Over Prairie Trails

by Frederick Philip Grove

  “You had a hard trip?” asked my wife; and I replied with as much cheer as I could muster, “I have seen sights to-day that I did not expect to see before my dying day.” And taking her arm, I looked at the westering sun and turned towards the house.

  “But I had not yet gone very far … when the trees began to bend under the impact of that squall.”

  WIND AND WAVES

  When I awoke on the morning after the last described arrival at “home,” I thought of the angry glow in the east at sunrise of the day before. It had been cold again over night, so cold that in the small cottage, whatever was capable of freezing froze to its very core. The frost had even penetrated the hole which in this “teacher’s residence” made shift for a cellar, and, in spite of their being covered with layer upon layer of empty bags, had sweetened the winter’s supply of potatoes.

  But towards morning there had been a let-up, a sudden rise in temperature, as we experience it so often, coincident with a change in the direction of the wind, which now blew rather briskly from the south, foreboding a storm.

  I got the horses ready at an early hour, for I was going to try the roundabout way at last, forty-five miles of it; and never before had I gone over the whole of it in winter. Even in summer I had done so only once, and that in a car, when I had accompanied the school-inspector on one of his trips. I wanted to make sure that I should be ready in time to start at ten o’clock in the morning.

  This new road had chiefly two features which recommended it to me. Firstly, about thirty-eight miles out of forty-five led through a fairly well settled district where I could hope to find a chain of short-haul trails. The widest gap in this series of settlements was one of two miles where there was wild land. The remaining seven miles, it is true, led across that wilderness on the east side of which lay Bell’s farm. This piece, however, I knew so well that I felt sure of finding my way there by night or day in any reasonable kind of weather. Nor did I expect to find it badly drifted. And secondly, about twenty-nine miles from “home” I should pass within one mile of a town which boasted of boarding house and livery stable, offering thus, in case of an emergency, a convenient stopping place.

  I watched the sky rather anxiously, not so much on my own account as because my wife, seeing me start, would worry a good deal should that start be made in foul weather. At nine the sky began to get grey in spots. Shortly after a big cloud came sailing up, and I went out to watch it. And sure enough, it had that altogether loose appearance, with those wind-torn, cottony appendages hanging down from its darker upper body which are sure to bring snow. Lower away in the south – a rare thing to come from the south in our climate – there lay a black squall-cloud with a rounded outline, like a big windbag, resembling nothing so much as a fat boy’s face with its cheeks blown out, when he tries to fill a football with the pressure from his lungs. That was an infallible sign. The first cloud, which was travelling fast, might blow over. The second, larger one was sure to bring wind a-plenty. But still there was hope. So long as it did not bring outright snow, my wife would not worry so much. Here where she was, the snow would not drift – there was altogether too much bush. She – not having been much of an observer of the skies before – dreaded the snowstorm more than the blizzard. I knew the latter was what portended danger.

  When I turned back into the house, a new thought struck me. I spoke to my wife, who was putting up a lunch for me, and proposed to take her and our little girl over to a neighbour’s place a mile and a half west of the school. Those people were among the very few who had been decent to her, and the visit would beguile the weary Sunday afternoon. She agreed at once. So we all got ready; I brought the horses out and hooked them up, alone – no trouble from them this morning: they were quiet enough when they drank deep at the well.

  A few whirls of snow had come down meanwhile – not enough, however, as yet to show as a new layer on the older snow. Again a cloud had torn loose from that squall-bag on the horizon, and again it showed that cottony, fringy, whitish under layer which meant snow. I raised the top of the cutter and fastened the curtains.

  By the time we three piled in, the thin flakes were dancing all around again, dusting our furs with their thin, glittering crystals. I bandied baby-talk with the little girl to make things look cheerful, but there was anguish in the young woman’s look. I saw she would like to ask me to stay over till Monday, but she knew that I considered it my duty to get back to town by night.

  The short drive to the neighbour’s place was pleasant enough. There was plenty of snow on this part of the correction line, which farther east was bare; and it was packed down by abundant traffic. Then came the parting. I kissed wife and child; and slowly, accompanied by much waving of hands on the part of the little girl and a rather depressed looking smile on that of my wife, I turned on the yard and swung back to the road. The cliffs of black poplar boles engulfed me at once: a sheltered grade.

  But I had not yet gone very far – a mile perhaps, or a little over – when the trees began to bend under the impact of that squall. Nearly at the same moment the sun, which so far had been shining in an intermittent way, was blotted from the sky, and it turned almost dusky. For a long while – for more than an hour, indeed – it had seemed as if that black squall-cloud were lying motionless at the horizon – an anchored ship, bulging at its wharf. But then, as if its moorings had been cast off, or its sails unfurled, it travelled up with amazing speed. The wind had an easterly slant to it – a rare thing with us for a wind from that quarter to bring a heavy storm. The gale had hardly been blowing for ten or fifteen minutes, when the snow began to whirl down. It came in the tiniest possible flakes, consisting this time of short needles that looked like miniature spindles, strung with the smallest imaginable globules of ice – no six-armed crystals that I could find so far. Many a snowstorm begins that way with us. And there was even here, in the chasm of the road, a swing and dance to the flakes that bespoke the force of the wind above.

  My total direction – after I should have turned off the correction line – lay to the southeast; into the very teeth of the wind. I had to make it by laps though, first south, then east, then south again, with the exception of six or seven miles across the wild land west of Bell’s corner; there, as nearly as I could hold the direction, I should have to strike a true line southeast.

  I timed my horses; I could not possibly urge them on today. They took about nine minutes to the mile, and I knew I should have to give them many a walk. That meant at best a drive of eight hours. It would be dark before I reached town. I did not mind that, for I knew there would be many a night drive ahead, and I felt sure that that half-mile on the southern correction line, one mile from town, would have been gone over on Saturday by quite a number of teams. The snow settles down considerably, too, in thirty hours, especially under the pressure of wind. If a trail had been made over the drift, I was confident my horses would find it without fail. So I dismissed all anxiety on my own score.

  But all the more did the thought of my wife worry me. If only I could have made her see things with my own eyes – but I could not. She regarded me as an invalid whose health was undermined by a wasting illness and who needed nursing and coddling on the slightest provocation. Instead of drawing Nature’s inference that what cannot live should die, she clung to the slender thread of life that sometimes threatened to break – but never on these drives. I often told her that, if I could make my living by driving instead of teaching, I should feel the stronger, the healthier, and the better for it – my main problem would have been solved. But she, with a woman’s instinct for shelter and home, cowered down before every one of Nature’s menaces. And yet she bore up with remarkable courage.

  A mile or so before I came to the turn in my road the forest withdrew on both sides, yielding space to the fields and elbow-room for the wind to unfold its wings. As soon as its full force struck the cutter, the curtains began to emit that crackling sound which indicates to the sailor that he has turned his craft as f
ar into the wind as he can safely do without losing speed. Little ripples ran through the bulging canvas. As yet I sat snug and sheltered within, my left shoulder turned to the weather, but soon I sighted dimly a curtain of trees that ran at right angles to my road. Behind it there stood a school building, and beyond that I should have to turn south. I gave the horses a walk. I decided to give them a walk of five minutes for every hour they trotted along. We reached the corner that way, and I started them up again.

  Instantly things changed. We met the wind at an angle of about thirty degrees from the southeast. The air looked thick ahead. I moved into the left-hand corner of the seat, and though the full force of the wind did not strike me there, the whirling snow did not respect my shelter. It blew in slantways under the top, then described a curve upward, and downward again, as if it were going to settle on the right end of the back. But just before it touched the back, it turned at a sharp angle and piled on to my right side. A fair proportion of it reached my face which soon became wet and then caked over with ice. There was a sting to the flakes which made them rather disagreeable. My right eye kept closing up, and I had to wipe it ever so often to keep it open. The wind, too, for the first and only time on my drives, somehow found an entrance into the lower part of the cutter box, and though my feet were resting on the heater and my legs were wrapped, first in woollen and then in leather leggings, besides being covered with a good fur robe, my left side soon began to feel the cold. It may be that this comparative discomfort, which I had to endure for the better part of the day, somewhat coloured the kind of experience this drive became.

  As far as the road was concerned, I had as yet little to complain of. About three miles from the turn there stood a Lutheran church frequented by the Russian Germans that formed a settlement for miles around. They had made the trail for me on these three miles, and even for a matter of four or five miles south of the church, as I found out. It is that kind of a road which you want for long drives: where others who have short drives and, therefore, do not need to consider their horses break the crust of the snow and pack it down. I hoped that a goodly part of my day’s trip would be in the nature of a chain of shorter, much frequented stretches; and on the whole I was not to be disappointed.

  Doubtless all my readers know how a country road that is covered with from two to three feet of snow will look when the trail is broken. There is a smooth expanse, mostly somewhat hardened at the surface, and there are two deep-cut tracks in it, each about ten to twelve inches wide, sharply defined, with the snow at the bottom packed down by the horses’ feet and the runners of the respective conveyances. So long as you have such a trail and horses with road sense, you do not need to worry about your directions, no matter how badly it may blow. Horses that are used to travelling in the snow will never leave the trail, for they dread nothing so much as breaking in on the sides. This fact released my attention for other things.

  Now I thought again for a while of home, of how my wife would be worrying, how even the little girl would be infected by her nervousness – how she would ask, “Mamma, is Daddy in … now?” But I did not care to follow up these thoughts too far. They made me feel too soft.

  After that I just sat there for a while and looked ahead. But I saw only the whirl, whirl, whirl of the snow slanting across my field of vision. You are closed in by it as by insecure and ever receding walls when you drive in a snowstorm. If I had met a team, I could not have seen it, and if my safety had depended on my discerning it in time to turn out of the road, my safety would not have been very safe indeed. But I could rely on my horses: they would hear the bells of any encountering conveyance long enough ahead to betray it to me by their behaviour. And should I not even notice that, they would turn out in time of their own accord: they had a great deal of road sense.

  Weariness overcame me. In the open the howling and whistling of the wind always acts on me like a soporific. Inside of a house it is just the reverse; I know nothing that will keep my nerves as much on edge and prevent me as certainly from sleeping as the voices at night of a gale around the buildings. I needed something more definite to look at than that prospect ahead. The snow was by this time piling in on the seat at my right and in the box, so as to exclude all drafts except from below. I felt that as a distinct advantage.

  Without any conscious intention I began to peer out below the slanting edge of the left side-curtain and to watch the sharp crest-wave of snow-spray thrown by the curve of the runner where it cut into the freshly accumulating mass. It looked like the wing-wave thrown to either side by the bow of a power boat that cuts swiftly through quiet water. From it my eye began to slip over to the snow expanse. The road was wide, lined with brush along the fence to the left. The fields beyond had no very large open areas – windbreaks had everywhere been spared out when the primeval forest had first been broken into by the early settlers. So whatever the force of the wind might be, no high drift layer could form. But still the snow drifted. There was enough coming down from above to supply material even on such a narrow strip as a road allowance. It was the manner of this drifting that held my eye and my attention at last.

  All this is, of course, utterly trivial. I had observed it myself a hundred times before. I observe it again to-day at this very writing, in the first blizzard of the season. It always has a strange fascination for me; but maybe I need to apologize for setting it down in writing.

  The wind would send the snowflakes at a sharp angle downward to the older surface. There was no impact, as there is with rain. The flakes, of course, did not rebound. But they did not come to rest either, not for the most imperceptible fraction of time. As soon as they touched the white, underlying surface, they would start to scud along horizontally at a most amazing speed, forming with their previous path an obtuse angle. So long as I watched the single flake – which is quite a task, especially while driving – it seemed to be in a tremendous hurry. It rushed along very nearly at the speed of the wind, and that was considerable, say between thirty-five and forty miles an hour or even more. But then, when it hit the trail, the crack made by horses and runners, strange to say, it did not fall down perpendicularly, as it would have done had it acted there under the influence of gravity alone; but it started on a curved path towards the lower edge of the opposite wall of the crack and there, without touching the wall, it started back, first downward, thus making the turn, and then upward again, towards the upper edge of the east wall, and not in a straight line either, but in a wavy curve, rising very nearly but not quite to the edge; and only then would it settle down against the eastern wall of the track, helping to fill it in. I watched this with all the utmost effort of attention of which I was capable. I became intensely interested in my observations. I even made sure – as sure as anybody can be of anything – that the whole of this curious path lay in the same perpendicular plane which ran from the southeast to the north-west, that is to say in the direction of the main current of the wind. I have since confirmed these observations many times.

  I am aware of the fact that nobody – nobody whom I know, at least – takes the slightest interest in such things. People watch birds because some “Nature-Study-cranks” (I am one of them) urge it in the schools. Others will make desultory observations on “Weeds” or “Native Trees.” Our school work in this respect seems to me to be most ridiculously and palpably superficial. Worst of all, most of it is dry as dust, and it leads nowhere. I sometimes fear there is something wrong with my own mentality. But to me it seems that the Kingdom of Heaven lies all around us, and that most of us simply prefer the moving-picture-show. I have kept we at her records for whole seasons – brief notes on the everyday observations of mere nothings. You, for whom above all I am setting these things down, will find them among my papers one day. They would seem meaningless to most of my fellow-men, I believe; to me they are absorbingly interesting reading when once in a great while I pick an older record up and glance it over. But this is digressing.

  Now slowly, slowly another fact ca
me home to me. This unanimous, synchronous march of all the flakes coming down over hundreds of square miles – and I was watching it myself over miles upon miles of road – in spite of the fact that every single flake seemed to be in the greatest possible hurry – was, judged as a whole, nevertheless an exceedingly leisurely process. In one respect it reminded me of bees swarming; watch the single bee, and it seems to fly at its utmost speed; watch the swarm, and it seems to be merely floating along. The reason, of course, is entirely different. The bees wheel and circle around individually, the whole swarm revolves – if I remember right, Burroughs has well described it (as what has he not?).* But the snow will not change its direction while drifting in a wind that blows straight ahead. Its direction is from first to last the resultant of the direction of the wind and that of the pull of gravity, into which there enters besides only the ratio of the strengths of these two forces. The single snow-flake is to the indifferent eye something infinitesimal, too small to take individual notice of, once it reaches the ground. For most of us it hardly has any separate existence, however it may be to more astute observers. We see the flakes in the mass, and we judge by results. Now firstly, to talk of results, the filling up of a hollow, unless the drifting snow is simply picked up from the ground where it lay ready from previous falls, proceeds itself rather slowly and in quite a leisurely way. But secondly, and this is the more important reason, the wind blows in waves of greater and lesser density; these waves – and I do not know whether this observation has ever been recorded though doubtless it has been made by better observers than I am – these waves, I say, are propagated in a direction opposite to that of the wind. They are like sound-waves sent into the teeth of the wind, only they travel more slowly. Anybody who has observed a really splashing rain on smooth ground – on a cement sidewalk, for instance – must have observed that the rebounding drops, like those that are falling, form streaks, because they, too, are arranged in vertical layers – or sheets – of greater and lesser density – or maybe the term “frequency” would be more appropriate; and these streaks travel as compared with the wind, and, as compared with its direction, they travel against it. It is this that causes the curious criss-cross pattern of falling and rebounding rain-streaks in heavy showers. Quite likely there are more competent observers who might analyze these phenomena better than I can do it; but if nobody else does, maybe I shall one day make public a little volume containing observations on our summer rains. But again I am digressing.