How cold is cold = cold enough
to freeze waterfalls. Here is a view looking outward from beneath Minnehaha
Falls in Minneapolis. What is called an "arctic vortex" or "polar vortex" is in the midst of holding captive the Upper Midwest, bringing the coldest temperatures since the mid-1990s.
Since this turned out to be a very long post, I will move right along. The first song included today is, "It's Only
Make Believe," written by Conway Twitty and Jack Nance, and recorded by Twitty
in 1958. It became a No. 1 hit for him and later for Glen Campbell, as well. I
sort of stumbled on to this cover of it by Ronni Rae Rivers. She recorded it in
the Bojangles Saloon & Restaurant at Alice Springs, Northern Territory,
Australia, which seems as good a place as any since she was born in Australia
and drifts back and forth between there and Texas. I like her rendition and I
like the sign just as the song is getting under way: "Cowboys leave your guns
at the bar."
The second song is, "Tiny
Dancer," by Elton John, who sings it here, with lyrics from Bernie Taupin. The
title of this post comes from the action in the video for this song:
Blue jean baby
L.A. lady
Seamstress for the band
Pretty eyed
Pirate smile
You'll marry a music man
Ballerina, you must have seen
her ....
Ballerina, soon it will be summer ....
As
I sit here writing this on Wednesday,
January 30, 2019, ten in the morning, the actual air temperature outside is
minus 29 degrees Fahrenheit (which translates to minus 34 Celsius). I guess
that puts the wind chill temperature somewhere in the neighborhood of minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
What
are the results of this weather "occurrence?"
For
a start, there will be no mail delivery in Minnesota and all or parts of a
number of other Midwestern states. Classes have been cancelled in every public
school and at most, if not all colleges. Many businesses have closed and
thousands of individuals are staying at home.
Minus
29 is nothing to sneeze at, but when I was a boy I can recall many days similar
to this, some of them not only frigid, but in the grips of a blizzard, when I
picked up my .22 caliber rifle, pulled my Golden Labrador (yes, golden, not
yellow) from his snug as a bug in a rug nest and headed out the door to circle
the nearest lake. There were times when it meant walking backwards against the
wind or finding shelter behind a tree for a few minutes, but such excursions
truly were enjoyable experiences.
Personally,
I have experienced the actual air temperature at minus 56 degrees Fahrenheit and below
zero weather which lasted a few weeks. It took time to adjust to it. It was tolerable, but no fun at all.
Life
and living the hardships it brought and continues to bring on the American prairies are a fascination
of mine. One book, "The Children's Blizzard," by David Laskin, describes
weather conditions of the harshest magnitude. Among the words in the book are
these: "In three minutes, the front subtracted eighteen degrees from the air's
temperature. Then evening gathered in,
and temperatures kept dropping in the northwest gale. By morning on Friday,
January 13, 1888, more than a hundred children lay dead on the Dakota-Nebraska
prairie."
The
last quarter of the Nineteenth Century was an era filled with stories of horrendous
weather conditions. Here are more words from the book: "They called the winter
of 1880-81 the Snow Winter because the snowstorms started early and never let
up. A three-day blizzard took the settlers of the Upper Midwest by surprise on
October 15, and after that, snowstorms came at regular intervals ...."
"....
Mary Paulson King, a child of immigrant Norwegian parents in Yellow Medicine
County, Minnesota, remembers opening the door on the morning of October 15 to a
wall of snow that 'just fell in the house.' Her father had to get up on a chair
and make a hole in the snow in order to crawl out."
Laura
Ingalls Wilder made the Snow Winter the subject of her novel, "The Long Winter."
Every detail in the book matches up exactly with the memoirs of pioneers. By
midwinter, Laura and her sisters had learned to scan the northwest horizon for "the
cloud," the single sooty cloud that set the stage for another storm.
"No
one knew how soon the blizzard would come again," wrote Wilder. "At any moment
the cloud might rise and come faster than any horses could run."
The
Little House books were made into an overly emotional television series in the 1970s and
1980s, but the books themselves are sparse and unsentimental. Wilder took
for granted that schoolgirls, even her prim, ladylike sister, Mary, do not
flinch when the conversation turns to death by exposure:
"'What
would you do if you were caught in a blizzard, Mary?' Minnie Johnson was
asking."
...."'I'd
dig into a snowbank and let the snow cover me up. I don't think you'd freeze to
death in a snowbank. Would you, Laura?'"
"'Well,
what would you do, Laura, if you got caught in a blizzard?' Minnie insisted."
"'I
wouldn't get caught,' Laura answered."
Actually,
Mary was on the right track. There is an adage probably as old as time itself:
The wind is your enemy; the snow is your friend. I have spent more than a few
frigid, stormy nights outdoors warm and comfortable in a "snowhouse" or an "icehouse." Residents of
the far/far/far north have done so for generations.
Sometimes
I think it a blessing, sometimes I think it a curse that my interests lead me
toward attempting to see into the past and to understand it. This I do by reading books by such people as Willa
Cather, Frederick Manfred, Hamlin Garland, Mari Sandoz, Laura Engels Wilder,
Herbert Krause, Ole Rolvaag and many others, some of whom actually experienced
the winters of the 1880s and the
horrific blizzards of that era and every other hardship imaginable. I also practice "archaeology by experiment" .... I might explain that further another day, but I assume most can figure it out.
One
writer wrote: ".... in a way the entire pioneer period was a kind of children's
disaster. Children were the unpaid workforce of the prairie, the hands that did
the work no one else had the time for or the stomach for .... a safe and carefree
childhood was a luxury the pioneer prairie could not afford." That certainly is a stark contrast to the "participation trophies" for children of today.
In,
"My Antonia," Cather wrote of the 1888 blizzard: "It was as if we were being
punished for loving the loveliness of summer."
This
post started out on one note and ended on another, but I guess that is fine
since both are relevant to life and to living as it was back then and as it is now ....
6 comments:
Hi Fram.I am glad you posted this.I was worried yesterday night when I saw the news thinking of you..OMG !What a cold!!!
Hope you keep warm!
There is so much interesting books on this post..I have to c0py it and save it to my email so I can look them up.I love litterature from the old days..Specially from the hard winthers time .How did people cope with that?Just kept on working ?
And you too..You have been in an igloo??Wow!You surprise me more and more..
The music is very good specially the first one..So relaxing--
Elton John Tiny Dancer never heard before..Before I could listen to his songs all day long..Candle in the wind ,Your song, Rocket man ,The list is long :)
I tried to answer this post earlier this morning but the internet was so loozy..I can not stand it!!(I think when summer comes i will be leaving this cottage..hell..no internet and every snowy day is is a struggle)
All in all a very good post!And keep on telling us how it goes..They say the cold will disappear on monday..I wonder what the people says
about climate changes ..?Did they not say the weather should be warmer?Well hell not around my place! I am wearing wool stockings wool dress and a wool cardigan inside house--No outgoing for me..and we have only ca 10 below
Talk later when the old cobber internet is rolling again
Stay warm xxx
My usual response is something like this: I write what I think and I feel at a particular moment in time. In other words, I write to please myself, no one else. If someone comes by -- fine. If someone comes by and actually reads what I have written -- still better. If someone comes by and actually reads what I have written and leaves a comment -- even better yet. It makes no difference if the writer of the comment agrees with me or not. A comment simply means my words have been interesting enough for someone to have read and to have thought about for a moment or two or three .... and, taken the time to reply.
Have a good day ....
It still is cold here, Anita. More than cold .... frigid .... but it is better today than it was yesterday. It is just after noon here and the temperature is minus 9 Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius). A brief reprieve is predicted for the weekend, with the temperature expected to exceed 40 degrees Fahrenheit (5 Celsius) both Saturday and Sunday. It worries me that such a dramatic shift could affect the lives of both wildlife and plants.
Winter might delay life a bit, but not much for those living and growing up in a small, rural community where life centers around agriculture. The father and grandfather of one of my friends had a blacksmith shop which, you might imagine, was even hot in the dead of winter. The day after a Christmas snowstorm when we were eight years old, we were running around in it in our shirtsleeves shooting our BB guns out the open windows.
As for the "icehouse" business, a friend and I spent most of our high school, senior year, Christmas vacation (about ten days of it) living in one in the middle of a lake. We were 17 at the time. We would hike into town periodically to "resupply," but otherwise actually lived in it. Prior to that, we had done mid-winter outdoor overnights beginning in backyards when we were about 10 or 11. There have been other "icehouses” since, but enough about that for now. By the way, our plans had been to live in the woodlands of northern Minnesota for a year after high school, but it turned out we went our own separate directions.
Among the writers I mentioned, O.E. "Ole" Rolvaag is my absolute favorite and one of his books, "Giants in the Earth," is an absolute masterpiece. I have written about him before, but to summarize: Rolvaag was born in 1876 in a fishing village on the island of Dønna, in Nordland county, Norway. He worked with his family on fishing boats, and came to the United States at age 20. Rolvaag worked on an uncle's farm about 20 miles from where I lived when I was in South Dakota. He graduated from Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, about 20 miles from my current residence, and taught there until his death in 1931.
He was an excellent painter with words. In his novel, "The Boat of Longing," Rolvaag described many sights and sounds of downtown Minneapolis, where he lived for a while. Holding Rolvaag's book in one hand and walking the same streets, I was able to see many of the places he described.
The same is true of Rolvaag's novel, "Giants in the Earth," which is the story of Norwegian settlers on the Dakota prairie. Central characters are Per Hansa, a natural pioneer who sees promise in the windswept plains, and his wife, Beret, who misses the ways of her homeland to the point loneliness overpowers the deeper reality of life lived on the American frontier.
A man filled with blind ambition, perhaps, describes Per Hansa best. At the end of the novel, he ventures out into a blizzard on skis to find help for his dying friend, but he never stops thinking about taking more land and fulfilling his ambitions. Per Hansa stops to rest along the way and freezes to death. His body is found in the spring by a group of boys: "To the boys, it looked as though the man were sitting there resting while he waited for better skiing .... His face was ashen and drawn. His eyes were set toward the west."
I was introduced to Rolvaag as a college boy by an old, old Norwegian doctor of literature, Hjalmar Lokensgard. Some of my favorite memories are associated with his classes. He had a reputation as being a grouch and a difficult teacher, but I won him over, probably because of my name and my enthusiasm for books.
Too long .... end part 1 ....
Continuation .... part 2 ....
You have a long note, and I do want to mention two other points from it. One is that, of course, there is climate change. Witness the coming and going of glacial ages. Many people now, however, are foolish enough to think they can actually influence it. Such thoughts are further evidence of human vanity.
I am not a true fan of Elton John, but he has some songs I enjoy, such as the one today and the ones you mention.
So, now, it is time for me to take my puppy boy outside. I have not mentioned it, but I saw a rather large fox trotting down the street a few days ago. I see a coyote periodically, but this is the first time I have seen a fox here. Coyote and fox and eagles are reasons I do not let my little dog be outside by himself.
Take care, Anita, and I hope you do read some of the writers I mentioned. My suggestion would be to begin with Ole Rolvaag. Actually, many (maybe all) of his books were originally written in Norwegian, so I would assume copies in your native language are available. I also would suggest to begin with, "Giants in the Earth" .... "I de dage" ....
Thank you, for being here and for writing here .... you truly are a gem and a sweetie ....
I found an old book in my book shield thats called Paa Glemte Veie av Ole Edvard Rølvaag..In his first books, America's letters and On forgot ways, came out under the pseudonym Paal Mørck
But i think Giants of The earth is a better ones..so i shall search for the trilogy
Lovely to hear about your puppy!Good taken care of--Dont let the fox or the Coyote come near him
Hope you continue telling us about the weather!
You taught me something today, Anita. Thank you !!!!
If I ever were aware that Ole Rolvaag used a pseudonym, I had forgotten it. I did a bit of research, and came up with this:
"Ole Rolvaag, later famous for Giants in the Earth, wrote his first novel under a pseudonym because it was 'too personal' to put out under his own name. Amerika-breve, which translates as Letters from America, appeared in Norway in 1912, under the name Paal Morck. (Both Rolvaag and Morck feature the vowel that looks like an o, but has a right-leaning slash through it. I'll fix this entry if I can figure out how to do that in this program.)
"Ella Valborg Tweet, Rolvaag's daughter, and granddaughter, Solvieg Tweet Zempel, translated it, and it came out as The Third Life of Per Smevik in 1971 in hardback from Dillon Press, and in 1987 as a Perennial Library trade paperback from Harper & Row. Tweet also wrote the introduction, which is, in essence, a short biography of Rolvaag.
"The 'third life' of the title is explained in the first letter the young Norwegian immigrant to Clarkfield, South Dakota, writes home. He explains that it feels like he has led two lives on Earth already, the first being the nearly 21 years he lived in Helgeland, and the second one consisting of his trip from there to South Dakota. He tells his father that the second life, although just over three weeks long, seemed longer than the first life. His third life, he says, is starting in America."
Those three paragraphs were written by a young lady name Kathryn Judson and came from here, if you wish to check it out:
http://suitableformixedcompany.blogspot.com/2005/02/good-book-third-life-of-per-smevik-by.html
I am wondering if Clarkfield is misplaced from Minnesota to South Dakota. Clarkfield is a town in Minnesota about thirty miles from the border with South Dakota. It is the town where my father grew up.
In any case, I found a copy of the book on eBay and ordered it. I will let you know what I think of it.
Thank you, Anita, for being Anita .... you are a very special young lady ....
Post a Comment