This deeply moving book for all I know is a classic. I read it eighteen years ago when it came out, have only now re-read it, and as with all classics, I rather hope I've learned more from it in re-reading than I did the first time around. The Meadow is about several things, but first it's the story of Lyle Van Waning and the community he helped form on the high ridge of the Continental Divide, the region called Boulder Ridge and Sheep Creek Meadow in the border area between Wyoming and Colorado. This community, still inhabited by the author and other families represented here, lives at an altitude of 8,500 feet, and so is subject to five-month long winters of circumscribed movement, while the book's central figure, Lyle, higher still off the main road, chooses to provide for himself, hermit-like, for those five months of the year. Galvin is writing about the men who brought him up: Lyle, but also the son of one of the founding families on the mountain, Ray Worster, Frank Lilley, and in much deeper foreshortening, his own father, who ranches in the area but seems to have been scoured from this narrative, as the author's mother is -- entire. Galvin wants to tell the history of this place from the early part of the Twentieth century to the late eighties, and he uses the lives of Lilley, the App Worsters, and the Van Wanings to do it. The project is Faulknerian, and Galvin imagines these earlier lives (Galvin himself was born in the early fifties) in chapters that move -- quite accessibly, really -- between the past and the present; between, that is, the fictionally re-created, the orally transmitted, and the authorially witnessed: a non-fiction book with no reason not to honor the imaginative rendering of the area's founding, a myth which allows Galvin to write in a style with equal footing in Faulknerian self-argument, and Twainian tall-tale-telling. The Meadow moves in short bursts of thought, and Marilynne Robinson on the back cover is quite right to note that "Its language reenacts the discipline through which wilderness refines consciousness." About Lyle Van Waning, one is reluctant to generalize, other than to say that somebody ought to write a book about him. Our reluctance owes itself to Galvin's own refined consciousness, a lyricism that renders these short essays full of gracenotes, as when, in one short essay, Lyle is watched as he hays the meadow, a coyote trailing ten feet behind, pouncing on field mice. Galvin writes: "A lot of people would shoot a coyote if they got that close to it, which is why a lot of people never get that close." Here the refinement of Twainian hyperbole aphoristically tailors us to Lyle's adaptation to his own scene: "As the price of defiance they [coyotes] have to work harder than most animals just to stay alive." The resemblance here is between Lyle and the coyote, but we would not see the connection without the author's own act of attention, which elsewhere he insists is the value most necessary to Lyle's adaptiveness. This attention is the meaning of the tall-tale telling Galvin enacts when he tells us of Lyle's aid in helping the author build his own house on the mountain. On the one hand, Lyle does not want the responsibility for helping the ephebe build his house; on the other hand, he can't help but attend to what's going on around him (the author and Lyle live about a mile away from each other), so he ends up advising and then pitching in to help Galvin raise the roof's top logs into position -- work Galvin admits he would not have been able to do himself, and so he wonders aloud to Lyle how Lyle managed to do it on all the houses Lyle has built; Galvin, like Twain in his Jumping Frog tale, sticks with the enigma: "'You know, Jim, I've often wondered that myself'," Lyle answers. The book, for all its reverential attention to Lyle, is also concerned to give us the man who is something of a child-man, of that gentleness, which in another context Galvin defines as "that elite society of people who, because defective in a certain way, go through life without hurting anyone." So, Lyle, for example, a master craftsman, makes violins, and earrings, which get put away, at his house, into boxes and drawers -- because, it seems, Lyle's "defect" is in the social nature that would psychically draw him into a relationship with another human for whom such a gift could have meaning. To whom would such a gift as the violin not be too rare? This heartbreaking poignancy is rendered by the contrasting reciprocity and gift exchange through which Lyle helps people (the author, e.g.) onto the mountain, and (tourists, etc.) off it. Lyle's living is from hay baling and the rent from cattle pasturing on his land; everything else he gets from others -- it seems -- for free, and in exchange for the enormous amounts of work he himself gives away for free. Galvin's thinking about the relation of these kinds of economies of reciprocity and craftsmanship (e.g., the earrings) for which there may very well be no eros at all -- this I find one of the joys of the book this time through. Galvin's own living in both the world of the ridge community as well as in his own craft -- the prose tuning itself against Twainian hyperbole throughout -- reflects both his gift to the memory of Lyle as well as his elegy that insists Lyle's way of life may not, as it seems, die with him.
This is the memoir of a Place, the play of Nature's moods, and the lives of people who settled in "The Meadow." The remote location is a high valley surrounded by tall pines, red cliffs, and streams on the border of Colorado and Wyoming in view of the jagged faces of the Medicine Bow mountains and Snowy Range. The stories of the people--hermits and families--grow organically from the landscape and the effects of weather and climate. The Reader gradually learns the back stories of the characters as would a friendly stranger dropping by to pick up bits and pieces in conversation with the Meadow residents, slowly revealing the amazing happenings and tragic events that happened in the landscape throughout the years. The stories alternate randomly between first settlement in 1895 to the 1980's. There is a bit of jumping around, such as when the funerals of some characters precede stories of earlier events in their lives. But that's the way folks talk, and it's generally easy to distinguish the characters and the times they lived in. One of my favorite stories was when early settler App set out on his horse during a snowstorm to bring some of his cows down from a mountain pasture. The snow was deeper than he expected, but he pushed on farther than he should have to find his cows. Eventually he noticed his legs were numb with cold, and then he spotted a stranded "antelope child," separated from its herd, in a hopeless, shivering condition. App rode slowly to the young animal, dropped his lariat over its neck, and pulled the antelope up onto his lap on the saddle. The warmth of contact was a win-win for both App and the young antelope. He took the critter home to his wife, where it became their household pet named Misty. The writing is beautiful, serene and strong as the landscape, with descriptions and metaphors that arise as naturally as the rush of wind across the Meadow. As far as I can tell, the author wrote from his own experience and stories handed down. I have to admire the independence, ingenuity, and perseverance of the strong and wise settlers who lived so peaceably with each other and the wildlife in this remote, rugged terrain.
What do You think about The Meadow (1993)?
The Meadow is an extraordinary book. James Galvin is a poet and this part novel / part biography reads almost like an epic poem with each chapter as a new verse. Weaving back and forth in time and from character to character, the meadow of the title remains at the core of these people’s lives. The land is harsh, beautiful and unforgiving but it demands so much from App, Ray, Clara and Lyle who are a family determined to keep their land and remain fervently independent despite blizzards, tragedy and city developers. If you’ve ever visited the Never Summer Mountains and seen the stunning landscape found up there, you might just about understand the symbiotic relationship they have with their meadow and it has with them.
—Inken Purvis
The real world goes like this: I marked this "to read" long before I realized I would be living on the island made by the wandering waters of Chambers Lake. Now that I am living here, of course I get a heart-tug whenever I read the places that have become so familiar: Laramie, Jelm, Woods Landing, Virginia Dale, Fort Collins. And of course whenever I cross the river I can't help but think, "Well, back on the island."But familiarity aside: this is perfect, or maybe just as sound as the right piece of wood. It belongs with all the best true fiction of the rural West, some of my favorite books of all time, with Ana Castillo's So Far From God and John Nichols' Milagro Beanfield War and Susan Power's Grass Dancer. You know it happened because stuff happens out here.Galvin is not particularly good with women's perspectives, and he avoids them as much as possible. But I am holding in my hands the copy donated to the Albany County Library by "A Friend," signed by the author, and here in the very back is what drove the story home like a nail: "Jacket illustration by Clara Van Waning."
—Abby
"As it turned out they were indeed not far from home. The snow stopped with eerie suddenness. The wind quit working on them. suddenly the whole thing seemed like the jokes kids played on Jack at school, the kind that make you mad. The stars showed like holes drilled in a tin roof beyond which it was always day. The outline of Boulder Ridge proclaimed itself. It looked too big ever to lose. When they reached the cabin App lit the heater and a piece of the matchhead stuck under his thumbnail and flared there, but he didn't mention it. He tossed on a piece of split pitch pine, and they stood around the ticking metal box waiting for the steam to start rising off them again. App took Jack in his arms and wrapped him under his own coat, waiting. Pete lit the lamp. The glass chimney was streaked with smoke, but in its light Ray could see the tears begin to stream down his father's face. Tears dripped from the ends of his moustache like water off the eaves after the rain stops falling and fell into his son's hair that was the color of late summer grass. Ray hardly took notice of this, since he had seen his father cry often before at inexplicable times and he was used to knot knowing why." -- p. 41
—Susan Eubank
