“The sun that brief
December day rose cheerless over hill of gray…”
I’ll never forget the grim smile on my
father’s wind-burned face as he pulled back my bedroom
curtains. Snow was falling so heavily outside that I couldn’t
see the pump house 20 feet away.
“Snow tracing down
the thickening sky its mute and ominous prophecy,” my father
intoned with relish. I tried to look serious as he told me I
wouldn’t be going to high school today. The road was buried
three feet deep, so the school bus probably wouldn’t run even
if we could get to the highway.
He’d sniffed the
wind the night before, and gotten the team of Belgian workhorses
into the barn; he always knew when a storm was coming. After
breakfast, he’d harness them, pitch the hayrack full, and
we’d try to get some feed into the cattle before the weather
got really bad.
“A hard, dull bitterness of cold. .
. .
A night made hoary with the storm,
And
whirl-dance of the blinding storm. . . .
The white drift
piled the window-frame.”
All day, he kept
reciting lines from John Greenleaf Whittier’s
“Snow-Bound.” When I looked it up, I was stunned by its
length, and by how much he had memorized. Whittier’s subtitle
was “A Winter Idyll,” but as many Westerners have
discovered during the past few months, there’s nothing
idyllic about a real Plains winter. The experts say global warming
will bring increasingly violent storm surges, so we’d better
consider the lessons we’ve learned lately, and from our
ancestors as well.
“A prompt, decisive man, no
breath
Our father wasted: ‘Boys, a
path!’”
My father delivered that
line with particular relish, even though he was addressing a lone
daughter and knew he’d do most of the shoveling. When we
climbed on that hayrack behind the team of horses, we knew we could
make it to work outside and home without relying on anyone else.
Inside, my mother surveyed her cupboards, knowing she could cook
for weeks without going to a grocery store.
When friends
look at the full pantry in my city home in Wyoming, they are apt to
tell me — with just that annoying hint of superiority — that
times have changed. Some even announce that they shop every day so
they can get the freshest food for their families’ health.
Isn’t that nice?
Other neighbors relished this
winter’s blizzards for different reasons, whooping and
leaping into their four-wheel drive Humongous to snowmobile or ski,
and then drive to the store, with a slight detour to the gas pump.
Soon, though, the fantasy began to crumble as grocery store
managers explained that the coolers were empty of milk and lettuce
and meat because of the storms. Because the roads were closed.
Because the trucks and planes that bring food to the
country’s breadbasket couldn’t get through the drifts.
Because we don’t grow food close to home anymore. Because our
most productive land is covered with inedible subdivisions. Because
subdivisions are more profitable than cows and farms.
Heads up, folks. December was just a test. “Snowbound”
may become a permanent condition. Some experts say we can stave off
the worst effects if we immediately become more self-sufficient and
less dependent on coal; others say it’s already too late.
Some time while your electricity is still on, find
“Snow-Bound” on the Internet and print a copy to read
by candlelight during the next blizzard or brownout. Within its
rhyme and rollicking rhythm, it provides entertainment, as well as
information about what folks used to do before we adopted
“throngful city ways,” and started relying on vehicles
powered by foreign oil to haul our posteriors around.
“So days went on: a week had passed since the great world was
heard from last,” recited my father as he took the reins.
Sometimes I imagine trying to explain kiwi fruit to him. We
couldn’t even see the highway through a whiteout when he
remembered the poem’s last lines:
“The
traveller owns the grateful sense
Of sweetness near, he
knows not whence,
And, pausing takes with forehead
bare
The benediction of the air.”
“The benediction of the air,” he repeated.
Bud and Beauty snorted and tossed their heads, the harness
jingling, as we turned toward the corral through the blinding snow.
Linda M. Hasselstrom is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). She ranches in South
Dakota and writes in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
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