Bird Cloud

by Annie Proulx

  It was a builder’s nightmare, the owner moving in before the house was finished, but I had no choice. The James Gang made no complaint and kept on working. In fact they were months, even years away from being finished. We learned to live with each other.

  My sons Jon, Gillis and Morgan arrived and Jon’s wife Gail for a truly weird Christmas celebration. Nothing was unpacked and moving around was a matter of sucking in your stomach and sidling through the narrow aisles between boxes. It was like a scavenger hunt as the Roughriders had mislabeled almost every box. A carton that was marked “bed linen” might hold two sheets, a coffee grinder, fragile lamps, vases, a box of matches and seven shoes. Doing anything in the kitchen was difficult as there were still no counters, just sagging pieces of scrap plywood to get us through.

  It was cold. And it began to snow. Hard. The battle to get in and out over the snow-clogged, drift-packed county road began. I was shocked and frightened to learn that the road was not maintained in winter, contrary to the real estate agent’s assurances three years earlier.

  Despite the welter of unpacked boxes, blowing snow and cold, when I came downstairs in the morning the great cliff filled the windows, radiant and bulging forward. All difficulties were forgotten as the rising sun drenched it in luminous yellow. Rockwell Kent in N by E remarked, “We live for those fantastic and unreal moments of beauty which our thoughts may build upon the passing panorama of experience.”1

  CHAPTER 7

  Details, Details, Details

  2006–2007

  It was Christmas and Jon and Gail, Gillis, Morgan and I were in the house, unable to find roasting pans or silverware, everyone jammed into odd corners, vehicles getting stuck in the snow, some sliding into deep ditches, some unable to move at all, wind howling. I lost it when someone stuck the old Land Cruiser half in the deepest ditch so that it teetered horribly on the verge of tipping upside down and maiming my nearest and dearest. Hack, of Hack’s Tackle, came with his plow and got stuck himself. The James Gang came to rescue Hack and got enough snow out of the way so that Gillis could escape the heavy drifts. Gillis fled south and we all wished we could follow him.

  The James Gang, in between hours of working on the house, plowed the white stuff. More snow fell. Again and again I heard the voice of The Nature Conservancy’s real estate agent answering my early question “Is the county road maintained in winter?” with a clear, confident “yes.” I think he honestly believed they plowed this back road, but I wish he had checked, because for me it was a serious problem. I now had a new house that had taken all my money and that was inaccessible to wheeled vehicles in snowy winters. By the time spring came I understood very well that spending winters at Bird Cloud would be impossible. Everything changed as I realized I would be semihomeless from October through March. Later it dawned on me that I would still have to heat the empty house.

  But the Japanese soak tub was in place, clean and ready to use, the massive heater in the adjacent closet turned on. That evening I filled the tub with hot water. I had been looking forward to this for two years. The long soak was wonderful, but an hour later, I discovered a terrible flood in the library. Water had cascaded all over the file cabinets and floor and swelled the wall paint into an enormous blister. A hysterical call brought the James Gang out. They discovered that the outflow drain had frozen up. Fortunately very little water got inside the file cabinets and four people violently mopping and swabbing got the water cleaned up with no bad damage. But Gerald decided to install a different drain system.

  On the last day of January, Dave went in for surgery on his ankle. While he was being prepped, he complained of a stomachache. Nothing was simple. The stomachache turned out to be appendicitis. The docs removed the offending organ and the ankle fusing was scheduled for the future when he was hale and hearty again. While all this was happening my wonderful assistant, Lindsay Ricketts, went to Texas to visit her family and I planned to go to Santa Fe to visit Gillis and escape the snow for a week.

  In the days before I left, the wind was like a carpenter’s plane shaving long strips of snow-filled air off the side of the house and the pale face of the cliff. Those strips curled and tangled in turbulence of extraordinary velocity. More and more snow came and the James Gang couldn’t make it out to the house. They worked on doors in Gerald’s shop. As soon as the weather cleared they roared in on snowmobiles. When I got back from New Mexico the Wyoming weather had improved. Briefly. On and on went the finish work on the hundreds of small details. The copper ceilings went up in the family room, the entryway and fishing room, the shiny metal softened with a patina that suggested subtle aging. The plank walls were a mellow, warm color like Darjeeling tea, stained with a vinegar and steel wool pad recipe from Doug Ricketts. And the snow and wind kept coming. Relentlessly.

  We waited for the reverse osmosis water purification system. By error the whole outfit went to Kansas where it was passed along to another freight company that suffered a break-in and wouldn’t have another guard until the next day. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. But finally all of it arrived in early March which is not springtime in Wyoming but the snowiest month. Gerald kept smashing a path through the drifts on the county road and managed to get in and out most days, taking a risk lover’s joy in the nauseating slides toward the ditch, the scrape of ice and packed snow on his truck’s undercarriage. Deryl ran the skid steer up and down the lane constantly, working the blower overtime. From a mile away you could see a great plume of snow arcing into the grey air.

  At this point I was close to broke and asked, How much longer? How much more money? Gerald promised figures and dates soon and kept putting up the copper ceiling in the family room. We did not know it then but he had scratched the names of all our family on the panels. They were impossible to see. Everything had been far more expensive than the budget.

  I understood the need to get the work finished, but the late hours and lack of privacy were driving me mad. I asked the plumber and electrician to leave one night and everyone’s nose was out of joint. They were doing me a favor by working long, hard hours, and I, instead of being appreciative, complained. Trying to write, trying to think, even trying to live in the midst of incessant construction made me terminally irritable. God, would it ever be done? How much better it would have been if I had been able to stay in the old house until the end of the work on this one. This is why house owners take long ocean voyages until construction is quite finished.

  On a March weekend when the James Gang had a snowmobile holiday there was an accident and Lindsay broke her arm, a bad break that would refuse to heal properly. Late in the month, by some miracle of climate change, the paved roads to and from the outside world were clear and Jim Petrie came up. I complained that the mechanical room made a lot of noise that reverberated both downstairs and upstairs. The Sub-Zero refrigerator was noisy as well. The Sierra Pacific window screens did not fit and the electrician said the only thing to do was make new ones. So be it, dammit.

  I had a talk with the James Gang about the cost overruns and Gerald opined that the architects should pay the difference as problems in the design had needed remedial work to make the house functional. Maybe all architects design buildings that are primarily about appearance. Didn’t some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses have leaky roofs? And as much as with the architect, the problems lay with the suppliers who sent wrong or ill-fitting parts. I think, too, that Gerald, who had rarely worked with architects, was under the impression that all problems would be solved in advance in the design on paper. Then, when a problem did arise and the James Gang saw a way to fix it, Harry’s attitude toward proposed modifications was not always cooperative. Both sides—adversarial when the paper plans did not match wood or metal reality—could have been more open and listened to each other, but I’m the last one who should complain that others were not cooperative enough. Gerald mentioned that he hoped the time would come when he could sit down with Harry and explain some construction procedures that couldn’t work as dra
wn on the plans. And Harry had a little list of items that he thought Gerald should have known.

  The Augustan architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio is regarded today more as a figurehead father of architecture than someone whose views on houses belong in the pages of Dwell or Wallpaper, but there is something terribly obvious about his three general precepts in De Architectura that have held true over two thousand years: that an architect-designed building must have integrity of structure, a responsibility to function, and the added delight of beauty. Included in those precepts might be enhanced landscaping, and, as we discover today, in the first years of the third millennium, the necessity of making energy-efficient, water-thrifty houses overrides everything else. There is no choice. Buildings must operate within stricter “green” bounds.

  Many architects also seem more concerned with self-expression as artists, or the chance to pursue an intellectual exercise rather than cater to a client’s presumed desires. So there is the question of warring egos, and even if the anti-pathetical positions are never voiced, they lurk dangerously beneath the surface. Architects think differently than clients might expect. For example, Thom Mayne, one of the founders of the California architects’ group, Morphosis, remarked on “real architecture”:

  The business of architecture serves clients. You go out there and you find out what clients need today—what are they interested in today? Real architecture is the antithesis of that. Your interests are more private and personal over an extended period of time and require an independence which is akin to leadership. It is up to you to define the issues. I am not interested in fashion or even in the look of the work. I am interested in starting ideas that take you someplace, and in the process, the methodological process. You have to build to get feedback. Some people start with the visual or physiognomic characteristics. They work toward manifesting that vision. I don’t work that way. I work with concepts that build to something. I don’t know where I am going. . . . Materials are chosen very late. It has to do with lines and directions and forces that have nothing to do with appearance. It is not easy to deal with clients because most of them are not at all interested in the investigation.1

  I noted the emphasis on “today,” implying that the clients are flighty creatures who may well have different interests tomorrow. Nor do clients, including this one, always know what they really want in the structure. I had been sure I wanted a writing area without eye-level windows so I would not be distracted by bird-watching or the view. I got that room and now often carry my work to the dining room with the large windows where I can look outside. A window in the work area would have been better. And I have always liked rooms with high ceilings, but there is an atmosphere of chill remoteness that comes with such space.

  A favorite book of mine is Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 Architecture Without Architects, photographs of some of the world’s most vernacular dwellings, including the rodentlike holes of an old burial ground in Siwa, Egypt, which people have taken over as housing, hollow baobab trees, the stone-cone trulli of Apulia, the clawed-out rock houses of Les Baux-en-Provence, and, in Anatolia, the adaptation of volcanic formations to dwellings. They seem springboards of ideas rather than models outside of fortuitous local geology, but from what I’ve learned of American Indian pit houses, many such vernacular dwellings were efficient and sensible for their locations.

  Something that seems to irritate all architects is the basic fact that buildings (except for nomads’ tents) are fixed. Many avant-garde structures have complex angles and thrusts that indicate motion such as a bird frozen in flight or the “exploded isometric projection” of Zaha Hadid’s Vitra Fire Station, or Eric Owen Moss’s “The Box” with its violent twists and “bronco attic,” or Peter Eisenman’s unbuilt Möbius strip double-tower house. Those few buildings of stunning visual impact that were actually constructed suited the period of computer-aided design and surplus wealth that allowed experimentation. Although I find innovative architecture extremely interesting, I did not have the money to play that game. Bird Cloud’s site had its own powerful forces—the cliff that dominated the immediate and surrounding region, and, at its foot, the islanded North Platte River, and, above all, the wind. Were it not for the wind, the snow would not be an insoluble problem.

  The decision to build near the entrance at the lower southwest part of the property answered the expectation of the house serving as a year-round dwelling. It was the most economical site and had the most dramatic view of the cliff. The southeast area, in the trees, was more beautiful and secluded, but would have added another mile to the site entrance and called for a bridge over an old river channel that became impassably wet in springtime. Hindsight is cheap, but if I had known the unexpected and undisclosed problems of the chosen site I would not have bought the property.

  At the end of March, after a period of clear skies, all the roads were again closed by blowing, hard-packed snow, reinforcing the winter limitations of the site. On April Fool’s Day the mechanical room still wasn’t finished and the pumps in it made an amount of noise that was especially obnoxious in the guest room upstairs. Gerald thought it was the solar pumps that made the noise, but later we decided it was the lack of sound-deadening rubber cushions between the various pumps and the walls and concrete slab. Harry said (but had neglected to put this in the plans, assuming the contractor would know it) that separating the machine room section of the slab from the main house would have greatly reduced the noise, for sound travels through concrete rather well. Some noise persisted. When Harry visited the house a few years later he remarked that the culprit was the pipes, especially the pipes from the main pump on the floor, and that by draining and cutting them and inserting short rubber interrupter sections the noise would be dampened. He remarked that the plumber and/or builder should have known this and have done it automatically. But this is Wyoming and such arcane knowledge hadn’t yet reached the mountains.

  Work on the windows continued through the spring of 2007, punctuated by visits to various doctors for Lindsay (broken arm), Deryl (spine), osteo surgeon for Dave, the chiropractor for Gerald, the dentist for me. The battle of the trespass cows continued on the far side of the river and the island. To chase cows off the far shore we paddled across the river, leapt out and ran cursing through the cottonwoods. A bridge across the North Platte would have been a huge help and we made idle talk about the possibility of buying the beautiful old Pick Bridge downriver, still in place though superseded by a standard concrete bridge. Dave remarked that it had been for sale some time ago and perhaps still was. A monster helicopter could lift and carry it a mile to Bird Cloud. Then we found out the bridge was not for sale but had been designated a National Register property—a good thing as it is a fine example of a nineteenth-century iron truss design and more handsome than any concrete wannabe.

  There were more doctor trips and more cow chasing. I talked with the James Gang about finding an unemployed cowboy to chase the critters away, but that was a pipe dream, not a practical solution. Unfortunately more fencing was needed, especially around the island. I’d rather have had a cow chaser than more fence, but fence doesn’t take any days off and it is never late. Damn living in an open range state where cows can wander where they want. Ranchers have dominated the laws and affairs of this state since the Territorial days. Fencing cows in will not become Wyoming law until there is a major shift in mind-set, until more people do not want cows trampling around their houses. That may underlie the state’s antipathy toward newcomers, for they are the unreasonable souls who would like to flout open range tradition. But the good news was that the helpful cowboy from the neighboring TA Ranch said the cows would move up to summer pasture on Elk Mountain in a few days.

  In late April 2007 the Gang cleared construction materials out of the garage and for the first time I could park vehicles in it. In between the bustle of doors, cabinets, toe kicks and finish details Gerald helped me hang pictures to get them out of the way. It warmed up one weekend and friends came for supper and we
grilled steaks. Springtime in the Rockies.

  In May the work continued. One of the strange design problems was the placement in the floor of several electrical outlets downstairs. In the living-dining room area they were directly in the traffic corridor and someone was always tripping on them. They were unattractive and useless, as plugging anything in meant the traffic hazard of trailing cords. Sanding, varnishing, prepping, priming, caulking, hanging, installing, patching, mudding, trimming, drilling, assembling, capping went on and on and I fled to Ireland.

  By the time I got back the giant snowplows had opened the Medicine Bow Pass between Centennial and the Saratoga Road, and the Gang had made me a vegetable garden with mole-proof underlay, a watering system, topsoil and some rotted manure from retired Dr. L’s manure heap on the east side of the valley. I was thrilled. For the past decade I had been barred from having a garden by the rules of the Centennial homeowners’ association. I grew up in a gardening family and I have almost always had a vegetable garden myself. I deplore the stale produce and food conglomerate cans of mush sold in too many western grocery stores. It was a good day when Whole Foods opened a store in Fort Collins and I shopped there once a month despite the long, long drive and high prices. Now I studied the seed catalogs planning to grow everything from eggplants to cavalo nero, a dark and bitter Italian kale. In fact I became enamored of an Italian seed company and bought too many packets of seeds that needed a Mediterranean climate. We’d see what they could do in a challenging place, though the San Marzano tomatoes had to go in the greenhouse. I was not so lucky with this company the next year for a packet proclaiming the contents were seeds of small white eggplants turned out to be cantaloupes. Curses!

  One May day the James Gang and I and the archaeologist Dudley Gardner, who had dropped in, all took an afternoon to go down to the immigrant crossing where ’49ers and Overland Trail parties crossed the North Platte. To get there we went through the vast Overland Ranch owned by Anschutz, reportedly the site for the world’s largest wind turbine farm. There are many very large ranches in this part of Wyoming owned by corporate executives and heirs, including such household names as Ciba-Geigy, Anschutz, Wal-Mart, Campbell’s Foods. On the way we saw swathes of Indian paintbrush, Wyoming’s state flower, most a deep orange-red color, some a lighter red or orange and a few yellow. Deryl remarked that when he and his brothers were kids they could still see bits and pieces of broken wagons and discarded items along the road which was, in fact, an important section of the Overland Trail. At the crossing in the period from 1840 to 1860 there was a rope-operated ferry that hauled wagon parties across the river.