This Place Can Kill You
By Matthew Kliewer
It takes a lot for us to embrace an outsider writing our stories. I sat with Duane West, the prosecutor of the murders of the Clutter family, in his living room for three hours in 2017, and he had quite a bit to say about his distaste for Truman Capote. While I don’t have the same personal animus that our mournfully departed Mr. West had for In Cold Blood, I’ll admit it’s tough for a New Yorker to “get it,” and the readers of this book club often just know when someone has it right.
All of that’s to say, as someone raised on the Great Plains, David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard has become one of the most important books I’ve picked up in quite some time. Consistent listeners might be a bit tired of these extended monologic therapy sessions regarding place, belonging, and perhaps our most consistent theme across all of the books we’ve read over these many years: the fact that it’s just so hard to live out here. In a sense, the entirety of this book focuses on this fundamental aspect of life on the plains that we all intuitively understand. This place will kill you; you just don’t quite know how or when.
The Children’s Blizzard is an exceptionally well-written account of the blizzard of 1888, in which 235 people were killed when an abrupt temperature drop of nearly 40 degrees caught the schoolchildren of Nebraska and South Dakota unaware and unable to protect themselves from the deadly conditions of the sudden storm. Laskin’s account contextualizes this storm, beginning with the large Mennonite migration to the Midwest, in which my own family participated, moving on to the early iterations of the National Weather Service, and finally arriving at the individual stories of those lives lost and frozen in the snow.
It’s these latter individual stories that I’d like to focus on in this short review, because as I was rereading the harrowing, horrifying accounts of teachers making split-second decisions to protect their students and themselves, the news network I have on in the background informed me of yet another shooting in an elementary school.
If you are listening to my voice in real time, if you are reading these words on the High Plains Public Radio website, I pray that you know the school shooting I’m referring to. If not, it’s perhaps because another has occurred in this long line of a national nightmare that those in power refuse to fix. Unlike blizzards, we cannot describe a school shooting by a preceding year. There are just too many.
This school, where children died, is not unlike the one where Stella Badger taught, or the last room in which Walter Allen took his last breath trying to escape. While advancements in weather prediction technology have made the nightmare of a sudden, deadly blizzard seem locked in the distant past, we all still know that sending our children off to school does not guarantee they will come back. David Laskin’s The Children’s Blizzard makes real the sustained devastation that the loss of children can have on a community and, at least for this reader, implores us to take action, to make those difficult decisions, and to protect our most vulnerable.
I’m Matt Kliewer for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
Originally from Cimarron, KS, Matt Kliewer is a Professor of Humanities at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. Matt is a scholar of Native American and global Indigenous literature, film, and media, and he holds an MA in English from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD in English with a certificate in Native American studies from the University of Georgia. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Georgia Review and Transmotion. Additionally, he served as an editorial assistant for the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
