Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx

Bird Cloud, Annie Proulx

Thanks to Carol Nulsen for this book. 

Bird Cloud is the name of her home in Wyoming and this is the story of its design, creation, and location.  The books first chapter was nearly a turn off.  Annie portrays herself so negatively as a loner and bitch that I almost quit.  I did not like her.  “Well do I know my own character negatives – bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded.” But through the book that image softens, here curiosity about nature, geology, archaeology give her better dimensions.  Her patience with the exceedingly complex and long two year process of completing the house exceeds my ability to adapt.

In chapter two she does a family history research project that might be nice for her family, but it did nothing for me.  As she found these various connections all I could think was – who cares.  “I have moved countless times in my adult life, too.  Part of this peripatetic behavior is because Americans are mobile people, but I also come from a Franco American background, rootless people who have no national identity, who really belong nowhere in the United State.”

But, alas from there on I was hooked.  The architects continue to live in the clouds forgetting things like storage rooms (just like they did at Audubon Center) and leaving out details that the contractor has to fill in.  He would have driven me crazy.  “I told myself the house had to be built.  I began to think of it then as a kind of wooden poem.”

The construction team, a family, becomes her family through the effort and they deal with issues like her property being at the end of a long road that is impassable in the winter (a fact that the seller neglected to tell her), the 80 – 100 mph winds that soar through the valley, the flooding of the stream, the difficulty in keeping her neighbors cattle out, and the alkaline water to name a few.  “With Bird Cloud, I saw the house rise from what I thought were good ideas.  The intentions were good at least.  I still do not know where things went wrong or even if things did go wrong.  After years of wrestling with awkward domiciles I thought I knew what I needed in a house.  I’m afraid I still don’t know, which is another way of saying that for me there is no perfect house.”

But there is a resiliency in meeting each challenge plus escapism in learning about the geology, ecology, archaeology of the land.  The last chapter is all about the birds and was really fun.

And did she succeed in creating her dream home?  “…but I had to face the fact that no matter how much I loved the place it was not, and never could be, the final home of which I had dreamed.”