by Tom Trusky

It isn’t easy. And (pick-your-deity) knows I’ve tried. 

My current example is Life in the Upper Country: The Diary of Evelyn E. Amos (1914-2003). Were one writing a serious monograph about the creation and survival of a remarkable book, in this instance, an authentic, colorfully detailed, no-nonsense yet eloquent and vivid to the point of poetry, intermittent (almost decade-long), hand-writ (later manual machine-typed) journal kept over half a century ago by a backcountry Idaho ranchwoman, one might well consider Amos’ work as illustration par excellence. 

Amos’ diary of life without electricity, indoor plumbing, or paved roads eight miles from Sweet on the way to Ola, Idaho, began its life in 1948 in pencil and pen on the less-than-archival surfaces of Kraft paper bags, the backs of Emmett, Idaho’s “Ideal” movie theater bulk mail flyers, and used, split-open billing envelopes.  Found materials—the sort Outsider, self-taught and presumed deaf and/or autistic Idaho artist/bookmaker James Castle (1899-1977) used in works created 43 miles east of Amos, in Garden Valley, circa 1910-1924.

Photographs clockwise from top left: Evelyn and Clark Amos; The Amos spread; Evelyn Amos with other offspring raised at the ranch; Dan, Artell (John), Ginger (the dog), Evelyn and Jim Amos at the ranch; Squaw Creek/valley panorama (circa 1948); Evelyn in her garden. Photographs throughout this article courtesy of Evelyn Amos and Special Collections, Albertsons Library, Boise State University.

Amos explains her creation’s origin in her book’s 1988 “Epilogue,” composed at my request some thirty years after she and her husband had given up the family farm whose history her diary chronicles:

We allowed an older couple with their son and daughter-in-law to move into our ranch house on Squaw Creek [in the mid-1950s].

One day my brother Everett, who lived north of Sweet, telephoned to tell us that a fire was raging up at our ranch. We jumped into the car (with wet burlap sacks) and drove the 35 miles [from Emmett]. But when we arrived, all the buildings and trees were burning—no way could we save anything. The old-fashioned cook stove and many other antiques were gone. A fire of unknown origin had swept up around the bend in the creek toward the buildings. The men renters had gone fishing and the women were so scared they jumped into their car and raced away.

Later we sold the ranch to another cattleman who uses all the ground for cattle grazing.

Around 1970, I decided to get all the scraps of paper together on which I had written a few ranch happenings when I had time (thank goodness I hadn't left them to get burned up) and compose an organized log book—sort of a sequel to a letter of mine that Reader’s Digest had printed before we moved to the ranch so long ago—in it I had given nostalgic reasons we were taking the boys back to the farm. So many readers had written nice letters to me, complimenting our decision.  I thought they might like to know how the venture turned out.

Transforming paper bags and envelopes, scrap papers and bulk mail material into stationery, Amos began listing memorable events in 1948.  Her modern pioneer diary, however, is not a day-by-day record for three reasons:  some days Amos did not have an opportunity to dawdle with pen-in-hand—a pig was dying or giving birth to a dozen piglets, an irrigation pipe was plugged, or hay needed baling.  Other times, when there was time to dally with her diary, there had been no events worthy of recording—or Amos was too fatigued to lift either pen or pencil. Shown are some of stationeries Amos employed (clockwise from top left): Kraft paper bag; recto of 1956 Emmett Drive-In bulk mail flyer; verso of same 1956 Emmett Drive-In bulk mail flyer; recto/verso of cancelled (1955)/split envelope; recto of 1954 Ideal Theater bulk mail flyer. Facsimiles of these pages have been tipped in to the artists’ book edition of the diary published in 1990.

By the mid-1970’s Amos had typed all of her opus (portions, we know, had been typed earlier, for Amos tells us she is at her typewriter in a December 26, 1954 diary entry).   She apparently made no attempt to publish her work, however, until she read of my publishing The Literature of Idaho by Dr. James H. Maguire in 1986 and my calling for manuscripts from authors of works related to life in the Inter-Mountain West.  In September 1987, Amos wrote, asking if the Hemingway Western Studies Series would be interested in considering her diary for publication. 

In October I received Amos’ cover letter and an almost-ream-thick typescript, whose first chapter I hastily perused. I was less than impressed.  The chapter struck me as sentimental, nostalgic, as authentic as Western Idaho Fair “cowboy” portraits, those costumed, sepia-toned, photographic frauds for which recently arrived refugees from Anaheim, Brooklyn, and Costa Mesa pose and pay good money before beelining to the pronto pup and chorizo stands.

I forwarded the hefty typescript to a member of the series editorial board, an Art professor reputedly as heartless as I.  Within a week, the typescript came back with a note explaining that she had only been able to get through the first chapter, a note which ended with one word:  “Ixnay.” The issue settled, I prepared to return Evelyn E. her manuscript, only to realize it would reach her in Emmett just as she or husband Clark or one of their three strapping sons were set to carve a turkey.  I decided to hold off and wait until mid-December to return the work, when the Amos clan was reduced to turkey sandwiches, turkey a la king and turkey jerky.

My soft-hearted decision precipitated the predicament titling this essay.

Over Thanksgiving vacation it suddenly struck me that neither my colleague nor I had read any of Amos’ fifty-year-old diary. Instead, both of us had struggled through a recently-written introductory chapter.  Bemused by this realization, I picked up the typescript, reluctantly willing (as we once were wont to say) to give the old girl another try—or at least hoping ancient Amos prose might be an antidote to the nap-inducing effects of my L-tryptophan-laden dinner. 

At random, late afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, I flipped to a 1952 entry:

April 12                       Chinee

While we were feeding hay at the Lower Place yesterday, we thought we could see a cow lying in a boggy spot below a spring on the hill west. Clark rode up and found it to be a young Holstein cow that I had named Chinee because black and white markings resembling Chinese writing streaked on her face. She was lying in the mud, too weak to get up. Clark pulled her around onto more solid ground with her head uphill until she managed to pull herself onto her feet. As it was too far to drive her back to the barn in her weakened condition, he left her to graze on the few wisps of green grass coming through.

I sat on the leeward side of the old rickety barn, where I could watch him while he rode back to get her this morning. He rode up around an immense fresh dirt slide, and started the cow back the same way. But she was bound to take a short cut back across the dirt slide and he couldn't stop her. I held my breath! I suppose rock and earth slides that have stabilized are safe, but these looked as though they might start sliding again at any moment.

Chinee was about two-thirds of the way across when her foot slipped in the softened soil, and down she rolled, over and over and over, finally stopping about forty-five feet from the creek which was the foot of the slide.  Clark was leaping down after her, and I started on the run to help him. When I got there, he was holding onto her tail to keep her from rolling again, but he couldn't get her up. The trouble was that we had raised her at the barn—what we call a bucket calf—and she was too gentle to be afraid of our threats and too weak to want to get up.

We considered tying a rope to the saddle horse and trying to drag her out, but decided against it, as the mountain was so steep and the footage so soft in the slide, that we might also lose the horse. After more deliberation, we let her slip on down into the creek, hoping that when her feet hit solid rock she would stand up and wade along the edge of the water until she could find a way out. Instead of that, the water swept her down the creek! She bobbed slowly up and down, swimming just enough to bring her ashore on the other side several rods downstream. She landed on her feet, but there were bushes all around her, and instead of trying to find a way out, she just stood there looking back at us, as though to say, "Well, aren't you coming to get me out?"

The water was too high to take a chance on riding the horse across, so when we arrived back at the house, Clark, hoping to drag her out with the horse and lariat, crossed above the barn and rode the two miles back down on the other side of the creek. But when he got there, she was gone, evidently washed away down the canyon.

Here, the entry ended.  I was still awake, sepia drained from my veins. 

Where were the initial chapter’s Disneyesque touches, the golden afterglow of happy-ever-afters, the Amos boys finding little Chinee downstream, sopping but safe, leading her back to the barn, wreathed with roses whilst an anachronistic Hannah Montana tune garlanded all? I flipped a few days forward:

As Clark was going to drive ten miles up the valley to do a few hours welding for a neighbor, I decided to ride along to visit with the neighbor's wife, take her some early green onions, and find if she was ready for the raspberry plants I have been saving for her. However, my visit was cancelled when on the road we met the neighbor, who told us that his wife was attending a textile painting class at another neighbor's home.

I decided to visit the class. Eight ranch women were sitting around tables, busily tracing patterns, blending colors, and painting flowers on pillow cases. All but three of these women have small children. I listened to them talking about how each had spent the morning—they had helped to drive cattle, or clean the chicken house, or plant garden, or drive the school bus—this I knew was in addition to all of their regular house work, outdoor chores, getting the children off to school, and preparing the noon meal.

What determination, thought I, to learn this work of beauty, when it would have been so much easier to have taken a nap in the afternoon with the babies. This was their third lesson—one lesson a week—seven more weeks to go, right at the busiest season.

Back at work the next week (Chinee not spotted), I took Amos’ manuscript back to the Art professor, explaining I’d re-reviewed it, skipping the first chapter, and was hoping she would do ditto.  Her thumbs-up arrived within that week. The Hemingway Series editorial board, however, was not so agreeable. The board reasoned, following publication of Maguire’s impressive, xenophobic (all-Idaho) anthology, that it would be best to publish an impressive, illustrated work by J. R. Jones, Preserving the Game in the Vanishing West, next and put Amos’ indigenous (Gem county, Idaho) memoir on the back biblio burner.

I decided to proceed with publication (Amos-willing) and somehow bring her book out under a different imprint, namely cold-drill books, the quasi-mythological but certainly unfunded publishing arm of the literary magazine I had created.  Thankfully, Amos was amenable to this switch. Publication of the diary via cold-drill was fraught with the usual impediments faced by any penniless publisher in the Gem or any state.  I prevailed on a Boise State University secretary who loved the diary to turn Amos’ typescript—littered with my illegible editings—into a Microsoft Office Word document on her lunch hours.  Salary?  Comp copy. 

How to fund publication?  Providentially, Idaho’s centenary was at hand and the natives were restless, eager to part with their hard-earned dollars for anything with “Gem State” embossed, decaled, or decoupaged on it. My publication strategy revolved around this realization and was two-fold: 

First:  I had long-wanted to design a casebound (hardback) artist’s book, even though one of my Ten Commandments was that artists’ books could be more than expensive, limited, so-called “fine print” (letterpress), casebound editions—they could be cheap, offset / Xeroxed / silkscreened, yea even hectographed multiples for the masses. Perfectbound—saddle-stitched, even. 

Second:  Perhaps I could create a limited edition casebound book, printing it offset but dolling it up to look letterpress-like and charging the rich arm and leg to cover the expenses of producing it—and a paperback edition for the masses. 

(A Third-fold involved piggy-backing both editions with a copy of cold-drill Magazine but the basic two-fold chicanery outlined above applied to this subsidiary plot, too)

How to trick-out a casebound edition, then? I reasoned the hardback could be numbered and signed.  Members Only, gated communities, flying first class—Wealth loves exclusivity (and autographs?). And the book could include artifacts like, like what? 

Snow, for instance.  Amos wrote frequently and extensively about snow.  She loved and hated the white precipitation that so affected their Upper Country lives.  I had read that scientists had created a medium to capture snowflakes—a liquid chemical on whose surface a flake would fall, face-first, imprinting on the liquid its supposedly unique portrait.  Using the hardened chemical as a mold, I would cast little snowflake replicas from Upper Country originals trapped on-site, midwinter.  This plot was to be effected with the assistance of a Geology professor and good friend whose specialty was glaciation.  He was as excited about this adventure as was I until he learned the chemical involved was highly carcinogenic. Instead, one of my student cold-drill Magazine editors suggested she produce 50 lace snowflakes for the limited edition, a suggestion which provided some—if not complete--solace.

Another artifact?  Lupine.  Amos’ favorite flower—collected on-site, pressed and dried (yours truly having been an undergraduate Botany major). 

Photographs, clockwise from top left: Perfectbound paperback edition (1990) of the Amos diary; Stand-in Amos ranch snowflake candidates (lace samples created by Kay E. Collins); Pressed and dried lupine collected from the Amos homestead in 1989; Casebound edition, opened, with loose, inserted, facsimile artifact (one of five family photographs); Casebound, limited, artists’ book edition (1990) of Life in the Upper Country; Casebound edition, opened, with tipped-in facsimile artifact (drive-in theater flyer); Casebound edition, opened, with embedded artifacts.

Using projected sales as cash, I was able to convince our university Printing & Graphics Department to help design the diary’s textblock and covers for both offset-printed editions, retain southwestern Idaho’s (then) sole handmade bookbinder, Al Bond, to design and casebind fifty artists’ book copies, while 450 copies would be perfectbound (and color cover printed) by a Mid-Western short-run house that could be stalled until sales receipts arrived.

Both editions sold out in 1990, paying for themselves and a second paperback edition two years later.  By spring of 2009, nearly twenty years later, only four copies of the second edition remained, which led us to conclude the handwritten/manually typed/keyboarded diary of survival in Idaho should not go out of print.  Instead, it should be digitized. More accurately, Kindled.

In “Family History,” the introduction to her diary, Evelyn Amos explains why she and her husband chose to leave “civilization” for the wilds of Idaho.

Clark and I were in the same grade at Montour [Idaho] High School and graduated during the Great Depression. Two years later, in 1934, we were married in Sweet.

We lived on several different ranches in southern Idaho, but times being so hard, Clark had to go to work in the timber industry—log­ging, sawmill, truck repair, electric shop, maintenance superintendent.

We were living in a logging camp in northern California when we decided to return to Squaw Creek in August of 1948.

By this time we had three sons: Artell John, age 11 (referred to as Johnny because that is what his father calls him); Daniel, age 9; and Jimmy, age 7.

We wanted them to grow up in the wholesome atmosphere of the country, where they could have room for pets of their own, ride horses, and learn about the beauty of the wild out-of-doors.

Photographs, clockwise from left: Artell (John) with Brandy in the mid-1950s and "slopping" his prize 4-H Berkshires (2 images); Jim, quenching his horses.

A return home to a healthy lifestyle, to Trigger, Black Beauty, Flicka or Silver—none of these motives explained my mania to return to the Amos diary and make it available on Amazon’s Kindle. The university’s Printing & Graphics digital archives seldom hold files over fifteen years old, and the nineteen year-old files I sought could not be located. Then I recalled I had donated all my Amos material to the Idaho Writers Archive in Albertsons Library’s Special Collections.  I had taken particular pride in this donation because after months of pleading I finally had been able to convince Amos to donate some of the found papers on which she jotted outlines and paragraphs for what would become her “organized log book” (Evelyn had been extremely reluctant to reveal the type of papers on which she had begun her diary. “They’re not nice stationery,” she kept protesting).

A cursory review of Special Collections Amos material produced no disk, however.  This meant the work would have to be keyboarded anew, edited again, then stored before being formatted for uploading on Kindle.  Enter Impedimenta: the benevolent keyboarding secretary who had prepared the original floppy with the diary on it had retired. 

Before I had a chance to seriously consider following Chinee’s lead down Squaw Creek, the head of Special Collections called in early September 2009 to report they had located a small box of yet-to-be-filed Amos material and, in it, a floppy disk labeled “Amos Diary”!  Equally exhilarating: Special Collections possessed two geriatric computers capable of reading “small floppies” and at that very moment an awestruck Special Collections staff was huddled around one of these machines reading the diary on-screen.

I raced to Special Collections.  There, glowing on-screen in the difficult-to-read-for-anyone-raised-to-read-type-in-the-pre-Gates-era, was Amos’ diary, lost for almost twenty years but preserved on disk in climate-controlled, secure conditions in the library’s university archives! Had I been able to cradle that monitor in my hands, would I have recalled Idaho-born Ezra Pound’s famed pronouncement, “The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand”?  Better, would I have manhandled the keyboard and rudely tapped out a “Save As” command?

I wasn’t and I didn’t. Rather, at that moment we all agreed upon a brilliantly bad idea whose disastrous logic went like this:

1. The disk now belonged to Special Collections.
2. I would need to send a copy of the file to our web mistress who would, in turn, upload it and do all the other cyber dirty work necessary to Kindle it. I could try to email the file as an attachment or send it to her on a CD (compact disc). 
3. We chose the fateful CD option.
4. Unfortunately, the machine the disk was on did not have the capability to burn a disk; however, its nearby brethren antique did. 

Swiftly, we removed the disk and an intern sprinted for a blank CD whilst we inserted the floppy in the second computer, watching as the screen beeped, glowed, then displayed a small message informing us the disk was damaged and could not be read.

Undeterred, we decided emailing was a better strategy.  Inasmuch as the second computer was not hooked up to Google Mail, we retrieved the floppy, inserted it back in Antique #1 and watched in silent horror as the same template reappeared. Without warning, images of the still-quite-legible 4,000+ year-old cuneiform clay tablets in Archives at the College of Idaho, BYU-Idaho’s McKay Library, the Idaho State Historical Society Public Archives and Research Library, and the University of Idaho’s Archives flashed before my eyes….

Next day, I carried the little, blue, damaged disk to Academic Technologies, a unit on campus which a year or two ago had successfully retrieved photographs from a recalcitrant CD for me.  Though the obliging AT technician had a machine which could read floppies, my disk’s outer, initializing ring, he regretfully informed me, had decayed.  He was unable to gain entrance to the text within.  All was not lost, however.  He suggested I take the disk to campus Office of Information Technology (OIT).  He believed they might have software that could restore data.

After explaining the situation to a sympathetic OIT’er, I left my disk behind and walked back across campus to my office.  When I returned, I found a voicemail message informing me OIT had found a program that allowed them access to my disk. They had successfully copied it to disk and I might retrieve both at my convenience—at no charge! Back in my office, floppy in-hand, new CD in my computer, I watched a screen fill with an endless, scrolling shatter, a splay of glowing, spilled alphabet soup. The floppy’s guts were as corrupted as its outer ring. 

Photograph: 1990 floppy disk containing the decayed Word.doc text of the first edition of Life in the Upper Country; also shown:  the “restored”/OIT CD copy of the floppy.

For two weeks I sulked, plotted and pondered.  The English department at Boise State could not supply a work/study student for the project.  The deadline had passed for me to concoct an internship that might have attracted a fast-fingered, academic-credit-seeking student.  Then I recalled some cyber sleight-of-hand of mine when writing a recent article about Carl Maria Seyppel, an amazing (and completely unknown) German book artist.  I’d found one online article that mentioned Seyppel—a  PDF—and desperately wanted to quote an extended passage.  But who types out extended passages, these days of cut and paste? Somehow, after a morning of trial-and-error, hit-and-run, I managed to highlight the text I wanted, then cut and paste it into my Word document. 

Of course, Amos now lived only in hard copy. Four paperbacks.  But I knew everyone under the age of eighteen—and our department secretaries—knew how to scan a print document and transform it into a PDF, even if I did not.  Could I not then go Neo-Nazi on Amos and convert her PDF to Word, as I somehow had with Seyppel?

One of the remaining second edition Amoses would have to be sacrificed to scan it, page after page.  Before taking that radical, spine-snapping step, I suggested to Crystal, our departmental secretary, that she test drive the idea and scan only one spread (two pages of facing text) to see if my Polish digital alchemizing would produce pyrites or real gold. A short time later, Crystal emailed me.  She had scanned the spread, made a PDF, cut and pasted it and declared I might read the result in the attached Word document!

There they were.  Or 98% verbatim of the two pages in lovely twelve-point Times Roman. Our economy-model scanner had had some troubles.  Globe Gothic (text) and Carmine Tango (chapter heads), the slightly antiquated fonts I had selected for the diary, had text capital A’s and H’s and all chapter titles beyond the scanner’s ken—and there were some comma/period confusions.  But these were small Russet Burbanks, indeed.  And best of all: Crystal had shanghaied two student lab monitors and told them to begin scanning, PDFing, and cutting/pasting the entire diary into a Word document!

It should have been a Wednesday, that day traditionally characterized by woe, when the shanghaiees emailed me the first diary chapter they had fashioned into Word. Whenever it was, it was with great and undeserved pride—pride deserving of a fall—that I opened their attachment.  So excited was I, having labored at Kindling for over six months, that I ignored their yadda-yadda that prefaced the attachment.  I went straight for the download.

Campbell’s again.  Alphabet soup, again.

The students’ yaddas, when finally reviewed, however, were clear.  They had spent hours, they explained, carefully positioning the book on the scanner, calibrating and recalibrating it, then creating PDF after PDF—all to no avail.  Gem county country had been translated to page after page of gobbledygook. Such incompetence could not be dealt with virtually.  Flushed, angry and frustrated, I headed for the student lab and there accosted the apologetic duo. 

“How could Crystal manage to scan two pages and send me an almost-perfect Word doc?”

The duo explained they had no answer and, in a harmony reminiscent of the early Beach Boys, they recounted the professional procedures they had assiduously followed to produce failure.

Then Brian Wilson stopped. “You know,” he mused aloud, “Crystal didn’t scan the book.”

“Didn’t scan the book?  Of course she did,” I corrected.  “You have the book I gave her right there” (dear readers are to imagine the pointy-finger gesture accompanying that outburst).

Female Beach Boy stammered, “No, no, she didn’t,” and turned to pick up Copy Number 4. “You see,” she said, pulling out a single sheet of white paper stuck in the volume, “she Xeroxed the spread to avoid breaking the spine.”

“She scanned the Xerox,” Brian explained.

“We scanned the book,” explained the stammerer.

At this point, aesthetes will perhaps appreciate learning of the care taken when fonts and papers were selected for the first two editions of the Amos diary.  A veritable confederacy of opinions (identified in the book’s lengthy colophon, fashioned to impress the wealthy) had finally concurred that type for Amos had to have a slightly-’40s, bucolic noir-y look.  Likewise, we agreed we needed neither a blindingly white text paper nor a medieval parchment look-alike.  Instead, we chose 60# acid-free Natural Text, a paper of the palest ivory tint.  What Sherwin-Williams might label “Adolescent Elephant Tusk.”  Whatever Whiter Shade of Pale it was, it was—in apparent concert with the type selected—enough to stymie our scanner. 

Photograph: Evelyn and Clark Amos, Emmett, Idaho (1990). Photo by Katherine Jones, courtesy Idaho Statesman/Albertsons Library Special Collections.

The rest of that afternoon I spent Xeroxing the entirety of Copy 4.  Within the week, the Beach Boys provided the long-sought-and-uploadable Word document that enables you to join Evelyn and scan your screen to see the scene her picture window framed fifty-five years ago:

This is, needless to say, no beautiful picture window decorated with frilly curtains or rich drapes or potted plants, but is, rather, two small-paned windows sitting side-by-side with nothing to veil the view to­ward the south.

Two dry-grown locust trees, trunks tinted with yellowish-green moss, stand at the edge of the yard on a carpet of soft, unsoiled snow. From their rough, dark limbs hang clusters of brown seed pods and snow-frosted birds' nests. Round puffs of snow sit on hollyhock seed pods where bright pink and red petals once flared in tiers in the summer sun. This season's hues are more mellow—pale yellow dry grasses, russet syringa bushes.

Snow birds are flicking white, powdery bits from the brushy limbs of the thorn trees where they restlessly alight for a moment. Yearling, white-face calves drink fresh water from the tank on the other side of the snow-capped pole fence, while hopping and flying here and there, seek­ing possible scraps of food, are glistening, black and white, long-tailed magpies.

Beyond the trees, the rocky crags high up on the mountain stand out black above the speckled yellow, gray, and white of dry grass, buck brush, and snow. Not a trace of smoke, fog, or wind in the branches: yet over it all, swiftly floating, white, cumulus clouds, break­ing more and more to let patches of deep blue sky show through.

Note: The Kindle edition of Life in the Upper Country is now available at: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Upper-Country-Diary-Evelyn/dp/B002R8LF0C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1255585843&sr=1-1

Tom Trusky is Director of the Hemingway Western Studies Center, Head of the Idaho Film Collection and Professor of English at Boise State University. His recent book, James Castle: His Life & Art, is reviewed in this issue of The Idaho Librarian.