Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [182]
We had miles of that, while Betsy slept and Ollie got to drive the team, seated between his father’s knees. It was touching to see how he responded to the wild empty country–touching and a little alarming. I would not be fully easy in my mind if I thought he might grow into a Western child, limited by his limited world.
And yet how beautiful it is! For the first time I understood Oliver’s enthusiasm. We went softly on that sandy trail among the sage, and that dry magical wind from the west blew across us, until at last we came out on a long bench above a river valley, with mountains close behind patched with snow and forest. To our right, the stream broke out of a canyon cut through the sagebrush foothills. To the left, across a bridge, was Boise City climbing up its stepped benches. Below town the crooked line of cottonwoods marking Boise Creek groped across the plain until in the distance trees and river sank below the benches and the plains healed over. From a mile or two away, unless one is on a high place, neither the Boise nor the Snake can be seen at all, sunken in their canyons.
Canyon gate and creek and city were no more than a scribble on the great empty page across which Oliver hopes to write a history of human occupation. He stopped the team and we looked at it a considerable while. It was good for me to see it as he first saw it when he came down from the Coeur d’Alene and was struck by his great idea. Oliver knew, in that quiet way he has of knowing, that if I once saw it I would feel about it as he does. It is a great idea, difficult of accomplishment but not impossible. I have become half a believer, and though I cannot say I am fully reconciled to the life it will lead us, I am no longer fearful of failure.
Now that we are here and the work is going forward, there are even indications that the West which so lightly and cruelly separates and scatters people can bring them together again–that the binding force of civilization and human association is as strong, perhaps, as the West’s bigness and impersonality. I allude to the fact that Oliver has managed to locate his old assistant, Frank Sargent, and has arranged for him to join us here. I am glad–but not because, as you once or twice playfully suggested, Frank is romantically attached to a woman ten years older than himself. I have been concerned about him, a well-born and educated young man from the East, thrown among rough men in the rough camps where he has worked the past several years. He used to talk to me in Leadville about his mother and sisters, and about the temptations that assail any young man in the West, and his determination to resist them. But if rumor is correct, he has not been able to evade them entirely in Tombstone, as dreadful a camp as the West ever spawned. Oliver tells me that in Arizona Frank participated in the hunt for a man who had murdered a friend, and that the hunt ended, down across the line in Mexico, with the murderer swinging from a tree. It is hard to believe this of the Frank I know, so ardently gentle–and yet there was always a young warrior in him. When Pricey was beaten in Leadville, only Oliver’s restraint kept Frank from going after his assailants with a gun.
To us, he is a dear and loyal friend, and to boot, as they say out here, a beautiful and patient model. He would try all day to balance on a toad-stool while I drew him as Oberon, if only I asked it. He will add much to Boise. He arrives next week.
How gossipy this sounds, like chattering with you and Katy and Emma in the halls of Cooper!
Oliver’s other young assistant is a Boston Tech man named Wiley, as sunny and good natured as some cheerful bird. You must know, having had it from the beginning, what a happiness it is to have one’s husband completely contented in his work. O. has always handled his jobs conscientiously and well, but I think his heart was never in a job until now. He works all day, and at night buries himself in the history of irrigation, and reports on systems in Persia, India, China, everywhere. Reading aloud to him the other night when he had a headache, I came across a quotation from Confucius that made us both laugh, it so perfectly expressed Oliver Ward. Confucius said,