Angle of Repose (56 page)

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 water the pool was smooth, with a gravel beach which was their front yard. Into the natural reservoir that was a forecast of the much larger one they intended some day to build there, logs came down on the spring run-off, followed by loggers in sharp-prowed boats. If they needed fence posts or timbers they could sail out in their own black boat, called the Parson, and harpoon what they wanted with picks, and drag it ashore. They pulled breakfast from the pool, the children waded its edges and caught crayfish under its stones, the juniors took icy swims in it before the ladies were up or after they had gone to bed. Through the nights of five years their campfires threw red light on the lava cliffs and touched the moving river with the mystery of transitoriness, and framed the triangle of the tent against the dark in an assertion of human purpose. Even in low water, the rapid below was a steady rush and mutter on the air.

On the beach, while they were still all together, they held their conferences and sang and talked in the evenings. Much planning went on around their fires, much hope went downriver and was renewed from upstream. This was the place where for a while Grandfather had everything he had come West looking for-the freedom, the active outdoor life, the excitement of something mighty to be built.

In Grandmother’s old photograph album with the Yellowstone bear on its cover there is a snapshot of Grandfather, the juniors, and the Keyser son who came out to inspect the irrigation scheme his family was considering. They are standing on the beach with saddle horses and a laden packhorse droop-headed behind them, and an edge of river and the black pillar of Arrow Rock in the background. Across the bottom, evidently at some later time, Grandmother has printed in white ink, in the neat print that is so different from her hasty script,
“How Hope looked. Aug. 1883.”

Hope looks very young, young enough to seem dubious to less cautious men than the Keysers. Young Keyser himself, the man upon whose word their future hangs, is a bare-faced boy. Wiley is even younger, only twenty-three, but he is important to them because it turns out that he attended St. Paul’s School with young Keyser, and they have become in this slot in the Western mountains instant friends. Sargent with his dark sideburns and mustache looks like a young actor impersonating middle age, and he bends upon the camera, or upon the person holding it, who was Grandmother, a smile like the smile of a man watching the play of children who are dear to him. And the Chief, in a pith helmet that he must have dug out to impress visiting capitalism, looks nearly as young as the rest of them, so young that I have trouble recognizing my grandfather in him. His skin is burned dark, his eyes look very light. He too is smiling into the camera–a young athlete with a powerful long body and a candid face. But also pukka sahib of the Sawtooths, on his way to prove to careful money men that his scheme is sound and that its creator, young as he looks, is a man of skill, judgment, and experience.

It makes me melancholy to see him so youthful and girded with determination, ready to mount and ride off into the future more than eighty years ago.

 

I skip over that summer, in which nothing much happened but the passage of time, and jump to a chilly night in September 1883. The four of them sat around a big fire on the beach. Under a wide river of sky the river of water went with wet splashings, sunk in the rock, and above and along the river of water, down the beaches and around corners of worn stone, flowed a river of cold air that was sucked into the draft of the fire and spewed upward as sparks that multiplied the stars. Susan felt it numb on the back of her neck, and pulled up the collar of Oliver’s sheepskin coat and tightened the
rebozo
around her hair.

Reddened with firelight, its weeds casting black shadows, their path started up the gulch, up toward where Wan’s cooktent was pasted orange on the darkness. On the other side of the fire, lapped with shining, unseen wetness, the beach pebbles gleamed like the scales of a fish. Against the creep of the downcanyon wind the sound of the rapid was only a mutter. They sat hugging their knees, low-spirited, frowning into the flames.

I can visualize them pretty exactly, because a little later Grandmother drew her three men in that posture for a series called
Far Western Life
-the best things she ever did, I believe, better even than the Mexican drawings. I saw them described in an art history the other day as “beautiful examples from the golden age of woodcut illustration.” This picture she titled
Prospectors,
and she captioned it with a verse from Bret Harte:

In their hour of disspiritedness, the haggard face and form that drooped and fainted were authentic enough. They had worked hard and hoped hard, and their disappointment was as great as their expectations had been. But the money motive demeans them. They were in no race for wealth-that was precisely what disgusted Grandfather with the mining business. They were makers and doers, they wanted to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for a civilization. I suppose they were wrong–their whole civilization was wrong-but they were the antithesis of mean or greedy. Given the choice, any one of them would have chosen poverty, with the success of their project, over wealth and its failure. It was some such perception that made Susan raise her voice above the lonely night sounds of fire and wind. “Ah,
well!
The Keysers aren’t the only people with money.”

No, they said. Of course not. Sure.

“General Tompkins is working. You might get a telegram tomorrow.”

“If we did it wouldn’t do us any good this year,” Oliver said. “Our construction season’s gone.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do in the winter?”

Frank Sargent slapped his dusty boots, a sound loud and impatient. “Why don’t we just start digging that ditch ourselves, the four of us?”

“Because it wouldn’t do to get people laughing,” Oliver said. “If we’d got started we could have gone on till Christmas. Now it isn’t worth starting. Not with four men, one team, and one Fresno scraper.”

“At least you can use the winter for more planning,” Susan said.

Across the fire he sent her a slow, narrow-eyed smile. “We’re already oversupplied with that. There’s one thing we can do through the winter, though.”

“What?”

“Wait ”

They laughed. They threw sticks and pebbles at the fire. Huddled in the coat whose sleeves came four inches below her fingertips, listening to the secret noises of the river, watching the light flutter on the cliff behind Frank Sargent’s profiled head, Susan tasted the word and did not like its flavor. Wait. They had done little else since he came East to convert her to his scheme. She remembered him standing above the basket of his three-week-old daughter and declaring himself as confident of success as she was that the baby could be brought up to be a woman. Betsy was now a month past her second birthday. Their home was this wild canyon, their hearth this river beach, their hope as far off as ever. Farther, for then they had Pope and Cole behind them, and now they had no one.

“Waiting’s got its problems, though,” Oliver said.

“I thought we were getting pretty good at it,” Wiley said, and laughed again.

Oliver did not laugh. He looked at Susan and then into the fire. “We can’t go back to town-can’t afford it. We can’t keep Wan-no money, no room. We can’t ask Frank and Wiley to go on working for nothing. They’ve been doing it since the first of May.”

Wiley looked up once, quickly, and then began to dig in the coarse sand with a stick. Frank arched his back against the log and relaxed again. It occurred to Susan that though she had drawn him in many poses, she had never tried him as an Indian. He had a high-nosed, proud, touchy look. She imagined a blanket around his shoulders, his hair in braids with bits of feather and bone plugs. Yes.

She heard him say humorously, “What are you doing, firing us?”

“I’m giving you the chance to do something besides wait.”

“What if we’d rather wait than do something else?”

Oliver threw a stick at the fire. He had the ground around him cleaned down to the gravel. His hand went on absently feeling for other scraps of things to pick up and throw. “These are the years you should be establishing yourself, instead of bogging down in a stalled project.”

“Shoot,” Wiley said, “don’t you believe in this project? I do.”

“So do I,” Frank said.

Oliver said patiently, “There’s no place for you to live, Frank. Even if you two were crazy enough to go on working for nothing.”

“Crazy?” Susan said. “Oh no, loyal!”

She embarrassed them. They sent her way wags of the head and depreciatory smiles. “What’s the matter with the tent?” Frank said.

“Through the winter?”

“Don’t think you’ll be much better off in the shack. Would you say, Art?”

“She gets a little fresh,” Wiley said.

“We’ll have to fix it up. Tarpaper it, something.”

“Look,” Frank said, and sat up straight against the log, “I don’t think Mrs. Ward is going to enjoy that shack whatever we do to it. That’s just not good enough for her and the children and Nellie. Why don’t we build her a house? We won’t be doing anything else.”

Oliver looked amused. “Out of what?”

“Logs?”

“Sure,” Wiley said.

“Too late to get ’em cut,” Oliver said. “No water to float ’em down.”

“Rock? There’s plenty of that.”

“What do we do for roof, floors, framing, windows, all the rest of it? I’m telling you, the company’s broke and so am I. You’d better line up something else. If we ever start again, and you want to come back, you’re hired, at a good raise.”

It seemed to Susan that he dealt callously with their loyalty and their faith. They had been in it together too long to break up now like casual travelers after a train ride. She said impulsively, “But Oliver, we will have some money. I’ll be getting a check from Thomas for The Witness.”

Right back to their old argument. She saw his face go wooden. His hand groped for something to pick up, found a piece of stick. His fingers broke it absently, broke it again. “Which is not for building houses,” he said, and warned her with his eyes.

But she threw back the sheepskin collar and leaned forward into the fire’s heat, pulling the
rebozo
tighter around her head. Mexico had taught her what such a shawl could do for a pretty face. As I imagine her, bright-eyed and intense, she might be by Murillo.

Lightly she said, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll put up the money to build a house, and I’ll retain title, and when the time comes I’ll sell it back to the company for a construction headquarters. And I’ll charge you twice what it costs.”

She made him laugh, which was much. His stubbornness seldom lasted through his laughter. To the juniors he said, “Boys, when you get married, marry a Quaker. They can buy from a Scotchman and sell to a Jew and make money.”

“Is it a bargain?” Susan said. “Then we can stay together. We
must
stay together! Isn’t that what you want, Frank? Mr. Wiley?”