[Sca-cooks] Harvest times

[Terry Decker]

As I recall, the winter of 1959 was rather memorable complete with 
blizzards, losing power and winding up in the basement for a couple days to 
conserve heat, eight foot drifts and some really beautiful days. 
Temperatures ran from around 25 to -40.  I also remember seeing a guy in 
swim trunks and boots out getting a tan (perfectly clear, still day).  The 
drifts lasted until spring thaw, but they got plowed out to permit traffic 
flow around them.

The problem with Wilder's "Long Winter" was that it was long.  Winter came 
early and stayed late at a time when an iffy transportation system and slow 
travel times made resupply and exposure to the weather extreme dangers. 
With a prolonged winter, people tend to run out of food and fuel reducing 
their chances of survival even if the weather was not overly extreme.

The winter of 86 was extreme but not as long.  Rather than starving or 
freezing as you ran out of food and fuel, you stood the risk of dying of 
exposure crossing from the house to the barn.  The winter of 86 is also 
noteworthy because the conditions were not localized, but spread almost from 
Canada to Mexico across the western plains states.

I am tentatively willing to accept the reliability of Wilder's account, 
because she first wrote of this period in a letter to (IIRC) the Territorial 
Legislature in 1886.  I just haven't been interested enough to do the 
research.

Bear


> >If so, then why were the trains not able to get in or out?  Why were 
> >there high
>>snow drifts?  Why did the people nearly starve and/or freeze to death? 
>>Her
>>account doesn't jibe with what you are saying.  You should read her book, 
>>"The Long
>>Winter".
>
> It is, in the end, a book, written by a human with all the
> fallibilities of memory that humans are prone to, and all the
> tendencies toward artistic licence that novelists are wont.
>
> Perhaps Laura Ingalls Wilder wanted to combine plot elements
> and character ages/situations from from '81 with the dramatic
> tension of the hard winter in '86.
>
> Perhaps she just misremembered the date.
> It was written about 40 years after the fact, IIRC.
> How many of us can recall which of the firt 10 winters of your
> life was the hardest/coldest without an almanac?
>
> More importantly, what did they cook for that hard winter?
>
> Capt Elias
> Dragonship Haven, East
> (Stratford, CT, USA)
> Apprentice in the House of Silverwing