Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [181]
It is a life without much stimulation or excitement. The bugles from the cavalry post just above us mark off the days as inexorably as the whistles of New Almaden or the church bells of Morelia. I open my eyes to First Call, rise to Reveille, nurse my baby to Mess Call. When I am working at my desk I am often spurred on by the thrilling notes of the Charge from the drill field beyond our pasture fence. When I hear To the Colors, as they lower the flag in the evening, I know it is time to bestir myself about supper. I go to bed to Taps, and drift off to sleep as Lights Out blows eastward across the mesa, a long, fading, musical relinquishment as sweet and sad as the call of a mourning dove.
The house is comfortable, the children are very well, Oliver’s work goes ahead steadily, I have my own work to keep me from thinking too much about all I left behind, and so I have no right to belittle this place where we shall spend our lives until Oliver gives up being a field engineer. There are one or two Army wives, Eastern ladies, who are good company. The town ladies I can say less for. You never saw such attention to dress and manners, and to so little purpose. They have been eager about paying calls, but most of their calls I shall not return. They may think me snobbish if they wish.
Oliver hoped that I would find the Governor and his wife attractive. We dined with them a few nights ago, and alas, I am afraid I thought him pretentious, his house tasteless, and his wife common. For O’s sake I do not admit this, for the Governor is his supporter, and of much use to him in cutting red tape.
It is strange to find ourselves people of consequence. My old boy has sold them all on his dream. I am sure they all hope to get rich out of him, or richer–some shareholders in the company are the Irish millionaires I mentioned. There has been a considerable land boom already, and the land office is doing-I just realized where the phrase comes from–a land-office business. Oh, couldn’t you and Thomas homestead a claim and lay the foundations for a western place of visitation? Quite seriously, it would be a profitable thing to do, and on “desert” or “timber-culture” claims there is no residence requirement as there is for a homestead. You need only have someone make minimal “improvements,” as they are called, and wait. Don’t you want to join us in the making of a new country? Have you no impulse to see the banks of the Snake? Or is that one of those horrid Western names that put you off?
The country, as distinguished from its improvements and its people, is beautiful–a vast sage plain that falls in great steps from the mountains to the canyon of the Snake, and then rises gradually on the other side to other mountains. It is one of the compensations of being a pioneer that one may see it wild and unbroken. Coming out, we had to leave the Union Pacific at Granger, in Wyoming Territory, and board the single passenger car attached to a construction train on the Oregon Shortline, which is not yet completed. Oliver met us with a democrat wagon at Kuna, the end of the line.
I wish I could make you feel a place like Kuna. It is a place where silence closes about you after the bustle of the train, where a soft, dry wind from great distances hums through the telephone wires and a stage road goes out of sight in one direction and a new railroad track in another. There is not a tree, nothing but sage. As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. The wind has magic in it, and the air is full of birds and birdsong. Meadowlarks pipe all around us, something else–pipits? true skylarks?–rains down brief sweet showers of notes from the sky. Hawks sail far up in the blue, magpies fly along ahead, coming back now and then like ranging dogs to make sure you are not lost. Not a house, windmill, hill, only that jade-gray plain with lilac mountains on every distant horizon. The mountains companionably move along with you as the dirt road flows behind. The plain, like a great Lazy Susan, turns gravely, and as it turns it brings into view primroses blooming in the sand, and cactus pads with great red and yellow blooms as showy as hibiscus.