Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  To us, he is a dear and loyal friend, and to boot, as they say out here, a beautiful and patient model. He would try all day to balance on a toad-stool while I drew him as Oberon, if only I asked it. He will add much to Boise. He arrives next week.

  How gossipy this sounds, like chattering with you and Katy and Emma in the halls of Cooper!

  Oliver’s other young assistant is a Boston Tech man named Wiley, as sunny and good natured as some cheerful bird. You must know, having had it from the beginning, what a happiness it is to have one’s husband completely contented in his work. O. has always handled his jobs conscientiously and well, but I think his heart was never in a job until now. He works all day, and at night buries himself in the history of irrigation, and reports on systems in Persia, India, China, everywhere. Reading aloud to him the other night when he had a headache, I came across a quotation from Confucius that made us both laugh, it so perfectly expressed Oliver Ward. Confucius said, “I find no fault with the character of Yu. He lived in a mean low house and expended all his strength on the ditches and water channels.” Oliver at once painted the whole quotation on a board and nailed it above the door of the canyon shack, like an epigraph at the beginning of a chapter.

  I must end this. Ollie has just come out and asked if he can go up to the post, where a sergeant—one of the men who hunted down Chief Joseph—has promised to teach him and some of his playmates to ride like cavalrymen. I suppose it is safe, but at least I must go up and take a look at this sergeant. At five, to ride like a cavalryman!

  Good-bye, dear Augusta. It eases me to talk to you through half an afternoon this way. You will have many miles of my illegible hand to decipher, I fear, before we have brought this valley into the civilized world.

  Your own

  S.B.W.

  2

  I have heard publishers, lamenting their hard life over Scotch and soda, complain that they must read a hundred bad manuscripts to find one good one. Having practiced the trade of history, I feel no stir of sympathy. A historian scans a thousand documents to find one fact that he can use. If he is working with correspondence, as I am, and with the correspondence of a woman to boot, he will wade toward his little islands of information through a dismal swamp of recipes, housekeeping details, children’s diseases, insignificant visitors, inconclusive conversations with people unknown to the historian, and recitations of what the writer did yesterday.

  Susan Ward, a devoted correspondent and sometimes a very interesting one, had her dry spells like other mortals. She also had her reticences and her pride: having made up her mind to follow her husband into that sagebrush desert, she would not complain more than humorously; she would have to adopt the attitudes of a tourist confronted by the picturesque. Result: she chatters a good deal during her first year or so in Boise. Her only companions are Army wives who never come back into her life—are transferred away, or dropped, or forgotten about.

  Nothing there that I want to know about, neither events nor feelings. I have to keep turning the pages of those chatty, empty letters for a long time before I find any that are worth stopping at. The first of these comes eleven months, one novel, one miscarriage, some anxious cases of measles and whooping cough, and some miles of her hasty illegible scrawl after the one I have just quoted.

  P.O. Box 311

  Boise City

  May 17, 1883

  Dearest Augusta—

  Please note the change of address, which was effected last week. For the summer, we shall get our mail only when someone rides into town, ten miles. We have given up Father Mespie’s house and moved bag and baggage into the canyon. Pope and Cole, our Eastern backers, have suffered reverses, and tell General Tompkins that they are unable to go on with us.

  Oliver takes the blow with a lightness I could never manage. He says he never did expect to sail right through without delays and troubles, but I am sure it must be maddening to him to have to stop, for he drove himself very hard through the winter to complete the topographical work, and had just arranged with a contractor for the digging of the first eight miles of ditch—a unit which will be called (it makes me want to laugh at the intended compliment and shed a tear for the bad luck!) the Susan Canal. Now we must postpone everything while General Tompkins finds new backers. The likeliest prospects seem to be the Keysers of Baltimore, who are connected with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

  In the circumstances, the canyon camp is a godsend. Oliver is on standby salary. Frank and Wiley are sticking with us on no salary at all beyond the privilege of putting their legs under our camp table. We shall keep John, the handyman, to do the minimal work required to keep our claims and permits clear, and the Chinese cook, named Charley Wan—doesn’t he sound faded? He isn’t at all. He is a little grinning idol of old ivory, and a great dandy. On Saturday he rode into Boise, spent the night, and came back barbered and shining and smelling of lotions, in time to get Sunday breakfast. Betsy calls him the “pitty Chinaman.”

  The failure of our money frightens me—it is what I feared, or half feared, all along—but for the summer I like the canyon much better than Boise. I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull. The camp consists of a shack, a cook tent with a “fly” over our table, Wiley’s and Frank’s tent on the beach, and an abandoned miner’s cabin downriver, where John sleeps. The shack used to be the office, but as Oliver says, you don’t need an office to mark time in, and so now it houses the four Wards and Nellie Linton. “A mean low house,” etc—and don’t we wish we could expend all our strength on the ditches and water channels!

  It was Nellie more than myself that I worried about when it became plain that we must move out here. You remember I wrote you about her—my old teacher’s daughter who once expressed an interest in sometime coming West. But oh, my, to come West, not to a civilized house, but to a shack in a canyon! There was no way to stop her, she was already on her way from London, where she had been teaching the children of an American diplomat. So Oliver and the juniors hastily built on a bare, pine-board room, I all the time sure that, being a gentlewoman, and fastidious, she would look once and turn around and go back.

  But she is an absolute brick. Coming in day before yesterday, Oliver had to stop the team and kill a rattlesnake in the trail. She watched without aversion or screams or hysterics; only her lips pulled back a little from her teeth. She admires the scenery in a really Wordsworthian way, and she says her room will do splendidly. She has already fixed it up with pictures and china hens and bits of Paisley and her mother’s inlaid workbox. Her dressing table is a box set on end and curtained with muslin, her bed is a home-made bunk. And this for a girl who was brought up in an English country house (it now belongs to Ruskin!), whose father is a famous artist and whose stepmother recently published a book called The Girl of the Period!

  Nothing like her has ever been seen in Idaho. Before she came, I confess I had some notion that she and one of the juniors, perhaps Wiley, might find their situation romantic, but Nellie is a somewhat homely little body, with rather too many teeth and too little chin, and I am afraid all her gifts, wonderful as they are, are sisterly ...

  More later. We are very busy, as you can imagine, getting established in our primitive camp.

  Your own

  Sue

  3

  Among my grandfather’s few papers, along with offprints of his articles in Irrigation News and Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, is a government publication on the Arrow Rock Dam, at the time of its completion the highest in the world. The bulletin lists, in addition to the politicians who took credit for the dam, the engineers who built it. Oliver Ward’s name is not among them, but A. J. Wiley’s is. It was Wiley, by that time a great name in reclamation circles, who sent the book to Grandfather, with a scrawl across the flyleaf: “It’s your dam, boss, whatever it says here-the same one we talked about on the river beach twenty years before the Bureau of Reclamation was ever heard of.”

  As a practitioner o
f hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken.. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong. Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

  When they moved to the canyon camp, for example, they expected to stay only through the summer. They stayed five years.

  Naturally I never saw the camp in Boise Canyon. Before I was old enough to hear about it, it was three hundred feet under water. Just as well. Abandoned in its gulch, its garden gone to weeds, its fences down, its ditches drifted full, its windows out, its bridge no more than broken cables trailing in the creek, every nail and fencepost tufted with the wool of passing sheep bands, it would look like failure and lost cause.

  But while they lived there it was hopeful struggle, not lost cause, and for a while it was a little comer of Eden.

  Eden had three stories. The upper one ran from the canyon rim up high sage slopes toward the aspen groves, pines, mountain meadows, and cold lakes and streams of the high country. The middle story was the rounding flat in the side gulch where a spring broke out and where their buildings and garden were. The lowest story was the river beach.

  Just below the mouth of their gulch the cliffs pinched in, and the pinnacle called Arrow Rock, into whose slot Indians were supposed to have shot arrows to appease or subdue the spirits, stood up close against one wall. Rock slides had partially dammed the river and created a rapid below, a pool above. Except in very high water the pool was smooth, with a gravel beach which was their front yard. Into the natural reservoir that was a forecast of the much larger one they intended some day to build there, logs came down on the spring run-off, followed by loggers in sharp-prowed boats. If they needed fence posts or timbers they could sail out in their own black boat, called the Parson, and harpoon what they wanted with picks, and drag it ashore. They pulled breakfast from the pool, the children waded its edges and caught crayfish under its stones, the juniors took icy swims in it before the ladies were up or after they had gone to bed. Through the nights of five years their campfires threw red light on the lava cliffs and touched the moving river with the mystery of transitoriness, and framed the triangle of the tent against the dark in an assertion of human purpose. Even in low water, the rapid below was a steady rush and mutter on the air.

  On the beach, while they were still all together, they held their conferences and sang and talked in the evenings. Much planning went on around their fires, much hope went downriver and was renewed from upstream. This was the place where for a while Grandfather had everything he had come West looking for-the freedom, the active outdoor life, the excitement of something mighty to be built.

  In Grandmother’s old photograph album with the Yellowstone bear on its cover there is a snapshot of Grandfather, the juniors, and the Keyser son who came out to inspect the irrigation scheme his family was considering. They are standing on the beach with saddle horses and a laden packhorse droop-headed behind them, and an edge of river and the black pillar of Arrow Rock in the background. Across the bottom, evidently at some later time, Grandmother has printed in white ink, in the neat print that is so different from her hasty script, “How Hope looked. Aug. 1883.”

  Hope looks very young, young enough to seem dubious to less cautious men than the Keysers. Young Keyser himself, the man upon whose word their future hangs, is a bare-faced boy. Wiley is even younger, only twenty-three, but he is important to them because it turns out that he attended St. Paul’s School with young Keyser, and they have become in this slot in the Western mountains instant friends. Sargent with his dark sideburns and mustache looks like a young actor impersonating middle age, and he bends upon the camera, or upon the person holding it, who was Grandmother, a smile like the smile of a man watching the play of children who are dear to him. And the Chief, in a pith helmet that he must have dug out to impress visiting capitalism, looks nearly as young as the rest of them, so young that I have trouble recognizing my grandfather in him. His skin is burned dark, his eyes look very light. He too is smiling into the camera—a young athlete with a powerful long body and a candid face. But also pukka sahib of the Sawtooths, on his way to prove to careful money men that his scheme is sound and that its creator, young as he looks, is a man of skill, judgment, and experience.

  It makes me melancholy to see him so youthful and girded with determination, ready to mount and ride off into the future more than eighty years ago.

  I skip over that summer, in which nothing much happened but the passage of time, and jump to a chilly night in September 1883. The four of them sat around a big fire on the beach. Under a wide river of sky the river of water went with wet splashings, sunk in the rock, and above and along the river of water, down the beaches and around corners of worn stone, flowed a river of cold air that was sucked into the draft of the fire and spewed upward as sparks that multiplied the stars. Susan felt it numb on the back of her neck, and pulled up the collar of Oliver’s sheepskin coat and tightened the rebozo around her hair.

  Reddened with firelight, its weeds casting black shadows, their path started up the gulch, up toward where Wan’s cooktent was pasted orange on the darkness. On the other side of the fire, lapped with shining, unseen wetness, the beach pebbles gleamed like the scales of a fish. Against the creep of the downcanyon wind the sound of the rapid was only a mutter. They sat hugging their knees, low-spirited, frowning into the flames.

  I can visualize them pretty exactly, because a little later Grandmother drew her three men in that posture for a series called Far Western Life-the best things she ever did, I believe, better even than the Mexican drawings. I saw them described in an art history the other day as “beautiful examples from the golden age of woodcut illustration.” This picture she titled Prospectors, and she captioned it with a verse from Bret Harte:The glowing campfire with rude humor painted

  The ruddy tints of health

  On haggard face, and form that drooped and fainted

  In the fierce race for wealth

  In their hour of disspiritedness, the haggard face and form that drooped and fainted were authentic enough. They had worked hard and hoped hard, and their disappointment was as great as their expectations had been. But the money motive demeans them. They were in no race for wealth-that was precisely what disgusted Grandfather with the mining business. They were makers and doers, they wanted to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for a civilization. I suppose they were wrong—their whole civilization was wrong-but they were the antithesis of mean or greedy. Given the choice, any one of them would have chosen poverty, with the success of their project, over wealth and its failure. It was some such perception that made Susan raise her voice above the lonely night sounds of fire and wind. “Ah, well! The Keysers aren’t the only people with money.”

  No, they said. Of course not. Sure.

  “General Tompkins is working. You might get a telegram tomorrow.”

  “If we did it wouldn’t do us any good this year,” Oliver said. “Our construction season’s gone.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do in the winter?”

  Frank Sargent slapped his dusty boots, a sound loud and impatient. “Why don’t we just start digging that ditch ourselves, the four of us?”

  “Because it wouldn’t do to get people laughing,” Oliver said. “If we’d got started we could have gone on till Christmas. Now it isn’t worth starting. Not with four men, one team, and one Fresno scraper.”

  “At least you can use the winter for more planning,” Susan said.

  Across the fire he sent her a slow, narrow-eyed smile. “We’re already oversuppl
ied with that. There’s one thing we can do through the winter, though.”

  “What?”

  “Wait ”

  They laughed. They threw sticks and pebbles at the fire. Huddled in the coat whose sleeves came four inches below her fingertips, listening to the secret noises of the river, watching the light flutter on the cliff behind Frank Sargent’s profiled head, Susan tasted the word and did not like its flavor. Wait. They had done little else since he came East to convert her to his scheme. She remembered him standing above the basket of his three-week-old daughter and declaring himself as confident of success as she was that the baby could be brought up to be a woman. Betsy was now a month past her second birthday. Their home was this wild canyon, their hearth this river beach, their hope as far off as ever. Farther, for then they had Pope and Cole behind them, and now they had no one.

  “Waiting’s got its problems, though,” Oliver said.

  “I thought we were getting pretty good at it,” Wiley said, and laughed again.

  Oliver did not laugh. He looked at Susan and then into the fire. “We can’t go back to town-can’t afford it. We can’t keep Wan-no money, no room. We can’t ask Frank and Wiley to go on working for nothing. They’ve been doing it since the first of May.”

  Wiley looked up once, quickly, and then began to dig in the coarse sand with a stick. Frank arched his back against the log and relaxed again. It occurred to Susan that though she had drawn him in many poses, she had never tried him as an Indian. He had a high-nosed, proud, touchy look. She imagined a blanket around his shoulders, his hair in braids with bits of feather and bone plugs. Yes.