Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [184]
The failure of our money frightens me–it is what I feared, or half feared, all along–but for the summer I like the canyon much better than Boise. I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull. The camp consists of a shack, a cook tent with a “fly” over our table, Wiley’s and Frank’s tent on the beach, and an abandoned miner’s cabin downriver, where John sleeps. The shack used to be the office, but as Oliver says, you don’t need an office to mark time in, and so now it houses the four Wards and Nellie Linton. “A mean low house,” etc–and don’t we wish we could expend all our strength on the ditches and water channels!
It was Nellie more than myself that I worried about when it became plain that we must move out here. You remember I wrote you about her–my old teacher’s daughter who once expressed an interest in sometime coming West. But oh, my, to come West, not to a civilized house, but to a shack in a canyon! There was no way to stop her, she was already on her way from London, where she had been teaching the children of an American diplomat. So Oliver and the juniors hastily built on a bare, pine-board room, I all the time sure that, being a gentlewoman, and fastidious, she would look once and turn around and go back.
But she is an absolute brick. Coming in day before yesterday, Oliver had to stop the team and kill a rattlesnake in the trail. She watched without aversion or screams or hysterics; only her lips pulled back a little from her teeth. She admires the scenery in a really Wordsworthian way, and she says her room will do splendidly. She has already fixed it up with pictures and china hens and bits of Paisley and her mother’s inlaid workbox. Her dressing table is a box set on end and curtained with muslin, her bed is a home-made bunk. And this for a girl who was brought up in an English country house (it now belongs to Ruskin!), whose father is a famous artist and whose stepmother recently published a book called The Girl of the Period!
Nothing like her has ever been seen in Idaho. Before she came, I confess I had some notion that she and one of the juniors, perhaps Wiley, might find their situation romantic, but Nellie is a somewhat homely little body, with rather too many teeth and too little chin, and I am afraid all her gifts, wonderful as they are, are sisterly . . .
More later. We are very busy, as you can imagine, getting established in our primitive camp.
Your own
Sue
3
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.