The Long Winter

The Long Winter

When it's really cold and snowy, I always think of the Laura Ingalls Wilder book about her family's first winter in De Smet, "The Long Winter." It's about the winter of 1880-1881 in De Smet, South Dakota. The town was newly settled and the blizzards came early, stayed late and hit every few days. An expected supply train was trapped in snow until late spring. To venture out to hunt or cut wood was to risk your life, as the blizzards arrived without warning and hit hard. Getting caught out in deadly weather was a very real possibility.

I read the entire Little House set to my children when they were little. Everyone remembers "Little House on the Prairie," but nobody seems to remember the rest of the series. But "The Long Winter" has always stuck in my mind.

Just the idea of being trapped in a tiny house, without much food and without much fuel, is terrifying to me. The book is written from a child's point of view, so there aren't long passages in which the protagonist speculates that they might starve or freeze to death. But when you read it as an adult, you do think about that — a lot. When you're a parent, you think about what it would be like to not be able to feed your children or keep them warm. And you also think about how spoiled most of us are. Even though we keep our house quite cool in the winter to save money (it's a drafty old house that costs a fortune to heat), we don't ever worry that if winter drags on much longer we might all die.

Laura described how dull they all felt, and how Pa eventually gave up playing his fiddle. They could do no more than endure. 

No smartphones. No laptops. No Netflix. Maybe your family had a book or two, if you were lucky. Maybe you had a Bible. As for food, for most of the winter, the Ingalls family had nothing but scant amounts of brown bread Ma made by grinding grain in their coffee grinder. 

I think the lack of mental stimulation and contact with the rest of the world would be worse than the lack of food and warmth. I'm an introspective loner who lives in my head more than most people and I think I appreciate food more than most people, but I still think if I had to choose one form of privation for months on end, I'd choose hunger over solitude.

Hunger, solitude, cold, boredom: Which can you least endure?