Bird Cloud the ranch is 640 acres in south central Wyoming on which Annie Proulx built her dream house, vexed by poor planning, worse advice, unavoidable tedium, harsh conditions, unrealistic expectations, bad luck, and awful organization -- saved by the beauty of the landscape and the artistry of the craftsmen from being a total disaster, but crushingly far from the gem it was intended to be. Bird Cloud [[Kindle]] the book is too often the same.
Fatal to the house is the realtor's telling her the county road is plowed in winter; after sinking 'all' her money in building the year-round home, she discovers the road isn't plowed, meaning with the heavy snowfall drifting in huge winds, she can only live there from April to October. Fatal to the book, which she intends as a dual ode to place and the unsung heroic contractors dubbed the James Gang, is her decision not to give the Wyomingites a line of dialogue. Jesus, Zeus, and Shakespeare worked overtime perfecting Proulx's ear for the way people talk in her fiction, so how she thought she could convey character in a memoir without letting us hear her characters speak is a confounding mystery.
Likewise, her hardened sense of privacy is a rough fit with personal nonfiction. She wants to share her generous wonder, and her many frustrations, but not the basics. Typically, her children and their spouses appear at random moments, but devoid of physical description, speech, or personality, they remain flat, mute names on the page. Vulgar, prying readers expecting any details about "a friend" who spends time with her in the house will be foiled. Proulx's reticence extends to the project at hand. She frets about dire cost overruns but won't reveal prices. She includes her own quick line drawings as chapter openers -- a bolt of cloth, pine needles, arrowheads, a falcon -- but no image of the house.
As the building debacle suffered from the lack of a project manager to corral the architect in Aspen, the local contractors, the state inspectors, the roofers in New Mexico, the wood suppliers in Alaska, the tilemakers in Brazil, the incompetent floor man, and the peppery client, the book suffers from the lack of what used to be an editor. The narrative loses considerable oomph through its hindsight telling (as opposed to showing) and the structure is a mess. The opening three pages comparing Bird Cloud to Australia's Uluru slide into a catalog of childhood dwellings, followed by a stand-alone chapter on the Proulxs' French-Canadian ancestry. The third chapter recounts adult dwellings, the history of lodgepole pines, and on page 45 begins the hunt for a place to build what will be Bird Cloud. That saga ends on page 137, but, lumpily, the book has three more chapters. Readers turn the page in anticipation of the pleasures of living in the finished house, and are dropped into an account of the railroad barons and white ranchers who have dominated the land, with a gripping account of their prolonged eagle slaughter (and boastful defiance of the federal government) up until the 1970s. The next chapter goes back to much earlier times, describing the Utes' millenia on the land, their fates, and Proulx's friends' attempts to excavate ancient fire rings on the property. The final chapter is a deep appreciation of the ranch's bird life during one year. Impossible as it sounds, John McPhee or Ian Frazier would have worked these globby parts into a single coherent flow.
To repeat, the project is saved by the beauty of the landscape and the craftsmanship. Despite the running hum of complaint, Proulx's prose remains a pleasure and her eye unerring. An unrelated sidetrip to an elk-collaring project in subzero temperatures before dawn is a thrill, as is her deft take on its leader: "Although Ron had a house and family, his truck was his real home." She spares nothing, even listing her own faults -- "bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded. The good parts are harder to see..." -- and views the natural world with the same tough realism. Yet her love of the region, and her place in particular, is palpable. Installing six miles of fence, she carefully nurtures the overgrazed land back to life, attracting everything from porcupines and antelope and mountain lions to a stray blue heron.
Perhaps the book was even more personal than readers could guess, writing as the means by which a writer lets go. Western United Reality has Bird Cloud Ranch listed for $3.7 million.
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