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I reread this while I was under 9 feet of snow, on the theory that it would make me more appreciative of the fact that I was not literally starving and I had plenty of food more varied than brown bread, and also quite a lot of books.
It was indeed very inspiring that way. I hadn't reread it in a while, as it isn't one of my favorites of the Little House books. Other than Almanzo and Cap Garland's daring ride to fetch the seed wheat, I always found it a bit monotonous. But of course, that is exactly the point. It's death by monotony.
Laura does an amazing job of evoking exactly how dreary and unchanging the experience is – like depression made into an environment. There's no variety in food. There's no variety in what you see. There's no variety in work. There's no variety in the people you interact with. Most horrific of all, there's no variety in sound. All you can hear is the incessant howling of the blizzard. Pa's fingers are so swollen from twisting hay into sticks in the cold that he can't even play his fiddle.
Laura describes this incredibly vividly, including her own state of mind-numbed depression. She literally can't think of anything but the sound of the wind. They get so bored of eating brown wheat bread and nothing but brown wheat bread, that all but Pa lose their appetites for it, even though they're on the verge of starvation. That did make me grateful for the variety of my own trapped in snow state. At least the work I had to do was shoveling snow from what felt like far too many locations, but that's a lot better than doing the same work over and over and over again. The fear of the adults is starvation, but what's most vivid to Laura is the sameness. It's almost a horror story.
Almanzo and Cap obtain the seed wheat from a settler who initially refuses to sell it to them, even when they explained that their entire town is starving. They have to talk him into it, even after raising the price far above the going rate. It never occurred to me before, but I wonder now what Almanzo would have done if the settlor had both refused to sell and if Almanzo didn't have his own seed wheat. I assume he would have dropped the money on the table and simply taken the wheat. But it's a situation that could have gotten very, very ugly.
There's a few non-blizzard bits that are lovely, most notably when they find a lost bird, nurse it back to health, and release it without ever finding out what it was or where it came from. But of course what the book is remembered for is the blizzard that seems to go on and on forever, and the triumphant moment when it ends, and the trains arrive, and they get to have appetizing food and hope and happiness again.
It was indeed very inspiring that way. I hadn't reread it in a while, as it isn't one of my favorites of the Little House books. Other than Almanzo and Cap Garland's daring ride to fetch the seed wheat, I always found it a bit monotonous. But of course, that is exactly the point. It's death by monotony.
Laura does an amazing job of evoking exactly how dreary and unchanging the experience is – like depression made into an environment. There's no variety in food. There's no variety in what you see. There's no variety in work. There's no variety in the people you interact with. Most horrific of all, there's no variety in sound. All you can hear is the incessant howling of the blizzard. Pa's fingers are so swollen from twisting hay into sticks in the cold that he can't even play his fiddle.
Laura describes this incredibly vividly, including her own state of mind-numbed depression. She literally can't think of anything but the sound of the wind. They get so bored of eating brown wheat bread and nothing but brown wheat bread, that all but Pa lose their appetites for it, even though they're on the verge of starvation. That did make me grateful for the variety of my own trapped in snow state. At least the work I had to do was shoveling snow from what felt like far too many locations, but that's a lot better than doing the same work over and over and over again. The fear of the adults is starvation, but what's most vivid to Laura is the sameness. It's almost a horror story.
Almanzo and Cap obtain the seed wheat from a settler who initially refuses to sell it to them, even when they explained that their entire town is starving. They have to talk him into it, even after raising the price far above the going rate. It never occurred to me before, but I wonder now what Almanzo would have done if the settlor had both refused to sell and if Almanzo didn't have his own seed wheat. I assume he would have dropped the money on the table and simply taken the wheat. But it's a situation that could have gotten very, very ugly.
There's a few non-blizzard bits that are lovely, most notably when they find a lost bird, nurse it back to health, and release it without ever finding out what it was or where it came from. But of course what the book is remembered for is the blizzard that seems to go on and on forever, and the triumphant moment when it ends, and the trains arrive, and they get to have appetizing food and hope and happiness again.
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He was a very old Indian. His brown face was carved in deep wrinkles and shriveled on the bones, but he stood tall and straight. His arms were folded under a gray blanket, holding it wrapped around him. His head was shaved to a scalp-lock and an eagle’s feather stood up from it. His eyes were bright and sharp. Behind him the sun was shining on the dusty street and an Indian pony stood there waiting.
This is the reaction from the townspeople:
“What was that about seven big snows?” Almanzo asked. Pa told him. The Indian meant that every seventh winter was a hard winter and that at the end of three times seven years came the hardest winter of all. He had come to tell the white men that this coming winter was a twenty-first winter, that there would be seven months of blizzards.
“You suppose the old geezer knows what he’s talking about?” Royal wanted to know. No one could answer that.
“Just on the chance,” Royal said, “I say we move in to town for the winter."
Ma, of course, wins first prize for Most Racist, but Pa is a product of his time too:
“There’s some good Indians,” Pa always insisted. Now he added, "And they know some things that we don't."
Nothing terribly racist here about the idea that the native might know some things the white folks don't, though. (Yeah, it's a low bar.)
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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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Oh, I know about the blizzard of '88! ...In New York City. Wow, TWO horrible blizzards in one year? Jeepers.
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