Yeah, the emphasis in this passage is more about his age: "the old geezer," "Old! Old! I have seen!" and there's the implied fact that he is a *native* and has been living there longer than, say, 6 months.
I know what you mean about the "especially attuned to the land" nonsense, though. There's definitely a bit in this book about the muskrats and their animal instinct and being attuned to the land, maybe you also conflated that?
(Hunh, I didn't realize that apparently there were TWO nightmare winters in the 1880s Dakotas.)
Oh, wow, I need to tell you about the blizzard of 1888! The Children's Blizzard, which is the title of a book I recommended to Rachel recently. Oh, hey, it's on archive.org, you can borrow it. Skip the bits about the history of meteorology if you're not interested, but the narratives and the descriptions of the intensity of that blizzard are just mind-blowing.
Just imagine the scene where Laura and all the schoolchildren get lost on the way coming back from the school at the beginning of Long Winter, multiplied by almost every school in every state in the Midwest that day in 1888. And people getting lost coming back from the barn to the house, etc. It's a wild read.
It sometimes gets confused with Laura's winter, but it was a few years later. She mentions it in passing, but since it happened after Golden Years, she doesn't go into it in detail.
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Date: 2023-03-17 10:39 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about the "especially attuned to the land" nonsense, though. There's definitely a bit in this book about the muskrats and their animal instinct and being attuned to the land, maybe you also conflated that?
(Hunh, I didn't realize that apparently there were TWO nightmare winters in the 1880s Dakotas.)
Oh, wow, I need to tell you about the blizzard of 1888! The Children's Blizzard, which is the title of a book I recommended to Rachel recently. Oh, hey, it's on archive.org, you can borrow it. Skip the bits about the history of meteorology if you're not interested, but the narratives and the descriptions of the intensity of that blizzard are just mind-blowing.
Just imagine the scene where Laura and all the schoolchildren get lost on the way coming back from the school at the beginning of Long Winter, multiplied by almost every school in every state in the Midwest that day in 1888. And people getting lost coming back from the barn to the house, etc. It's a wild read.
It sometimes gets confused with Laura's winter, but it was a few years later. She mentions it in passing, but since it happened after Golden Years, she doesn't go into it in detail.