Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [197]
Did you ever see an engineering report in limp leather with gold stamping? I believe you will. My engineers are capable of panning the gold dust and making their own gold leaf, if necessary.
As if these projects were not enough to occupy them, along with constant wood chopping, water hauling, care of the animals, trips to town, and all the chores of a frontier ranche, they plan to swing a cable footbridge across the river, between the cliffs where we dare hope that one day a dam will back up the waters. On this side a horse trail goes upriver along the foot of the cliff, but the wagon road to the mountains must go around, over the bluffs where I drew the freight wagon of “The Last Trip In.” We must haul our supplies roundabout and bring them down into our gulch by a steep trail, or haul them on the shorter road across the river and trans-ship them by the Parson, which is so lopsided it can hardly be rowed in calm water, much less when the river is high or clogged with ice. It is too cold and dangerous to try anchoring cables to the cliffs now, but at the first sign of spring I expect to see my men crawling around there like spiders.
Isn’t life strange? Where it takes us? As you know, I didn’t come out here with entire willingness, and I can’t be anything but anxious over the delays and uncertainties that we face now. And yet of all our wild nesting places this is the wildest and sweetest, and made up of the most extravagant incongruities.
Above our lava rock mantel hangs a print of Titian’s virgin, alone in the clouds in her amazement and wonder. On the walls, besides one or two watercolors of mine that the men insisted must be hung, are a half dozen watercolors contributed by Nellie, who has more of her father’s paintings and more of his lithographs of English wildflowers than her own walls will hold. And so she enriches us all with the delicacy of her father’s art, here where every other impression is of strong, rough Nature. From my desk, now that the working light has begun to fail, I can look into the other end of the room and see the children at tea and Nellie finishing, aloud, something she has been reading to them. Her voice is sweet and soft, but can ring on the sterner passages. Her English profile is sharp against the deep-toned West. The long window behind the three heads gives the whole of the canyon, like those detailed backgrounds in miniature which the early Italian painters liked to put in behind their saints and virgins. There comes a moment in these short winter days-it is at hand just now–when the light suddenly changes and becomes like the light during an eclipse. It is very strange-a pause before the passionate moment of the afterglow which will follow.
Wan, having prepared the children’s tea, is out in the cooktent preparing supper, probably singing through his nose some outlandish Chinese tune. When I was first at New Almaden the sight of a Chinese made me positively shudder, and yet I think we all love this smiling little ivory man. He is one of us; I believe he looks upon us as his family. Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
I shall be as quiet this winter as my men are active. I am expecting again, as Augusta must have told you-a consequence of the optimism that flooded us all when it seemed that young Mr. Keyser took such a glowing report eastward. After my bad luck last winter in Boise, the doctor says that this baby will make me or break me. I am forbidden to take more than the most gentle exercise, and in particular am forbidden to ride any conveyance, either wheeled or footed, that we possess. You can imagine how much this house means to me. We call it The House That Century Built, for it was your check for The Witness that made it possible.
Our Christmas to you two was small and mean by necessity, not through any lessening of our love. Yours to us was rich and warm, and will touch our minds and hearts through the whole winter. God bless you, Thomas Hudson, and your