Snowbound

"Being memorably snowbound in a concentrated, deeply human circle of friends and family is a 'Truce of God' in the middle of endless activity."

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Glenn Arbery

Being memorably snowbound in a concentrated, deeply human circle of friends and family is a “Truce of God” in the middle of endless activity. What is it about stories told in this kind of context? What is it about memories that bring both a sense of poignant loss but also the joy of renewed presence and spiritual hope?  

Weather is big in Wyoming. Over Christmas, after our students at Wyoming Catholic College scattered across America for the holidays, my wife, our daughter Julia, and I drove down through the middle of the country to see our daughter and her family in Arkansas, and we left a day later than we had intended because of the huge and deadly winter storm that was moving eastward ahead of us. As we started out, the temperature outside registered 27° below zero, and we hoped the roads would not be icy after the recent snow. We had just driven a few miles when Bishop David Ricken, one of the three founders of WCC, called me, not suspecting that I was driving. We discussed our business briefly, and when he discovered that Virginia and Julia were in the car with me, he gave us one of his superlative blessings before he got off the phone. The roads were wonderfully clear for the next two days.

During our time in Arkansas (a beautiful occasion all around), we visited friends in nearby Fayetteville and stopped by the famous Dickson Street Bookstore (all used books) while we were in town. Browsing, I found and bought the Library of America compilation of 19th-century American poetry, probably attracted to it by the conversation earlier that morning about the Civil War. Perhaps part of the attraction was also WCC’s 19th century connections, unlikely as they might seem for a college founded in 2005: the Baldwin building, which houses many of our offices and classrooms, still has metal shutters to guard against Indian attacks, and the Augur Building (classrooms and study space) occupies the site of Camp Augur, a fort built in 1868 during the Indian wars.

With Wyoming weather threatening again, we drove back the same way we had come, and the history of 19th-century America was everywhere as we went. In Nebraska, we passed Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff, which stood up from the high plains as crucial landmarks on the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails in the westward movement of the 1800s. We thought about weather in those days and the spirit of those travelers. Back across the border into Wyoming, we took a brief side trip to see Fort Laramie, one of the largest and most important forts in America’s western expansion. On a plaque, we read the story of John “Portugee” Phillips, who in 1866 after the Fetterman Massacre near Fort Phil Kearny rode 236 miles in two days in a sub-zero blizzard to get help. (The monument actually commemorates his horse, who did not survive.)

We were back at home before the predicted storm, and I had time to bring in extra firewood for our wood stove. In the early hours of New Year’s Day, a steady snow began to fall, and for the first two days of 2023, a huge winter storm—almost windless, not a blizzard—settled over central Wyoming. By mid-day on January 2, my colleagues and I were sending pictures of what everything around us looked like under two feet of snow. One of the poems I had noticed as I thumbed through the book of 19th-century poetry back in Fayetteville, John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-Bound,” had become the thing to read.

I remembered the vivid opening description of a New England snowstorm, but I did not remember the poem being so long (20 pages in the anthology). Reading it now, I realized what a different America Whittier had inhabited in the 19th century and how the memory of a snowbound evening around the central fireplace of the Whittier farmhouse in the 1820s speaks to the mission of Wyoming Catholic College.

This was a world not only without the distractions of smart phones and constant connectivity (the aim of our technology policy), but without electricity at all—a world closer to the Greece of Odysseus than to the prosperous cities and homes of the later 1800s. The poem was published in 1866 (the same year of Portugee Phillips’ ride), in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, and Whittier remembers being snowbound from a perspective four decades away. He and his brother are the only ones still living of all the figures who sat around the fire that night—his father, his mother, his outdoorsman uncle (“innocent of books”), his spinster aunt (“The sweetest woman ever Fate/Perverse denied a household mate”), his impulsive older sister, his sickly younger sister, the vigorous, classically-trained neighborhood schoolmaster, and a female guest with a savage temper, one of those startling 19^th-century New England ideologues who “blended in a like degree/The vixen and the devotee.” In expansive detail, Whittier repeats the stories told around the fire that night while the storm raged outside; he evokes the characters of the dead as though he had descended into the underworld.

“Snow-Bound” feels conventionally Victorian in some ways (unlike Whitman’s Leaves of Grass), but its complexities are moving. It deserves a fresh reading. Being memorably snowbound in a concentrated, deeply human circle of friends and family is a “Truce of God” in the middle of endless activity—exactly the kind of truce we hope to strike at WCC. William Faulkner calls stories told around a fire “the best of all talking.” Odysseus himself says that listening to an inspired bard is “the flower of life.” What is it about stories told in this kind of context? What is it about memories that bring both a sense of poignant loss but also the joy of renewed presence and spiritual hope? Forty years from now, how will our students remember the talk around their campfires in the wilderness? Asking the question increases the focus on the rarity and wonder of what they are doing now. What will they recollect of those times in class when the Wyoming winter raged outside, but inside, the conversation rose, and the tables and the books disappeared, and the great dead stood before them to tell their tales?

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.