Award winning author Jamie Lisa Forbes has once again brought us complex characters in a story based on real women and the early days when rodeo was wide open for them to become stars. It is a story of the social mores of the times and of a woman determined to defy them no matter how high the personal cost or where that choice might take her.
The road that wound out of our Little Laramie River Valley was called “The Swede Cabin.” For years during my childhood, I thought the adults were saying “Sweet Cabin” and I wondered, looking over the prairie, where the sweets were.
“Swede, Jamie,” my father said. “Not sweet.”
“There’s no Swedes here, either. And where’s the cabin?”
“There used to be a Swedish guy here. He’s gone and so is the cabin.”
No, there was no trace of a cabin there. The land swept up and away to the top of a bluff and on trips to Laramie, I used to glance back for a last glimpse at the valley and the Snowy Range beyond. “The Swede Cabin” meant the last stop between the valley and the rest of the world.
In September 1973, I was waiting out the fall days at the ranch before I was due to begin at the University of Denver. One morning, my parents asked me to take my brother to school. He was starting high school in Laramie.
There had been heavy rain the night before which explained why I wasn’t back in the hayfields that morning. Coming down over the bluff on my return trip, I hit the mud too fast and slid off the road. I turned off the car and there was silence.
There were no cell phones in those days, no way to contact anyone. But I wasn’t anxious. I knew that my father would come looking for me. In whatever spot I had gotten myself into, I always knew Dad would be along. There might be less than positive consequences when he arrived, but at the heart of the matter, it always was reassuring to he was on his way.
While I waited and the engine ticked off, the clouds began to break. Sun streaked the green meadows and prairie below. The haystacks were piled high with the summer’s hay. The mountaintops appeared with the season’s first dusting of snow. The cattle would trail down the mountains soon. The aspen would turn. Time never stopped here. Halted, however inadvertently, I now had the luxury of lingering over this view. “This is not goodbye. My absence will be just a pause, an interruption. All of this will still be here when I come back.”
And there sure enough five miles away, I saw our green ranch truck traveling south on Forbes Lane, swinging east on McGill Lane, crossing the cattle guard and starting up the Swede Cabin.
In 1994, she moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. In 2001, she graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law and began her North Carolina law practice.
Forbes’ first novel, Unbroken, won the WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction in 2011. Her collection of short stories, The Widow Smalls and Other Stories, won the High Plains Book Awards for a short story collection in 2015.
Forbes’ novel of rural North Carolina in the segregation era, entitled Eden, was published in 2020. Her historical novel about women bronc riders in the early days of rodeo, entitled Sunny Gale, was published in May 2024 by Pronghorn Press.
Ms. Forbes continues to live—and write—in North Carolina.
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