Bird Cloud: A Memoir by Annie Proulx, Fourth Estate, $35.95.
This is a rare glimpse into the private world of Annie Proulx, 75-year-old author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain.
Bird Cloud — her first non-fiction publication in 20 years — deals with her building a house for herself to live in and her four grown-up children to stay, on 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie, once a camping place for Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Western Indian tribes.
Proulx draws deep connections between the site and Australia’s Uluru, the changing colours of which she remembers from a 1996 visit. She dreams: “This place [Bird Cloud] is, perhaps, where I will end my days, or so I think.”
Ultimately, she will spend only one full year in her beloved bolthole, driven back by the “road-choking snow” and “painfully bright and cold Wyoming days that burn your eyes out of their sockets”.
Today she retreats to New Mexico where the roads are impassable. Intensely aware of her surrounds, Proulx pays respect. “We slide into houses and apartments others have built and rarely have a clue about what went on there.”
The indefatigable Proulx attends a class on waterfowl identification, takes her building gang on archaeological digs.
And while she curses, “Damn living in an open range state where cows can wander where they want…” some property headaches are common to all: “Roughrider Movers did a very bad thing… I had 40-odd boxes of manuscripts and drafts. One of the mover-helpers decided to open and repack the boxes…If he were to appear before me now, I would kill him.”
Captivatingly beautiful and courageously funny.
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