BOOKPATHS

Saratoga, Wyoming, U.S.

Annie Proulx reconsiders her life in Wyoming.

“’I moved to Wyoming for the long sightlines and the walkability,’ she says, making coffee in a kitchen of steel surfaces and brightly colored cabinets with antler handles. ‘But I've had enough.’" – from “Annie Proulx No Longer at Home on the Range,” by Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

Bookpath: Teton Marsh, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

One Day at Teton Marsh, by Sally Carrighar; illustrations by George and Patritia Mattson (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1979; other editions; out of print, but available)

Sally Carrighar focuses on fourteen wild creatures – otter, cutthroat trout, osprey, mosquito, scud, mink, varying hare, American merganser, moose, Clepsine leech, leopard frog, Physa snail, trumpeter swan, and beaver – on a stormy September day at Teton Marsh. Entering the book’s pages, you enter the life of the marsh. Carrighar’s descriptions of the landscape, weather, and wildlife, emphasize the interdependence of species in their constant quest for sustenance and survival.

Related Websites

Grant Teton National Park

“One phantom pillar toward the north stemmed down to a little lake on Mt. Moran. At the base of the bare immobile slope it flashed a blue as sharp as the gentians’ blue around the shores. The pond was more than water; because of it a fluent company had gathered here. Aspens, firs, and lodgepole pines had framed the granite basin. The banks were mazy with berry thickets. In the shallows wavelets meshed through cattails. The animals on the heights – the mountain sheep, black marmots, and grizzly bears – were few and scattered, but every cranny at the lake was sheltering a creature quick to leap, or fly, or swim.” – from One Day at Teton Marsh, by Sally Carrighar

Northwestern Wyoming

"I was raised in a family business. I was raised at Holm Lodge. Some of our guests called it the Crossed Sabers Ranch, because that is its brand. It is the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming; it opened for business in 1898. When my parents owned the lodge in the 1960s more buildings had been added, there were electric lights, propane heaters in the cabins, but the land remained the same -- the high Yellowstone Plateau, straddling the Continental Divide, its water falling away to the east and west." -- from Where Rivers Change Directions, by Mark Spragg

Where Rivers Change Directions, by Mark Spragg (New York : Riverhead Books, 1999; 2000 paperback)

Mark Spragg's memoir, Where Rivers Change Directions, places readers in the northwestern corner of Wyoming. Each of the book's essays builds on the previous one, following Spragg from a young teenager, already leading pack trips on his family's dude ranch, into adulthood. The essays share Spragg's relationship with the people, animals, and landscape that helped shape him. Where Rivers Change Directions is a beautifully written book, especially when he is describing places he knows so well. Readers hear the names and imagine Holm Lodge, the Shoshone River, Libby Creek, Sleeping Giant Mountain, McCullough Peaks, Eagle Creek meadows, Eagle Pass, Dike Creek Divide, Pinnacle Mountain, the Absaroka Mountains, Grinnell Creek, Rattlesnake Mountain, Cody, Greybull, and on and on. Mark Spragg's book is a gift to readers; when you open its pages you're given the northwestern corner of Wyoming and a glimpse at what it was like to come of age in "a wild, unspoiled part of the earth."

"It is easiest for me to remember the land. I close my eyes, and the heat of midsummer swells through me. I see tar-black butterflies at work in the meadows along the Shoshone River, the grasses come thick in seedheads. I smell white-cupped blossoms, bursts of lavender, the weedy scent of the bloodred Indian paintbrush, the over-powering tang of the backs of the big boulders and hear my boots scuff against the black and rust and corn-yellow lichens that covered them." -- from Where Rivers Change Directions, by Mark Spragg

"The Absarokas rise away from the river sharply, the rock crumbling into its separate gravels, into coarse sands, the walls of mountain rock turning back the sounds of the river into overlapping harmonies. It is in this chorus that my memories live...." from Where Rivers Change Directions, by Mark Spragg

Bookpath: Wyoming

The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich (New York : Penguin, 1986)

Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces holds Wyoming in its pages -- people, animals, seasons, weather, water, and landscape. Readers meet ranch owners, ranch hands, sheepherders, and "Indian neighbors." We learn about cattle ranching and sheepherding from Ehrlich's first hand experience. Weather moves across the landscape, sometimes bringing drought, sometimes flood. "Winter lasts six months here," Ehrlich explains. At the center of the book is the landscape itself. Each page shares, without romanticizing, what it's like to live and work in the harsh environment surrounding Shell, Wyoming, the nearby Big Horn Mountains rising "up to ten thousand feet." Whether resident, visitor, or armchair traveler, The Solace of Open Spaces, helps readers see Wyoming, where "the water courses...seven rivers and a network of good sized-creeks...trace the history of settlement...." In sharing her personal journey, Ehrlich illustrates the value of paying attention to the places we call home. The resulting intimacy can benefit the land and soothe the spirit.

Most characteristic of the state's landscape is what a developer euphemistically describes as 'indigenous growth right up to your front door' -- a reference to waterless stands of salt sage, snakes, jack rabbits, deerflies, red dust, a brief respite of wildflowers, dry washes, and no trees. In the Great Plains the vistas look like music, like Kyries of grass, but Wyoming seems to be the doing of a mad architect -- tumbled and twisted, ribboned with faded, deathbed colors, thrust up and pulled down as if the place had been startled out of a deep sleep and thrown into a pure light. -- from The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich

"A person's life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one's family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place." -- from The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich

"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are." -- from The Solace of Open Spaces, by Gretel Ehrlich

BOOKPATHS: Wyoming-Colorado Borderland

The Meadow, by James Galvin (New York : Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1992)

The real world goes like this: The Neversummer Mountains like a jumble of broken glass. Snowfields weep slowly down. Chambers Lake, ringed by trees, gratefully catches the drip in its tin cup, and gives the mountains their own reflection in turn. This is the real world, indifferent, unburdened.

Two rivers flow from opposite ends of Chambers Lake, like two ends of yarn being pulled off a spool at the same time. The Laramie River flows through its own valley, through its own town, then into the North Platte. From the opposing end of the lake the Cache la Poudre gouges into a steep canyon down to the South Platte River. At North Platte, Nebraska, the two forks of the Platte conjoin and then separate, long-traveled waters of Chambers Lake remarry.

The real world goes like this: Coming down from the high lake, timbered ridges in slow green waves suddently stop and bunch up like patiently disappointed refugees, waiting for permission to start walking out across the open prairie toward Nebraska, where the waters come together and form an enormous inland island, large parts of three large states surrounded by water. The island never heard of states; the real world is the island. -- from The Meadow, by James Galvin

There is a blurring of borders in James Galvin's The Meadow -- between Wyoming and Colorado, between fiction and nonfiction. The stateline matters little in The Meadow; it is the landscape and weather that determine lives. Galvin's home, near Tie Siding, Wyoming, is part of this landscape, reaching along and out from Highway 287 between Laramie and Fort Collins -- the Medicine Bow Range, the Snowy Range, Deadman Peak, Sand Creek, Sheep Creek, Eaton Reservoir and, of course, "the meadow."

"The Meadow was not meant for publication. It was intended to be a simple record, for my daughter, Emily, of a landscape, a way of life, an environment, an ethic, I saw disappearing," Galvin explains in the book's reading guide. For Emily, he began recording the lives of people who had lived on the land during the last 100 years -- Hazel, Clara, App, Ray, Frank, Ferris, and most of all, Lyle. "It was Lyle's last year on earth," Galvin explains, "I wanted my daughter to know, when she grew old enough to understand that these extraordinary people had existed, that the land had once been unspoiled and dignified by its human guests."

Readers move back and forth between past and present, meeting Lyle, and other "characters," at different times in their lives. We picture Lyle as a young boy living in his family's sod house on the Colorado plains. At 14, we follow him to "the meadow" on Sheep Creek purchased from his mother's frugal savings. As a man, we watch Lyle grow into the work required to live and make a living at 8,500 feet, the grace and skill it requires. He comes to know the land intimately, somehow "rais[ing] his consciousness almost up to coyote level." Dying from emphysema, we see him slow down, still dignified and alert to the world around him. Some of the most beautiful passages simply follow Lyle's gaze out the window, as he watches the meadow "the way people watch television while they eat -- looking up to the TV and down to take a bite and back...he's hooked on the plot, doesn't want to miss anything. He looks out over the rim of his cup as he sips." Through his gaze, readers see wildlife come and go -- coyote, elk, white crown sparrows, chickadees, Steller's Jays, barn swallows, and other creatures; the whiteness and silence of winter; and "how completely the meadow changes with respective seasons, how much it can change under light and clouds." Readers feel the weather through Lyle and learn the importance of water, that "you need a bad winter to have a good year." By the end of The Meadow, when Galvin describes Lyle's death, funeral, and burial, readers understand what has been lost.

You can visit the landscape described in the book by exploring Highway 287 and its side roads. Eventually, you may even find "the meadow" and "see the barn," Lyle crafted, "from the county road." If you visit, take The Meadow with you and read from it along the way. It is a perfect merging of book and place. But, even from a distance, The Meadow rewards readers with glimpses into a beautiful, but challenging, landscape; of the people who attempted living there; and the one who succeeded, who "lived so close to the real world it almost let him in." Readers have Galvin's wife, Jorie, and friends to thank for the publishing of The Meadow. They understood that the "record," with its mingling of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, started for his daughter should be shared.

Between the sky and the egg-shaped, egg-smooth granite boulder that floats out in the middle of the meadow's widest field, everything has its own green: cattails, willow leaves, the flip side of an aspen leaf, the gray-green sage, the yellow-green native pasture, the loden timber, all circling around with the boulder at the center, as if the meadow were a green ear held up to listen to the sky's blue, and there is an axis drawn between the boulder and the sun.

Elsewhere on the mountain, most of the green stays locked in pines, the prairie is scorched yellow. But Lyle's meadow is a hemorrhage of green, and a green clockwork of waterways and grasses, held up by the sky in its ring of ridges, held up for the sky to listen, too.

The granite boulder is only there to hold it down." --from The Meadow, by James Galvin

"Lyle said, 'If you want to know who really owns your land, don't pay the taxes for awhile. Then if you want to know who owns it even more, just look out the window in a blizzard. That's the landlord's face looking in, snooping.'" -- from The Meadow, by James Galvin

Related Website

Reading Guide http://www.henryholt.com/readingguides/galvin.htm

More by Galvin

Elements : Poems
Fencing the Sky : a Novel
God's Mistress
Imaginary Timber : Poems
Lethal Frequencies
Resurrection Update : Collected Poems 1975-1997
X : Poems

"Lyle learned to pay attention, to think things through and not get ahead of himself, not to lapse into inattention ever. After a while he couldn't not pay attention, shaking a stranger's hand, tasting Mrs. So and So's pickles, setting fenceposts. It endowed all his actions with precision. It gave him total recall. It obliterated time." -- from The Meadow, by James Galvin