IMAGINING AVALANCHES Bernard Mergen* George Washington University, Washington, DC ABSTRACT
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IMAGINING AVALANCHES Bernard Mergen* George Washington University, Washington, DC ABSTRACT: Most of the papers presented at this meeting describe avalanches in graphs, charts, mathematical formulas, and other dialects of the language of science. This paper surveys some fictional and poetic descriptions of snow slides by American writers from Helen Hunt Jackson and Mary Hallock Foote in the 1890s to Linda Hogan and William Dickey in the 1990s with a detour through the boys' fiction of Monty Atwater. An argument may be made that all descriptions of reality, verbal and mathematical, are simplifications, so we need the imagined avalanche to fully understand the literal. The word avalanche does not nobility, punishments and rewards. 1 appear in English until the middle of the Two of the earliest writers to use the eighteenth century. The Oxford English avalanche as a symbol were Helen Hunt Dictionary cites a book published in 1765 in Jackson and Mary Hallock Foote. Jackson, which some travelers "perceiving a noise born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, towards the top of the mountains, look up was a childhood friend of Emily Dickinson and descried two valancas driving towards and is remembered today as the author of the village." (812) Using the Italian two books exposing the mistreatment of equivalent of the French word avalanche, American Indians, Century of Dishonor indicates two important points. English, and (1881) and the novel Ramona (1884). The subsequently American, awareness of snow unexpected death in 1863 of her husband, avalanches begins in the Alps, a direct result an Army engineer,may have inspired her ofthe first phase of modern tourism that sonnet "Avalanches," which uses the fact required Englishmen (and women) to visit that avalanches can occur in good weather classical Italy via Switzerland. Substituting a as a metaphor for any unexpected disaster. Latinate word for "snow slide" enhanced the Listen to what all Alpine records experience and made it sublime. The other tell, implication of this brief quotation is that Of days on which the avalanches snow slides, when they threaten life and fell. property, deserve a suitably awesome Not days of storm when men name. were pale with fright, Nevertheless, it took more than a And watched the hills with century for avalanche to come into common anxious straining sight, use. As late as 1796, The Rural Magazine: And heard in every sound a note or, Vermont Repository published a of knell; translation of an account of an avalanche in But when in heavens still, and northwestem Italy without using the word. blue, and dear, What made this story compelling was that The sun rode high,-those were three women were rescued after being the hours to fear. buried in their house under sixty feet of (Jackson, 421) snow for more than five weeks. Although Foote, who was born on a farm in they suffered from the cold, they survived on New York State in 1847, was well known in milk from a goat that was trapped with them. her life as a writer and illustrator. She lived Avalanches enter American consciousness in various places in the west with her mining as phenomena that are violently destructive, engineer husband, eventually settling in but often permit miraculous escapes. Boise, where he worked on irrigation Avalanches provided artists, novelists, and projects from 1885-1896. Wallace Stegner poets with parables of human folly and borrowed freely from her life and writings in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Angle of *American Studies Department, George Repose (1971). Foote's short story "The Washington University, Washington, DC Cup of Trembling" is about a wealthy mine 20052; e-mail: [email protected] owner's wife, Esmee, who leaves him to spend the winter with Jack, the mine Titled, "He ... flung the six pounds superintendent, in his cabin in the Creur of powerful explosive out into the great snow d'Alene. When her lover's brother, Sid, comb," Wyeth's painting for the illustration unexpectedly arrives while Jack is getting shows one of the eight miners (who have supplies, she hides until he goes away. After been working for days to open the road to Jack's return, his dog, who had been with the mine) tossing twenty-four sticks of Sid, comes to the cabin and Esmee dynamite into the snow. The twelve-foot confesses that she had refused to let Sid in. snow comb breaks away and the resulting Jack goes out in a storm and retums with avalanche fills a gulch, allowing the men to Sid's frozen body. The guilty lovers believe construct a road for their sled and bring that their sin has caused the tragedy; they supplies to their starving families. The brief have drunk from the cup of desire and story focuses on the struggles of the men to expect punishment. Jack leaves, and Esmee clear a path with shovels between is visited by a miner who directed Sid to the snowstorms. Wyeth's illustrations are cabin. He listens to her story and warns her characteristically detailed, with attention to to leave because it's "snow-slide weather" clothing, the big "No.2" ore shovels the men ~nd the forest above the cabin has recently carry, and the play of light and shadows on been cut. Instantly she sees this as a sign the snow. Wyeth made three trips west and sending him away prepares to meet her between 1904 and 1906, including a visit fate. Soon, there is: where he sketched and collected gear that A stroke out of a clear sky; later served as props for his models, but he a roar that filled the air; a burst of left no written record of any actual light snow mounting over the tree experiences with avalanches. The men in tops like steam condensed above a the story treat the dynamiting of the snow rushing train; a concussion of wind comb as a brilliant idea by the bravest of that felled trees in the valley a their comrades, but the practice dated back hundred yards from the spot where to 1879, according to Betsy Armstrong and the plunging mass shot down-then Knox Williams. (Armstrong & Williams, 149) the chinook eddied back, across the A letter from Outing editor Casper Whitney track of the snow-slide, and went to Wyeth in January 1906 commissioned storming up the peak, (Foote, 85) him to ''witness the blasting and shoveling Foote avoids making this a conventional out of the wagon provision trails to the moralistic ending by having the miners mining camps-such as Cripple Creek, discuss early in the story whether Esmee is Leadville, etc." indicates that triggering 2 worthy of Jack's love. The miner who warns avalanches with dynamite was well known. her to leave realizes too late that she is. Her The emphasis on man's power to suicide by avalanche may be required by the control avalanches, not on their random formulas of late nineteenth-century fiction, destructive force, is the new element. The but Foote means it to be unjust because avalanche as adversary becomes a theme Esmee accepts her fate with newfound self in men's fiction of the 1920s. The popular awareness. writer Courtney Ryley Cooper, a frequent What both Jackson's poem and contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, Foote's story demonstrate is that knowledge True, and other magazines and author of Go about avalanches, their causes and dangers North, Young Man! (which promoted was spreading beyond mountain travelers immigration to Canada), made an avalanche and mining camps to a wider public. In the climatic event in his novel The White January 1907, Outing, one of the most Desert (1922). In this complicated mystery popular magazines of the time, contained a romance, a young man journeys to Colorado short story titled "How They Opened the from Boston to claim his inheritance, Snow Road" with four illustrations by the thousands of acres of forest and a lumber rising young artist N. C. Wyeth, whose mill. In the course of the story he falls in distinctive pictures for children's books such love, learns he's being cheated by the as Treasure Island would make him world manager, is suspected of murder, and famous. One of the illustrations is, I believe, attempts to recover his stolen property by the earliest visual depiction of the use of setting up a rival saw mill to provide ties for explosives to trigger an avalanche. a railroad construction project. Before he 2 can recoup his fortune and convince his love camp that was wiped out by an avalanche in of his innocence, a blizzard closes the pass, 1889. The main plot involves the murder of trapping all the characters in a "white the former snow ranger by some bank inferno." (Cooper, 215) He joins the railroad robbers who use an old mine tunnel as an workers to clear the snow-clogged tunnels escape route, but there are numerous and snow-sheds. They are engaged in a war subplots, including a rivalry between Brad with nature. The climax comes when the and a French skier for the attentions of a locomotives pushing the rotary snowplows lovely American women's ski champion. finally break free and clear the section of Brad and his rival join forces to rescue her track called the "Death Trail," but the from the bandits during a blizzard-a vibrations from their whistles trigger an "sockdolager"-and Brad traps the villains in 3 avalanche. the tunnel by causing an avalanche. The Then, the blare of the whistles was description of the avalanche itself is drowned in a greater sound, a roar disappointing.