In Hans Ostrom’s “Of the Valleys,” valleys are more than landscape—they are the places, phases, and possible selves a person moves through. The speaker looks back over a life spent entering and leaving them: some grow richer in memory, others are buried by forgetting. One remembered train journey crystallizes the mood: looking into a valley, he longs to be from there, to escape being himself. That wish stays with him even as a thief takes his luggage; the thief prospers, the abandoned suitcase withers. It is a quietly surreal image of identity left behind.
Later valleys become everyday pursuits—education, work, sex, solace—and sometimes shallow or fake places: highways, cities seen from the air, a too-perfect town with a hard-eyed waitress. The tone shifts between nostalgia, unease, and wry acceptance. By the end, valleys have shaped a life, hosting possibilities in the shadows of larger forces. The mood is reflective and melancholy, with a strange, almost dreamlike edge.