Book: Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx

Bird Cloud is the name Annie Proulx gives to the home she built near the Medicine Bow mountains in southern Wyoming. It is on the North Platte River which comes out of the Rockies west of Denver, heads north to Caspar, Wyoming, before it turns east and south into Nebraska. Bird Cloud is near the town of Saratoga, Wyoming, about 20 miles south of Interstate 80.

I liked half of the chapters. She writes of things other than the building of this house, such as natural history, the history of Wyoming, her genealogy, and it seemed these were filler chapters and not especially germane to the Bird Cloud project. Actually, I liked more than half but at times felt disenchanted with the author and her restlessness and slight crabbiness for want of a better word. She has nothing good to say about The Nature Conservancy, for instance, and says that "I gradually learned that this organization is allied with ranchers and is more concerned with land acquisition than conservations. 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 holding, but they seem unconcerned with the actual condition of that land...I was completely disillusioned."

She finally realized that she could not live in Bird Cloud in the winter as snow drifts make the access road impassable. She had been told the road would be plowed when she bought the property which turned out not to be true. Yet, I suspect she wouldn't stay in one place even if weather were not a problem. While building this home, she traveled a lot and chose not to tell why she went where she went, so I wondered about that. She would make trips back to New England, to Newfoundland, to New York, to Ireland; often to Santa Fe or other parts of the West. She alluded to other books she was writing and perhaps she traveled for those connections. She is not forthcoming about her personal life, except she occasionally mentioned her sons and a daughter-in-law and that she had twin sisters. Of course, the book isn't about her family; it's about Bird Cloud, which name started to seem a bit precious as the tale moved along. Frank Lloyd Wright can have Taliesin and Falling Water but not too many folk can get away with that pretension in my opinion. And, while the book was about building a dream home and having definite ideas about how this was to be done, it was also difficult to picture the life or lives that would be lived in that home. Still, there were many interesting vignettes about the process, just not a particularly cohesive complete accounting.

She spent a huge amount of money, going over budget by at least $200K. This was definitely a custom home, another one on the western landscape. The cover of the book is a photograph of the view...not the house, but the river and the cliffs across the river and it IS stunning. In one of the last chapters, she describes the birds she watches and of course I loved that: prairie falcons, bald and golden eagles, ravens, hawks and the smaller feeder birds, the ducks and pelicans and mergansers. And there are lovely descriptions of this wind-swept open land and of the weather and flora. She writes of fencing to keep neighboring cows out; of a concrete floor that caused her much despair; of The James Gang, a group of guys who do most of the actual building, of various subcontractors and architects and water people; of porcupines, mountain lions, mice and midges.

This book is surely worth reading if one is interested in architecture, or in the issues of the modern west; or if one wishes to vicariously sit awhile in front of one of the windows in Bird Cloud and watch the amazing changes in light and color on the cliff as raptors wheel in the winds, or watch the stars or listen to the wind or just think about all those who moved through this land before Bird Cloud was built. And, of course, Annie Proulx is a wonderful writer, whatever the subject.