Mount Tambora

Some people love winter, love the brisk air, the blinding glare, the crystal-clear night skies, soft fluffy snow and cups of steaming hot chocolate. Other people hate the freezing cold, the knifing winds, the treacherous roads, bare trees, and endless brown mud and slush clinging to shoes, cars, and pet feet tracking through the house.

For me, winter is a romantic time, curled by a fireplace (wood, gas, or electric) before a window with long velvet drapes (one of my favorite possessions), reading a book in a favorite chair while snow swirls outside the window and an animal lounges at my feet. It means a stew bubbling on the stove, fresh bread in the oven, or perhaps fresh shortbread cookies and a cup of Earl Gray tea by that fire. Perhaps it’s a holiday, with candles and lights and decorations, waiting for company to make it through the snow. Yeah, yeah, there’s no groundsman to shovel the walks when it’s over, I have to do it myself, but for a few hours I’m lost in an old English fantasy, there’s a mystery in the air, a challenge ahead, but love and fortune win in the end (note: I have never achieved this fantasy, but I keep hoping).

English Tales of Winter

Which made me think: why are all those images we cling to English fantasies? Sure, that period of literature is within what’s called the Little Ice Age, which ran from the 1300’s to the 1890’s, killing off the Vikings in Greenland and creating all those iconic Currier and Ives scenes, but it also put those chunks of ice in Washington Crossing the Delaware, and in 1816, with the dust of the exploded volcano Mount Tambora in the air, summer never arrived, and temperatures were still below freezing in June. Where is the American winter tale? American stories tend to be about blizzards, hardship, starvation, and ghosts. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, and Washington Irving are hardly on par with Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. Reading about the Donner party probably isn’t a good idea before eating stew.

American Tales of Winter

The only American “winter” tales I know well are children’s literature: The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Left By Themselves by Charles Paul May, the semi-historical Seven Alone by Honore Morrow, and the absolutely timeless endearing tale of Mandy, by Julie Andrews Edwards (Yes, Mary Poppins herself. Adults will love this, too!). But where are the adult books? Problem is, not much adult American literature of that period gives off that type of security.

That period of literature we think of is called the Romantic movement and includes Gothic literature, dealing with mystery, spiritualism, ghosts, hauntings, and torturous love – Frankenstein, Les Miserables, Dorian Gray, Hunchback of Notre Dame, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist – some of our most famous classics, running from about 1760 through the Victorian age, around 1890. America in 1776 was not only new and still forming, it was mostly unsettled, and people in the colds of Fort Duquesne, Fort Niagara, and Fort Cumberland were more concerned with staying alive than writing literature. Of course you still had authors, but not to the degree England – a stable civilization for 1200 years – did. While Heathcliff was brooding the lonely moors, Americans were exploring and giving us stories like Last of the Mohicans, Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Moby Dick, and The Scarlet Letter. Not the same, and certainly not the same as being snowed in and wringing one’s hands on the family estate. The American experience is uniquely American in that regard.

Just because our snow stories don’t go back to King Wenceslas (ok, Wenceslas was Bohemian/ Czechoslovakian, but the song, 900 years later, is English) doesn’t mean American literature isn’t good, it just means it’s different. Maybe you’ll have to settle for cotton twill drapes and a medium double-latte with a space heater and a Snuggie. If you love gothic literature, delve into a classic or something newer; there are hundreds of books (and films!) to choose from. If you love reading about snowy days while curled in a chair listening to the winds howl, try some of these modern tales (and films):

Office Girl by Joe Meno

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Snow by Orhan Panuk

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Wolf Winter by Celia Ekback

Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson

The Shining Stephen King

Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg,

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin

Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin

Think winter’s lasting too long? Imagine 18 straight months of cold and snow.

I’ve always liked books on natural disasters, and exploding volcanoes are about the biggest you can get. They spawn earthquakes and tsunamis, send pyroclastic flows racing down hillsides to poison and bury entire towns (Pele, Vesuvius, Pinatubo), blow entire islands away (Thera, Krakatoa), appear overnight (Parícutin), or ooze for years (Kilauea). They can also create spectacular sunsets for months afterward, or, if they’re really determined and throw huge amounts of ash too high into the air, they can change the climate of the entire Earth in a matter of weeks. This is what happened in 1816, when Mount Tambora, a fiery grumbling volcano, blew up in Indonesia, with the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. The Year Without Summer: 1816 tells how this single volcanic eruption in the tropics had far-reaching effects around the world.

Mount Tambora didn’t just explode, like Krakatoa. It blew like a fountain, throwing so much ash into the air that it blackened the sky for thousands of miles and created a cloud of dust that blocked out the sun. This just happened to occur while the sun was at its coolest point in its cycle anyway (the Maunder Minimum). The resulting cooling of the ground (a 7-degree difference) brought on dire climate changes (parts of New Hampshire didn’t receive a drop of rain for more than 3 months, while Switzerland experienced horrific flooding), wild swings in temperature (July temps would hit 95 one day and it would snow the next), but mostly an unrelenting cold that prevented seasonal changes and destroyed most crops as far south as the Carolinas. It created dire famines and unrest through most of the British Isles and western and central Europe that lasted through 1818, beginning a wave of immigration that helped spread America westward.

Klingaman explores in great detail the effects of the climate change on political structures in America and Europe, from the election politics of young America to disruptions in France, England, and Ireland. He spends a great deal of time discussing the travels of Lord Byron, Percy Bysse Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley through Europe and Switzerland, who all wrote oodles of letters fretting about the weather. The darkness and seclusion caused by the weather gave rise to Mary Shelley’s famous masterpiece, Frankenstein.

Myself, I did not care for the book. Unlike Winchester’s Krakatoa, Klingaman barely discusses the volcano; it’s a cause for the book, not a main character, more like a shadowy villain behind the scenes. Instead, most of the book is about the American and European political fallout because of the climate change. I understand most of the voluminous information comes from primary sources, and because it’s 1816 there is a lot of relevant written information of the time, but I picked up the book wanting to read about a volcano. If you like history and politics, or biographies of Mary Shelley, you might enjoy the book. If you’re looking for stories of volcanic glory and the birth and death of islands, go read Krakatoa.