Even before we started dating, Angela and I were trading book recommendations, mostly history books, mysteries and fantasy. But after she snared me and had me in a position where I dare not refuse her anything, she told me I should read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, which were a favorite of hers when she was growing up.
And, as much as I would delight in pretending to grumble and complain about this, I enjoyed the series enormously. They are at least slightly fictionalized accounts of Laura's childhood growing up on the frontier, but still filled with historical accuracy and characters you come to care for a great deal. Laura's prose is clear, straightfoward and able to generate honest emotion. Seeing events unfold through Laura's eyes as she grows up over the course of the books is often fascinationg.
For me, there is one book in the series that really stands out--The Long Winter (1940), which recounts the winter of 1880-81 in the Dakota territory, in which a series of blizzards struck the Ingalls homestead in a seemingly unending volley and kept them housebound, with dwindling supplies, for months. Outside the house, the railroad has stopped running and the cattle suffer and often die.
I think Laura's prose here is her best--giving a vivid and downright terrifying word picture of the ensuing hardships:
That blizzard seemed never to end. It paused sometimes, only to roar again quickly and more furiously out of the northwest. Three days and nights of yelling shrill winds and roaring fury beat at the dark, cold house and ceaselessly scoured it with ice-sand. Then the sun shone out, from morning to noon perhaps, and the dark anger of winds and icy snow came again.
The Ingalls run out of fuel for their fire, so begin twisting sticks of hay together to make fuel while they use a coffee grinder to grind wheat and make a little bread each day. But the storm continues.
The constant beating of the winds against the house, the roaring, shrieking, howling of the storm, made it hard to think. It was possible only to wait for the storm to stop. All the time, while they ground wheat, twisted hay, kept the fire burning in the stove, and huddled over it to thaw their chapped, numb hands and their itching, burning, chillblained feet, and while they chewed and swallowed the coarse bread, they were all waiting for the storm to stop.
There was nothing but cold and dark and work and coarse brown bread and wind blowing. The storm was always there, outside the walls, waiting sometimes, then pouncing, shaking the house, roaring, snarling, and screaming in rage.
Gee whiz, The Last Winter at times nearly becomes a horror story and it is a completely engrossing, riviting tale. It is, by far, my favorite of the series.
So there you have it. My wife made me read the Little House books and I actually enjoyed them.
Um, don't tell anybody. Okay?
Posts
Cowboys called it the Big Die-Up.
ReplyDeleteRemington's painting The Fall Of The Cowboy was based on it.