Band of Thebes

Utah Democrats: Gay Chairman & Gay Rep. Replaces Lesbian

On Saturday, Utah Democrats elected by a big margin openly gay Jim Dabakis to be the party's chairman. He is an art dealer and the co-founder of Equality Utah and of the Utah Pride Center.

Given the Mormons' long history of intolerance and aggressive fighting against gay rights, readers may be surprised to hear Chairman Dabakis chastising Democrats for not being "warm and inviting" enough to LDS members. He told the Salt Lake Tribune:

“I want to talk to LDS people and I want to tell them that we want them in our party, we need them in our party... We recognize that they have a great deal to contribute. ... As chair, my commitment is to make sure that LDS people feel comfortable in our Democrat tent. Sometimes, we haven’t been as warm and as inviting as we should be.”

Others may see the quasi-apology as shrewd politicking. 

Saying that "People are broad-minded in Utah," Dabakis reports that while campaigning in all 29 counties, "the whole gay thing just simply did not surface as an issue....they want to know if you can do the job or not."

Also at the convention, in a multi-round, six-way contest, delegates narrowly elected openly gay Brian Doughty to fill the Salt Lake City House seat vacated by out lesbian Jackie Biskupski. She said, "I am excited that the LGBT community will have a voice again on the Hill because I’ve seen what a difference it makes to have someone on the floor who can articulate a personal message on some of the issues that arise, and that is really important, especially during this critical civil-rights time for the LGBT community."

Nothing Daunted by Dorothy Wickenden

Another gem from last month's trip to Wyoming: In 1920 Jackson became the first town in America to have an all female government, when Mayor Grace Miller led a city council of Rose Crabtree, Mae Deloney, Geneviene Van Fleck, and Faustina Haight.

Their pioneering spirit comes to mind reading Dorothy Wickenden's delightful history of her grandmother's and best friend's adventures moving from Auburn, New York to teach at a rural schoolhouse in Colorado [below] in Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West. After graduating from Smith, Dorothy and Ros did a very grand, year-long tour of Europe including a stay at a mother's cousin's estate near Cannes, and returned home to reign over the city's social events, but they still weren't married by their late twenties. So, in 1916, they're off to the Elkhead Mountains to teach the ragamuffin, often barefoot children of homesteaders. Thrown into harsh conditions with a steep morning commute of 75 minutes on horseback, and relying on their own resourcefulness for the first time in their lives, the women thrive. Storms and blizzards enchant them. They arrange for charity packages to be sent from Auburn for their neediest students and organize community dances at the schoolhouse on Christmas and Valentine's Day. Two dashing men, the richer of whom gets kidnapped by Greek miners, woo one of them but not the other. Yet the friends never quarrel, never utter a sharp word. Likewise, the locals are unanimously good folk.

Some readers may find Wickenden's admiring portrait one shade too rosy. The agonizing stress and privation of ranch life captured in Annie Proulx's "Them Old Cowboy Songs" (published in The New Yorker, of which Wickenden has been executive editor since 1996) here is answered only with hard work, generosity, and happy times. When briefly discussing the Ute Indians forced off their land, she does not name any of the tribe members while identifying several of the army officers. Yet there is no denying the power and beauty of the frontier zeal, the boundless optimism, excitement, and momentum so palpable in these pages -- and so lacking from most 21st century lives. As Dorothy writes to her parents, “You simply can’t conceive of the newness of this country.” Decades later she said that one year of teaching was the happiest of her life. When Ros died in her eighties she left instructions for the cover of her memorial service program to be a picture of the schoolhouse.

Wyoming Postcard

So far, two days, two amazing hikes, and no coyote snares. Plenty of big horns.

Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx

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.

Cavalcade of Genius: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Colm Tóibín, Annie Proulx

You can have your blizzard nights stranded with a college swim team; there can be no greater thrill than this storm of literary brilliance. Just as I finished In Tearing Haste, the letters of travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and Debo Mitford, yesterday was the on-sale of Colm Tóibín's new collection of (gay-inclusive) stories The Empty Family [[Kindle]] and Annie Proulx's first nonfiction, Bird Cloud [[Kindle]], a memoir of her buying 640 acres in Wyoming and trying to build the perfect house. I'll review each separately.