The Long Winter

Wow, I’m grateful for my furnace and grocery stores.

The family is finally done with this book, listening to Cherry Jones read it as we traveled over-the-rive-and-through-the-woods-to Grandmother's-house-we-go and over a few meals, even, and it was not always fun, sometimes tense, but on the whole it was good, as usual.

This one is mostly blizzards and near starvation from the South Dakota winter. Tedious, for a while, then realistically and impressively oppressive and frightening. They could actually have starved. They go months never eating in any given day what might be required for ONE full meal! If some of the volumes are a little sugar-coated (by that eternally optimistic, always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life-mother, this one focused on the border of long winters, the hard physical labor of grinding wheat into grain and the desperation to survive. I liked getting a pretty good picture of that, with the kids, so we could talk about world hunger.

The whole family listened to The Long Winter on our last vacation (which had a lot of driving time!). I'm still so thrilled that my two sons love this series as much as I do. They requested this book over others that I had downloaded for the trip. The book sparked a lot of discussions on how times have changed.

Man. This one was wonderful. I started weeping somewhere toward the end–when Almanzo and Cap got back with the wheat, I think—and haven't stopped yet. I was kind of dreading what I knew was going to be a hard story, but she managed to tell it in a way that was affecting without being crushing.

By far the least happens in this book. Blizzard after blizzard after blizzard after blizzard

The Long Reviewtt


Again, I get literal chills reading even just the beginning of this book – how high and fast the geese fly, knowing instinctively the freakishly hard winter that lies ahead, how the whole country lies empty of wildlife long before usual, the muskrats asleep deep in their thick mud house.

I actually think that I learned everything I know about foreshadowing from The Long Winter (and probably everything I know about cold and hunger). The novel’s leisurely, foreboding set-up – the heat of the haying, the meagre harvest, the muskrats’ deep building and the wild birds instinctive flight – then the old Native American stranger warning that he’s seen this before – Almanzo’s first appearance, casually offering directions when Carrie and Laura are lost in the Big Slough – blissfully unaware, as he lazes in the sun, how fiercely he’ll be tested and proven by deathly cold and those same long grasses at the climax of the novel, when he risks his life to feed the town. I swear this is the way I build a story, and I learned it here.

I hear echoes in my own work, too, of theme and structure – here’s Laura, drawing well water as the sun rises over a world encased in hard frost, thinking:

Laura loved the beautiful world. She knew that the bitter frost had killed the hay and the garden. The tangled tomato vines with their red and green tomatoes, and the pumpkin vines holding their broad leaves over the green young pumpkins, were all glittering bright in frost over the broken, frosty sod. The sod corn’s stalks and long leaves were white. The frost had killed them. It would leave every living green thing dead. But the frost was beautiful.

And it reminds me so much of my own character Rose flying through the war-torn sky over Kent, though I was unconscious of the similarity as I wrote this passage from Rose Under Fire:

I can’t get over how beautiful the barrage balloons are. I can’t even talk about it to anyone - they all think I am crazy. But when you’re flying over them, and the sky above you is a sea of gray mist and the land below you is all green, the silver balloons float in between like a school of shining silver whales, bobbing a little in the wind. They are as big as buses, and me and every other pilot has a healthy fear of them because their tethering cables are all loaded with explosives to try to snarl up enemy aircraft. But they are just magical from above, great big silver bubbles filling the sky.

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like this when your face is so cold you can’t feel it any more, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and stay on course. And still the sky is beautiful.

And both passages are fearsome foreshadowing for the life-and-death struggles that lie in wait for both girls later in their respective books. (In some ways, Rose Under Fire is DEEPLY influenced by The Long Winter.)

Going back to Wilder’s expert foreshadowing – I must touch on the early blizzards. An October blizzard hits the family while they are living in their shanty on their claim, and though they have plenty of food and hunger is a non-issue, the storm serves to warn them that they cannot survive the winter in this unfinished house, prompting their life-saving move to town. The second early blizzard, after the move, serves the plot in a ton of ways. The storm hits during school hours, so forces Carrie and Laura out into its teeth so we get to experience the terror of snow-blindness, banshee winds and “zero weather” through Laura’s eyes; it is this storm that first forces the town into isolation, eventually making it too dangerous to keep school open for the winter; but most important of all, hugely important, it introduces us to Cap Garland, Almanzo’s partner-in-crime in the heroic journey for wheat that is the novel’s climax. Cap is youthful and charismatic, Laura’s schoolmate, but he’s also the only one who recognizes the danger the school group is in as they stumble through the storm, and he takes action to save them. So right here in the beginning of the book we know he’s intelligent, capable, brave, and self-sacrificing. And this chapter is actually called “Cap Garland,” not “Lost in the Storm” or “Blizzard at School” or any number of other things the chapter heading might highlight. It highlights Cap himself.

This book is absolutely beautifully structured, and I can’t ever read it now without noticing it. Even Laura and Carrie’s trip down Main Street to buy Pa’s Christmas present serves a dual purpose – it gives the reader a chance to see through Laura’s eyes the emptiness of both grocery stores as the town waits anxiously for a supply train to get through. The frightening wildness of each blizzard’s arrival is heightened now by the knowledge that every new storm sets back the desperately-needed train’s arrival by another day. There is no action or passage wasted anywhere in this text: it all serves to drive the plot, often in more than one way.

Almanzo’s point of view is woven throughout the book so that the reader is used to seeing things from his point of view when the climax comes, but what he’s thinking is also important as it builds tension as he tries to save his own wheat. Eventually Laura’s and Almanzo’s storylines come together: it is Pa’s discovery of Almanzo’s hidden seed wheat that makes Almanzo realize there are people in the town who are literally in danger of starving to death, and precipitates his quest. (I like the way Pa is “Pa” in the text when the third person narrator is in Laura’s head, but he is “Mr. Ingalls” when the narrator is in Almanzo’s head.)

And then the suspense, my God - in the chapter “For Daily Bread” she details the whole trip in the freezing cold as Cap and Almanzo find the mythic wheat, but they are in danger of losing their feet to frostbite on the journey back, the horses keep floundering in deep snow, they are never sure of their location, and just as the sun is setting and the next blizzard cloud is swirling in from the northwest, the chapter ends, and WE CUT TO A WHOLE CHAPTER BACK IN THE COLD, FOODLESS DARK INGALLS HOUSE.

It’s masterful.

In the last chapter, “Christmas in May” (I think – the book is out of my hands at the moment) the Boasts come and share “Christmas” dinner with the family, and of course that Pa is able to play his fiddle again – order and sanity is restored, all these hugely important things they have been deprived of all winter, social interaction and music and warmth and color, are back in their world. But I also really love that basically this chapter is just an orgy of food. The whole Christmas dinner is described in exquisite detail including scent and taste and color and texture, as they prepare it and eat it and have second and third helpings.

Praise God for bread.

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On the end paper, in the back of my copy, handwritten in pencil, is the toll free number to report power outages to the local electric company in Central Pennsylvania. My grandmother and I read the whole book aloud to each other in three days, snowbound during the blizzard of March 1993. I love this obscure memento.

This is terrifying and amazing and every single character in it is fabulous. Maybe even Mr. Loftus. Pa - and Almanzo - and Cap - and Ma, and Laura, and this entire town starving to death - with cows in the barn and wheat in the walls - no coal, and no lumber, and no kerosene - no grease, even, because they live in "modern times" - and all of it almost tempered by hay and sunshine and pancakes and that superintendent -

I really, really like this book. Even as I am terrified by it.

You can tell Laura is getting older in this book because her memories are infused a bit more with fear. When you see pictures of that winter though, you know it had to have been terrifying because the snow was insane! What a remarkable thing to live through. I love the courage and perseverance shown by all the characters in this story!