24
Mining Emotions
I want more time with Robert, when I’m not sharing him with investors and bankers and newcomers. He tells me to seek out women friends. And I have, but I also find the presence of other women on a daily basis both vexing and a blessing. I like silence and being alone. I haven’t found a gracious way to leave my talkative neighbors without offense. Perhaps it’s the difference between pioneering and settling. Different skills required. Friendships take adapting. I have also come to suspicion that Pard prefers pioneering. He is off starting other towns like Ontario and Lower Weizer, leaving me here. But I hope to make his moving boots find stillness beneath a table inside a sturdy house. Soon.
March 21, 1884, Caldwell
We’d finally undertaken the building of our own home. It was slow, as Pard was constantly called off for some deed issue or complication with plots in Hailey or Lower Weizer, another town he nudged from the wilderness. The hotel he wanted built at Shoshone Falls called to him. Once, when our house was but a frame structure and we returned from a Hailey visit, we arrived back to witness a horse race going on for entertainment with our unfinished house set up for the gambling pool to meet. He wasn’t a man to keep his feet beneath one bed in one town for very long, and he didn’t seem too distressed that he had no bed inside a Caldwell house.
Surprisingly, I took my greatest pleasure in those early days from watering my trees. I grew to like the silence of the work done early in the morning to avoid the rising heat. I’d planted six little elm trees initially, but a windstorm one day cut three of them off as though a rabbit had chewed them halfway to the desert floor. In the Idaho wind, the alkali sand cuts like a metal file. Then a rabbit took the rest of them. From Hailey, I brought another ten trees, and this time made a fence out of wooden boxes that surrounded the sprouts, keeping them in one place until they were larger and I could plant them at the corner of the house when it was finished. The barrier helped and I had my little nursery in the desert.
Delia agreed to water them when we traveled, and the hardware store owner had a boy and girl who responded to my offer of their help in return for a few coins to spend at Delia’s store. The trees’ progress became something for me to talk with my neighbors about. That proved helpful, because as more families did come to Caldwell, there seemed to be this distance between the women and me, as though being the wife of the developer put me into a different category. I wasn’t sure how to bridge that gap, especially as I struggled to know who I really was: Robert’s wife, my mother’s spoiled daughter, my smart sister’s sister, a kind of friend to Pace when the senator brought her to visit, and a sort of friend to Delia. But the “lady-ness” she ascribed to me kept me at a distance.
Delia and I shared conversations about the coyotes howling at night, how eerie they sounded when they called to each other in the dark. But as a group, circling the house, their voices intimidated, threatening danger and keeping me from reading my book. Robert thought to shoot them, but they’d only return or move on to the next house, so we all agreed to put up with them. I delayed getting an English bulldog pup for fear I’d lose it to those scavengers and looked instead for a grown dog, one who I hoped would not mind going from house to house, as we kept the Hailey house and one rented in Denver—and we had rooms set up for us at the hotel in Shoshone Falls. All were connected then by a train. A dog would have to adapt.
So would Robert. He didn’t really want me to have a dog.
I thought with our moving into the finished house in Caldwell and my struggle to have a garden as other women did, that things might change between me and my neighbors. But we Strahorns were of another ilk with all our houses and travel and whatnot. We were famous, spending our time with lawyers and legislators, making trips to Washington, DC, entertaining former senators, keeping busy, still writing Pard’s monthly Illustrated, replacing servants in Denver when they left to marry, working on the hotel for Hailey at the springs. All those doings set us apart. Set me apart. I was famous by association with my husband, not for anything I did. My writing wasn’t enough to bring much attention but maybe enough to keep me from having real women friends. It was difficult to have those thoughts and interchanges, though they led me toward a strengthening of the soul as I asked, “What is it I’m to do?”
With the completion of the Oregon Short Line, a Pullman car was added so one could travel with a little more comfort from Wyoming all the way to Portland. At the Willamette River, it required a ferry to Portland, but the time between that city and Omaha was now cut by thirty hours. We held a celebration, of course, when the railroad sent their first car all the way from Pocatello to Payette, rolling through Caldwell as we always hoped. A group from Ogden rode on that train, and we met them to travel with them from Pocatello on.
It was a grand day and the railroad offered free short rides into Payette and back to Caldwell. All sorts of cars were put into place, including the caboose, and people walked from car to car while the train moved, not realizing how dangerous that could be. But everyone survived and we gathered at the end of the day for an evening dance.
My dear Pard is not a terpsichorean. He hates dancing. He handed me off to the sheriff to spin me while his spurs clanked on the wood floor of the depot. We made the square, my “partner” loaded with his own pistols and handcuffs and a club, none of which halted him in the least from swinging me around, making me laugh and feel light as a feather, even though I knew I wasn’t, and sashaying me out the door into the cool night air at the last call.
“You’re quite a dancer, Mrs. S.” The sheriff bowed. Someone handed him his hat he’d removed for the dance. His forehead had a sheen of sweat.
“As are you, Sheriff Wells.”
“Thanks for returning her in good condition,” Robert said, leaving a group of men, the Pullman behind them black as night. Our presence broke up the conversation but not the cigar smoke.
“Easiest arrest I ever made.”
“Me too,” Robert said and took my arm. “Let’s head home.” We walked arm in arm. “You’re quite the arresting woman, Mrs. Strahorn.” He leaned to kiss my head and pulled me to him.
I felt so fortunate to have this man beside me whom I loved and who was also my best friend. One can put up with a lot of wind and dust when there’s warm strength to lean into.
It did concern me now and then that I was more attuned to the men than to women. More aware of what the men talked about, offering my thoughts that were sometimes listened to, and even wishing I’d been out there with Pard rather than high-footing it with the terpsichorean sheriff.
Caldwell grew over the next years. My sister Hattie had married and we’d gone to the wedding and were back from Chicago after a longer than usual absence. Something about the service had made me wistful, longing for that new beginning that Hattie and her William looked forward to. She’d return to her medical practice. She had a direction.
Delia stopped by to assess my suffering garden. Travel does bad things to greenery, but so did the high heat of Caldwell. We spoke of this and that and then in a moment of unguardedness I made a comment about not being all that good at making women friends.
“We don’t want to bother you. You’re busy and when you’re home we expect you want to rest, look over your trees. I think the Oakley boys are keeping them watered good. The heat wilts the lettuce.”
“I guess once we talk about the state of our home sites there isn’t much to share, is there?”
“Oh, there would be. But friends must be . . . available when things get tough, and that’s hard to do when one is miles away. Letters work then, ’course, but by the time there’s a response, the crisis has passed.”
“There’s the phone now.”
“Too expensive for our taste, I’m afraid. Only for emergencies. We appreciate your husband letting us use that one in the office.” We lived too far out for phone service. “I’m glad you’re back. Got that dog yet?” I shook my head. “They make great pals if you can keep them from chasing the rabbits. Might have to build a fence that goes all the way around your house and not just halfway to hold your climbing roses. It looks really pretty, Dell, but what good is a fence that won’t hold a dog in?”
The half fence had been my creative effort. Clearly, I needed more. “Sometimes I feel like a visitor in my own town.”
Delia lowered her eyes. “You’re not really a part of what goes on here. I don’t mean to be hurtful in any way, but you have another life. It’s not in Caldwell.”
I didn’t have the words then nor the self-reflection needed to respond to Delia. I felt defensive, wanted to say, “I helped start this town.” But like any birthing, as the child grows, it takes on its own goal and direction. Its parents are forced to watch it teethe and tumble as a toddler, then pick up speed and height and soon it has a life separate from its parents and they must find a full life without a child’s needs directing them.
“I’d like to have a life in Caldwell,” I said. I twisted my diamond wedding ring on my finger.
“If it’s what you want, you’ll find a way. A woman does.”
She patted my shoulder and headed back down the road a mile or more to that growing metropolis. Even our home site spoke of our isolation: Robert had staked a site quite a distance from the town center, he said to avoid the noise. But it also meant people had to make a trek to stop by. We were more of a destination than a place to take a pause on a hot day. The town folks even named where we were the Sunnyside district.
Reading books and Scripture, writing letters home, even my articles from my happy lane, didn’t really appease what I know now was spiritual drift, pure and simple. My diary focused on the happy lane rather than mining the depths of those isolating, purposeless emotions.
By early 1886, the work Robert did with the Land company had made progress on the irrigation system. He and his investors had formed the Caldwell Canal, and the diggers with their mules and land scrapers and hand shovels watched as water from the river made its way into the lower canal. A high line would come later to serve even more land. The nourishment of that water transformed the desert that season and for years to come. But that year, after we’d gone off to Denver for a time and returned seeing green instead of white dust, tweaked something in me.
Where was my nourishment? I needed exhilaration but a cowcatcher ride didn’t rise to the expectation.
“I’m going to stay here more often,” I told Robert that next day.
He sat at his desk and didn’t turn around. “Whatever you think, Dell.”
“I want to do more of what other women do here.”
“What do they do that you don’t?” He shook his head. “Labor costs for the canal are astronomical.”
“Preserve fruit. Make pickles. Boil jellies. Bottle conserves, label them and serve them for supper to young men who would like a home-cooked meal rather than visit the saloons. And I want that dog.”
“Well, get one. Pick one that’s not too pretty, to turn the tramps away that’ll come by once they hear about your fine viands being served on the front porch.”
“Without a cook, I’m not sure how fine a table I’ll prepare, but you’ve survived.”
“You’re a fine cook, Dell. Have you seen my good pen?” He patted his vest.
“In your jacket, the one that needed the sleeve repaired. I mended it.”
“Good girl.”
He returned to his papers, prompting me to say, “And I think I’ve found a passion of my own. I want to get a group of women together and start a Presbyterian church.”
“Doesn’t the church bureaucracy have to initiate a church? Send a missionary out first or something?”
I wanted him to honor my desire. “In the West, we do things differently. To begin, I’d like the Idaho and Oregon Land Improvement Company to make the first donation to the First Presbyterian Church of Caldwell.” Saying those words felt empowering. I could be a promoter in the interchange of thoughts and experiences. That was what Robert did and so could I. My spiritual drift began to find direction.