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.
