POSTED: 07 APRIL 2011 Annie Proulx fills Bird Cloud with exquisite language Widely-acclaimed writer Annie Proulx is perhaps best known for her novel, The Shipping News, and the 1997 short story on which the film, Brokeback Mountain, was based. Her recent book, Bird Cloud: A Memoir, outlines the trials and tribulations of building her much-loved, energy-efficient, and perhaps extravagant, house at Bird Cloud, on 640 acres overlooking Wyoming’s North Platte River. Not a lot is gleaned from the book about the author’s life prior to Bird Cloud – certain events, marriage to an Air-Force man in her early 20s and living in Japan, her many abodes, her mother’s ‘pale-eyed Yankee clan’, her father (who worked continuously to advance his career and shake off his poverty-stricken roots) – feature to some degree. Knowing little of her father’s past, she engaged a genealogist to undertake research, the resultant stories about French ancestry and French-Canadian fur trappers and riverboat captains add some colour to minutia which might otherwise only appeal to readers with an interest in genealogy. And it may only be readers with a bent for ornithology who have any real interest that she lives in a virtual aviary, among myriad species of birds including eagles, ravens, finches, grey jays, meadowlarks, chickadees, red-winged blackbirds, blue-winged teal, red-tailed hawks, peregrine falcons, prairie falcons and black scoters. At times, she has walked close enough to a great horned owl to note that its left eye is brilliant yellow while the right one is rusty brown. The dry, searing winds and noxious-weed infested environment of summer at Bird Cloud contrasts markedly with its inhospitable frigid, stark winters. Proulx finds some similarities there with Australia’s Uluru region, including size, lighting and spiritual and ceremonial significance for local indigenous people. Her property is a nature lover’s paradise inhabited by deer, elk, coyotes, marmots and mountain lions along with rattlesnakes, tarantulas, porcupines and the odd scorpion. From her dining room she can peer directly into a mountain lion’s den and she feels ‘fabulously wealthy’ that she can clearly see nests of bald eagles and golden eagles and study their mating, fishing and food-gathering behaviour. But the birds are in charge: she gave up skiing near a particular part of the property so as not to disturb the ‘goldens’ and a walk along the river might be cut short by an agitated eagle angrily ‘escorting’ her back to the house. Proulx’s use of language is exquisite with many expressive passages along the lines of: ‘...Freezing river mist had coated every tree and shrub. There were no birds in sight. The sun struggled up and the mist rose in great humps...the cottonwoods glittered like icy nosegays, stems wrapped in gauze. Spring seemed very far away.’ Every word and phrase seem to have been forensically considered. Her graphic descriptions of animals feasting on dead carcasses, a deer’s heart being gouged out while it is alive or a cow or deer being strategically chased by a mountain lion to a cliff face, falling and becoming the predator’s meal, are poignant tales of survival of the fittest. Recently at Canberra’s Portrait Gallery Proulx received enthusiastic audience support about the merits of traditional books over e-readers and acknowledged her obsession of poring over every word or phrase for her work. She also spoke glowingly of the ever-reliable builders, dubbed the James Gang, who were integral to many aspects of construction, landscaping and problem solving at Bird Cloud. At the heart of this book is the very inspirational story of someone who has taken on the monumental task of building a large home in a remote part of America. Certainly in reading of the various building disasters and projects gone haywire, a reader may feel decidedly inadequate, lazy and non-innovative about her own dwelling. But Proulx inhabits a different world to many of us. Her life is punctuated with trips to other places including her other home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when Bird Cloud is snowed in and ‘...isolated... at the end of the impassable road’ (which is pretty much half the year). Not surprisingly, she has become reconciled to the fact that it is not to be the final home of which she had dreamed. With myriad footnotes and digressions, Proulx has generously cited information from a wide array of other authors, though getting to a point at times, can be a bit laboured. Much of what she has included seems to be material which she was simply unable to resist, be it on: anthropology, architecture, archaeology, geography, history, politics, weather patterns, or indeed, building a house, with readers concluding that the book would lend itself well to university studies in a range of disciplines. Certainly she has provided a wealth of information and her focus on Wyoming’s history and early-days landowners, entrepreneurs, politicians and Indian tribes (including their gift for oratory and persuasion), is no exception. Considering the author’s obsession with detail and research, it seems a bit curious that she did not know prior to purchasing and taking up residence at Bird Cloud that it would be snowed in during winter, and/or that the local council did not as a matter of course, plough snow away from the nearby road. But as she has admitted (rather embarrassedly): ‘I believed the real estate agent.’ While readers can empathise about the significant building problems such as the tensions between some of the crew or the smashed sewerage pipes, extravagant inclusions such as elk horn handles on kitchen cupboards, Brazilian floor tiles, a Japanese soak tub and clerestory windows would be anathema to many people. Similarly, the debacle over the concrete floor which was meant to be orange-red but ended up looking like ‘raw liver’ and when re-dyed became ‘dusty, dull brownish red speckled’ and shed colour for the next year, does seem a big investment for so little return, for any home owner. An enormous amount of information is packed into Bird Cloud: A Memoir ‘s 234 tightly-written pages. Little wonder that Proulx needed a large dwelling for long worktables for manuscripts, maps and research material (and her ever-growing large book collection). A great read, and an ideal reference book, it needs an index for readers wishing to check information. And a glossary of terms covering the plethora of unusual words would be useful. Ironically, while one of the book’s strengths is that it provides so much information, at times this can present challenges for readers in maintaining an interest in the many stories within stories. |
Annie Proulx ... her use of language is exquisite.
PUBLISHING DETAILS Bird Cloud, by Annie Proulx | 288pp paperback $27.99 | Published by 4th Estate. |
