A Book to Make You Think, “Hey, It Ain’t So Bad!”

I was irresistibly reminded of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter as the cascading news reports have been coming about the coronavirus. It’s so interesting to see the different sources that people are drawn to in responding to bad news. Some want to distance themselves, reading, watching and listening to material as far removed as possible from the real world.

And then there are people like me, who always find it consoling to say, “Well, other people have had it worse.” For some reason, I’m especially drawn to the last days of the Roman Empire. Hey, the Goths haven’t poured into the city, looting and burning! So we don’t have anything to complain about!! And, in concert with about 95 million other people, Jim and I re-watched the movie Contagion this past weekend. I must say, I have some serious issues about the plot, especially on a third watching. Society almost immediately descends into chaos and looting, but then, suddenly, as soon as there’s a vaccine, everyone is lining up perfectly to snort the stuff. (I have no plans to watch it a fourth time; that honor is reserved for Inception.)

In reality, for those of us in this house, all of us working at/from home and none of us dependent on a job that requires us to show up in person, the whole situation has a strange, unrealistic vibe. I read a fair number of articles over on the conservative news website National Review, with a particular favorite being Kevin Williamson, who recently said, “I’m a writer who works from home anyway, so I can hardly tell any difference.” None of the forgoing is meant in any way to minimize the pain and panic that people are experiencing, of course—I’m just talking about my own situation.

Anyway, I couldn’t recommend a better set of books for this time than what are collectively called the Little House books. I read them in grade school and loved them on that level, and then I re-read them all when I was in college. I was working at my church’s office one summer when I was home and vividly remember sitting at a table near the library while eating my lunch every day, completely consumed with the details of Pa’s building of the smokehouse, perhaps, or Ma’s cheese-making. In fact, it’s kind of astonishing how much of those books is taken up with food. Pa is constantly working to produce it; Ma is constantly figuring out what to do with it. As Pa tells her when she reveals the lovely surprise that she’s been saving for just the right moment in the dreadful time during that winter when they’re all sick and tired of the monotonous diet of brown bread made from wheat ground in the coffee grinder: “By George, Caroline, nothing can beat the Scotch!” The surprise is a piece of salt cod that Ma has been keeping squirreled away. She flakes it and makes a sort of gravy to put on the bread. Pa’s appreciative attitude “made the coarse bread and the gruel of groundwheat flour with a bit of salt fish in it seem almost like a treat.”

Just as with my third viewing of Contagion brought home some plot holes, so my third (at least) reading of The Long Winter made me question Ma’s conduct in a few ways, her way with a codfish notwithstanding. For one thing, everyone has to go upstairs to bed instead of bringing their straw-filled mattresses downstairs so they can sleep by the fire. Laura dreads going upstairs in the cold and the dark, and I don’t blame her. Also, when she and Pa work on twisting the hay into sticks to burn in the stove, they do it out in the lean-to where the hay is stored. That part of the house isn’t heated and isn’t even very well built. It’s so cold out there that Pa and Laura can only do so much before they have to come back into the kitchen and warm up their hands. Again, why can’t they bring armloads of hay into the kitchen and do the twisting there? It seems so strange, but no one seems to question that it’s just the way you do things. (Maybe I’m blaming Ma unnecessarily, but she’s such a bastion of the family standards that I have a feeling she’d be scandalized by putting mattresses on the floor and getting hay all over her kitchen floor that’s swept every day no matter what.) Oh, and by the way—you may be aware that the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal that’s been given to authors of children’s literature since the 1950’s had its name changed in 2018 to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award because of “racist stereotypes” of African- and Native Americans in the books. But for the most part those attitudes come from Ma. She hates and fears Native Americans. To be fair, she has lived through an actual attack. But this type of backwards projection into the past is so misguided. And is Laura supposed to condemn her own mother? Honestly!

Besides, one of the sort-of-heroes of this particular book is an elderly Native American who comes into the general store in September and warns the men there that a bad winter is coming and that it will last for seven months. He turns out to be exactly right, and while no one can actually take any action about it by that point at least they’ve been warned. He comes back up in the story several times as people say, “Maybe that old Indian was right.” It’s hard to know for sure that he’s a real character, to be sure, but my impression is that Laura had journals and diaries–maybe? I also get a little tickled about the character of Almonzo Wilder, who (as I’m sure you know) married Laura. He kind of rides a fine line between recklessness and practicality, as he’s determined not to use up his seed wheat for food and so risks his life and that of a friend to go out on the lone prairie and look for a man on a homestead who’s rumored to have wheat. He and Cap Garland make it, but just barely. Almonzo saves the town from starvation and also saves his wheat.

Anyway, get hold of a copy of this book. I got mine through the Libby app available at my public library system; I was able to get it on Kindle immediately and read it on my phone. All those years and years that I carted stacks of books home from library! Well, those days are over. After you’ve read it, go into your kitchen, gaze into your fridge, and give thanks. (And be grateful that you’re not going to try and eat a turkey that’s been frozen at the bottom of a barrel for months. That’s what the Ingalls family does when the train finally comes in at the beginning of May. They have their Christmas turkey dinner with all the trimmings. There’s no mention of freezer burn. I’m sure they would have thought it was great even if it tasted like sawdust.)