The Meadow, by James Galvin
After a recent trip to Wyoming, I decided to read James Galvin’s depictions of life and work across 100 years in the American West. His volume tells stories about the high meadow called Sheep Creek, which sits on the Colorado/Wyoming border.
Galvin’s ability to pay attention to detail helps the reader visualize a family ranch in order to show the challenges and beauty of everything from vertiginous snow drifts to local topography, wildlife, and a reverence for the earth in striking and eloquent prose.
At times funny, one of the characters named Clay, who has a wife and three kids, ages one, two, and three, says, “We’ll stop having kids as soon as we find out what’s causing them.”
This tour through this majestic landscape offers a clear explanation about life on a ranch during hard economic times and shifting values.
For me, this book’s meditations solidified my view of the expansiveness and natural beauty of northern Colorado and southern Wyoming as I had just seen with my own eyes. What makes Galvin’s book come alive is that his characters know the land so intimately, revealed in his descriptions of the buried pains of families, their history, and their bravery in the face of all situations, where hard work, and independence are valued.
A paragraph in the first chapter sums things up nicely: “The history of the meadow goes something like this: No one owns it, no one ever will. The people, all ghosts now, were ghosts even then; they drifted through, drifted away, thinking they were not moving. They learned the recitations of the seasons and the repetitive work that seasons require.”
Raised in northern Colorado, Galvin built his own log cabin in nearby Tie Siding, Wyoming. His ability to pay attention to his surroundings and the people around him gave me a sense of place, where history melds with the present.
