Over Prairie Trails

I like weather, and I like acute observation, and I like Manitoba, but even I could not weather all the observations of Manitoban fog, snow, etc... Bless his heart. It is wonderful poetry and a great meditation if taken in bits. But read cover to cover--my eyes begin to bleed.

This is a very quirky book indeed. It's not often you find an author--contemporary or 'quaint'--going into such detail about snowflakes and drift formation, cloud organisation and blizzard theory. I tried to pretend those madman's theory sections were interesting, but they were merely great soporifics; on the other hand, I admired the imagination to be able to focus on the task, and my own latter attempts to analyse my own Yukon weather dissipated quickly. The actual travel bits were interesting enough, though I think the man was an absolute fool to undertake some of the trips, against all local advice; he'd be fined by Bylaw today for animal cruelty, the way he kept losing his horses Peter and Dan in snowdrifts, driving them stupidly show more and relentlessly to assuage his mastery inclinations. Still, I'm glad he left this document behind. Should give it a 4 for uniqueness of concept; had had a 3. show less

After the first couple essays, the author spends a lot of time talking about snow and snow drifts (and much of the book is weather-centric). His natural curiosity is endearing, but the detailed observations can wear a little thin for a modern reader who’s been able to see both Antarctica and the North Pole on TV her whole life. But as he says in his essays, he’s writing these primarily for his wife and daughter, and his devotion to his daughter specifically and his desire to see her learn about the world and nature and succeed in life is again endearing. There are references to his advanced age and chronic illness, both unspecified, that lend a sense of urgency and poignancy to his desire to share his knowledge and experiences with show more her. His sense of impending mortality is tangible, and yet he seems to risk an awful lot by traveling through extreme winter road conditions to spend barely a day each week with his family. It’s fascinating on several levels.

Peter and Dan, of course, are the not wholly unsung heroes of the piece. Grove knows he’s got a good pair of horses in them, and he does show genuine care and concern for their welfare even as he drives them 45 miles each way through monumental snow drifts in 30-below temperatures. You don’t get much concrete information about the people in these stories, but the extraordinary feats these horses undertook so willingly for Grove may speak as much to his character as their own.

ETA: According to Wikipedia, his "advanced age" would be his early forties, and he ended up outliving his young daughter. It was a different time... :-) show less