A hundred years of one meadow on the Wyoming-Colorado line, at ten thousand feet, told out of order. Galvin owned part of it and knew the people who worked it, chiefly Lyle Van Waning, a man who built his own house and his own tools and lived alone up there for decades doing everything exactly right. The book moves between decades chapter to chapter — homesteaders who failed, a woman who froze, cattle, snow, a hay crop that comes in or doesn’t — and the meadow itself is the only continuous character. Galvin is a poet and it reads like one, in short hard sentences with no self-pity anywhere in them.
The Meadow