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MARK STEIL: Think of some of the phrases used to describe this winter-- the worst ever, unbelievable, or I can't describe it, but it was bad. They're good, but not quite up to the level of Mr. Rolvaag's prose. If there's one lesson we can learn from him, it's that a really memorable description has personality. In his 1927 book Giants in the Earth, Rolvaag often depicts winter as a living, breathing monster.

[WIND HOWLING]

JOHN BISCHOFF: "Like lightning, a giant troll had risen up in the west, ripped open his great sack of woolly fleece, and emptied the whole contents of it above their heads. A squall of snow so thick that they could not see an arm's length ahead of them. High overhead, a sharp hissing sound mingled with growls like thunder, and then the blizzard broke in all its terror."

[WIND BLOWING]

TROY MARDEN: The storm I got stuck in was the one January 9, 1997.

MARK STEIL: Troy Marden was driving home from his job in Appleton when he met Rolvaag's blizzard troll. Nine miles from his house in the tiny community of Hagen, a snowdrift stopped his four-wheel-drive truck. Within minutes, the pickup was nearly buried. Marden decided to walk home on the county road.

He put on his coveralls, parka, face mask, boots, and thick gloves. He was sure he could make it because he had experienced being out in winter storms. He'd even camped in some. But those experiences were in Northern Minnesota, where trees break the winter wind. He was not prepared for the fury of a blizzard on the open prairie.

TROY MARDEN: The wind was just pounding at the side of my head so bad that I started to black out, see spots, and stuff like that. Well, I crawled behind a couple of hay bales, one of them big round hay bales. At that point, I thought I was dead. I was on the edge of falling asleep. I shook my head and that's when I seen the pheasant, a hen pheasant flying into the wind. If that isn't a sign from God, I don't know what is. Something telling me to just hey, wake up, get moving.

MARK STEIL: Marden's guide for the journey were glimpses of the road at his feet, nearby power lines, and the moon overhead. But mostly he walked in a blinding white cloud. The blizzard swept parts of the road clean and piled rows of bewildering drifts in other spots. In one place, a series of head-high drifts blocked his path.

TROY MARDEN: I got to the top of this hill up here by the Chippewa River, and there was another drift up there. And I got in the middle of that and just sat down in it. [LAUGHS] I couldn't go no more. I just sat down in a drift thinking, I don't know where in the heck I'm at. Just delirious. I think back and just laugh at myself sometimes. I didn't know where in heck I was, and I looked up and I seen this streetlight right out here, right out in front of my house.

[WIND WHISTLING]

JOHN BISCHOFF: "Between the heads of the two oxen, a yellow eye seemed to be gleaming through the curtain of the driving snow. 'It must be my death signal,' thought Per Hansa. He trembled so violently that he could hardly keep his feet. He saw now that the eye shining through the drifting snow was, in reality, the light from a small window. He found his way around the house corner, came to a door, flung it open without ceremony, and stumbled in.

The heat of the room seemed to flow over him in a great wave, deadening all his senses. The light blinded him. He could not open his eyes beyond a narrow slit. His face was crusted with snow and ice. His eyelashes were frozen together. Out of the jaws of death, he had walked in a single step into warmth and life and safety." From Giants in the Earth by OE Rolvaag.

[WIND BLOWING]

MARK STEIL: People suffered in the weather. There were even some deaths. Many more animals died. Drifts buried their food supplies. Deadly winds packed snow into eyes, mouths, nostrils. Wild animals formed herds as they searched for relief. Pheasants clustered on road shoulders, scratching through gravel for crumbs of food. Deer walked into farmyards looking for hay. Some farm animals headed for the wild, trying to escape the searing wind. In South Dakota, it's estimated 100,000 head of cattle died. It's a scene right out of The Long Winter, a book by Laura Ingalls Wilder published in 1940.

KATE SMITH: "They did not seem like real cattle. They stood so terribly still. In the whole herd, there was not the least movement. Only their breathing sucked their hairy sides in between the rib bones and then pushed them out again. Their hip bones and their shoulder bones stood up sharply. Their legs were braced out, stiff and still. And where their heads should be, swollen white lumps seemed fast to the ground under the blowing snow.

When Pa came in, Ma asked, 'What was wrong with the cattle, Charles?' 'Their heads were frozen over with ice and snow,' Pa said. 'Their breath froze over their eyes and their noses until they couldn't see nor breathe. They're all right now. I broke the ice off their heads.'"

PAUL KELLER: My name is Paul Keller. I live seven miles southeast of McLaughlin, South Dakota. I run 250 head of commercial stock cows. The cows that I found, their muzzles were frozen shut, their eyes were frozen shut. They couldn't see, smell, or even eat feed. So when I found the cows that were in the yard, I broke the ice off of their face with a large stick so they could eat and so they could see.

As the storm progressed, they would drift away. 30 would walk out and get caught in the wind, and they would just move with the wind. The snow had filled up the draws and had covered the fences, so they could drift 50 miles if they wanted to. And the only thing that might stop them is sometimes a cliff or sometimes a deep draw. And I've seen it where cattle have pushed over cliffs in this storm, where they couldn't see. Their muzzles were frozen. They just walked over cliffs and they were found impaled on trees along the cliffside and at the bottom.

MARK STEIL: Keller lost 10% of his herd in the blizzard of January 9. Some of his neighbors lost even more. Ranchers took a huge economic loss. Keller's house shook when winds gusted as high as 80 miles an hour.

PAUL KELLER: I've just never seen anything so cold or so windy and bleak in all my life. I've never gotten to a point where I worried about my family. Most of my concern was about the livestock and how am I going to feed them, or what are they doing, or what? But I was worried about the safety of my family through this.

[WIND WHISTLING]

KATE SMITH: "She was tired. She was tired of the cold and the dark, tired of brown bread and potatoes, tired of twisting hay and grinding wheat, filling the stove and washing dishes and making beds and going to sleep and waking up. She was tired of the blizzard winds. There was no tune in them anymore, only a confusion of sound beating on her ears. 'Pa,' she spoke suddenly, interrupting his reading, 'won't you play the fiddle?'"

[FIDDLE TUNE]

From The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

[TUNE CONTINUES]

MARK STEIL: If the endless string of blizzards brought monotony, they also produced intense excitement. When a storm dropped more than two feet of snow on the Wheaton area of West Central Minnesota, Liann and Richard Johnson faced a decision. Liann expected to give birth to the couple's first baby any day. On January 5, with blizzard winds choking county roads, Richard decided to drive Liann to town in a tractor.

Liann didn't like the idea. There were no labor pains, and she thought she could wait. Richard insisted they leave. He was the first baby of 1966 born at the Wheaton Hospital, something the couple's blizzard baby would duplicate in 1997. Liann perched on the armrest of the driver's seat in the enclosed tractor cab as Richard drove the gravel road.

RICHARD JOHNSON: There was a few groves of trees there where it had piled in pretty deep, about five feet high, I suppose, somewhere in there.

LIANN JOHNSON: He would hit them snowdrifts pretty hard to get through it, and then he would hit the ice underneath it. And we would just going swinging on the road, and I was scared that we were going to go just sliding into the ditch. I had the feeling we were just driving over a giant field. I was always thinking, we're never going to make it to the road, to the highway.

RICHARD JOHNSON: And once we got to the highway, they had one lane plowed on the highway. So that was pretty easy going there. Pulled up to the motel with the tractor, and got a room. And then we settled in and watched some TV and went to bed.

LIANN JOHNSON: So it must have been 3:30 this afternoon, we went to the hospital. And sure enough we went on the tractor again, and Richard was waving to people he knew, and I was covering my face. I thought, oh, jeez, I don't want to be recognized.

RICHARD JOHNSON: Well, she made me park in back, so nobody would see us.

LIANN JOHNSON: Our son Benjamin Robert Johnson was born on January 6, '97 at 10:38 PM.

[BABY CRIES]

JOHN BISCHOFF: "Monsterlike, the plain lay there, sucked in her breath one week and the next week blew it out again. Man she scorned. His works she would not brook. Had it not been for the tiny newcomer who by mysterious paths found his way into the settlement, the monster might have had her way. But the newcomer made a breach in her plans, a vital breach. For he beguiled the heavy-hearted folk into laughing, and what can avail against folk who laugh, who dare laugh in the face of a winter like this one?" From Giants in the Earth by OE Rolvaag.

MARK STEIL: Winter did not win this year. Whenever and wherever there were problems, it seems like someone was there to help out. A grandmother from the Morris area was one. During the same January blizzard when the Johnsons made their tractor drive to town, Vi Wulf had a full house. The Wulf farm is a half-mile off Highway 59, which was clogged with snow. She already had a house full of stranded family members, but still managed to pack in a couple dozen snowbound travelers. The first group were 18 hungry University of Minnesota Morris wrestlers, their coach, and bus driver.

VI WULF: Being they said they hadn't eaten since morning, I knew they would like something in their tummies. So I lucked out. I had baked a big bunch of fresh rolls. Half were caramel and the other half I just frosted. And they just devoured them rolls. [LAUGHS] There was a milk truck driver stalled out there too. So he was in here too, warming up and having rolls and coffee.

I was working at it at 5 o'clock. One of the boys come in and they said, Mom, can you take a vanload of family and two highway department guys? I said, sure, we'll just get some more meat out of the freezer. And it ended up where it was 38 of us for the evening meal.

And the radio had said snowplows running for emergencies only, but the highway department men decided that 38 people in one home was an emergency. So they called to see if the snowplow would come out, which they did. And our guests all got into town. We're ready for spring. Yeah, it's been a long winter.

[WIND BLOWING]

KATE SMITH: "On the fourth morning, there was a queer feeling in Laura's ears. She peeped from the quilts and saw snow drifted over the bed. She heard the little crash of the stove lid, and then the first crackling of the fire. Then she knew why her ears felt empty. The noise of the blizzard had stopped." From The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

[FIDDLE TUNE]

MARK STEIL: The readings in this story were by John Bischoff and Kate Smith. This is Mark Steil, Mainstreet Radio.

[TUNE CONTINUES]