The New American West

Selected Shorts

This episode of Selected Shorts explores the multifaceted identity of the American West through fiction and interview. It features Louise Er

Key takeaways

• Louise Erdrich's 'The Hollow Children' is inspired by a real 1923 blizzard in South Dakota.
• Erdrich discusses her transition from short stories to longer novel forms and the importance of character relationship.

Main topics

• The American West
• Native American Literature

Notable quotes

There's no one way to look at the American West.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound meditation on how landscape and histor

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:07) There's no one way to look at the American West. A wild place of awesome natural beauty, a big open territory for pioneering individualists, or a colonized landscape. I'm Meg Wolitzer, and in this edition of Selected Shorts, fiction that explores an iconic area of the country and the space it occupies in our minds. Stay with us. Speaker 3 (0:38) You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. For many of us, the idea of the American West holds a lot of power. There's just something about the rugged terrain and the rugged individualism born of that terrain, something about bravely confronting everything that nature might throw at you, something about the stubbornness to seek new worlds and the survival instincts to see it through. Though many of the standard tropes about men and women or heroes and villains perpetuated by classic Westerns have shifted over time, there's still some magnetism to the idea. Of course, there's Speaker 2 (1:16) another layer that romantic American ideas often fail to confront, and we'll touch on that. Speaker 3 (1:22) This show is made up of two stories, each of which reflects a different element of what the West has become in the years since the first European settlers claimed the land for themselves. One story of a harrowing weather event, cleaves a stalwart generation from its offspring, the other story examines the way in which humans have shaped the landscape and asks how long they can remain safe, physically and emotionally. The first piece we'll hear is by beloved, multiple-award-winning writer Louise Erdrich. Erdrich is a Minnesotan whose narratives often embrace a Western landscape and her heritage as part of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe. She's published it all, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, even children's books. Her titles include The Roundhouse, The Sentence, and Love Medicine. This piece doesn't explicitly deal with colonialism, as do a number of Erdrich's works. But it is about being haunted by troubled legacies. It's set in South Dakota and inspired by very real accounts of a famous blizzard in 1923. Right away, the story is framed as some barflies sitting around telling one another old ancestral chestnuts. Speaker 2 (2:29) And from there, Erdrich makes clear the difference between Speaker 3 (2:32) those who shaped the Old West and those living in their relatives' shadows. The weather in this story, its beauty and its violence, is strong and strange and memorable, and best experienced from the warm confines of a bar or from your home, and certainly well after the fact. Performing it is Tate Donovan. His long TV and film career includes roles in well-regarded titles including Argo, as well as animated works such as Hercules. But once you hear his voice and do an image search, you're going to say, oh, that guy, he's in everything. And here's Tate Donovan reading The Hollow Children by Louise Erdrich. Speaker 1 (3:18) At the Tabor Bar around beer number four, the men sometimes got into history farming, trading stories of their antecedents, exploits, and agonies. In the long ago, wheat prices had plunged and most of the Bonanza farms had broken up. That was when their great-greats had bought the land. The men talked about old plagues, old equipment, old swaps of ownerships, crops, land, and dire weather. John Pavlecki's great-grandmother, at the age of nine, had survived the blizzard of 1923 by burrowing into a nearby haystack when the school bus didn't show up. Diz remembered his grandfather telling stories about an Uncle Ivek who had also endured that blizzard, which was particularly lethal because it happened on a misty and mild April day. Around 8 that morning, the bus had been almost full of children and headed toward the school, when out of the northwest, a wind of 60 miles per hour had dropped the temperature instantly to minus 20. and filled the air with a blistering cold curtain of powder. Such a snow would blind your eyes and scour the features off your face. Ivek was a farmer, part-time school teacher, and one of the bus drivers. He was taking his turn behind the wheel, and in the back of a school notebook, not long after the blizzard, he wrote about what happened. Ivek was bouncing down the muddy road when the mist dissolved, and he saw it. The boiling white mass rolling at him like annihilation. He drove straight in at full speed, hoping to make the rest of the way on sheer momentum. But in the whiteout, he slowed to a crawl, then crept along, feeling through the tires for the road. The children had gone dead silent. Speaker 1 (5:28) The silence lasted until Ivek lost his feel of the road and knew that they had left it. The earth on either side of the Red River had been rolling pinned by a vast and ancient glacier. The flat fields and prairie were of a time eternal, and the human presence in that expanse was slight. The children knew it. He knew it. They had to keep moving or die. Luckily, he filled the gasoline tank. Speaker 1 (6:00) How about a song? Ivek shouted. What shall we sing? The vivigy boy called out from a few seats back. His voice trembled. Perhaps he thought that a church hymn would ensure their admittance to heaven. We shall sing Wild Clover. Ivoc had noticed the girl. She touched her hand to his shoulder. It was Agnid Aubrey, a daughter of a Welshman and an Irish woman, a steady girl of 11 years whose upbringing had been of the finest sort. From her mother, fearless good cheer. And from her father, a soldier who fought in Mesopotamia, drinking songs adapted for childish years. Speaker 1 (6:44) She began and she taught the other children the words as she went along, just the way Ivic taught his students to learn poems and stirring speeches by heart. Speaker 2 (6:54) I've been a white clover all Speaker 1 (6:57) summer long, and I've spent all my money on sunlight and song. But now I am falling asleep under snow, so I can return as wild clover once more. And it's yay, yay ever. Speaker 1 (7:18) Yea, yea, ever and more, shall I be the wild clover. Yea, ever and more. And the song went on, amended verse after verse with clapping and stamping on the chorus. It roused Ivek's heart, and he roared the chorus too. When the children were tired of that song, there was another. Fiery pillar on our journey, lead us through the snow. Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire. This one was also accompanied by stamping and pounding and clapping and roaring. Agnet had probably made it up just to keep them warm, but the children eventually quieted, spent. Speaker 1 (8:07) Iva kept the school bus moving, sometimes jerking across the prairie and at times gliding on roads, determined not to drive into a ravine or be stopped by any means other than a warm house or a barn. His heart sped up so fast that he could hardly breathe. He thought of a child, Mary Waka, so quiet and so good at math. Or Warwick, the boy who chopped wood for the school stove. Or small-boned Morris, only five years old, whom he directed Agnet to bundle in the blanket that he usually draped his lap. Speaker 1 (8:51) He would get the children out of his mind only to have their parents crowd in. He knew the parents were praying that the bus had reached the schoolhouse before the worst hit. He thought of his friend John, whose child, the last on his route, he hadn't picked up. Was she wandering in the blizzard? And Agnes' father and mother, and his own wife, her dark hair in a braid down to her waist. She was at home, and he was glad now that the children had been ill that morning and stayed with her. She would be praying too. He put her out of his mind and drove on and on. There was no telling, no telling which direction he was going, and he knew not where he was. He only knew that he must not stop. Speaker 1 (9:47) The others are hungry, Agnes said at last. I myself have a meat pie so great I cannot eat the whole. Shall I direct us to surrender our lunches and divide the food? Yes, Ivek spoke without taking his eyes off the nothingness. Then I will, she said, and fairly, in spite of the spiral boys. Ivek smiled, even in their peril. Have they given you trouble? I have them in hand. Speaker 1 (10:16) I've occurred the sounds of negotiation and discussion voices kept low He was in a cold sweat because after a long stretch of flat surface, which he thought was possibly the Meridian Road, the bus was bumping over hummocks that didn't feel like snow. For some reason, he imagined that it was a graveyard, although, of course, that was absurd. But then Speaker 2 (10:42) he felt a Speaker 1 (10:43) terrible slickness beneath the wheels. The bus skidded, and his heart dropped. Speaker 1 (10:54) He was either farther south or farther west than he thought. He hadn't gone down a steep riverbank, so he understood that they were on one of the arms of the deep lake that curved intimately below Tabor. And now, though he knew that it was unlikely in the extreme, his blighted mind reviewed the recent stretch of mild days and seized on the vision of the bus plunging to the bottom. He knew that the ice should still be sound throughout the lake, yet his unruly thoughts continued. Agnes tapped his shoulder, and he nearly shrugged her off, but she reached around with a meat pie and let him know that the children had agreed that he must have it. Speaker 1 (11:43) The instant he bit into the pie, his wheels found purchase. The roads were all straight section roads, though often little more than trails. Reading the way the snow was settling, he renewed his commitment to steering within a few degrees of center, creeping along even more slowly, peering down through the edge of his window, which he'd been forced to crack open. He nosed at the drifts and used a bit of speed to grind through them, always returning to the central line. He went on and on and on. The wind toyed with the bus, sometimes booming at its sides, sometimes sliding with a slow whistle along the window tops. At times, it reached below the hood and shook the engine like a baby's rattle. Ivic would shout to the children, sing that song, sing the song about the fire. Children sang for as long as they could. His sweat froze on his forehead. His leg shook as he pressed and let up on the brake. He blinked quickly so he wouldn't run into a tree, few though they were. His mouth was so dry that his tongue was swelling, staring desperately hard. He wondered about snow blindness. When the light assumed that flat, bluish cast of skim milk, he knew that dusk was upon them, and they fell into the lake. Speaker 1 (13:35) It wasn't, as he imagined, an icy plummet. The water seized them so swiftly that there was no fear or pain, and the fall was surprisingly gradual. They rocked and swayed, lakeweed swirling around their necks and ears. He knew that he and the children were all lost forever. Speaker 1 (14:02) He didn't like his thoughts, but he was still glad that his son and his daughter were safe at home in the warmth of a good stove. He thought of them burning the wood that he had chopped. There was plenty. But then he heard their voices behind him, and he realized they had got on the bus. After all, sorrow cascaded over him as the bus settled on the bottom of the lake. When there was no use in steering any longer, he rose in his grief and he turned to the children. He meant to apologize and hope to recommence the singing, but the children had changed. By unknown means, on the way down to the bottom, the children had become hollow. They were transparent and so frail that they were almost unbearably weighted down by their clothing. Speaker 1 (15:00) Sagging and faint, they listed in their seats their skin membranous and glistening. Ivic knew that he must not allow them to guess how precarious their existence was, so he went down the center aisle collecting their coats. Once they shed their coats, some shot through the windows to the surface, while others would, he realized, spend their days at the bottom, waiting for their families to come to the lake and let down a line they might grasp hold of. Ivek's eyes were open, but somehow they opened. He was once again driving on the surface of the blinding earth. He caught a glimpse of the school to the left of the bus before snow slammed shut over the site. He doubted what he had seen, but his arms had faith. His hands guided the wheel according to his vision. He sensed that they were in the shadow of something large, a building. He pulled closer to the side, idled the bus. It was the school. Speaker 1 (16:16) In the lee of the storm, he could see the familiar boards that he himself had painted. He stopped the bus, opened the door. Wind almost sucked them out. He closed it again and instructed Agnes to sort out her classmates.