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Show OF EARTH AND AIR AND LONGING Chapter IX Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive But to be young was very heaven! Those lines from Wordsworth could be used about early Escalante times. But our heaven was a bit on the sweaty side. Sweaty and gritty. Nevertheless, our frontier hopefulness made little of hardships and undercurrents of uneasiness. To echo a Nada wisecrack, we were "as happy as if we had good sense." For me the desert could be empty and hot, gusty and dusty. Father treated discomforts as passing aspects of pioneering, tests of our right to enjoy fruits of victory later. He warned us: relish these stirring days-all too soon they'd fade into humdrum prosperity. Any suffering of ours he could more than match from tales Iowa and Nebraska graybeards, now wealthy, had told him. Midwestern droughts, tornadoes, snowstorms, grasshopper swarms had been evil spirits jealous of progress. Pioneers of the Middle Border had been "giants in the earth" whose toughness we must rival to achieve their triumphs. Mother had the same joyous sturdiness. She drew on pioneer experiences, some personal. At 16 she'd gone to North Dakota to join a brother and his wife homesteading near Fargo and to teach a one-room school on the treeless prairie. She had seen blizzards so savage that people lost their way between house and barn, and froze to death. Nada dealt us nothing nearly so perilous! When we yearned for rain she sang a parody of the revival hymn "Beulahland," This wry version was popular among early Dakotans; Dakota-land, Dakota-land, Upon thy burning sand I stand. I look away across the plains And wonder why it never rains! |