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By Root 11265 0

’s head attitudes that were never there. He understood well enough that a mining engineer was a Westerner by profession. He was not slopping around in that steaming mine ten hours a day, and mapping its labyrinths in his spare time, and studying engineering texts and government reports after you went to bed, just so he could give it all up and go back to an East coast barren of every mineral except maybe asbestos. You commented often enough how ambitious he was, how hard he worked to make up for the handicap of an aborted education. I think he didn’t stress what your future was likely to be, because he was tender of your homesickness, but he understood it well enough. What he didn’t fully understand, because he was always absorbed in his job, was how dreary long the days were for you, how lonely and how isolated and how strange.

Don’t you know how we lose the sense of our own individuality when there is nothing to reflect it back upon us? These people here have so little conception of our world that sometimes I feel myself as if I must have dreamed it.

The few hours, comparatively, that Oliver and I spend together are like the bread of life by which I live through the rest. I have never said much to you about him, because I have already begun to take him for granted as we do all the good things. I have already forgotten to count the dreadful ways in which all this happiness might have been turned into hopeless misery. Even so little a thing as Oliver’s loving this country and wishing to spend his life here, would have counted up as a serious trouble after a while. As it is, our wistful memories of home make another bond between us.

By such devices she perverted his sympathy into agreement with her fantasy that the West for them was only an excursion. Meantime, every day was the same. Morning opened like a great eye, daylight spied interminably upon her habitual activities, evening closed down. The uninterrupted sunshine made her desperate; it was like something she was doomed to.

Everything was static, in suspension, withheld. She lived a sleep-walker’s life, except for the Sundays when Oliver could leave his map and his reports for a few hours and take her on picnics back into the mountain, or the afternoons when he brought home letters that bloomed for her like firelight on loved faces. Time hung unchanging, or with no more visible change than a slow reddening of poison oak leaves, an imperceptible darkening of the golden hills. It dripped like a slow percolation through limestone, so slow that she forgot it between drops. Nevertheless every drop, indistinguishable from every other, left a little deposit of sensation, experience, feeling. In thirty or forty years the accumulated deposits would turn my cultivated, ladylike, lively, talkative, talented, innocently snobbish grandmother into a Western woman in spite of herself.

Willingly or unwillingly, she collected experience and wrote it back East in letters. Perhaps she wrote so fully because she wanted to divert Augusta’s depression. Perhaps she was only indulging her own starved desire for talk.

3

In the early morning the light leaned on these eastward-facing mountains. She could see it gilding the ridges southward and making a moiré of the varying leaf-faces of oak, madrone, and bay in the gulches. The fogfall that lay along the crest in a cottony roll was as white as the clouds of a fairytale.

Only the heads of the men in the skip were visible from where she stood just outside the door of the shaft house: Oliver, two of his young assistants, two timbermen, and a visiting engineer. The flat sun shone in the door and turned Oliver’s sunburned face to copper, the timbermen’s underground skins to pale brass. The candles on their hats burned with an almost invisible flame. Oliver was taller than the others, she could see him almost to the shoulders. Like someone leaving on a boat or train he smiled and waved. Stranger started forward, and she hung onto his collar.

There was a smell of woodsmoke and steam, the air still cringed from the whistle blast. A bell