mate from a different direction. But the rabbit did some pretzel-like acrobatics and escaped the double sets of talons. “It’s harder than it looks,” I said to the owls who flew away. The rabbit disappeared into the shadows and the next evening returned to the clover patch. Just another day at the office.
After the chinking marathon it was finally time to put the rusted metal siding on the entryways. A sheet of old barn metal lying on the ground does not look like the stuff of dreams, but in combination with the plank siding and neatly enclosing the entryways it looked entirely right. We were all so pleased with the success of the entryways that we went back to the top of the cliff, archaeological clues marking a possible ancient bison jump.
The Gang could not stop. The house was essentially finished but the “yard” outside was remarkably similar to a gravel pit. When the wind blew, fine dust was hurled against the windows and when it blew hard, small gravel rattled the house. There was no place one could sit outside in comfort, so we planned a deck on the north of the house using the leftover planks, dreaming of cool shadows and quiet evenings. Deryl and I had some discussions about turning the gravel pit area into a landscaped garden. Because of the gravelly, alkaline soil it seemed a good idea to plant clover which would ameliorate the alkalinity and build up the soil. Deryl thought it a good idea to sow ryegrass around the house in the fall and clover the next spring. The idea seemed sensible. We couldn’t guess what a monster we were going to create, for the clover went berserk, grew like wildfire in a strong wind and needed cutting every week, a hard job that i
nvolved moving the wire fence circles around all the trees. Furthermore, the clover attracted a herd of deer who also ate the expensive shrubs Deryl had planted.
The deck went together very quickly and by the end of the next day the Gang sanded the planks and made them ready for the vinegar-and-steel-wool stain. Then we could sit outside with a glass of wine.
In late August the stairway handrail went up. The stairs were of the same beautiful distressed heartwood pine as the upstairs floors and fastened down with fancy bronze button nails. One of the most attractive features of the house was only visible from the top of the stairs. In a high, angled alcove above the front entry there was a confluence of intersecting lines, materials and angles. A section of the corrugated rusted metal polished to a soft gleam comes forward at a rakish angle. Behind it, at another angle, runs a strip of blue Polygal window in diminishing perspective that makes me think of Utrillo’s streets. Far at the back of the shadowy recess hangs one of the artist Jeff Fields’s headless torsos, a life-size female figure in the flowing garments of another century. I’d had this piece for several years but had never realized until it was placed at Bird Cloud, that it glowed with a faint blue iridescent light echoing the Polygal windows. It worked so well it seemed to have been made for the space. This one small area, with its interesting slices and bands of light, its varied textures, its harmonious strangeness, gives the journey down the stairs a little zing of pleasure.
My old fishing pal, Tom, came to visit in August. We went to the top of Kennaday Peak where Tom found good cell phone reception, visited the James Gang’s lodge site in Battle Pass. Years before, in Newfoundland, Tom had built a table for me from old boards pulled from the ancient and collapsing fish house on the shore. It was one of the few things I salvaged from the Newfoundland house, and it had been waiting in storage for two years. Now Tom put the legs back on and the old spruce boards, tempered by time, salt and sea, began a new life as an outside sorting table for archaeological and geological finds. The same day the table came back to life we discovered cows on the east end of the property, cows that had waded down the river. We drove them back into the water, and I, still thinking about Newfoundland, wished for lashing, salty waves. (In truth there were cows who swam in the ocean in Newfoundland near the island where the abandoned town of Fortune rotted away.) The week closed with a merry dinner with Tom, the James Gang and Mr. B, a friend from Centennial. I got out the glass bota that a friend had given me years before and filled it with Mr. B’s red wine. It was rather fun, passing it around, and everyone—even Gerald, unable to resist a contest, who abandoned his Mountain Dew habit for the evening—went home with a stained shirt.
At the end of August the James Gang went off to Mount Antero in Colorado’s Sawatch Range, their annual geological expedition and vacation, something they’ve done for years. They have often described the trip up the mountain over a narrow hairpin road with steep drop-offs, no place to turn around, snow, mud and ice and violent lightning. It is accessible only for a few weeks in summer before the wind and snow close the perilous track.
For almost a year several times a week I mopped the ugly and very large floor. We called Mr. Floorfix frequently to ask when we could put sealer on the floor. “Not yet! Not yet!” he kept saying although we told him the mop water was no longer picking up thrown-off stain, and the floor was everlastingly dull and dusty. It was really ugly and ruined the house. I began to think we would have to do everything over again, move all fifty-six bookcases, each weighing hundreds of pounds, and put something—what?—on top of the speckled, dusty mess. I started to think about tiles.
In September, Pearl, the James Gang’s mother, died. Somehow, in the midst of all the building and work, they had cared and cooked for her and now she was gone. The funeral service was packed and the little memorial leaflet, instead of the usual poem about heading into the sunset, featured Pearl’s secret recipe for her famous fried chicken.
Although the house was finished, the geodesic dome I used as a greenhouse, which the Gang had disassembled and moved from Centennial, lay in pieces under a large tarp. Now came the mind-twisting puzzle of putting it back together. Wyoming is a tough place to grow vegetables as summer hailstorms and frosts and strong winds make growing anything except herbs, carrots and beets a silly dream. But gardening is an important part of life for me. The Growing Dome greenhouse, the invention of two Scots, Udgar and Pujga Parsons in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, was the answer. A Buckminster Fuller–inspired low-cost geodesic dome designed for gardening in the Rocky Mountains, it is one of the best objects I ever acquired. For fourteen years I have grown tomatoes, lettuces, cucumbers, eggplant and other tender crops in one of these excellent structures. In the Centennial location the prevailing westerly wind constantly strained the self-regulating ventilation opener mechanisms and we replaced several. But at Bird Cloud the structure was in a more sheltered setting and there were no problems with the openers. We regularly have ripe tomatoes by mid-July. In open gardens it is a race with the season to have even faintly pink tomatoes by September. My only complaint about the dome is that I should have bought a larger size.
We still had storage problems, so in October, while the good weather held, the Gang poured the foundation for a shed to hold garden tools, vehicle tires, canoe, kayak, plant pots, camping equipment, tools, wire fence and a hundred other items that would not fit into either the garage or the fishing room. The building went up quickly and Gerald insulated it in case I ever wanted to turn it into a guesthouse. Not!
The driveway to the house went in using the same lousy road base material the county used for its back ways, a kind of fine gravel and sand with no clay to bind it together. It never firmed up and tires gradually worked the material to the sides of the road. It was poor stuff compared to New England dirt roads that pack down smooth and hard because there is clay content. But there was nothing else and we put it on the half-mile lane that leads to the house from the county road, hoping it would improve the alkali mud and river rock of the original lane. The next year we brought in several loads of crushed stone which, judiciously placed, made a firmer surface.
We tried a rented floor-cleaning machine on the damn dusty red floor. Gerald’s understatement was that “it didn’t work too good,” and he took off elk hunting. It snowed and after the snow melted Deryl scratched up a few acres on the east end where rampant cheatgrass had grown until Mr. Bromley, the weed control wizard from Encampment, had sprayed it earlier in the year. This was an area we hoped to put back into native grasses. Deryl sowed inland salt grass seed at the suggestion of a Game and Fish adviser and we hoped for a wet spring. Suddenly autumn was finished and here came cold, blowing snow, plenty of winter weather. We had a final dinner at the Wolf Hotel for Lindsay Ricketts to see her off to Denver and a new career. Dave and Deryl took off to Florida. And I headed for Santa Fe.
In Santa Fe that winter I found an answer to Bird Cloud’s ugly floor. I had the habit of walking around the town in the mornings, and on one of those walks I passed a stone yard that specialized in floor tiles. It was closed but I went again a week later during business hours. There were so many tiles in so many rich colors that I was bewildered until I saw several very large (twenty-four-inch-square) slate tiles the color of the Atlantic ocean in deep water, a liquid blue-green. I knew at once that these would suit Bird Cloud and make the horrible floor beautiful. They could also cover the unwanted floor outlets. After several phone consultations with the James Gang—Could it be done? Could the full bookcases be moved without removing the books? What was the floor area?—I placed the order. Indeed, overordered at Gerald’s request to allow for breakage. Because the tiles had to come from Brazil there would be a wait of many months.
That summer when the heavy crates arrived we all crowded around as Gerald pried the lid off the first box. There was a moment of horror when he took out the first tiles. They were rough and unfinished. I had ordered brushed tiles, neither milled completely flat, nor rough, but smooth and w
ith an interesting slight texture visible to the eye but not the touch. I went inside, sure that the entire order was wrong, another chapter in the dreadful floor saga. But Deryl came in and said it had been only the first two tiles that were rough. The others were brushed smooth. They were beautiful. In rapture we rushed around putting random tiles down to see how they went with the walls, with the metal baseboard, in the kitchen, the entryway. Everywhere they looked wonderful. Success at last.
I had to go to Germany and while I was gone the James Gang and the tile setter handled the enormous job of moving all the furniture and the full bookcases, of closing off and filling in the unwanted floor outlets, of measuring, cutting and laying the tile. The floor was almost the floor of my dreams, clean, smooth, elegant and a ravishing color. I swore always to have tile floors wherever I lived. The bookcases were perfectly in place. How had they done all this in two weeks? I will never know.
CHAPTER 8
