September 16, 2001, Indian Hills
Susan Goldstein
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Here, we are far from trouble. No one would have said so during the wildfires last summer, but that was before what happened last week in the East. Now we know very well how safe we are. All of the rural foothills fire departments have spent the weekend at checkpoints along the road, passing the boot to collect money for emergency relief in New York. It's hard to get this across to someone in a moving automobile, but I think one of the signs for the Indian Hills Volunteer Fire Department nails the message:
HELP
NEW YORK
FIRE
FAMILYit says, and my eleven-year-old daughter wrote it. I watch her standing in the road with two grown-up firefighters, both of whom have been with the department twenty years. They told her it was okay to put on my husband's bunker gear, as it looks like rain. All decked out, my daughter is now desperately hoping that someone she knows will drive by the checkpoint and mistake her for Jefferson County's youngest firewoman.
I go back into the firehouse with two boots full of cash. All weekend long it has been my assignment to sort and count the greenbacks. Talk about instant gratification -- the boots are stuffed to the toes, with lots of ones and fives, but several hundreds, too, and the cash has been coming not just from the Porsches and Audis, but from the ancient Chevys held together with baling twine. My daughter comes in with another pile of cash.
"Are you helping Dave Weeks out there?" I ask. "Is he in a good mood?"
"Mom. Do zebras have stripes?"
In the four years we've lived on his road, we've never known Weeks, the president of the fire department, to be in anything other than a Zenlike state of good humor. "But it's raining pretty hard out there," my daughter says. "Dave Weeks keeps saying it's going to be a long winter."
In August I reread all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, something I have done periodically since I was thirteen. I take them more seriously each time. When I was a girl growing up in New York City, I didn't find signs of meaning and portent in these pioneer stories, but I see them now. And I wonder if Laura, who was in her sixties when she started writing, put them there on purpose, or if life itself is full of meaning and portent the longer you live it -- and if you are as good a writer as she was, all you have to do is set it down.
In this passage from The Long Winter, Laura and her Pa have just discovered a muskrat house in the field where they have been gathering hay:
Pa was shaking his head. "We're going to have a hard winter," he said, not liking the prospect.
"Why, how do you know?" Laura asked in surprise.
"The colder the winter will be, the thicker the muskrats build the walls of their houses," Pa told her. "I never saw a heavier-built muskrats' house than this one."
Laura looked at it again. It was very solid and big. But the sun was blazing, burning on her shoulders through the faded, thin calico, and the hot wind was blowing, and stronger than the damp-mud smell of the slough was the ripening smell of grasses parching in the heat. Laura could hardly think of ice and snow and cruel cold.
"Pa, how can the muskrats know?" she asked.
"I don't know how they know," Pa said, "but they do. God tells them, somehow, I suppose."
"Then why doesn't God tell us?" Laura wanted to know.
"Because," said Pa, "we're not animals. We're humans, and, like it says in the Declaration of Independence, God created us free. That means we got to take care of ourselves."
Laura said faintly, "I thought God takes care of us."
"He does," Pa said, "so far as we do what's right. And he gives us a conscience and brains to know what's right. But he leaves it to us to do as we please. That's the difference between us and everything else in creation."
"Can't muskrats do what they please?" Laura asked, amazed.
"No," said Pa. "I don't know why they can't, but you can see they can't. Look at that muskrat house. Muskrats have to build that kind of house. They always have and they always will. It's plain they can't build any other kind. But folks build all kinds of houses. A man can build any kind of house he can think of. So if his house don't keep out the weather, that'shis look-out."
Of course, what comes next is the worst winter in decades. The family barely survives by burning hay and eating half-cupfuls of ground-up wheat, while neighbors disappear for good into howling blizzards, and the supply train from the East can't seem to get through. The blizzards keep coming, and the men keep going outside in subzero weather to dig out. The job of digging out continues until spring, which doesn't come until June.
