High Plains Winter
During the winter of 1982-83, when I was living on a farm, going to high school and desperately trying to keep my ’74 Camaro in good repair sans garage, 81 inches of snow dropped on northeast Nebraska. The following year, we got even more. Unable to climb the steep snow covered lane leading to the house, I parked the Camaro on the road and dug it free with a corn shovel more times than I can count.
If winter in Wyoming was about the wind and the cold, winter in Nebraska was first and foremost about the snow, though the wind and cold were there too.
I remember old folks telling stories about the winter of 1888, how the day of that first storm started out balmy, almost spring-like, before the mercury plunged scores of degrees and the wind shifted and the rain came with ice. Seeming almost supernatural in origin and strength, it was devastating for new homesteaders and pioneers with little prairie experience.
Even Grandma wasn’t old enough to have had first-hand knowledge of that awful time, but many of my relatives lived through the blizzards of 1948 and ’49. Again the days before Thanksgiving gave little inkling of what was ultimately in store. Though post-war weather forecasts were better than ever and almost everyone owned a radio, thousands were still caught off guard when the wind and snowed rolled across the western horizon.
During that particular winter, my hometown of Bloomfield received an official 95.7 inches of snow, and across the Great Plains more than 76 people died and hundreds of thousands of livestock were lost. As in 1888, the winter was only the first act. The spring brought universal flooding and never ending seas of mud.
I remember the mud of the early ‘80s, but by then there were more paved roads and better drainage and what once might have been life threatening was simply annoying.
What’s funny is that my most life-threatening winter experience didn’t happen during the ‘80s, but years before when I was in first grade and went feet first into a snow drift and over my head into a TV cliché.
Here’s what happened.
It was 1972, the darkest depth of winter, the sun going down fast, and I was on my grandparents’ farm after school. Grandma and Grandpa were inside the milk barn with my German Shepherd, Tuffy, about 300 yards from where I was, alone, in the windbreak of trees.
The thick belt of cedar with their rows of interlaced branches towered impossibly high above me, and snow held fast between those limbs formed a smooth white range of hills inviting a climb. Standing tall in the dark at the summit four or five times my height, the icy crust under me gave way and I went straight down. Underneath, everything was dry powdery except the submerged cedar boughs that my feet got caught up in. I thrashed around in snow like quicksand, my left foot twisted and hurting, my right foot floundering, useless. I was buried up to my chin. You can bet I cried and shouted and screamed.
But nobody could hear me as it got dark and the cold set in. Before long I quit feeling the cold and you know how they say you start to get sleepy with hypothermia? Well, I did.
And then I heard Tuffy bark.
It’s almost embarrassing to tell the story, it’s so predictable.
Tuffy the magnificent, the wonder dog, the real-life heir to Rin-Tin-Tin, responded to my renewed catterwalling. He barked, and ran to me, then back toward the barn, then back to me again. And since my Grandma was standing outside while Grandpa finished with the cows, she noticed, and within minutes I was saved.
So today when people tell me how much they love winter, I just sorta shrug and move on. I don’t argue with them, but I honestly can’t relate. I’ve had frost bite and hypothermia, buried cars and frustrated plans, and every year, around this time, I turn my back with smug satisfaction on the last melting flakes of snow, and like I’m living in a Ray Bradbury story, gleefully plunge into summer.
on March 10, 2010 at 10:14 am
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Great story. I hate winter, too, and I live in a swamp.
on March 10, 2010 at 12:18 pm
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Lovely story, Richard. I bet kids in the DC area will be telling stories about this winter. Hope they had a faithful dog.