Out in the Blizzard

On the prairies, winter storms can blow up very fast.

Obliterating the countryside and bringing visibility to zero.

One can lose one’s way walking between the house and the barn.

The best thing to do is to get inside where it’s warm and stay put.

If one has warning, one can get to the nearest safe place.

If one doesn’t . . .

A storm was coming. The local school had been emptied of children, sent home with strict instructions to get there as quickly as possible.

Most of them made it.

One little girl did not.

As the storm closed over the area, frantic searchers were sent out, fanning the countryside for one tiny figure in the vast, freezing blizzard.

A hopeless search.

It was many hours before my Uncle Owen found her, nearly frozen solid.

He hefted her on his back and began to make his way toward the Stringam home. Partway there, he met his father and the two of them managed to carry the poor, frozen figure the rest of the way.

My Dad remembers the scene well as they carried the still and silent girl into the house. As he told us, her feet ‘clopped together like two wooden blocks’.

She was handed over to my Grandma Stringam, who was largely accepted as the ‘doctor’ in the area.

Grandma took the little frozen body and laid her on the bed. Then, throughout the night, she tended her, rubbing her extremities with coal oil.

By the next morning, the girl was awake and improving.

She survived - her only damage the loss of the nail from one little finger - largely due to the knowledge and care of my grandma.

Pictures of the prairies show a soft, gently-folded landscape. Largely treeless, but covered in waving grass and sagebrush. The occasional stream or river flows through and the sky is clear and endless.

A perfect world.

But, in winter, it is a place to be respected.

Anything can happen.

And when it does, thank goodness for people like my Grandma.