I could say that Annie Proulx’s “Bird Cloud” is a fascinating book written in razor-sharp prose that doesn’t waste the reader’s time and that it will draw in anyone who has ever thought about building their dream house, or has actually lived in their dream house, or just lived in any kind of house at all.
But that would be only a piece of the story.
This book is about place, and no American author tops Proulx at setting the reader down in unfamiliar territory, whether it be her postcard re-creation of Newfoundland in “The Shipping News” or the dried-up Texas Panhandle in “That Old Ace in the Hole.” “Bird Cloud” shows the Pulitzer Prize-winning author at her best.
Several years ago, Proulx purchased a square mile of property on the high plains of Wyoming that included a rolling ribbon of the North Platte River. On one side of this stream she chose a building site facing a vast 400-foot rise of blond rock shaped something like a cake that fell in the oven.
This cliff across the river provides habitat for just about any type of animal found in Wyoming. Bird Cloud is what she named the place she built on this wind-scoured and lonely tract, and the book is the elaborate and engaging tale of bringing about her wonderful house.
Proulx gives the many reasons she wanted to move from her existing Wyoming home and then carefully paints the Bird Cloud property’s history, geology and then its physical nature.
She tells us about its animal life and projects what the land will look like in the future after she fences out the ordinary cows, which do their best to eat away the indigenous plants.
She ladles out a dollop of personal information regarding her family, and even some facts about its history. She tells of her French Canadian father who, always striving to move up in the world, transplanted his kids once a year or more, so that by the time she was 15 she had lived in more than 20 houses.
She tells how she lived for a time in a log cabin and then in a former gas station, and I wondered for a bit what this history had to do with Bird Cloud. But I soon understood something: Who would want a special home that she would fit into like a key into a complex lock other than someone who’d moved dozens of times in her childhood, never having had the time to connect to one place?
Bird Cloud was to be, maybe, the complete and perfect consolidation of everything she liked about a dwelling and the exclusion of everything she disliked. The book entertains wonderfully as she tells how she made out on both fronts.
Most of the narrative deals with making the house, built painstakingly by a group of expert contractors whom she eventually relates to better than blood relatives because she works with them so hard for so long.
She takes the reader through permits, rights of way, foundations, machinery rooms, siding, molding, furniture, a quest for a floor color that would discourage Odysseus, and she makes it all fascinating.
It would be giving too much away to mention specifics of the house other than to say that every nail and tile, hue and texture was selected with the care a great writer uses to choose an adjective for the final sentence of a novel.
Reading about Proulx’s vision of home building, I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s term, the “habit of art,” which refers to the way a good writer approaches everything he or she is responsible for making. It is a process of intuitive selection informed by experience. And just being picky as hell about everything.
Proulx’s fabulous house was made not only to meld into the landscape but also into the world of the region’s wildlife, especially the birds.
Bird Cloud’s big windows show the daily shuttling of every kind of feathered traveler, and the author takes pains to show her love for the fierce and hardy fowl that brave the brutal Wyoming winters.
“Bird Cloud” is part personal memoir, part construction adventure, part diary about noble animals, but all of it comes together like a glorious meal.
NONFICTION: MEMOIR
Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx
