50+ Lifestyles

Max’s Musings

By Max Molleston

For you readers who pay close attention to the promises I make about “next Months” subject, Spring excitement will appear in May when our greenery and selection of purchased blooms are as firm as set jello. Can we wait to make good on the winters’ pondering and all the rest?

Ted Kooser is a longtime friend and one of this nations eminent poets. I knew of his effort with the 1888 blizzard over the plains for years and told myself I’d get hold of it. A
colleague on the Iowa Poetry Association leadership listened, and ordered the book on her smart phone, just that quick. Ted’s forward reveals his sources, and claims the language is “all mine.” This blizzard was strongest and fastest to develop in the last years of the 19th century.

I have chosen from his THE BLIZZARD VOICES
published by Bieler Press in 1986. University of Nerbraska Press (Bison Books) first re-printing was 2006.

As fast as this historic storm developed, the book aspects took longer, as recollections and actual experiences were “dug out” from personal recall, and from print sources like county papers, authenticating fury in the 1888 blizzard. Illustrations are drawn by Tom Pohrt.

A Man’s Voice

One man who was lost that day

had been shelling corn, and had gone

to a neighbor’s to borrow

a grain scoop. Halfway home,

he was caught by the storm,

and he left the scoop in the snow

near the road.

He wandered ahead of the wind

and was found that spring

when it thawed, twelve miles

southeast of his home.

Men and women lived through another more recent storm ,the 1936 deep snow drifts, publicized then and since with wonderful photographs. Another man’s voice poem concludes thusly.

The wind had packed the snow so hard

our horses could walk on it

without breaking the crust.

The drifts were there till June.

Stories similar to what you just read have been tossed about in decades past when teams were a powerful and necessary feature of crop agriculture.

A Woman’s Voice

According to weather reports

At the time the storm front moved

southeasterly, sweeping

the blizzard before it.

The mercury plummeted—

sixty degrees at some stations.

Railroad travel was blocked,

and telegraph clerks

sitting in boxcars rocked by the wind

on the sidetracks tapped out

the news. The tight wires whined

  along the tracks past schoolyards

where children played, black clouds

piling up over their shoulders.

Ted Kooser sustains mastery over the plains states’ feelings and attitudes. He is embedded. Even mice have not escaped his grasp of factors as men and women share the nature of their lives then and now. Aspects of his poetry touches, simply and directly, all that we plains men and women have experienced, desired, and have dreamed. This is a powerful small book recapturing a significant event in the live s of those who are remembered for their stories of The Blizzard of 1888. Interest in the book calls us to get on the web and print out bisonbooks.com. Kooser will whet your interest.

We work with birds next month, a fixture of our sighted lives. and those of us keenly aware of bird calls all round us as we transit into Spring.