Michele Hewitson talks to Annie Proulx

Alone on Broke Bank Mountain
By Michele Hewitson, New Zealand Herald , Saturday Mar 12, 2011

American writer Annie Proulx's The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. Photo / Gus Powell

In March 2005, Annie Proulx writes in Bird Cloud: A Memoir, she is driving through a "cow-speckled landscape" in Wyoming, "the occasional line of tumbled green alfalfa the only colour in a drab world". She drives past grey, dusty ditches; banks that are "sloping crumbles of powdery soil ... sagebrush nearly black and beaten low by the ceaseless wind".

She thinks: "Why would anybody live here? I live here."

Here is Bird Cloud - her 59ha which includes a river and a 121m high "golden cliff" which makes her think of Uluru: "Both seem to be fitted with interior lights that create a glow after dark."

She lives here, part-time, in a place that, for the winter months, she can't live in. The only road is not snow ploughed. If she over-wintered, she would be a captive in the house she built, which was to be her final home, and which is the subject (sort of; in part) of her book Bird Cloud.

She put Bird Cloud on the market for US$3.7 million ($5.03 million). There was no interest except from what she calls, scathingly, "an entity", a representative of a big ranching outfit. "They were looking for pasture land, and a place to put cows. Which is what we don't want."

There are many battles with cows in the book. There are problems with fencing; a coolness with a neighbour Proulx was letting grazing land to (nobody is about to say she can't be contrary) after a cow fell off a cliff (she had to pay for said cow).
There are scenes of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author chasing after and shouting at cows. Wyoming is what is called an open range state; this means that if your land is not fenced, the cows have access rights.

Obviously the "entity" hadn't read her book, otherwise it would know how she feels about cows. "I certainly have a great deal of regard for the cow - when it's on a plate."

If there had been other potential buyers, perhaps they had read the book. It is hardly a glossy advertisement for the joys of Wyoming living. So she has taken the place off the market, and will try to figure out some way to live there through the winters. This is a daunting prospect - there is her age (75), lack of local health care, that road, the cripplingly expensive heating bills, the struggle to get decent groceries.

There is money. "There are a lot of expenses associated with living in Wyoming," she says, talking it up some more.

She writes that the place sent her "close to broke". How close? "Aah. Don't start me on that! You'll give me nightmares. I'm not about to go down to the street corner with my tin cup but everything went into the place."

The Guardian suggested another name for Bird Cloud might be Broke Bank House. "Oh!" Which is bleakly amusing, perhaps? "Perhaps. Ha, ha.

Michele Hewitson's full piece at NZHerald online.