Letting Time In: A Comparison of Time-Consciousness in Nature-Driven Lifestyles

An Analysis of The Meadow by James Galvin

April 2021

What is a hundred years to an ecosystem? With luck, human beings could live that long. To a tree in good conditions, a hundred years may be a lot of experience, but neither the start nor end of it. Some insects, meanwhile, have lifespans of days. To attribute even a hundred generations to a hundred years is a vast understatement. James Galvin challenges the imprint of time on a single location in the American Midwest in his book, The Meadow. He follows two generations of farmers along a meadowy expanse and exposes the reader to the harshness of deep time. To a human, sequencing a hundred years is logical: Births, deaths, marriages, children, and more all come in an order that contextualizes and characterizes a century. But to the soil? To the trees and the rivers? A hundred years is a blink, a breath in the lungs of time. All these events that sequence human life might as well all have happened at the same time, or out of order for all it matters.

Humans break patterns in time, in comparison to other animals. A human born in Seattle may find themselves in Boston in three years’ time with just as much likelihood as they could find themselves in Moscow or Lima. Urbanized humans seldom find themselves expecting the range and familiarity to which other species are adapted. This examination of The Meadow theorizes a cognizant understanding of one’s place within a system on a timeframe much longer and deeper than one’s own, and how that is expressed through interaction with the space. When Galvin’s characters – Principally App, Ray, and Lyle – settle along Sheep Creek, they enter the range of the animals that have lived there far longer than they have, and may continue to live there long after the humans have moved on. Animals may in fact embody a place-space connection that portrays not only an embodiment of the deep-time mindset, but take the role of a litmus test of embodied living in a miniscule point against the intangibly large tapestry woven by time. The Meadow explores and compares lifestyles in nature as manifested by the connections and interactions with animals by its principal characters representing deep-time understanding.

Framed as an even-tempered, solitary hermit of a meadow-dweller, Lyle’s life is described through his achievements in building, his love for his neighbors, and how he experiences the harsh winters of the area. Galvin describes him as the only person who succeeded in living there, and how “He lived so close to the real world it almost let him in” (Galvin 4). Lyle’s relationship to animals is described immediately following this accolade with his assessment and management of the barbed wire surrounding his property. When he notices the time-honored routes of the elk interfere with his wire, he switches to baling wire, which breaks easier and does less damage to the fence posts; This is supported by the notion of the elk having passed through “the north side of Bull Mountain for a lot longer than there has ever been anyone here to build fence and get pissed off every time the elk tear it up” (Galvin 5). In this way, Lyle is immediately established as someone who is actively aware of time and his place in it through his relationship with the local fauna. Yet, instead of surrendering himself to the place by not building fence at all, he finds a middle-ground decision that impacts the animals and his fence less than if he had been stubborn enough to challenge time. Lyle’s introduction reveals something else to this effect: He lived based on the land. This is not limited to the hay that he grows or the animals that he raises, but is reflected too in the elk and the wire. The way he decides to succeed – as there are certainly more ways than his – is based on the way the meadow has been before him, and will continue to be after him. In this way, Lyle sets the standard for deep-time understanding in The Meadow.

On the other end of the spectrum is a brief subject of the ranchers’ judgement: Ferris, a neighbor who challenges even Lyle’s patience. Ferris is discovered to have taken in others’

animals to “pasture them over the winter” (Galvin, 135), but in this capitalistic feat left all the animals to freeze, starve, and otherwise die. Ferris’s animal hoarding performs the lifestyle that the ranchers exhibit, but doesn’t lacks the attention to detail that comes from realizing deep time. If ‘real life’ nearly let Lyle in for his actions, then it may as well put up an extra fence to keep Ferris out. By taking control of these animals and abusing them, Ferris gains only selfishness in an attempt to put forward a persona of ranching life. He brings his life to the land, and unlike Lyle, lived not from the land but from himself. The consequences of this were inhospitable housing, a horrific show of animal mistreatment, and the resentment of the Sheep Creek community. While Ferris doesn’t represent the direct inverse of Lyle in terms of living with respect to time, he serves as an example of how performative action that mimics such damages the self and the environment that cradles the imitated lifestyle. Ferris’s actions betray the vastness of time in that they are short-term: He accumulates appliances and animals without a plan for sustainability. He lives only in the time that he can experiences, where other characters plan their actions for the long haul, or recognize that the timeline of their surroundings is older than they’ll ever know and may persist long after they’re gone.

With Lyle as the standard of time-consciousness in this investigation, and Ferris as an indicator of red-herring performativity, other authors may be examined against this bar. Terry Tempest-Williams, author of Refuge among other renowned pieces on nature, challenges the concept of place-space connection being bound to living off of the land. She explores her connection to birds in Refuge through the personification of species on the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in parallel to her impending grief and personal history as a Mormon person. Williams reflects on this on a visit to a bird refuge in Oregon: “The birds have moved on. They give me the courage to do the same” (Williams, 253). She also lets the land live off of her: Following her mother’s death, she offers hair from her hairbrush to the spring birds (Williams, 233). Williams’s undoubted understanding of her connection to the land adds the nuance of a two-way street of sharing and living off of and with the land. Williams’s deep connection to her lineage and genealogy, hand in hand with the ancestrally ingrained migration patterns of the birds on the refuge treats the reader to deep time shared in family and nature.

Annie Dillard, meanwhile, embraces the concept of being “let in” by nature, as it nearly had to Lyle. In her morning routine as told through “Heaven and Earth in Jest” she blurs the lines that otherwise delineate life from nature. She describes the bloody paw prints of her cat – undeniably nature – as potentially roses of union, the blood of the Passover, or murder (exactly what it is in the most literal sense) (Dillard 817). Dillard’s style of living entwined with nature, even from the home, challenges the image of Lyle’s experience being connected to the physical being exposed to the outdoors. Dillard’s lived experience even transforms the previous standard set by Lyle by inviting the reality of deep time in nature in through the window. Though Dillard varies from Lyle’s external context in this way, she still experiences time through her questioning of the blood’s meaning on her body. By assuming the Passover (an event of ancestral origin) and assuming murder (an event of overnight occurrence) for the same blood, Dillard demonstrates an understanding of the timelessness of nature.

For what purpose is there a measure of authenticity to time?, one may ask of these findings. However, the comparison of all relationships between nature and time set neither a bar nor a gate against connection between nature and oneself, but serves to establish the co-definition of deep time and ecological history as a gradient of lived experience for which there are few other uniting factors.

Where does this place James Galvin, as The Meadow’s charismatic narrator, Jim? The Meadow itself is arranged out of order, with deaths preceding life highlights, childhood described once a character in old age is well established, and the harsh winters on the ranches making all the times blend together. Galvin recognizes the arbitrary nature of a lifespan in the timeframe of rivers and meadows and embodies this through Jim’s recollection cherry-picking years and moments to expand upon in the order he feels fit. However, as if to expound continually on the inauthenticity, Galvin portrays Ferris’s actions in a sequential fashion. Though the story of his arrival, accumulation, and narrative exit are given in between chunks of others’ lives out of order, Ferris is presented in order.

Embodying a connection to nature with respect to time greater than oneself requires only time understood as a force larger than any other, and the presence of nature itself. Galvin, Williams, and Dillard all recognize this through the interactions with the other beating hearts in the universes of their characters – whether they have wings, claws, or tendencies to break down the baling wire. Galvin though The Meadow makes this understanding literal to the reader in his betrayal of sequential narrative, but subtle in the intentions and individual connections made by each of his characters to time and place.

Bibliography

Galvin, James. The meadow. New York: H. Holt, 1992. Print.

Tempest-Williams, T. (1992). Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Vintage Books. Print.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998. Print.