BLIZZARD

The temperature had finally risen above zero after several days of severe cold, but when I left the house for the barn one dark January morning I noticed a few snowflakes in the air. After the morning milking, Pa glanced up from his plate of eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes and said, “Weather feels like the makings of a blizzard. Don’t like the way the wind’s blowing … switched around to the northeast overnight. And those tiny snowflakes flying on the wind—bad sign. Appears we’re in for a bad one.” We expected at least one big blizzard a year. And so far this winter we’d had plenty of snow, but it had come slow and easy, with little wind, and we hadn’t yet been snowed in.

After breakfast my brothers and I washed up, changed into our school clothes, and pulled on our wool Mackinaw coats and wool plaid caps. Before we were out the door, Ma wrapped a wool scarf around each of our heads so just our eyes peered out: her standard frostbite preventer. By the time we left the house there were four inches of fresh snow on the ground. The wind was now blowing the snow nearly horizontal as it fell. I walked in front and my brothers walked single file behind me in my tracks. Pa had long ago instructed us that when walking in deep snow, walk in single file. “No sense more than one person breaking trail,” he’d said.

As we trekked past the Millers’ farm, I could scarcely make out their buildings through the falling snow. By this time a circle of frost had formed on the front of our scarves where our breath had frozen. The three of us must have looked like three slow-moving snowmen, as we were covered with snow from the top of our caps to the tips of our four-buckle rubber boots.

After another half-mile of trudging through the ever-deepening snow, we arrived at the schoolhouse. We stomped the snow off our boots in the entryway before entering the schoolroom, where a handful of other students were already gathered around the big wood-burning stove. It appeared a good number of students had stayed home.

In those days there was no such thing as a snow day; it was school policy to stay open no matter the weather. For many years the Chain O’ Lake schoolteacher boarded at the Jenks farm, a short hike through the woods to the schoolhouse. She usually arrived early, well before the students, to start the fire and warm the building. Even so, on days like this the schoolhouse warmed slowly thanks to cold air that sneaked into the uninsulated structure through the big windows on the north and south sides.

The ten or so of us who had braved the storm sat around the woodstove until nearly noon doing our recitations and other schoolwork. The wind rattled the windows, and I saw little piles of snow gathered on the windowsills where the wind had sent snow sifting through every crack and crevice. At midmorning recess, Miss Thompson said we must all stay inside, except for necessary trips to the outhouses. She asked me, as one of the older students, to shovel the schoolhouse steps. When I opened the outside door, it pushed aside a drift of snow three feet deep. Paths to the outhouses and to the woodshed, made earlier that morning, were already drifted nearly full.

The storm’s intensity increased throughout the day. We all huddled around the woodstove to keep warm; the thermometer at the front of the room, far from the stove, read 50 degrees; even with the stove going full blast, it had not budged a degree since recess time.

At three o’clock Pa arrived to lead us home through the storm.

“How’s the weather, Herm?” Miss Thompson asked.

“Not good. It’s already snowed more than a foot and a half, and with the wind you can’t see anything. Can’t see your hand in front of your face.”

“Good thing it’s Friday. By Monday the roads should be clear and walking a little easier.”

“Let’s hope so,” said Pa. “But this storm is far from over. In fact, it looks like it’s just getting started.”

Other fathers arrived, and as we kids bundled up in our coats and caps and scarves, they huddled briefly around the stove, warming up before starting the difficult walk home. Puddles accumulated where they stood as melting snow dripped from their heavy coats. Then we ventured out and began the mile walk home, this time with Pa breaking trail. Donald followed close behind him, and then Darrel. I brought up the rear. Pa had been right; at times the snow blew so hard that I could barely see Darrel just a few feet in front of me.

“Don’t any of you guys stop walkin’ without yelling first,” Pa cautioned. “Don’t want anybody lost in the storm. If you fall down, yell out, and we’ll wait for you. If you fall it’ll only take a few minutes for the snow to bury you.”

At times I had to gasp for breath as I marched along, making sure that my little brothers were keeping up with Pa. After a quarter mile or so my chest was pounding and my legs ached. Walking in deep snow, even in someone else’s tracks, is hard work. Pa kept moving, not fast, but steady, one step after the other. The snow swirled and twisted as it sifted off the tops of the snow banks the snowplow had left on either side of our narrow country road. In some places we waded through snowdrifts that were waist deep, but we kept on going. No one talked; we couldn’t have heard the words over the wind, anyway.

About halfway home we stopped to rest alongside a high snow bank. We were out of the wind, but the snow kept sifting down on us. Pa checked each of us, making sure our scarves were in place with only our eyes showing. He brushed the snow from our eyelids with his big mittened hands. And then we were on our way again, step after step, step after step. I felt like I couldn’t go on and needed to rest once more, but Pa kept going and my brothers—with their little legs that I know were even more tired than mine—kept trudging along behind him.

Finally, through the blowing snow I spotted our farm buildings. In another minute we were on the kitchen porch and sweeping the snow from each other before going into the house. Ma had a big kettle of vegetable soup steaming on the cookstove, and the delightful smell welcomed us in from the cold. We took off our Mackinaw coats and caps and crowded up to the warm stove, rubbing our hands together.

“Storm doesn’t seem to be lettin’ up,” Pa said, shoving another stick of split oak wood into the hungry cookstove. “We better drag our extra milk cans down from the attic and get them cleaned up. Expect the milkman won’t be coming along for a couple days, the way this storm looks.”

In those days we shipped our milk in ten-gallon cans that the milkman picked up each morning and hauled to the local cheese factory. Our cows produced about four cans of milk a day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, and we had four or five extra milk cans for emergencies such as this, enough for two days with no pickup. After two days, we’d have a problem: no place to store the milk until the milkman arrived.

Pa turned to me. “Soon as you’ve warmed up, grab a shovel. Lots of shoveling to do, with all this snow and wind.” I shoveled a path to the chicken house first, the snow so hard I had to cut it into chunks before I could move it. As I shoveled a path to the woodpile, I couldn’t see the barn, only a hundred yards away, through the blowing snow. The woodpile was a white mound; I shoveled around the bottom enough to expose some of the blocks of wood. My efforts seemed futile; as soon as I cleared an area, the wind filled it with snow once more.

I waded through the deep snow to the barn to help Pa with the afternoon chores. Snow had sifted through a crack in the barn door, forming a drift six inches deep inside, and I noticed it was sifting through the cracks around the barn windows in front of the cows as well. Frost covered the windows so thick I could peel it off with my fingernails.

With the cattle fed, Pa and I waded back through the snow to the house, dimly visible through the blowing snow. The kerosene lamp on the kitchen table, normally a beacon on a dark night, appeared no brighter than a candle through the white curtain of snow. We sat down to steaming bowls of homemade vegetable soup, thick slices of fresh baked bread, and canned peaches that Ma had brought up from the cellar. It was warm and cozy in the kitchen even though we could hear the wind tearing around the sides of the house, moaning like some wild animal in agony.

After supper Pa and I pulled on our barn coats, lit our barn lanterns, and headed out once more into the storm, which seemed even more intense than before. Again I trudged behind Pa as we carried milk cans from the pump house to the barn. The lanterns were challenged by the horizontal wall of snow, which swirled so thick around me I felt I could scarcely breathe. The cows seemed content, though, even as the snow sifted in around the windows.

With the milking finished, I crawled up the ladder to the haymow to toss down hay for the cows’ evening feeding. Despite being nearly full of hay, the barn creaked and shuddered as the wind struck it full force. Snow sifted in through cracks in the barn doors and accumulated in little piles on the dried alfalfa hay that I pitched from the mows to the threshing floor and then down the hay chutes in the floor to the hungry cattle below. Normally the haymow was a quiet, peaceful place, the only sounds the coo-ooh of a pigeon or soft chirp of an English sparrow. But on this night the barn was filled with the sounds of the raging blizzard outside, every board and beam of the massive structure protesting the wind.

With the evening milking finished and the cattle given their night feed, we hauled the two cans of milk to the pump house through the still deepening snow. Back in the house we gathered with the rest of the family in the kitchen, where it was warm and pleasant, the soft glow of the kerosene lamp casting long shadows, the snap and crackle of the cookstove keeping everyone warm.

Pa reminded us of the November 11, 1940, blizzard that had blown in from the west and killed 150 people, 49 of them in Minnesota alone and 12 in Wisconsin. I had been six years old at the time. The temperature had gotten up to 60 degrees that day in parts of the Midwest before plummeting, and many duck hunters were trapped in the backwaters of the Mississippi when the storm struck. Rain turned to snow when the temperature dropped, and the wind gusted up to more than fifty miles per hour. Some snowdrifts topped eight feet.

“Doubt this storm will be as bad as that one,” Pa said, “but you never know.” He sat back in his chair at one end of the table and began reading a copy of Successful Farming magazine. Ma sat at the other end with her endless pile of socks to be darned. My brothers and I took out our homework from school, but it being a Friday evening, our hearts weren’t in our studies. Every few minutes a small puff of wood smoke filtered into the room as the wind drove it back down the chimney.

“Stove’s smoking again,” said Ma. “Gotta do something about that, Herm.”

“Wind like this, nothing much you can do,” Pa replied. “Besides, a little oak smoke smells pretty good on a miserable night like this.”

When we heard the clock in the dining room strike nine, Pa informed us that it was time for bed. He reminded us that we’d have lots of shoveling to do the next day. My brothers and I climbed the stairs to our upstairs bedroom, where the stovepipe from the dining room below was doing its best to take the chill from the air. A little mound of snow sat on the sill beneath a crack in one of the big east-facing windows.

We took off our outer layer of clothes, leaving on long underwear and wool socks, and crawled into bed, listening to the snow pounding against the windows and the wind tearing around the corners of our old farmhouse. It was a frightening sound, yet I knew our house was sturdy and strong and had withstood many storms such as this.

It snowed all night and was still snowing when I got up the next morning. I mushed my way to the barn, carrying my barn lantern. Pa was there ahead of me; I saw that he’d had to shovel through a drift of hard snow that came halfway to the top of the door before he could get inside.

When we finished milking and emerged from the barn, we saw just a few snowflakes flying on the brisk northwest wind. The blizzard’s main force had dissipated. But thanks to the stiff wind, the drifting continued. I glanced toward Bill Miller’s farm and still could see nothing but a wall of drifting snow moving across the big field south of our barn.

“Looks like no milkman today,” Pa said. “Road’s drifted full—and with all this wind the snow is as hard as a rock.”

After breakfast we shoveled and shoveled some more. By noon we’d cleared paths to the various outbuildings and to the straw stack and the woodpile. Then we began shoveling the driveway from the road to the pump house so that when the roads were plowed the milkman could pick up our milk.

By late morning the wind had lessened and the drifting had stopped, but there was no sign of the snowplow or the milkman. Ma tried calling on the party-line telephone, but the storm must have knocked down a pole somewhere, and she couldn’t get through to anyone. After our noon meal, Pa and I slipped on our skis and skied to the Millers’ to see if they had any news about the plow or the milkman. Bill sat by the kitchen stove, reading the newspaper. “Nope, haven’t heard a word,” he said. “Phone doesn’t work. Suppose we could ski down to Mac Jenks’s place on County A. The county roads usually get plowed out before back roads like ours.”

“We’ll just wait and see,” Pa replied. “Problem is the milk. You got enough extra milk cans?”

“For a couple days,” Bill said, “but not much longer.”

After enjoying a couple of Lorraine Miller’s sugar cookies and some hot coffee, Pa and I slipped on our skis and headed back home. We skied on top of the snowdrifts that were blocking the road, five feet or deeper in places. The January sun, low on the horizon, had broken through the cloud cover, making the snow sparkle like millions of diamonds. The white snow contrasted with the brown oaks that lined both sides of our road. Wood smoke trickled from all our chimneys.

That afternoon the five of us sat around the Round Oak heater in the dining room, reading and talking about the storm. Later we filled the last of our spare milk cans. If the milkman didn’t make it the next day, we’d be filling everything we could find that would hold milk.

On Sunday the road was still blocked, and we stored milk in kettles, tubs, even the washing machine. Ma skimmed cream from some of the milk and asked my brothers and me if we’d like to make butter.

I’d read in school about how the pioneers made their own butter in their kitchens, with butter churns. We didn’t have a churn; we got our butter from the cheese factory where we sold our milk.

Ma poured cream in a large bowl and handed me an eggbeater. “Nothing to it,” she said. “Just crank the eggbeater until you have butter.”

I cranked the eggbeater’s handle, slowly at first, trying to keep the cream from splattering out of the bowl. As the cream stiffened, I cranked more rapidly, and soon the bowl was filled with fluffy whipped cream.

“No butter, Ma,” I said. “Got lots of whipped cream, though.”

“Keep cranking,” she said. “Won’t be long now.”

In a few minutes I could scarcely turn the handle, and then, almost as if a miracle had happened, pieces of butter appeared in the bowl, dotting the liquid that remained. I didn’t believe it was butter.

“I thought butter was yellow,” I said.

“It is,” Ma answered, “if you make it in the spring when the cows are on fresh grass. This time of the year you’ve got to add food coloring if you want yellow butter.”

I put a piece of my new butter in my mouth and tasted it. It didn’t quite taste like butter.

“Put a little salt on it,” Ma suggested.

Now the butter tasted more like the butter we got from the cheese factory. Still, I couldn’t get my mind past the fact that it was white and not yellow, and somehow it tasted different to me.

As we came in from doing the evening chores on Sunday, we heard it: the roar of the snowplow slowly making its way along our drifted country road. The county had sent the biggest one it had, a diesel, to clear our road. Later we heard that even with all of its power and might, the plow struggled with the snow from this blizzard. It moved forward a few feet, backed up, took another run at a drift, and repeated the process all night long.

When we got up on Monday morning, our road was clear, a narrow path snaking through the hard-packed snowdrifts, just wide enough for the milk truck. The snowplow driver knew that it was the milk hauler that we most wanted to see. By noon that day the milk truck arrived. The milk hauler told Pa he would be making two trips, because he couldn’t haul everyone’s extra milk in one load. But he took all of our milk and left us some empty cans.

A day or two later, our phone service was restored. Our winter routine was back to normal. And we had another story to add to our collection of blizzard tales, one everyone in my family would tell for years to come.