Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place Read online

  In the past there was a nineteenth-century farmhouse in northern Vermont with a collapsing shed reputed to have been the last-stand hideout for several Irish Fenians who came down from Canada to St. Albans, Vermont, during the uprising in 1866. When workmen were digging up the septic tank of this house one of them unearthed an 1860s dime—which he kept. Then there was the log house a friend and I built in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, a wretched and weird semi-hippie building that cost much exhausting labor, from cutting the trees, limbing them, dragging them to the site, spudding the bark off, cutting the mortises and tenons for pièce-sur-pièce construction and putting the whole god-awful mess together. With the same friend there followed a sojourn in Montréal in the St.-Laurent district near the wonderful old market where one could buy road-stripe yellow chicken feet, exotic spices, little hot empanadas, durians and water chestnuts. We had a little apartment of strange angles in a house owned and run by a one-armed German ex-POW. An extremely tall transvestite who only wore summer dresses—inadequate for a Montréal winter—lived down the hall. The most memorable feature of this place was an ancient electric stove with heat coils lining the oven interior. I baked a cake in the oven once and the top coil hung down into the batter.

  Later there was a converted bank vault, a rather dark place but certainly secure. Years of renovating a Newfoundland fisherman’s house started with prying nineteen layers of linoleum off the rotten kitchen floor and ended seven years later with tears over the botched mess a local handyman made of the replacement floor. The first carpenter, who was an excellent craftsman, found a new sweetie on the Internet, left his wife and ran off to the mainland with the new love. And there was a short stay in what was probably in the 1960s a luxe house—it had sliding glass doors and a cottage cheese ceiling finish. Then there was a year or two in a Denver apartment with a view of a Ferris wheel and a nutcase on the top floor, and a little cabin without electricity on the Powder River in northeast Wyoming that came with an extraordinary sky. The Perseid meteor showers in August were the most stunning I ever saw, bushels of shooting stars, more than I could count. But coal trains rumbled through all night on the track a mile away. And then there was the house in Centennial, Wyoming.

  In 1995 I bought a three-year-old log house in Centennial, a tiny town on the east slope of the Medicine Bow range in the southern Rockies. The elevation was eight thousand feet. West of the house was the national forest, steep slopes packed with lodgepole pine and threaded with hiking and ski trails. On the east reared the bulk of Sheep Mountain, a rugged chunk of mountain still populated by elk and mountain lions. Beyond that lay the Laramie plains where the Wyoming cattle business started after a nineteenth-century cattleman lost some of his cows on a drive from Montana summer pasture back to Texas. The next year, heading north with another herd, he discovered his lost cattle, fat, healthy and increased in numbers. From that time on, the Laramie plain with distant Laramie Peak on the skyline was cow country until very recently when a longtime ranch family sold out and small houses and a gas compression station sprouted up. I was glad not to live in one of these houses as the water table was expensively deep underground and the new house owners constantly had to haul in tanks of water.

  Over the decade in Centennial I haunted the dark trails summer and winter until I had explored most, skiing, hiking or riding my mountain bike on the old abandoned logging roads. In winter these same trails, so dramatically different under many feet of snow, became the best cross-country skiing of my life. I skied daily, sometimes only a few miles, sometimes for hours, depending on snow conditions. I saw few animals beyond birds and an occasional deer as this massive monoculture forest that lies between eight thousand and ten thousand feet was rather sterile for wildlife, a biological desert with virtually no understory. Only a few plants, such as the grouse whortleberry (Vaccinium scoparium) and elk sedge (Carex geyeri), grew in the dense shade. This open ground beneath the trees made walking anywhere easy in contrast to eastern forests with their thick bushy undergrowth and giant jackstraws deadfalls. In the Medicine Bows there was bear sign in the more remote draws and drainages, and Shiras moose in the swamps. I occasionally saw moose when skiing and remembered the way they ruined the few nascent cross-country ski trails in Newfoundland, their enormous hooves making deep holes in the ungroomed surface. It was better traveling if one got away from the ruined trail although the risk of getting lost in the tuckamore increased dramatically. In the Medicine Bows on a sunny day the black shadow stripes of the pines across a trail had a strobe effect that could be disorienting and even dangerous on steep, twisty runs.

  Humans like lodgepole pines and have used them in dozens of ways. Because they grew so straight and tall many house-builders liked them for post and beam structures. Indians used the younger, slenderest trees as tipi and travois poles. The pine pitch waterproofed moccasins and held feathers firmly in headdresses. The Cree reportedly used the gum in painful, hollow teeth to protect the nerves from exposure to the air. As a chewing gum it entertained the jaws and freshened the breath, and both Indians and settlers heated it and used it to ameliorate the itch of insect stings and bites, boils and ulcers. The bark, steeped in boiling water, made a scurvy-preventing brew that could be taken straight or mixed into stew and soups. Army doctors on the frontier learned to use the needles as a scorbutic.

  I thought the Rocky Mountain lodgepole—sometimes called “black pine”—was beautiful in its great numbers but not deeply interesting until I started thinking about the cones and the red needles that even then were illustrating the great and terrible plague seizing the forest. The green forest itself was monotonous, mile after mile of the same trees, almost no diversity in age or in species. It was all lodgepole, and that was part of the problem.

  The cones caught my attention first, cone-bearing end branches bitten off by squirrels who found it easier to cut the branch tips, watch them fall, then race down the tree and stockpile the nutritious cones under roots and fallen logs. I often saw their middens in the forest, huge heaps of discarded seed husks. One day I brought a squirrel-severed branch of the tightly closed, prickly cones home and left them on the big table. They were fastened asymmetrically so tightly to the branch that it was impossible to break or pull them off. For a few days they stayed as impregnable as clams, then started to open, spilling out their winged seeds, so like translucent insect wings, a pale brown the color of swamp water.

  I learned that the lodgepole makes two kinds of cones—serotinous and nonserotinous. The nonserotinous, which was what I had brought home, open and scatter seed for the wind and squirrels every year. Young lodgepoles—ten to thirty years old—usually make these cones which open at temperatures of 79° to 125°F. Older trees, or trees in a region with a history of fire, produce mostly serotinous cones which squirrels ignore as too difficult, and which open only at higher temperatures from 113° to 140°F.

  The trees themselves were thin-barked and grew straight, eighty to a hundred feet tall with branches that curved slightly upward. They were the most common trees in the Rocky Mountain west and gave the region its distinctive appearance. The stout needles came in bundles of two, each with a long inner groove. Under my pocket microscope I saw chains of transparent little bumps running the length of each and assumed these were sacs of resin. I admired these lodgepole pines that could so nimbly adapt their reproductive strategy, and thought it illustrated the intermeshed flexibility of the natural world where call and response was the way of continued life. There were many voices in this antiphonal choir: fire and seed, disease and fire, sunlight and cutting, insect and beak, parasite mistletoe and hungry squirrel. Although in the past fire was sometimes an immediate enemy to specific stands of lodgepole, fire also opened the serotinous cones and prepared a nutrient-rich seedbed for the next generation. Those seedlings also had enemies: snowshoe hare, voles, the omnipresent squirrels, pocket gophers and domestic cattle and sheep which both ate and trampled leased forest sections. But the lodgepole had no strategies or def
enses against the triple catastrophes of prolonged drought, warming climate and an unprecedented invasion of mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, whose apt Latin name means “tree killer.”

  When I moved to Centennial, climate change in the Rockies was taking the shape of a severe drought and shorter, warmer winters without the prolonged deep temperatures of 30° to 40°F below zero that froze Wyoming in the past. This warming, drying trend weakened the trees and was an important factor in what has now become “the largest known insect infestation in the history of North America,” the mountain pine beetle that has destroyed most of the lodgepole forests of the west.1 Other conditions encouraged the invasion. As well as vast armies of monoculture trees, decades of fire suppression produced a susceptible same-age forest, the equivalent of a human population of millions of eighty-year-olds caught in the surge of a deadly infectious plague. And it was not just mountain pine beetles. Spruce bark beetles were after the spruce trees and fir engraver beetles were killing subalpine fir trees. Most of the lodgepole forests of Colorado and southern Wyoming are now standing dead. I am deeply sorry for all who never experienced the beautiful lodgepole forests of the American and Canadian Rockies, who never skied under the snowy branches or looked out from a fire tower across miles of green mountain wilderness. It is astonishing to me that so many people outside the west have no idea this has happened. Although many newspapers have reported the catastrophe, it remains something of a millions-of-acres secret.

  The mountain pine beetle is a tiny creature that chews through a lodgepole’s bark, gouges out a hollow in the wood and lays its eggs. The larvae hatch hungry and feed on the cambium layer, a tree’s most vital part, the annual layer of cells that makes up a growth ring. To prevent drowning in the tree’s sap, the beetle larvae can eject a choking fungus that not only halts the life-giving flow of sap, but stains the wood a grey-blue color. For a while furniture makers thought the blue wood was attractive, but it is now recognized as a disfigurement. Many people who cut lodgepole in the forest to heat their houses in winter brought the cordwood—and the beetles—into town. The beetles, delighted to have more food, moved into landscaped and ornamental trees. Lodgepoles have known beetle attacks before and their defense is a sticky, thick resin to swamp the beetles’ egg galleries and holes. Unfortunately the beetles were stirred into pheromone action by this resin, sending out signals that attract myriad hordes of more attack beetles. Because of the long drought the dried-out and weakened trees were hampered in their resin defense.

  The scourge covered virtually the entire west from British Columbia to New Mexico. British Columbia and Alberta had the worst infestations, but Wyoming, Colorado and Montana were hit a hard blow, millions of acres turned a dull rust-red. Predictions were that almost all lodgepole trees over five inches in diameter would be dead within the next few years. There was no known practical remedy. Today in the forests around Bird Cloud mile after mile of dead, red trees stand on their last roots and will eventually fall, making a terrifying pile of fire-ready timber. Once the fires begin perhaps even the East Coast will see the smoke.

  Thinking about what comes afterward forces one to take the long view—how will the Rockies look in a hundred years, five hundred years? Will they come to resemble the Alps, rich in meadows and wildflowers? Will ranchers move in with cows? Will they look more like the deforested, erosion-clawed exposed steppes of Afghanistan? Will an embarrassed Forest Service embark on massive planting programs of diverse species? We don’t know.

  I should have learned all the important lessons about houses with the Centennial house. I learned some, but not enough. The site was a two-acre lot, one of ten lots on ninety wooded acres managed by a homeowners’ association. There was a half-mile access road which occasionally closed during heavy snowstorms. The house had plenty of problems, but the original builder was nearby and I embarked on a long series of improvements and repairs.

  This entire house was heated with three electric “storage” heaters. The first winter proved they were utterly inadequate and stored nothing but expense. Rarely did the house temperature rise above 62°F, rather chill, and it was necessary to keep a wood fire burning in the stove. The kitchen was a beige horror, the tile floor and counters impossible to keep clean. This kitchen was cursed with mini cupboard space, an awkward layout and floor-to-ceiling east windows that in summer let in the intense high-altitude sunlight and converted the room into a glaring bake oven, a change from the winter freeze-out. Slowly, and painfully, as they began to fail, I discovered that the previous owners had bought the cheapest appliances possible. I had to replace the well pump, the washer and dryer. The electrical wiring was inadequate. Worst of all was the entrance to the garage, a smooth concrete slab on the north side and at the base of a slope. Every winter a thick glacier built up on the slab and extended about ten feet up the driveway. I spent many hours chipping at each winter’s ice accumulation.

  Renovation of this house began by covering the knotty pine ceilings with Sheetrock and putting a wood floor over the plywood. Each year, as I could afford it, there was a new project—bookshelves for my library, gutting of the kitchen and a full makeover, replacement of the electric heaters with a gas furnace, conversion of the unfinished basement to an office. I had the concrete slab in front of the garage ripped out and replaced with an underground heating system that almost worked, though it blew many fuses and bumped the electric bill up to national debt status, but it ended the glaciers. The new concrete apron had a rough finish to thwart the tendency of ice to cleave to smooth concrete.

  When I first moved into this house the dark and unfinished basement was lined with rough shelves. A disturbing line about sixteen inches above the floor indicated a flood in the past. Driving through Clayton, New Mexico, I noticed the waterline high on a stone building from a flood in the 1920s and it reminded me of the basement’s sinister watermark. It worried me. The house was situated at the bottom of a slope; on the hardened Wyoming clay, snowmelt water and rain ran rapidly over the ground in broad sheets without soaking in. All that saved the house from a yearly flood was a culvert under the driveway that led the upslope water safely away into an old irrigation ditch and the aspen grove below.

  The flood situation became complicated by a Mr. Busybody neighbor who decided to block the irrigation ditch one autumn for reasons unknown. (There is a Mr. Busybody and a Mr. Know-All in every homeowners’ association.) In the spring the water gurgled out from under the massive wind-driven snowdrifts to the west of the house, a permanent feature of living on the lee side of a mountain ridge. Inevitably water backed up and froze inside the culvert. By then Mr. B’s ditch blockage work was buried under ten feet of ice and hard-frozen snow where I couldn’t get at it to break through the choke point and divert the meltwater from the house. My oldest son and his wife came visiting for a weekend and we spent most of our time digging and hacking at the ice barrier. Everything froze up again as soon as the sun went down. As spring advanced, meltwater cascaded down the driveway and into the garage. To approach the house one needed mud boots and I put in hours digging diversion channels across the driveway. The situation could not be resolved amicably and to me it was clear that it was time to go.

  No doubt about it, although the setting was exquisitely beautiful and near many miles of ideal mountain hiking, bicycling and ski trails, the house was wrong for me. During the frustrating time that I lived in it, I wrote an article describing what I thought was my ideal house. Even before the ditch blockage episode I had been looking for property on which I could build a house that would suit me. It took more than ten years to find what I believed to be the right place.

  I looked nearby because I liked being close to the national forest and I liked Centennial, its funky main drag with an ancient police car parked near the highway to deter speeders, and, when I first arrived, five bars to serve a population of less than a hundred people. I looked at a property on flat prairie surrounded by a boulder field from an ancient local glacier. Unde
r the house there was a half basement, a low room fitted with a workbench and storage shelves which one entered through a trapdoor; it was not possible to stand upright. I looked at another with every surface tiled to ward off dust. I admired a property to the southeast abutting another part of the forest until I learned it was a major revving-up zone for snowmobiles in winter, and I saw overpriced sage-land steppe, then some sloping land so high an oxygen mask would have been useful. Another piece was stratospherically expensive, ten thousand dollars an acre, located right on a heavily traveled highway, with restricted access and an allegedly grouchy neighbor. Finally I saw a handsome piece of property, private and beautiful with the North Fork of the Little Laramie River whisking through it and fine views of the north end of Sheep Mountain, and I could afford the price. I arranged to buy this forty-acre property, planning to build. Ten minutes before the time set for the closing the seller canceled out.

  The search became desultory. In conversation with an acquaintance one day I said I had little hope of ever finding the right place. She asked if I had considered looking around the town of Saratoga on the North Platte River on the west slope of the Medicine Bow range. I said I thought that country very beautiful, but didn’t think there was much for sale over there. No, she said, not much, but there was one place that might interest me. It belonged to The Nature Conservancy and they were looking for a buyer. It was on the river.

  “It has big cliffs,” she said. “And the river. You should look at it.”