While writing my recently released novella, The Sunbonnet Bride, I needed a devastating natural event to occur and so I researched grasshopper plagues, tornadoes and other acts of God.
The Sunbonnet Bride is a sequel to my The Yuletide Bride, set in southeastern Nebraska in 1874. The following summer was a grasshopper plague summer and it seemed a perfect catastrophe for my characters.
I remembered reading about the horror of a grasshopper plague in Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s On the Banks of Plum Creek, as well as By the Shores of Silver Lake. The Bible describes grasshopper plagues as well, brought down upon Egypt at Moses‘ command.
I examined photos, read recounts, shook my head over the devastation, imagined the sound of all those tiny jaws scissoring their way through crops and got a little depressed myself!
Here’s a video about the 1874 plague of locusts in Nebraska:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=To48K5E4ULM
According to Wikipedia, the rocky mountain locust that destroyed so many farms in the later half of the 19th century eventually went extinct. The last recorded sighting was in 1902.
Still, the clouds of grasshoppers were enormous. According to Wikipedia:
“one was estimated to cover 198,00 square miles, weighing 27.5 tons, and consisting of some 12.5 trillion insects.”
Between 1873 and 1877 the grasshoppers caused $200 million in damage through the prairie states of north America.
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1875 was known as the year of the locusts.
Oh, the horror.
The more I read, the more I realized that when the grasshoppers went through, life changed for everyone within a broad swath.
The Sunbonnet Bride is a summer romance. I didn’t think the 15,000 words I had to tell the story would work with such a grim catastrophe.
While I was plotting the novel and wrestling with the grasshoppers, my daughter and I saw an IMAX film, Forces of Nature, which centers on earthquakes, volcanoes and tornadoes.
A tornado chaser friend in Nebraska had described the devastation caused by twisters–noting it could be limited in scope.
While a tornado was dangerous and horrible, it didn’t destroy all the crops for an entire area of the state.
A tornado’s path could be localized.
(Wikipedia)
Capricious, too.
A tornado would work better than a grasshopper plague for The Sunbonnet Bride.
Still, I needed to learn about tornadoes and that was sobering, too.
Many learned about tornadoes from watching movies, whether Tornado, or The Wizard of Oz.
Many years ago while living in Washington state, I happened to glance out the window at a curious cloudy sky.
The color was a bruised gray-yellow and moving quickly.
I grew up in Los Angeles, yet those skies looked vaguely familiar.
I actually said, “it looks like the sky just before the tornado strikes in The Wizard of Oz.”
Hail began to fall, an odd funnel-shaped knot of frozen water. My toddler and I examined the pieces I brought into the house, marveling at the spiraling lines.
The hail abruptly ended, leaving me puzzled by the odd weather until the announcer on the radio reported a waterspout on Dye’s Inlet, not a mile from my house.
It’s a good thing we were in the basement at the time!
A storm cellar saves several characters in The Sunbonnet Bride.
No one died in my story, but the wreckage provided a vehicle for demonstrating the different ways people react to a calamity.
A community came together, appreciation and respect blossomed, and the small church in Fairhope served as God’s hands and feet.
It was much easier to believe without the grasshoppers!
Tweetables
Grasshoppers and Tornadoes! Click to Tweet
Choosing which catastrophe serves a novella better! Click to Tweet
Grasshopper plague or a tornado–which would you rather face? Click to Tweet
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