MY LAND OF WINTER
                   by Eugene Hutchinson Mallory 2


     In my early memories, winter seems very much a paper tiger
although I can remember my aunt Nettie checking my ears and nose
for freezing on otherwise long forgotten days of cold. Later her
sharp reminder "Rub your ears, Gene, they look too white."

     Later, I was a long time puzzled by the term frostbite. I
was familiar with frost upon the windows, but how could it bite.
I was not sure about all this until I went to school and saw
other less protected children with blackened peeling ears.

     I also had my doubts about the stories read or told to me
about children who became lost or weary in the snow and lay down
to rest and immediately went to sleep and never woke up.

     I grew more and more skeptical of pictures of Eskimos
cutting up snow into neat blocks and laying up elegant dome
shape snow houses. My snow was either too slushy or too fragile
and fluffy. All was made clear to me when I was about 10 or 11.
I had been born into a series of mild winters.

     One day a real 20 below screamer came to call. It left
plenty granular wind packed arctic snow. The igloo problem was
not lack of material any more. If I had had an Eskimo's skill I
could have build an excellent igloo. From then on through the
thirties delivery of igloo snow were more than adequate, but I
never built another igloo.

     I think I learned the most about our old land of winter on
a summers day. One of father's hired men reported that he had
discovered a gravel pit on one of the farms. This could be
important as Iowa was still trying to get out of the mud with
gravel and the gravel was in demand.

     Father was doubtful and wary. He was already turning into a
nay sayer, but he called the county engineer to give an expert
opinion and off we went to examine our gravel pit as I was
calling it already over fathers protest.

     We stopped at the court house for Mr. Rudisil, the engineer
who followed us in a county Ford. At the site he soon dashed my
hopes.

     "This is the terminal moraine of the Wisconsin Drift and
moraine deposits are almost always small. This is just a pocket.
Not enough to be worthwhile."

     Father said "That's what I thought. I'll have the boys take
out enough to fix up all the driveways and then plow it shut."
(I don't think father wanted a pit to mar his land.)

     I did not give up my gravel pit so easily.

     "Mr. Rudisil, are you sure? What is a terminal moraine of
the Wisconsin Drift?"

     Father gave me a look that said "be quiet."

     But Mr. Rudisil liked to talk and said "The Wisconsin Drift
was the latest glacier to come this way and the terminal moraine
is the dirt and sand and rocks left behind when it stopped and
melted away."

     He went on pointing down the hill to the south. "The melt
water always carries away most of the sand and gravel. It went
down there on the Hoxie land and has been already taken out. You
have seen the old pit."

     Father said, "Yes, and an ugly useless hole it is. I
wouldn't want one up here on my land."

     That settled that, but Mr. Rudisil liked to teach and I got
a very good lecture on what it was like on site here 12,000
years ago. How the ice was not just higher than the court house
as I thought, but high as perhaps 10 court house one on top of
the other and that was not somehow self propelled, but was just
squashed out by the weight of ice piled miles high behind it. He
could make it plain how it creaked and ground and great ice
cliffs fell as it was squeezed forward and how great floods of
water had rushed across these fields as all that ice had melted
away at last. He also made me see the glacial winter had lasted
20,000 years. It was not just a visit.

     I could tell that Father was a little weary of me
monopolizing the conversation, so when he and Mr. Rudisil sat
down in the shade of a wild black cherry tree I moved up the
fence line to look for wild grapes while they lit fresh cigars.
We were waiting for the finder of the so called gravel pit to
come with a team and wagon and take out an exploratory load.

     Father wanted Rudisil's backing that it was just a pocket
and not a great discovery.

     I had my wild grapes and I could hear the rattle of the
coming wagon so I hurried back to collect my black cherries.
They were already scarce. There were many trees bearing the
astringent, well named choke cherries, but these, the real black
ones were a prize. It was high summer, time to collect the
freely given wild bounty of the land. So I made my fingers fly
although it only took a relative few of the cherries to flavor
the wild grape jelly Aunt Nettie and I had in mind.

     However, I listened with care as the two gentlemen
explained to the young man the relative unimportance of his
proud discovery. It was done with care and kindness, but only
later I realized the advantages I had had to learn such skills
and much later I realized I had learned the social skills of a
doomed society. The young laborer made the sand fly and the
sweat roll to uncover as much sand as he could in the time he
had. I shared his disappointment, but the cause was hopeless.

     I would ease the pain with the jelly to be and thinking up
the great yarn I would tell Aunt Nettie while she made the
jelly.

     How the disappointed discoverer would ease his feelings I
never wondered nor thought that the other two men should share
his labor.

     Ours was a class society and that was understood.

     The jelly and the yarn were a great success. Also the scene
there by the black cherry tree, the eager digger in the sand,
the patient team arrogant in their huge strength, (They were as
big as the T.V. Clydesdales) the two gentlemen in command of
themselves and all they surveyed, the eager boy with his bounty
of the high summer in his hat and a tale of wonders in his head,
all this was at a time and place that can never return, but I do
remember.

     Oh the land is still there waiting the next coming of the
ice but those born of that land now will never taste the
products of the wild bounty of high summer. The years of
herbicide have seen to that. They probably wouldn't like it
anyway. Their tastes are formed in the supermarket like
everybody else's.

     They cannot even drink the clear cold water of their wells.
It is loaded with nitrates from the fertilizer.

     The next time I encountered the terrible side of my land of
winter I was married and living in the house that had been my
parents, the Andrews house. The house that has appeared before
in the fragments of my past that I have brought to this class.

     I claim this land as my land of winter because I have
formed the bond that some people make with the land of their
birth and their youth. The bond that makes a certain land their
home. The place where they belong.

     A bond that were broken, is rarely if ever to be renewed. I
broke that bond when I crossed the bridge at Blair, also told in
these tales.

     Aunt Nettie, the jelly maker, should not be dismissed as a
mere jelly maker, honorable as that role may be to hungry boys.

     During the school year she taught mathematics at the Iowa
College for the Blind and specialized in instructing the
children who were both blind and deaf.

     The touch of Miss Ferris's fingers on the palms actually
brought the world to these prisoners of the silent dark.

     Aunt Nettie also had a knowledge of history I never
encountered in anyone else and she shared that enormous drama
with a cast of thousands of complex characters with me.

     At the time of the discovery of the gravel pit that never
was, we had met the gods of northern myth and learned of their
struggle with the implacable and invincible ice giants.

     I knew stories were the legacy of the loss of the northern
lands of Europe to the glaciers in pre-history.

     I would have loved to have traded stories of Oden and Thor
of the magic hammer and their battles with Fafnir the greatest
of the ice giants, for Mr. Rudisil knowledge of the history of
our peaceful farm.

     I did not try. Father was not a man to tolerate magic
hammers and giants very well.

     That was only a small problem. With Mother's knowledge of
music and the fine arts I must admit my old people offered me a
wide choice of the best of their old world.

     I liked Auntie's contribution best. The incredible and
endless drama of human history and all those complex characters.

     Of course there was a price. People said I did not have a
normal childhood and I have always been out of sync with time,
but I do not know I would have had it otherwise. For who can say
what is the proper price to meet the likes of Margart of Anjou
or John of Barneyveld.

     At the time I tell of now, 1936, the old people who
nurtured and protected me and gave me their world had gone away
as old people will. Unfortunately they seemed to have taken
their world with them as I could not find it in the depression
ravaged chaos of 1936.

     Even the weather had become more violent and changeable.
There were experts who could explain this and who liked to
pretend they had even predicted it.

     Predicted and explained or not the violence arrived
promptly on the very first day of 1936.

     It was what the old folks called a siege of weather and
siege it was.

     On those strange days that seem to rattle around loose
between Christmas and New Year's Day the weather was totally
undecided, the wind blew this way and that or not at all. It was
cold. The thermometer hung around zero, but never took any real
trend. The sun and the clouds contended for the sky, but neither
held sway for long. The very last day of 1935 some kind of a
settlement seemed to occur.

     The clouds won the sky. The wind settled in the east. The
thermometer said it was little warmer. The people who felt the
east wind said it was colder. The weather wise said it was going
to snow and were they right.

     New Year's morning the snow was coming down. All day it
came steadily and heavily in a way that is seldom seen in that
country. We are too far west to get the lake effect and too cold
to snow heavily. Our winter is more like the cold desert of the
high Canadian Arctic. Most of the time the ground is bare nearly
all winter.

     As the day wore on and the snow piled up inch after inch
the east wind went around to northeast to north to northwest,
but never anything to get excited about and the temperature went
gradually down into below zero numbers where it can't snow much.

     At sunset the wind fell almost to nothing. Then came the
screamer, out of the northwest. All that beautiful new snow took
to the air again. The mercury dove into the minus 20's as if the
bottom had fallen out of the thermometer. The siege was on.
Nobody realized it. Such things had happened before, but soon
passed into folk lore as the blizzard of 1902 or whatever.

     This one had a new feature. The wind blew itself away in
about a day. With calm came more cold and then a slow rise
toward zero. Then the new trick as soon as zero was reached,
just warm enough to snow, the east wind came and whole show was
on again. This was the winter pattern until well into March.
East wind, snow, blow, below zero, colder every time, warm to
zero and repeat.

     The snow that fell from the sky could never have caused a
serious problem there just isn't enough of it even this unusual
year. The snow plows or the wind could hurl it off the highways
or rails into the ditches and borrow pits which furnished the
earth to raise the roadway to what we called snow grade. Once
down and out of the wind the snow could rest peacefully until it
melted. In areas where snow tended to be wind swept onto the
roads, temporary picket fences were erected in the fields before
winter came to break the wind and drop the moving snow in the
fields where it did no harm.

     All this clever planning worked for a while. By the pause
after the second storm the ditches and borrow pits were full.
The artificial snow drifts made by the snow fences were huge and
advancing on the roads as relentlessly as sand dunes. The
countryside was smooth and loaded with snow. The snow that fled
the searing winds found no refuge until it found a plowed out
road. There it could duck behind the spill banks the plows had
thrown up and deposit itself in the path of progress.

     The highways were passable on a when and if you can basis.
There were many one way stretches and after bad visibility from
blowing snow. Five trucks went. Four got back with coal which
was just as bad as people said Iowa coal was. The fifth truck
was wrecked and the driver spent a long time in a hospital far
from home.

     About this time it is hard to keep the sequence straight as
the whole thing was beginning to have a endless nightmare
quality. Anyway about this time the lost train got stuck.

     This was serious. No snowplow and snorting engines could
clear that away. The town had had four railroads counting the
branch. The branch was a lost cause from the beginning. No heavy
equipment could be risked on that fragile track. Now the Great
Western was down. Worse yet the town was burdened by the salvage
and repair crews sent in. They had to find a place to sleep and
the town was full. Beds were scarce.

     A good many high school pupils lived in the country and
ordinarily commuted to school one way or another. Now they were
staying in town. Pregnant women near term and people in fragile
health had also come in to be near their doctors.

     A surprising number of people were still on the highways.
Those stranded by sudden storms, broken cars, fatigue, or sheer
loss of nerve were among us seeking beds.

     We had our own refugees too. Houses were becoming
uninhabitable from burned out furnaces, broken or frozen
plumbing and those with all masonry walls were sweating and
icing up on the inside of outer walls.

     Most houses were haunted by the dank and ghostly presence
of drying laundry. Most of it seemed to be long john underwear
hanging from temporary lines strung from room to room. The lines
prevented the closing of doors and so aggravated the loss of
privacy from over crowding.

     Living standard for most were being pushed down to medieval
levels when people were just camping out in their miserable
hovels.

     Even the stink of the middle ages was beginning to be with
us. Not all the long john underwear was being washed.

     All was not just grim endurance. Before the temperature
worked is self down to bitter levels there was fun to be gotten
from the snow at least by me and the children. Good sledding was
not so usual. I was a bit old for flexible flyers, but I knew
where there was an old time bob sled tucked away in one of the
lofts on other farms.

     This was no toy, but an alternative to wagon wheels in the
days before gravel on the roads and automobile traffic had made
the road impossible for sleds.

     One of the tasks, the chores on the farm was to bring in
hay and straw from stacks scattered about the fields.

     Faced with that job and trips outside the wind break out
into the snow I said to Grant, my man on the farm,"Why don't we
get the bob sled down and put the hay rack on it?"

     "Sure," he said, "Why don't we, that would be fun."

     Grant was an old man as old as I am now, but had never lost
his capacity for enjoyment or his physical vigor. He could
easily enough handle the daily chores of hauling feed to the
stock and chopping the ice out of stock tanks. My work was
really on the repairs and replacement of fences and buildings
that were sadly neglected and not to be in this kind of weather.

     Grant had a rather sad history, but was always cheerful. He
had farmed for himself until as he told it, he had retired at
the request of a bank. Grants troubles was not for incompetence
of lack of industry. He had knowledge and skills of the down to
earth variety that I needed badly and he shared them with me,
gladly.

     Grant's problem was a bad son who was an accomplished paper
hanger. Not the kind of paper that you hang on walls, but the
paper he hung on unsuspecting bankers. In other words he was a
forger. His clever pen and innocent stupid looks would have been
his fortune if he could have kept out of jail, but he could not.
He had the cleverness of a fox that comes back to the same
chicken coop until the farm dog or the farmer's shot gun gets
him. Grant had bought him out of trouble until the money ran
out.

     So Grand was working away his old age on someone else farm
and I believe enjoying it. The bad son was spending his youth in
the reformatory at Anarnosa and I don't think he enjoyed it or
was being reformed either.

     The sled was great, the contrast to the jolting rattling
wagon floundering about in the snow was amazing. Grant enjoyed
it too. He was a good horse man and said he had never hoped to
drive good horses on a sled again.

     I had found some pieces of the old sleigh bells from the
days of fathers trotting horses and cutters. That was even
better than the bob sled, but I didn't tell Grant.

     Even the horses seemed to enjoy the sled. They had been to
Henry Skow's before the storms and were sure of their footing
and not afraid to pick up their feet and show a little style.

     I had first visited Henry Skow's to see horses shod as a
little boy holding fathers hand. The place had not changed much.

     The same false front building the same dark gray paint. The
same blacks sign across the front.

                      HENRY SKOW BLACKSMITH.

     The thud and rumble as the horses going onto the raised
plank floor all the same. As was the soft, but solid chunks of
Henry's hammer biting into the glowing iron.

     If you expect an anvil chorus don't go to Henry's shop. If
the anvil rings it is because the hammer has missed the work
piece and Henry does not miss. The glowing metal just seems to
flow into shape by the magic of the smith's art and art is and
was to me.

     I still felt a twinge of fear as Henry laid red hot metal
on the hoof to check for fit. The sizzle and acrid stink of
scorched hoof still smell the same. The horse cares no more than
the other horse 20 years ago. It does not hurt.

     Henry has changed. The mighty man of my boyhood is now a
great sagging limping hulk. The smooth red cheeks are mottled
and lumpy. Henry flinches when he picks up the horse's foot and
groans when the horse leans his way a little. After all that
corner of the horse weighs five hundred pounds.

     It is not for the young to waste much pity on the old, but
I must wonder what I shall do when the team must be shod again.
I am sure no young man will come to paint his name on Henry's
shop when Henry is gone.

     I am not sure if this was the last time Henry Skow shod a
team for the Mallory's, but we have recently received assurance
from high places that it is possible to forget.

     Anyway I was glad to have the sharp shoes on the team for I
had a plan to bring the team to town.

     The streets were coated in ice several inches thick.

     On that more distant day when the gravel pit that never was
was opened and Mr. Rudisil had explained the glaciers to a small
boy, I had difficulty understanding how cold dry snow had been
converted to mountains of ice. I had thought ice came from
water. Snow must be at least partially melted and refrozen to
make ice. There certainly had been no melting of snow in this
siege of cold.

     Liquid water had become what science calls a forbidden
state except in the presence of fire. I remember this time of
cold as a time of fire and ice.

     I had seen the pounding of what little traffic we had make
ice from snow and I had seen ice pass directly to the air where
it was exposed to the fiercely cold dry wind. It was strange to
see our well watered land turned into a frozen desert with dunes
of snow instead of sand.

     Dorothy, my wife, was teaching again and I was going to
give her dancing classes a sleigh ride. Without those sharp
shoes such a project would have been impossible.

     In Ames, Dorothy had been highly successful and her pupils
had given a great show in a theater. Hampton had no such
resources in talent and money, but this was the hey day of
musical movies. Dreams of wealth and fame haunted the minds of
would be stage mothers and precious dollars were some way made
available.

     Hilda Jones, remarkable jazz pianist, had two girls whose
lessons paid for the music. If I came home early and came in the
back door I would hear a rustle and bustle and many female
voices.

     Hilda would roll out a chorus of the "Sidewalks of New
York." Dorothy would call "and a one, and a two" and taps would
rattle on the hard wood.

     I would come on in through the dining room and there would
be a chorus line ranging from adolescents to pre-schoolers
pounding out a waltz clog for an audience of admiring and
jealous stage mothers.

     There were fathers who thought this a foolish waste of
money, but I said then and say now that Dorothy was an honest
purveyor of golden dreams in a grim time of hardship and
poverty.

     There was not much that could be done about the poverty,
but it is hard to be grim on a hay ride. The sharp shod team,
the hay rack and bob sled and plenty of hay was available at no
cost, so the plan was laid to take the dancing class for a hay
ride.

     It took some scheming to get it all together as there were
more than one class (two) and individual pupils. Naturally it
needed to be a surprise for the smaller children at least. Some
very small children came as spectators as they could not be left
alone while brother or sister danced and for these Mother had to
be prepared to go. Dorothy had a natural talent for intrigue so
she managed this and left the weather to me. I managed a day
with clear skies, no wind and temperature a degree or two above
zero and made a great secret of how I did it. Of course it would
snow tomorrow, but I would take no blame for that.

     This kind of weather it was possible to get back and forth
to the farm by the south road, the one along the southern edge
of town, still called the bootlegger's road from the bad old
days of prohibition. The usual road, the fairground road had
been a lost cause for several weeks.

     Grant and I picked out the cleanest and most fragrant hay.
The rack was new, I had made it last summer after the old one
fell apart. The harness was much patched, but Grant had the
horses shining.

     I went off ahead and found the house well filled and
bursting with curiosity. I stayed discreetly in the kitchen and
had not long to wait before I heard the sleigh bells.

     Grant brought the horses right up across the snow packed
lawn to the big window in the living room.

     Such a screeching and screaming, it brought me in from the
kitchen.

     "Can we go for a ride, Mr. Mallory?."

     I graciously extend an invitation to all and the scramble
began to get into the cumbersome winter clothes.

     One very small boy in his mother's lap had one foot stuck
crosswise in the leg of his snow suit. I can hear the rising
edge in his mother's voice.

     "Point your toe, Robert. Now point your toe."

     I could remember when I too was so anxious to be off that I
had no time to pull back my foot and point my toe.

     Robert wanted to get to the window and those horses.

     Housebound mother's with small children we suffered in this
seemingly endless cold. Children would fuss and beg to be
dressed and go out and a few minutes later be whimpering with
cold at the door.

     That was all forgotten for a while on the hay ride day. The
weather was mild enough that there were people on the streets to
call out to us and with all the singing and jingling and ice
flying from those iron shod hooves we made our little show.

     But with children the cold could not be ignored and soon we
were dropping off those who did not have to return to pickup
cars. At our house again, the party quickly scattered.

     But when Grant went jingling off down the street back to
the farm I suddenly felt he was taking it all with him. All the
old things. The things that had lasted. Not just the reliable
old men like Grant and Henry Skow, but the whole structure of
the world I had known.

     I knew now what the winter depression, that the Eskimos
called the word I never could pronounce, was like. The word
means feeling the weight of life.

     I surely felt as if the whole of my old world was slumping
down on my back and ordering me to cope and I could not.

     Many people seek the gift of foreknowledge. To me it seems
the cruelest gift of all. Who could face the toil, trouble, and
tragedy of a lifetime in all its looming horror. And who would
care to have all the joys of a life opened before Christmas.

     This cloudy glimpse of the hideous face of all my future
problems could not hold for long. Problems were becoming
immediate. Money was running out. A whole winter's full was
almost gone.

     The farm car, the one with the mud and snow tires and the
aroma of the feed lot had been laid up with a shattered
transmission since the first blizzard.

     Every garage in town was full of bad order cars. The number
of bad things this kind of weather could do to automobiles was
hard to believe. I wasn't anxious to face the bill for this one,
but it was sure to come.

     The money shortage should have been no problem. There were
plenty of hogs in the feed lot ready, even more than ready to
sell, but the price had fallen all winter and was insult added
to injury. Prime butcher hogs had fallen below three dollars a
hundred pounds.

     That was unsurviveable. These animal's death would pay our
bills but there would be nothing left to restock the lot. That
lot had been filled with animals much the same as those there
now for over 20 years. I knew that all the thousands had died,
but somehow they all seemed immortal always there, always young
and healthy. Something was passing that should not. Not really,
there would be no difficulty borrowing to fill the ranks. My
father had begun that way, but I was not my father and my time
was not his time. I was afraid of debt.

     The outrageously low price was generally blamed on
manipulation of the market by the hog slaughtering industry.

     In the 20's almost all the hogs were sent to Chicago or
other central markets and sold on what at least seemed to be
competitive markets.

     No more. The packers had removed many of the plants to
smaller scattered cities and had set up buying stations in towns
as small as Hampton.

     This had aroused resentment and surprise. Indeed, our
Hampton station had been set afire in the anarchic days of '33.

     The prices at country points were supposedly based on those
at the surviving central markets, but it was generally believed
that hogs brought in the country were used to rig the city
markets. After all, people selling to them can be happy with low
prices.