Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [191]
But she is an absolute brick. Coming in day before yesterday, Oliver had to stop the team and kill a rattlesnake in the trail. She watched without aversion or screams or hysterics; only her lips pulled back a little from her teeth. She admires the scenery in a really Wordsworthian way, and she says her room will do splendidly. She has already fixed it up with pictures and china hens and bits of Paisley and her mother’s inlaid workbox. Her dressing table is a box set on end and curtained with muslin, her bed is a home-made bunk. And this for a girl who was brought up in an English country house (it now belongs to Ruskin!), whose father is a famous artist and whose stepmother recently published a book called The Girl of the Period!
Nothing like her has ever been seen in Idaho. Before she came, I confess I had some notion that she and one of the juniors, perhaps Wiley, might find their situation romantic, but Nellie is a somewhat homely little body, with rather too many teeth and too little chin, and I am afraid all her gifts, wonderful as they are, are sisterly . . .
More later. We are very busy, as you can imagine, getting established in our primitive camp.
Your own
Sue
3
Among my grandfather’s few papers, along with offprints of his articles in Irrigation News and Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, is a government publication on the Arrow Rock Dam, at the time of its completion the highest in the world. The bulletin lists, in addition to the politicians who took credit for the dam, the engineers who built it. Oliver Ward’s name is not among them, but A. J. Wiley’s is. It was Wiley, by that time a great name in reclamation circles, who sent the book to Grandfather, with a scrawl across the flyleaf: “It’s your dam, boss, whatever it says here-the same one we talked about on the river beach twenty years before the Bureau of Reclamation was ever heard of.”
As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong. Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
When they moved to the canyon camp, for example, they expected to stay only through the summer. They stayed five years.
Naturally I never saw the camp in Boise Canyon. Before I was old enough to hear about it, it was three hundred feet under water. Just as well. Abandoned in its gulch, its garden gone to weeds, its fences down, its ditches drifted full, its windows out, its bridge no more than broken cables trailing in the creek, every nail and fencepost tufted with the wool of passing sheep bands, it would look like failure and lost cause.
But while they lived there it was hopeful struggle, not lost cause, and for a while it was a little corner of Eden.
Eden had three stories. The upper one ran from the canyon rim up high sage slopes toward the aspen groves, pines, mountain meadows, and cold lakes and streams of the high country. The middle story was the rounding flat in the side gulch where a spring broke out and where their buildings and garden were. The lowest story was the river beach.
Just below the mouth of their gulch the cliffs pinched in, and the pinnacle called Arrow Rock, into whose slot Indians were supposed to have shot arrows to appease or subdue the spirits, stood up close against one wall. Rock slides had partially dammed the river and created a rapid below, a pool above. Except in very high