There was a time when pioneers did not play hockey. A time when – indigenous inhabitants notwithstanding – the hard-ground determination, the sheer irascible stubbornness of those who settled the now mythic American West of the late 19th century were the only thing that kept them alive. That and divine providence, of course.
And it is a remarkable portrait of this time and place, on which so much of the American myth is based, that novelist Lloyd Zimpel offers up in “A Season of Fire & Ice.” Set in the Dakota territory of the 1880s, “Fire & Ice” tells the story of Gerhardt Praeger; a man whose fierce faith, large family of tough frontier boys and their encounters with their eccentric loner of a neighbor Beidermann, provide laconic tension that builds to a devastating confrontation for a stunning panorama of historical fiction.
Told through Praeger’s journal entries covering the better part of a decade, and interspersed with some exposition from a third-person omniscient narrator, this episodic narrative reads like a work strung together with scenes taken from hazy memories retold in confidence. And it may well be.
“Fire & Ice” is loosely based on memories donated by the author’s grandparents, and elements taken from reading the frontier journals of others who braved the elements and conquered the plains. And it is this apparently exhaustive research, resulting in Zimpel’s re-creation of a vernacular from which he never deviates, that make this long-awaited sophomore effort a truly remarkable work. Where others have succeeded in re-creating the majestic and brutal landscapes of America’s now tamed western wild, Zimpel makes his mark reviving a lost generation through language.
Perhaps just as interesting is the story behind this book. “Fire & Ice” is an effort that doesn’t exactly come hot on the heels of Zimple’s first novel, “Meeting the Bear: Journal of the Black Wars,” which was published in 1971.
Zimpel wasn’t absent from writing all that time, though, regularly publishing short stories and essays and earning an NEA fiction fellowship.
But that’s not to say the story itself is without its charms. Although the natural calamities and life-altering actions taken by the characters affect only a lonely few individuals, the book exudes on an epic, almost biblical, feel. OK, a precisely biblical feel. A horrendous flood mars the lands and lives of hard-working farmers. Snowstorms, though notably absent from the Good Book, test the faith of even the most devout. God robs men of their most precious achievements to punish greed. A swarm of grasshoppers … well you get the picture. Faith is central to this story, though Zimpel’s writing is hardly preachy or morally predictable.
Instead, “Fire & Ice” is a meditation on anger and envy, belief and self-reliance and man against nature.
Praeger’s reluctant jealousy of a neighbor that seems almost superhuman at times lies just beneath his journal entries. Zimpel plays the intense faith of Praeger off the gruff atheism of the solitary Beidermann to convey a humanism that gives these characters depth. This is a book about people who left the comfort of the East and, with little more than their determination, helped build a great country. And while Zimpel indulges this popular folklore, his novel asks more questions than it answers in regard to the American belief in the myth of manifest destiny.
And, like any good Western, justice and vengeance are meted out in spades. These are by far the most intriguing passages of the book. While most of the story is filled with the spare and mundane records of daily life on the range – Zimpel avoids the banal by giving Praeger in his journal entries a novelist’s eye for meaningful detail – those moments where confrontations arise give this story just the punch it needs to keep the reader interested. And the harsh brutality doled out in the last few pages of this work by God, nature, bad choices made and the worst of luck more than make up for any dry spots in the beginning. Not to give too much away, Zimpel has crafted a bone-chilling ending worthy of the likes of Cormac McCarthy.
All in all, no better synopsis of this novel can be offered than that given in one of Praeger’s journal entries when he writes:
“I look back on the events that need telling: there are noisy thrills; there is a drab spectacle or two; there is knowledge imparted slyly; there is sport all around; and there is, of course, contention too, as there will often be when our bachelor neighbor Beidermann shows his face.”
With Fire & Ice, Zimpel has crafted an elegant and memorable work of character-driven pioneer fiction. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 30 years to hear from him again.
Sean Cronin is a Denver-based freelance writer.
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A Season of Fire and Ice
By Lloyd Zimpel
Unbridled, 256 pages, $23.95
