New West Book Review

Flight Risks: Gary Schanbacher’s “Migration Patterns”

By Jenny Shank, 12-17-07

Migration Patterns
By Gary Schanbacher
Fulcrum Publishing
268 pages, $14.95

The characters in Colorado writer Gary Schanbacher’s engrossing debut story collection tend to flee when the going gets rough.  An itinerant laborer and ex-con named Nash who leads a crew that does shoddy repairs in the wake of coastal storms figures in three stories, and he’s in motion practically the whole time, driving around looking for work or returning home to Denver to try to make sense of his past.  Even Nash’s father Alvin, who is elderly and has diminished faculties, gets around quite a bit, breaking out of any nursing home or hospital he’s placed in and still managing to find his way home.  The Colorado landscape plays a prominent role in many of the stories, its mountains serving as beacons for characters who have lost their way.

This is especially true for Clayton, the protagonist of the fine novella “The Sea in These Hills.” The story begins in 1955 in Virginia (where Schanbacher grew up before moving to Colorado many years ago), when Clayton is a young man spending the summer catching crabs to sell to a local fish market.  He falls in love with Loretta, the teenage bride of the crusty, abusive proprietor of the market.  They carry on their affair for several years.  The love triangle is eventually forced to its crisis in a tense scene that displays Schanbacher’s skill for dramatizing his characters’ underlying psychological motivations, and Clayton flees across the country to Colorado, where he ends up in a mountain mining town that is destined to be flooded by a dam in a few years.

Schanbacher writes beautifully, but not in a showy way.  He builds up characters and landscape through simple, precise detail, such as when he describes Clayton catching a glimpse of Loretta on a hot Virginia day, “a small rotating fan stirring her hair.” There are hardly any slip-ups in this tight, compelling novella (such as when a telephone conversation is cut off just as Clayton is to learn a key detail about Loretta, and his friend seems to have never bothered to finish his thought in four years of subsequent telephone conversations). 
The setting of the Colorado portion of the novella is fascinating: a town in its final years before it is flooded to make way for progress, the graves of its founders dug up and moved.  Some of the townspeople protest and put up a fight against developers, while others accept their buyouts and do their best to make new lives elsewhere.  Clayton, still crushed by his disappointment with Loretta, stays in the town as long as possible, leaving after it is totally deserted. “One evening at dusk,” Schanbacher writes, “a coyote stalked down the center of Main Street, as if reclaiming it.” Although there is only one story of this length in Migration Patterns, Schanbacher works so well in this longer form that I won’t be surprised if he turns out a novel soon.

The next cycle of three semi-connected short stories begins with “Herding Instinct,” about a teenager named Jeffrey Pugh who draws solo summer sheepherding duty when his older brother grows tired of their father’s demands and refuses to help.  Despite the distant attractions of town, his awakening interest in girls, and his resentment toward his father, Jeffrey does a conscientious job taking care of the sheep in summer pasture, until a calamitous betrayal prompts him to flee across the country, “to wherever the truckers might carry him,” as is the template of Migration Patterns.  Jeffrey next fetches up in Boulder, Colorado, as a wild-eyed survivalist in the background of the story “Laws of Gravity.”

“Laws of Gravity” is a great Boulder story, featuring a house just like those that many students passing through here have lived in, full of weird, naked roommates named Windship, complicated sleeping arrangements, and tumultuous love affairs.  The narrator is a law student who falls in love with a very Boulder woman named Shelly, who is “forever off on one excursion or another: rock climbing in Eldorado Canyon, kayaking the white water of the Cache La Poudre, hiking the remote wilderness of Flattop Mountain.” The narrator even manages to marry Shelly despite knowing that he can’t keep her tied down for long—and there’s only one way for this story to end, with the flight of one of the characters.

While the humor in “Laws of Gravity” is sharp and incisive, the next story, “Windship Universe Floats to Earth,” gets a little goofy, featuring an altercation at the grocery checkout line involving a cantaloupe and levitation.  Still, it shows Schanbacher isn’t afraid to include some playful moments in his fiction and that bodes well for his career.  Migration Patterns is the welcome and promising debut of a Colorado fiction writer with a keen sense for psychological detail and an appreciation for the influence natural landscapes can have on people’s behavior.

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