Main-Travelled Roads

Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads. New York: Holt 1891. Print

First Sentences:

In the windless September dawn a voice went ringing clear and sweet, a man's voice, singing a cheap and common air. 

Yet something in the sound of it told he was young, jubilant, and a happy lover.

Description:


Sometimes it is wonderful to simply immerse yourself in the era and environment of a book. One where you are able to really get to know the people, to experience first-hand their daily lives, to see their dreams, enjoy their loves, and feel their frustrations. Such a book is Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads, a heart-rending series of short stories about rural farm families In Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the prairies of the Midwest in the late 1860s.

Having spent years in big cities on the east coast, author Garland in 1887 returned to his boyhood farm in Iowa where is mother still lived.

I found my mother imprisoned in a small cabin on the enormous sunburnt, treeless plain, with no expectation of ever living anywhere else. Deserted by her sons and failing in health, she endured the discomforts of her life uncomplainingly.  

This realistic image inspired Garland to write these eleven exquisitely-crafted stories of people living out lives on these treeless plains. going through each day with no hope of changing their profession or their economic status, nor of exploring the world through travel or new relationships. These people face daily challenges and routines that rarely change and most often bring sadness or frustration. But these people go on in order to survive, enduring their harsh surroundings to deal with another lonely day, and then another, and another.

The houses, bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty.

The stories include intimate portraits of a hard-working farmer who is ruined by his dishonest landowner; an elderly wife who decides to leave her husband and take a trip to visit her family for the first time in decades; and (autobiographically?) a successful son who returns to his childhood home and his proud but poverty-stricken mother and brother.

The stories are grim, dusty, and worn, giving readers a look at a world rarely portrayed in literature. But these fascinating people and their stories grip readers in their grittiness and realism. The reader is completely engulfed in a foreign land inhabited by strong individuals who speak little but with tremendous depth.

And Harland's writing also provides pictures of great beauty, however fleeting they may be. 

Chicago has three winds that blow upon it. One comes from the east, and the mind goes out to the cold gray blue lake. One from the north, and men think of illimitable spaces of pine-lands and maple-clad ridges which lead to the unknown deeps of the arctic woods.

But the third is the west or southwest wind, dry, magnetic, full of smell of unmeasured miles of growing grain in summer, or ripening corn and wheat in autumn. When it comes in winter the air glitters with incredible brilliancy. 

I found myself deep, deep into this world of 150 years ago. The writing, the characters, the environment, and the realism of these daily lives completely captivated me. It's not a pretty picture Garland paints, but an honest one that deserves seeing through his words. It was simply great.

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Haruf, Kent. Plainsong.   

Two elderly bachelor farmers in an isolated Colorado town take in a pregnant teenage girl with no where else to go. Together, the three of them learn about families, trusts, responsibility, and affection. Wonderfully written. 

The Whistling Season

Doig, Ivan. The Whistling Season. New York: Harvest Books. 2007. Print

First Sentences:

When I visit the back corners of my life again after so long a time, littlest things jump out first.

The oilcloth, tiny blue windmills on white squares worn to colorless smears at out four places at the kitchen table. Our father's pungent coffee, so strong it was almost ambulatory, which he gulped down from suppertime to bedtime and then slept serenely as a sphinx.

Description:

When I started this book blog several years ago, Ivan Doig's The Whistling Season was one of the first books I wanted to share. Just re-read it and felt it time to promote its wonderfulness. With each reading, it proves itself superior to most books. It is simply a delightful, serene, personable book full of delightful characters and unique situations.

Set in Marias Coulee, a small town on the Montana prairie in 1910, Whistling Season centers on Oliver Milliron, a widower with three young boys. Oliver realizes that before things get much more chaotic, they need a housekeeper to bring some order to their house and lives. The widow Rose Llewellyn from Minneapolis seems to fill the bill when he notices her Position Wanted ad: "A-1 Housekeeper. Can't cook, but doesn't bite." Rose is hired sight unseen and journeys out to Montana, bringing her brother Morris. He is also seeking a job and is willing to do anything, although the dandy-dressed Morris seems to have no experience with prairie living or skills.

Rose soon gets Oliver's house in order and, true to her advertisement, refuses to cook even an egg for the family. Meanwhile, brother Morris, despite having no experience in the classroom, is drafted to fill in as teacher in the one-room school for an ungainly mob of local children. But he does know a lot of interesting information as well as Latin, and sets about giving private lessons to thirteen-year-old Paul, Oliver's son, who narrates the book.

I say the house positively breathed in a way different from before, for among all the other exhalations of wonder that our housekeeper provided, Rose was  woman who whistled at her work. About like a ghost would. That is, the sound was just above silence. A least little tingle of air, the lightest music that could pass through lips, yet with a lingering quality that was inescapable.

But who really is Rose? She is silent about her background beyond saying she is a widow whose husband died recently. She is young, fashionably dressed, and constantly whistling. And Morris? He, too, is a mystery. But really, no one in this tiny town (or us readers) really cares about their history once they become integrated into the prairie life. Especially when their little school is to be evaluated by a school superintendent armed with standard tests?

The story, characters, writing, and setting are absolutely absorbing on every page. From the backwards-saddle horse race to visits to the Big Ditch irrigation project, spitbath shakes to seal a promise to the rambunctious students facing Morris, and even Paul's sleepwalking, Whistling Season is plot, writing, setting, and characters at their very best.

I feel without reservation that everyone will enjoy this book. Writing this, I want to start reading it again. And what is be a better testimony to a book's ability to captivate you than the desire to read it immediately after completing the story? Highest recommendation. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Young, Carrie. The Wedding Dress

More wonderful recollections about the people and life in the small farming community on the North Dakota plains. (previously reviewed here)

Nothing To Do But Stay

Young, Carrie. Nothing To Do But Stay. Iowa City: University of Iowa.1991. Print

First Sentences:

My pioneer mother was wild for education.

She fervently believed that young people given enough schooling and using the brains they were born with could rise above themselves as far as they wanted to go, the sky the limit. She herself, with no formal education of any kind, had managed to live a life characterized from end to end with vision and courage.

Description:

This winter has been pretty cold for most of us living in the United States, dipping to minus temperatures from the Midwest to the east coast and even the south, with wind chill in double digit minus degrees. Schools were closed, businesses shut down, food shelves picked bare, and most of us hunkered down underneath blankets in our homes to wait it out.

Now picture yourself around the turn of the century, living alone in a one-room shack on your undeveloped 160 acres on the North Dakota plains facing a real winter. You must live there for six months to qualify to purchase the land. Now imagine you are a young woman with little education, no knowledge of farming, and whose nearest neighbor is miles away, leaving you alone ... alone in the cold. And then the temperatures dip even further below already impossibly cold temperatures, with high drifts of snow blocking all roads and even paths to the barn and the responsibilities of farm animals. 

Now that is a hard winter, one experienced every year by Carrie Gafkjen, Norwegian settler and pioneer in the early 1900s in North Dakota. Nothing To Do But Stay by Carrie Young tells the stories of her mother and family pursuing their homestead dreams in the early 1900s in North Dakota when thousands of acres were unclaimed, ready to be improved by early intrepid settlers. 

Having worked as a cook and housekeeper in Minneapolis for ten years, saving all her earnings, Carrie Gafkjen set off in the late 1890s for North Dakota at age 25 along with other Norwegian immigrants with the determination to settle her own land. If she could live in her hastily-erected one room shack for six months, break a portion of the land with a plow, and bar the door against the wolves that came around every night, the government would allow her to purchase the land. 

The prospects were daunting. Some women had come to these prairie lands with new husbands, men who had been desperate to convince someone to help with housekeeping and companionship in the vast loneliness of the prairie. Most of these women had packed everything, left their homes, and traveled far from civilization by train and wagon to this isolated territory. Now, facing this foreign treeless land, their new ramshackle "home," sensing the isolation from friends and family, but realizing the impossibility of return, they decided that whether they liked it or not, there was nothing to do but stay. 

But Carrie Gafkjen knew what she was in for, what she had worked and saved for, and she never looked back. After "proving up" (qualifying) to purchase her land, for the next eight years she spent the winters working in another household before returning in spring to her property and hiring herself out as cook for a local threshing crew. She continued to cook for the men even after she married one of the threshers (who also happened to be from Norway), and raised six children.

And what a life she made for herself. Cooking for a ravenous, 40-man threshing group involved her preparing breakfast for the entire crew at 4:30am (eggs, pancakes, coffee); mid-morning meal (pies, sandwiches, doughnuts, coffee); noon dinner (mashed potatoes, beefsteak, creamed carrots and peas, fresh-baked bread, pie); mid-afternoon lunch at 4pm (more pies, doughnuts, coffee); and finally a cold supper (fried potatoes, cold pork, macaroni, pickles, and cake). The men often did not leave her house until dark, with the author's oldest sisters doing dishes until past midnight. And she did this every single day. 

Author Young recalls many vivid stories about her own life on her parents' small farm as well. Particularly vivid are stories of cold, with snows so heavy that she and her sister have to live in their school house for weeks at a time because the roads are blocks. Not so bad, you might think. But when the wild mustangs come each night to bump up against the thin walls to seek protection from the wind and bitter cold, the noise is definitely frightening to very young school children on their own.

There are struggles during the desperate years of drought in the 1930's, excursions into turkey-raising, the secret Christmas tree for the church decorated by two bachelor farmers, and pooling funds to pay for brothers and sisters to attend college.

And the food she cooks. Author Young lovingly describes the luscious Norwegian cookies, the elaborate feasts at Thanksgiving and Christmas, potato salad, lefse (potato pancake), rommegrot ("the Norwegian national porridge whose recipe reportedly has been handed down from generation to generation"), three-day buns, cakes, pies, and the unbelievably delicious ice cream fresh-churned on Christmas and the Fourth of July. 

The ice cream is made by two men who open their ice house to their neighbors for the annual Fourth of July feast. The local woman create the mix and the children take turns churning fresh ice cream from noon to dark. It would be their last ice cream until Christmas, so is enjoyed in huge quantities. As people leave the celebration absolutely stuffed with ice cream and many other plates and bowls of food, the ice house men yell, "Do you call this eating ice cream? Come back this evening and we'll show you some real eating!"

I loved these people, these settlers and their families who could do whatever it took to survive and proper in this harsh prairie land. Their experiences, from schooling to farming, from social gatherings to private traditions, are wonderful to real and experience vicariously. They live without complaints, tolerating the bad luck and differences in others quietly, and supporting each other in their families. It is just what people do in that place during those times, a matter-of-fact way of life that is so admirable in its purposefulness and personal satisfaction in doing a job well.   

While this well-written, captivating depiction of a wide variety of people, it is the adult women like Carrie Gafkjen who takes the spotlight. It is the women who make this inhospitable world manageable for their men and children.

...most of these women had an inner strength that seldom failed them. They could cry like babies at christenings and weddings, sniffling into their hemstitched handkerchiefs, but when the chips were down they were dry-eyed and fearless as lions. They could seize a garden hoe and cut a snake to ribbons who was approaching a baby on the grass,. They could stand beside their husbands and beat off prairie fires with wet rugs. They could climb a seventy-foot windmill tower to bring down a terrified child. They could lance infected wounds. They didn't know what taking a vacation was.

These are the women of our history. Nothing To Do But Stay is one of my favorite books to recommend to anyone interested in personable writing about quality people and their lives of perseverance, tradition, and family life.

Happy reading. 

Fred

www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Young, Carrie. The Wedding Dress

More wonderful recollections about the people and life in the small farming community on the North Dakota plains. (previously reviewed here)

Rich, Louise Dickinson. We Took to the Woods

Memoirs of her isolated life in the backwoods of Maine with family and friends, working as a guide, facing daily trials humorously, and lovingly depicting the beauty of the wild nature around her. (previously reviewed here)