I came across this article and thought there was lessons to be had from it
also, is it permissible to post a article like this? copyright law and such
The Day the Duck Hunters Died
by Tom Davis | Nov 11, 2015 | BIRD HUNTING |
It is easy to forget.
It is easy to forget that there was a time—not so very long ago, really—when there was no Gore-Tex, no Thinsulate, no neoprene, and no polypropylene. There was a time when outboard motors, far from the sleek and powerful marvels of today, were crude, cumbersome beasts, unreliable under the best circumstances and all but useless under the worst. There was a time when there were no cell phones, no emergency beacons, no Flight for Life helicopters.
There was a time, too, when there were no weather satellites, no telemetry to provide data that could be plugged into sophisticated formulas and fed into supercomputers for timely forecasts. Indeed, that the weather could be predicted with any degree of accuracy then—November 1940, to be precise—seems almost miraculous, meteorology in those days being one part science and two parts the divination of omens, signs, and portents. Nothing brings this into starker relief than the fact that, a little more than a year later, what appeared on radar to be a swarm of aircraft approaching the Hawaiian Islands was dismissed as some sort of malfunction by military officers who refused to trust this newfangled and unproven technology.
Of course, some things do not change with the passage of time, and one of these constants is the love of duck hunters for the kind of wet, raw, blustery, thoroughly miserable days that keep normal people indoors with the fireplace crackling and the teakettle whistling on the stove. And just as absence makes the heart grow fonder, the longer the duck hunter is made to wait for such a day, the hotter burns his pent-up desire to escape the sloughs and bays and marshes, and and there—decoys artfully set, blind brushed and grassed, dog expectant and quivering, call poised to be pressed to lips—scan the lowering skies for birds that ride the wind.
The fall of 1940 had been a mild one in the Upper Midwest, an extended Indian Summer of warm temperatures and little rainfall. In other words, the duck hunting had been disappointing. Oh, there had been the usual “local” birds in the early season—teal, wigeon, shoveler, the odd mallard—but without any heavy weather to set the migration in motion, the great flocks of northern ducks were still in the prairie provinces of Canada, fattening up for the long flight south. Hunters throughout the region, from the Dakotas across to Wisconsin, from Minnesota down to southern Illinois, were on pins and needles, knowing that the change in weather they so dearly wanted was overdue, that it could happen any day.
Finally, on Sunday, Nov. 10, came a forecast that held promise. The outlook was for clouds, snow flurries, and colder temperatures. Wildfowlers were ecstatic, and what made this good news even better was that Monday, Nov. 11, was Armistice Day—the predecessor to Veterans Day, and, for many people, a holiday. Although as holidays go it was a fairly somber one. The grinding effect of the Great Depression still lingered in the U.S. and Europe, where just 22 years earlier the eponymous armistice had been signed, war raged once again.
Still, it’s not much of a leap to suppose that the typical waterfowler of the Upper Midwest, upon hearing the forecast on the radio or reading it in the local newspaper, felt blessed—even jubilant. Other concerns were pushed aside; nothing mattered now but getting ready for tomorrow’s hunt. Decoys, shell boxes, shotguns, and calls were checked and re-checked. Ditto for boats, motors, gas tanks, and oars. Clothes were carefully laid out; sandwiches were made, wrapped in wax paper and refrigerated; thermos bottles were placed next to coffee percolators. The dog was given an extra bit of food, because in a few hours he was going to be one busy retriever and would need all the energy and stamina he could muster.
The phone lines hummed as hunting partner called hunting partner, their voices crackling with excitement. They knew, with as much certainty as they knew anything, the ducks would be flying, and they aimed to be smack dab in the middle of them.
They got more than they bargained for.
In his magisterial Where The Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie, John Madson describes the genesis of a midwestern blizzard as a “temperature marriage” of cold, dry polar air sweeping down from Canada and warm, moist subtropical air welling up from the Gulf of Mexico. “Since its primary component is wind,” Madson wrote, “the classic blizzard is essentially a phenomenon of the open lands—particularly the plains and prairies, where the topography offers little resistance to moving air and the great storms can run almost impeded. There may be more snow in northern and eastern forest regions, and certainly much cold. The difference between winter storms there and the classic prairie blizzard lies in the intensity of unbridled wind that plunges the chill factor to deadly lows, drives a blinding smother of snow during the actual storm, and continues as ground blizzards and white-outs long after snow has stopped falling. Depending on snowfall and wind, the storm may leave drifts three times as tall as a man and is usually followed by calm, silver-blue days of burning cold.”
That, in a nutshell, describes the blizzard that screamed across the Upper Midwest on Monday, Nov. 11, 1940, devastating everything it touched along the way. The winds blasted at a constant 40-50 mph, with gusts in excess of 80. More than 16 inches of snow fell in the Twin Cities, while more than 26 inches were recorded a few miles up the Mississippi River near St. Cloud. In LaCrosse, downstream on the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi, the barometric pressure sank to an all-time low. The temperature dropped 30 degrees—from above freezing to single digits—in two hours, and continued to plummet from there. Wind-chills were virtually off the charts.
Nothing escaped the storm’s furious, relentless, indiscriminate wrath. Livestock perished by the hundreds of thousands. So many turkeys died in parts of Minnesota and Iowa that after the storm, farmers were selling whole “fresh frozen” birds for 25 cents apiece. The losses to wildlife, especially pheasants, were spectacular. Communications and power were disrupted across thousands of square miles, and transportation was brought to an absolute standstill. Every town and village close to a main road became a refuge as stranded travelers sought shelter from the storm. Countless people opened their homes to complete strangers, providing whatever they could offer in the way of board and room.
But for some there was no shelter, no refuge. Motorists stuck in snowdrifts on remote stretches of road were buried alive in their cars, their frozen bodies not exhumed for days. On Lake Michigan, the freighter William B. Davock was sheared in two by monstrous waves.
The ferocity of the storm was almost beyond human reckoning. There are accounts of farmers who, after checking their livestock, could not find their way from the barn to the farmhouse. Disoriented, pummeled by the wind, with no visible landmarks to guide them, and no sense of east, west, north, or south, they wandered blindly through a roaring white hell. The lucky ones bumped into something recognizable and groped their way to safety. The unlucky ones didn’t.
Nearly everyone who survived the storm remarked on how incredibly difficult it was just to breathe. The air was so laden with moisture that it seemed as thick as syrup. And even when you were able to draw a deep breath, the cold seared your lungs like a red-hot blade.
This is what thousands of duck hunters, with their wooden skiffs and their cranky outboards and their canvas caps, found themselves caught in. Most of the world knows the midwestern blizzard of Nov. 11, 1940, as the Armistice Day Storm. To sportsmen, it’s simply the day the duck hunters died.
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