The Blizzard Voices by Ted Kooser

Abstract

370 Western American Literature The last section of the book—“the magnetic, mystical West”—is the most interesting and suggests an area that the reader wishes were investigated more thoroughly. Many of the travelers found only what they expected because of the preconceived notions and images they brought with them. But others were profoundly changed by what they saw and experienced. Unfortunately, the real impact of the West upon the minds and imagination of the women who traveled in it in the nineteenth century is only superficially examined in this slight work. RUTH ALEXANDER South Dakota State University The Blizzard Voices. By Ted Kooser. (Studio One, Fourth Floor / 212 Second Street / 55401 Minneapolis: The Bieler Press, 1986. 55 pages, $125. Limited edition hardcover, $8.95 paper.) At the end of March, I drove with my daughter from northern Utah to the Puget Sound. Spring settled uneasily over the Great Basin, but the weather was good until we reached the Blue Mountains of Oregon, where we ran into snow flurries as we made the circuitous descent into Pendleton. A thirty-knot wind was blowing in the Columbia River Valley, a strong head wind that embedded a three foot tumbleweed in the Plymouth’sgrille. Climbing into the mountains out of Yakima, we lost it, but as we descended into Ellensburg, the wind redoubled, blowing cold and wet out of the southwest. We stopped to top up the gas tank; the night attendant told us that cars were turning back at Snoqualmie Pass, that the road would soon be closed. We went on. The blizzard hit us in the foothills of the Cascades, twenty-five miles from the pass. Immediately, there were inches of accumulated snow on the road; from the windshield, white opacity. Home on my desk lay a copy of Ted Kooser’s The Blizzard Voices, a nar­ rative based on memories of a great blizzard in the Midwest in 1888. For me, the terror of the blizzard was now clear; it remained for Kooser to name and describe it with the voices from the blizzard, yet the voices are strangely mono­ tone—one voice, not many. They are subdued, not the scream of those caught in the cold grip of the white-out. In this sense the title is misleading. The voices are not the blizzard’s, or the victims of the blizzard, but the survivors’. Resignation is their striking quality. This may be appropriate for those farmers of the bare plains whose lives were on the knife’s edge of nature’s balance. The great blizzard was only a more extreme manifestation of the forces that decided survival. There is no anger, only calm acceptance. Missing is the terror, beauty, and majesty of the storm. As a monument to the survivors, The Blizzard Voices is a handsomely crafted success, but the memorial to the blizzard itself is yet to be composed. STEVEN PUGMIRE Seattle, Washington ...