Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [238]
I used to write you from Almaden how strangely transformed the dust clouds were after the sun went down. It is the same here. In some ways this mesa is a return. We look off, just as we did at Almaden, into a vast stretch of valley, with the moon at our back. Not a single tree in sight as far as we can see south, east, and west. To the north lie the irrigated lowlands along the river. The noble shape of the country lies bare under the sky as if just made, and ready for the birth of trees and crops.
It is a vision that absorbs Oliver. He follows it like a man panting after a mirage, and he works, works, works. He manages his survey, he supervises the ditch construction, he confers with politicians and contractors and shareholders, he takes visiting representatives of the Syndicate over the works–we have been visited twice since I arrived–and in the hours between dusk and dark, and even after dark, he is out with John doing something to the land or the buildings or the well. He is full of excitement and energy. But my heart whispers to me that all he dreams of is still years away, and that meantime we grow old, we diminish, we lose touch with all that used to make life rich and wonderful. I have just counted on my fingers how long it has been since I saw you. More than seven years.
But I began to speak of our house, before dust and the years obscured it. We have again the mud-plastered walls of the canyon house. The adobe is not as tough as that of the canyon, but a better color–a greenish-yellow gray, like beach sand. We are going to paint the wainscot and woodwork in one of the rooms old ivory–I think it will bring out the color of the walls. Even one finished room would cheer me. I must think in those terms –one room, then another, and another, till all are done, and then grass outside instead of dust, and hammocks on the veranda for the watching of sunsets.
Then if you could only come we could give you a peaceful, roomy sleeping chamber, and a house in which your serene beauty would feel at home. How solitary and strange this great sweep of country would look to you! Yet I can fancy you would like to lie on the hill slope by a clump of sage, and gaze down over the valley and into the bosom of the mountain range opposite, almost as we used to lie on Orchard Hill and look across at the farms of Dutchess County.
Wiley has driven the Susan Canal more than eight miles. It will go twenty before water is turned into it, to water claims that lie below ours. That is for next summer. Meantime the “Big Ditch” is alive with teams and scrapers, and the canyon resounds with blasting. It awes me to see how big this scheme is. In all the years I thought I was helping dream it, I hadn’t the imagination to understand what I was dreaming. The Big Ditch will be immense, a man-made river, and eventually will water nearly three hundred thousand acres–nearly five hundred square miles. There are countries in the world no bigger than that. There will have to be several storage dams, but those will come later. Even without the dams, this will be one of the grandest things in the West.
The finished section, so far hardly more than a half mile, sweeps in a great curve around the shoulder of the mountain, eighty feet wide at the top, fifty at the bottom. The twelve-foot banks slope back at the “angle of repose,” which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling. Down the bottom of the ditch fifteen horsemen could ride abreast, without crowding. It was good for me to see it all the other day, in company with the gentlemen from the London syndicate, and to be reminded how all of it is owing to my old