Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place Read online

  “I should.”

  A few weeks later I did look at it with the real estate agent who was handling the property. A bald eagle perched in a dead tree, watching us. The landscape was bold. Not only was the property on the North Platte River but the river ran through it, taking an east-west turn for a few miles in its course. The land was a section, 640 acres, a square mile of riparian shrubs and cottonwood, some wetland areas during June high water, sage flats and a lot of weedy overgrazed pasture. On the lower portion, about 120 acres, Jack Creek, an important spawning place for trout, came down from the Sierra Madre, thirty miles distant, and angled through the property to enter the North Platte. Jack Creek was big enough to need a bridge, and it had one, a sturdy structure made from the floor of a railroad freight car. The bulk of the property, more than five hundred acres, lay at the top of and behind the sandstone cliffs, a sloping expanse of sedge and sage. Top and bottom the land was seriously overgrazed and neglected, yet the day I first saw it I also saw a small herd of mule deer, pelicans, bald eagles, great blue herons, waterfowl, ravens, scores of bluebirds, a harrier, a kestrel, and, glued to the cliff, thousands of swallow nests. I knew most of Wyoming’s wildlife kept to the riparian areas, but this was astonishing. The place was already a diverse wildlife habitat. It was obviously a refuge for birds and I thought at once that it could be managed as an avian preserve. It seemed wonderfully private, accessible only by a one-lane right-of-way. I didn’t recognize the right-of-way lane as the property’s Achilles’ heel.

  I learned that a rare plant, Penstemon gibbensii, grew high on the west end of the cliff among exquisite cushion plants and fossil coral, one of those natural rock gardens, although only ankle high, that make hiking the Rockies such a feast of beauty. The views on top took my breath away—and so did the wind. It was hard to stand up. I could see the great bulks of Coad, Pennock and Elk mountains to the northeast, and farther east my beloved Medicine Bow range, and to the southwest the Sierra Madre, called the “Shining Ones” by the Utes who once lived in them. The habitat at the top of the cliff was very different than at the base—grassland steppe, though overgrazed, showed a diversity of sedges and grasses. There was a small prairie dog town populated by extremely wary residents. A badger nose appeared briefly above a hole, then disappeared. A coyote slid into the distance. Down below a small herd of mule deer fording the river looked like toy animals. The property was beautiful and unique, remote and powerful, and I fell for it, hard. It was also unfenced, surrounded by cattle ranches, without electric or phone lines anywhere near. But I was in love.

  The property had once belonged to a sheep ranch family with deep roots in Wyoming. The owner before The Nature Conservancy had planned a housing development. To that end a well had been drilled ten years earlier and a white plastic fence put up near the entrance, a kind of decorative flourish. There were also white-painted numbered stakes pounded into the ground to mark the long, skinny lot boundaries, each lot a mile deep and a few hundred feet wide, running across the sage-covered upland at the top of the cliff, straight down the four-hundred-foot face of the cliff, across the river and to the south property line so that the developer could claim each had river frontage. The arrangement might have been fun for Tarzan and Jane, who could have descended the cliff face on ropes and vines.

  Buying this property, which came with a multipage conservation easement, was a lengthy process. There were many times when it looked as though it could not work out. But driving from Laramie to Centennial on a windy day when the sky was filled with stretched-out laminar wave clouds I saw to the west, in the direction of the distant property, one cloud in the shape of an immense bird, the head and beak, the breast looming over the Rockies. I took it as a sign that I would get the property and thought Bird Cloud should be the new name for the old sheep ranch.

  There followed many months and vast quantities of paper and consultations with my lawyer, the State Board of [Water] Control, engineers, water testers, well drillers, the letter of intent, the purchase agreement, the reserved conservation agreement, appraisals, checking out of titles and quit claims, the well water analysis (so alkaline a new well and water treatment were necessaries), the easement documentation report, a new survey, a flood study report, gathering of the mineral rights information, and the Phase I environmental site assessment. It took six months before everything—money, paperwork, tests and measurements of all kinds, state permits—came together, but in December of 2003, at the title company in Rawlins, my children and I became the owners of Bird Cloud.

  I knew I would work with an architect. The general approach to making houses in this part of the west is that it is the responsibility of the builder to translate the homeowner’s ideas into reality without benefit of an architect. While this flatters the western claim to independent thinking and character, it sometimes results in quirky problem houses or repetitive buildings. At least that was my thinking at the time. That I was not entirely right became clear. If ever I have another house built I will consult a local architect with an office no more than twenty miles from the building site. I will put more value on the ideas and opinions of the construction crew. I will choose the appliances, plumbing and lighting fixtures myself.

  I had corresponded with the architect Harry Teague over the years. His office was in Aspen, Colorado, which should have been the tip-off that he was hours away from Bird Cloud, too far for frequent site visits. Harry is a big, interesting, smart guy. I liked him and admired his house designs, especially one that resembled a metal slash in the tawny Colorado foothills. He liked rusted metal and salvaged materials as I did. He had a grand sense of humor and was sensitive to light and shadow, wind and rock.

  In a kind of via negativa approach Harry and I went through the Centennial house and I pointed out the features that were problems I hoped never to encounter again: the lumpy log walls, the north-facing garage entrance, the ankle-to-ceiling east kitchen windows. I mentioned I had written an article about my dream house and he said he had read it. I was relieved to think that he already understood what I needed in a house. Later I decided that if he had read it he had quite forgotten the content. And when I reread it myself I saw it more as a complaint than as a constructive ideal.

  Harry’s first visit to the Bird Cloud site was on a day of strong westerly winds that I assumed were an anomaly, but that he correctly perceived as the defining feature of the place. The cliff loomed, a dominating wall of buff stone. I eventually learned that the property was constantly assailed by strong winds sweeping in across miles of open and treeless grazing land to the west, their velocity increased by the channeling cliff. There are days when the whole country is stirred by lashing, tearing wind, the air thick with dust, microscopic particles of ancient ash and silt whisked aloft in towers. The faded grass is whipped by this wind and it thrashes to and fro as if activated by powerful jolts of underground electricity. Tumbleweed bounces across roadways, peppering the asphalt with its dark seed. This is the wind that batters I-80 twenty miles to the north and regularly hurls semi-trailer trucks onto their sides, as Newfoundland’s Wreckhouse winds do on the western coast road. At Bird Cloud winds of seventy miles an hour are not uncommon in winter and blasts over a hundred miles an hour occur a few times each season, the source of the old joke that Wyoming snow does not melt, it just wears out. Those days are not days to hang out the laundry. Harry’s design offered a narrow slanting roof to the west wind, guiding the roaring air smoothly up and over the house instead of letting it batter and slam full-on. The shape of the house roof echoed that of the backdrop cliff, something I always note with pleasure.

  Because place is such a major part of my writing and life, I thought it important that Bird Cloud breathe in and out of the landscape, a house subject not only to the wind, but to the drowning shadows that submerge it every evening and the sharp slice of sunlight at the eastern end of the cliff. I wanted interesting pieces of light, sliver views as well as large windows holding the wide expanse of the cliff. Harry suc
ceeded brilliantly with this, the variable and changing tones and shapes of light a constant pleasure. But it was also important that the big windows not lure birds to their deaths with inimical reflections. Harry’s father, the industrial designer W. Dorwin Teague, whose work is featured in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, suggested that set-back windows with an overhang would prevent bird deaths. It sounded like a good idea, and I still am not sure where or why that idea evaporated. Expense, no doubt, the factor which forced everyone’s hand.

  Lodgepole logs have been an indigenous and beautiful housebuilding material in the west for years, and the log house is the esteemed vernacular architecture of Wyoming. I admired an old log barn on a back road near Laramie and showed Harry a photograph of it. But I didn’t want to live in a log house again unless the interior was drywalled, or the house built Québec style, pièce-sur-pièce, with squared logs. Interior walls of round, chinked logs are unattractive to my eye, and the uneven corduroy surface is impossible if you wish to hang paintings. The Centennial house taught me that interior logs are dreadful dust collectors. The twice-annual swabbing of the high, dust-laden logs in the Centennial house was work that never ended. Logs contract and expand according to humidity, temperature and season; the chinking material shrinks and insects pour in through tiny holes. Planed pièce-sur-pièce logs, though offering flat interior walls, still make for dark rooms and still need chinking. The heavy walls that result from using full logs are likely to sag and bow over time. Harry suggested we use two-inch-thick rough-cut planks cut with a slight taper to suggest pièce-sur-pièce construction, using a third of the material and less heavy labor. I agreed to this sensible idea. The exterior wood would be allowed to darken naturally, without stain.

  Because I spend my life in a shifting welter of papers, books, letters, maps and schedule sheets, I perversely love a clean minimalist look. I especially admired the Langston Hughes Library in Clinton, Tennessee, designed by Maya Lin. It has taken me half a lifetime to understand that my habits and work do not tally with clean minimalism. By default, complexity and clutter are my style, and I move from projects and paper piles on one table to different projects and paper piles on other big tables. Books are open on every surface next to bins of papers to be filed. Boxes of old photographs, manuscript drafts, correspondence and receipts crowd shelves and floor. Incoming and outgoing mail piles up. This is not a svelte, minimalist look. One large room was what I thought I needed for the tables, file cabinets, map case, desks, shelves for books, office supplies, book accessioning station and bill-paying desk.

  Adjacent to this library-office I hoped for a commodious kitchen with space for a sofa and chairs. I like to cook and cooking takes room for cleaning vegetables, prep work, chopping, slicing, for big pots, crocks and platters: paraphernalia, not minimalism. I wanted shelves for dozens of cookbooks. I grew up in rural New England in houses with large unheated pantries and knew their virtues. I wanted the kitchen door to lead to the vegetable garden. And because of the proximate river a fishing room seemed a marvelous addition, a place for rods and waders and nets just a minute away from the river and its dark pools.

  As the design developed, there were compromises. The fishing room had to accommodate the laundry area and the storage of other sports equipment, flower presses, day packs, a sewing table, vases and a good deal of miscellany. The kitchen itself was smaller than I wanted, and a little more defined than open. But it is adjacent and open to the room with the big maple dining table where I often end up writing with quick access to hot pots on the stove, the view of the cliff and of bird behavior.

  I wanted a modest but spacious bedroom with smooth ceilings and walls. The Centennial bedroom had five huge beams—each twelve to sixteen inches in diameter—across the ceiling and I would lie in bed staring up at them and wonder how quickly they would come down in an earthquake. It was not a bedroom with an excess of feng shui. I was keen to have tatami mats in a furniture-free alcove off the bedroom for meditation and exercise. I hoped for a commodious walk-in closet with good ventilation and a stupendous number of shelves and drawers. As I often travel, a small private attic for luggage and packing would be very useful.

  The Centennial garage had been snug, but at least it had roomy storage cabinets and shelves. I hoped the Bird Cloud garage would hold two vehicles, an SUV for trips into Wyoming’s backcountry, and a pickup to get around the property, to town and the dump. I hoped for a workbench and plenty of storage shelving. Underneath the master bedroom, Centennial had a noisy furnace, the replacement for the electric heaters, and I told Harry that a silent house was a major factor for me. I did not want to hear fans, blowers, pumps, whooshing and clunks.

  The year turned the corner into 2004. As Harry and crew worked on the design, the search began for a local builder.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Iron Enters My Soul

  2004

  Harry Teague’s first sketch for the house showed a long, dark building as lengthy as the old barn I fancied. There was no basement, a good idea as radon gas is a problem in this part of the world. The house was to be built on a slab with an interior ground floor of polished concrete. I had once mentioned to Harry that I was drawn to asymmetry in all things. So I was delighted to see the design was a long and narrow structure, but not a rectangle, incorporating interesting angles in its walls and the front and back entrances. The largest room, forty-eight feet long, was at the west end and destined to become the library. Moving toward the east was the dining-seating area with enormous windows facing the cliff. Then came the compact kitchen with very deep stone counters. A short hallway opened to the fishing room on the north and the front entry to the south and the two-vehicle garage at the end.

  Upstairs at the west end was the master bedroom with a fine view of the cliff face, a bath with the deep Japanese soaking tub and a tatami mat exercise area and a walk-in closet. Between the master suite and the guest room and its bath at the east end was a large family room—the upstairs living room. I had asked for a mouse-proof attic and there were two, one at each end of the house, both marvelous, both finished rooms fitted with electrical outlets and good lighting. The small attic off the master bedroom I used for suitcases and travel gear. The large attic was lined with metal shelving to hold books and papers which multiply like summer gnats in a writer’s house.

  I met E, the young, intense project manager from Harry’s office who seemed brimming with ideas, and felt I could depend on him for solving the inevitable problems while I was traveling out of the country. We began an e-mail correspondence concerning details of the plan.

  Most of the experienced local house construction workers were making big money in the gas fields. One contractor didn’t return my call for weeks and when he did it was too late. Another contractor who had done some work for me in Centennial said he was interested, but before things got serious he said he and his wife were getting a divorce and he was leaving Wyoming to start a new life. A local fellow—I’ll call him Mr. Construct—looked promising and Harry and I had several meetings with him. He seemed willing and interested and I liked him as a person. Yet in some way I was uneasy about him and I did not think he grasped what I wanted the house to be. Perhaps it was the John Wayne poster on his office wall. Perhaps it was his office walls themselves, plastic-coated wallboard, probably left over from some other construction project. I felt he was a good, reliable builder, comfortable with standard housing and standard materials, but probably not particularly imaginative. What would he think about incorporating rusted metal and found objects into the house? I felt this house needed someone a little freaky, open to new ideas, an experimenter. Yet given the shortage of experienced labor, we might have to work with Mr. Construct.

  Harry supplied him with plans and we waited for some kind of cost estimate. For many weeks there was silence. I had a tight budget. I also had a time budget as I was not getting any younger. I wanted to be in the house and on the property watching falcons and eagles. He did let
us know that there was no way he could undertake to start the building until autumn. And that was a blow.

  The year was wearing on. I drove over to the site as often as I could and tried to imagine the house. Late summer came and we still didn’t have a builder. I was intensely conscious of fleeting time. The thick green smell of June had blown away in the western wind and now, in August, the grasses were curing out, scenting the wind with the slightly sad odor of hay. The pronghorn were in rut, plant seeds ripe and packed with nutrition. Wildlife was approaching its annual prime condition. Unlike modern humans who eat well every day despite seasons and weather, wild creatures undergo annual fluctuations in their physical condition—well-nourished and strong at the end of summer, weak and trembling at the end of winter, year after year on the seesaw of life and death. Summer stops suddenly in Wyoming. A cold snap or a beginner snowstorm hits for a day or two in August or early September, then relents for a last-chance golden autumn period of a few weeks. Then things get serious, the storms longer and more intense and the snow stays on the ground.

  The property included a handsome little island, a shady cottonwood bosque, in the North Platte. Walking around on the island that August I found seven eagle primaries. (Primaries are the big outermost wing feathers.) For a few seconds I wondered if it had been a molt. But of course eagles do not molt bunches of feathers at once, but one at a time, and a loss of seven feathers would be catastrophic to flight. My Centennial friend, Uphill Bob, a walking encyclopedia of outdoor lore, but ever the optimist, said he thought this was not necessarily a sign of eagle demise (I had guessed someone passing in a boat took a shot at one). Yet when I asked the Yellowstone bird management biologist, Terry McEneaney, he said flatly, “That’s a dead eagle.”

  One important chore that I could get going while we worked out the practicalities of construction was fencing out the neighbors’ cows so the overgrazed and trampled land could begin to recover. Cows also eat young cottonwood trees, a habit which is gradually denuding the riparian margins of new tree growth, and their sharp hooves and heavy weights break down the riverbanks. I was surprised that The Nature Conservancy had allowed surrounding ranchers to run their stock on the property. Because we were beginning a conservation-restoration project I requested a clause be added to the conservation agreement excluding stock grazing from the property to protect it if it ever changed hands. The Nature Conservancy refused. Gradually I learned that this organization is allied with ranchers and is more concerned with land acquisition than conservation. Ranch owners often hold large acreages and it is a feather in The Nature Conservancy’s hat to add big chunks of ground to their holdings, but they seem unconcerned with the actual condition of that land. They ignore the fact that heavy grazing severely damages plant diversity and, where there is water, stream banks and tree regeneration. It was also shocking to me that their habitat inspector failed to notice the noxious weeds—leafy spurge along the waterways, Canada thistle, cheatgrass and other troublesome invaders largely spread by cattle. I was completely disillusioned.