MDMD snowbound in the Inn

[Doug Millison]

from the first M&D group reading:


http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9712&msg=21912&sort=date


Date:	Fri, 5 Dec 1997 09:55:07 -0800
To:	pynchon-l@[omitted]
From:	millison@[omitted] (Doug Millison)
Subject: Re: MDMD(13): Summary -- Ch. 38


At 12:30 PM 12/5/97, Andre Buys & Nicole Slagter wrote:
>   Chapter 38: The company is snowbound in the Inn and the forced
>   proximity breeds various tensions.

While reading this chapter, I thought of the scene in Mark Twain's Roughing
It (Chapter 30, 31, ) when he and his companions are trapped at an inn
("Honey Lake Smith's") on the Carson river in Nevada, by a flood, for eight
days and nights, in rough company:

"There were two men in the company who caused me particular discomfort. One
was a little Swede, about twenty-five years old, who knew only one song,
and he was forever singing it. By day we were all crowded into one small,
stifling bar-room, and so there was no escaping this person's music.
Through all the profanity, whisky-guzzling, 'old sledge' and quarreling,
his monotonous song meandered with never a variation in its tiresome
sameness, and it seemed to me, at last, that I would be content to die, in
order to be rid of the torture. The other man was a stalwart ruffian called
'Arkansas,' who carried two revolvers in his belt and a bowie knife
projecting from his boot, and who was always drunk and always suffering for
a fight."

Twain's escape from the inn, when the flood finally subsides, leads into a
wonderful sequence -- he and his companions get lost in a blizzard, go
around in circles within an easy walk of the inn, then get completely lost,
no food, down to the last match to make a fire and it goes out, they swear
off gambling and drinking forever, and resolve to die together, lie down to
let the snow cover them, then wake up the next morning within sight of
another  stage coach station.