Name: Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx
SKU: PCWbirdcloud
Price: 15.64 USD
Availability: InStock

Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx

$15.64

Annie Proulx is a private woman. In this book, she documents three crazy years of building her dream home, challenging builders, suppliers, 100 mph winds, snow blocked roads, and almost giving up.

Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of Annie Proulx’s piece of the Wyoming landscape and her home there.

“Bird Cloud” is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four-hundred-foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she wanted to build on it–a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character, a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen.

Bird Cloud is the story of designing and constructing that house–with its solar panels, Japanese soak tub, concrete floor, and elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets. It is also an enthralling natural history and archaeology of the region–inhabited for millennia by Ute, Arapaho, and Shoshone Indians–and a family history, going back to nineteenth-century Mississippi riverboat captains and Canadian settlers.

Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, here turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.

Description

Proulx’s first non-fiction in more than twenty years, Bird Cloud is the story of building that house with its solar panels, a Japanese soak tub, a concrete floor, elk horn handles on kitchen cabinets, an enthralling natural history and archeology of the region inhabited for thousands of years by Ute, Arapaho and Shoshone Indians.

Bird Cloud is the name Annie Proulx gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and 400 foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the first day she visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. Proulx also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She knew she had to purchase the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy, and she knew what she would build on it a house in harmony with her work, her appetites and her character with a library surrounded by bedrooms and a kitchen. ISBN 9780743288811.

Bird Cloud is also a family history, going back to nineteenth century Mississippi river boat captains and Canadian settlers. An illuminating autobiography. Annie Proulx, a writer with extraordinary powers of observation and compassion, turns her lens on herself. We understand how she came to be living in a house surrounded by wilderness, with shelves for thousands of books and long worktables on which to heap manuscripts, research materials and maps, and how she came to be one of the great American writers of her time.