her head and her face and her arms. They came thudding down like hail.
The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
Laura tried to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes, turning their heads this way and that. Mary ran screaming into the house. Grasshoppers covered the ground, there was not one bare bit to step on. Laura had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed squirming and slimy under her feet.
The locusts are not only frightening and disgusting, they are devastating to the family’s farm. But perhaps their greatest damage in the mind of young Laura is to nature’s garden, the fruit trees along the creek from which the title of the book is taken:
Pa was not downstairs next morning. All night he had been working to keep the smoke over the wheat, and he did not come to breakfast. He was still working.
The whole prairie was changed. The grasses did not wave; they had fallen in ridges. The rising sun made all the prairie rough with shadows where the tall grass had sunk against each other.
The willow trees were bare. In the plum thickets only a few plumpits hung to the leafless branches. The nipping, clicking, gnawing sound of the grasshoppers’ eating was still going on.
At noon Pa came driving the wagon out of the smoke. He put Sam and David into the stable, and slowly came to the house. His face was black with smoke and his eyeballs were red. He hung his hat on the nail behind and sat down at the table.
“It’s no use, Caroline,” he said. “Smoke won’t stop them. They keep dropping down through it and hopping in from all sides. The wheat is falling now. They’re cutting off like a scythe. And eating it, straw and all.”
In desperation, Pa leaves his family behind to search for work. His journey echoes our culture’s canonical story of a people wandering in the wilderness seeking the promised land. Laura learns from her mother’s reading of Scripture that locusts played a pivotal role in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. And so the tale of the pioneers became interwoven with Western culture’s most deep and abiding literary account of locusts. Perhaps the Ingalls sensed that they were part of a great human migration—an American exodus—across the continent. But what they did not know while watching their farm disappear under a blanket of locusts that summer of 1875 was that no people on earth, not even a pharaoh, had ever witnessed a swarm of such immensity.
2
Albert’s Swarm
I SAAC CLINE WILL FOREVER BE REMEMBERED FOR HIS tragic hubris. He was the chief meteorologist of Texas when Galveston was hit by the deadliest weather disaster in U.S. history. He had claimed that the city was immune to tropical cyclones, but the hurricane that struck on September 8, 1900, took the lives of more than 10,000 people. At that time, hurricanes were not being named, but this lethal tempest was called Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson in his gripping book by that title. What few people will ever recall about Isaac Cline is how he began his career in the U. S. Army Signal Corps (the predecessor of today’s National Weather Service). Cline’s first assignment did not involve monitoring hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other atmospheric events. Rather, he began by tracking the Rocky Mountain locust.
The Army Signal Corps was a logical birthplace for a weather service, as the corps had the capacity to collect and rapidly transmit information
regarding storms and their movements. For the first time, people could be warned of impending disaster and perhaps avoid the worst of the maelstrom. When General William B. Hazen wrote to colleges across the country to recruit graduates into the nascent weather service, Cline’s name was
The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
Laura tried to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes, turning their heads this way and that. Mary ran screaming into the house. Grasshoppers covered the ground, there was not one bare bit to step on. Laura had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed squirming and slimy under her feet.
The locusts are not only frightening and disgusting, they are devastating to the family’s farm. But perhaps their greatest damage in the mind of young Laura is to nature’s garden, the fruit trees along the creek from which the title of the book is taken:
Pa was not downstairs next morning. All night he had been working to keep the smoke over the wheat, and he did not come to breakfast. He was still working.
The whole prairie was changed. The grasses did not wave; they had fallen in ridges. The rising sun made all the prairie rough with shadows where the tall grass had sunk against each other.
The willow trees were bare. In the plum thickets only a few plumpits hung to the leafless branches. The nipping, clicking, gnawing sound of the grasshoppers’ eating was still going on.
At noon Pa came driving the wagon out of the smoke. He put Sam and David into the stable, and slowly came to the house. His face was black with smoke and his eyeballs were red. He hung his hat on the nail behind and sat down at the table.
“It’s no use, Caroline,” he said. “Smoke won’t stop them. They keep dropping down through it and hopping in from all sides. The wheat is falling now. They’re cutting off like a scythe. And eating it, straw and all.”
In desperation, Pa leaves his family behind to search for work. His journey echoes our culture’s canonical story of a people wandering in the wilderness seeking the promised land. Laura learns from her mother’s reading of Scripture that locusts played a pivotal role in the time of the Egyptian pharaohs. And so the tale of the pioneers became interwoven with Western culture’s most deep and abiding literary account of locusts. Perhaps the Ingalls sensed that they were part of a great human migration—an American exodus—across the continent. But what they did not know while watching their farm disappear under a blanket of locusts that summer of 1875 was that no people on earth, not even a pharaoh, had ever witnessed a swarm of such immensity.
2
Albert’s Swarm
I SAAC CLINE WILL FOREVER BE REMEMBERED FOR HIS tragic hubris. He was the chief meteorologist of Texas when Galveston was hit by the deadliest weather disaster in U.S. history. He had claimed that the city was immune to tropical cyclones, but the hurricane that struck on September 8, 1900, took the lives of more than 10,000 people. At that time, hurricanes were not being named, but this lethal tempest was called Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson in his gripping book by that title. What few people will ever recall about Isaac Cline is how he began his career in the U. S. Army Signal Corps (the predecessor of today’s National Weather Service). Cline’s first assignment did not involve monitoring hurricanes, tornadoes, or any other atmospheric events. Rather, he began by tracking the Rocky Mountain locust.
The Army Signal Corps was a logical birthplace for a weather service, as the corps had the capacity to collect and rapidly transmit information
regarding storms and their movements. For the first time, people could be warned of impending disaster and perhaps avoid the worst of the maelstrom. When General William B. Hazen wrote to colleges across the country to recruit graduates into the nascent weather service, Cline’s name was
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