Marmot Press

History

---

The Woodstock Avalanche

By Clifford M. Caruthers

Oglesby, IL: Marmot Press, 1999

A late spring snowstorm in 1884 triggered a Colorado avalanche that destroyed the boarding house and railroad depot in the town of Woodstock and killed 13 people. While avalanche disasters are part of Western history, the Woodstock event was unique in a statistical sense: no other Colorado avalanche has killed so many. It was unusual in terms of human courage also. A central figure in this meticulously researched tale of hope and death was a woman who had already experienced tragedy and ironically survived to face even greater loss. A further irony was the selectively narrow path of the slide, a path that town planners might have predicted in light of history and climate. Why did these planners of Woodstock and the nearby Alpine Tunnel ignore these factors? How did the inhabitants happen to find themselves in the path, literally, of such an extraordinary event? What motivated these people to live their lives on this perilous mountain slope? Who were the rescuers, men and women, who braved the trek from Pitkin to Woodstock in the bitter cold?

This booklet is the most accurate account of the disaster ever written. The author posits answers to the questions above and provides rare photos, both contemporaneous and present-day, to add to the poignancy of this tale of human courage and folly. It is a must for any western history collection.

Poetry

---

Opening Out

By Marydale Stewart-Caruthers and Clifford M. Caruthers

Oglesby, IL: Marmot Press, 1997

The title of this collection of poetry echoes a phrase in one of the poems that describes how specific experiences, or "spots of time," can sharpen our general perceptions. This Wordsworthian theme, stated long ago by that poet of poets, becomes powerfully meaningful in this collection as the authors reflect upon significant events in the their separate and shared past.

The authors, both Midwesterners who have spent considerable time in the West, are academics with diverse experiences as professors, librarians, editors, pilots, and equestrians. Most of their poems express similar feelings arising from brief transcendent moments in the Midwest and the West-in reflections having to do with love, death, animals, nature, and even baseball.

---

Northland

By Eric N. Alai

Oglesby, IL: Marmot Press, 1999

(NOW OUT OF PRINT)

This first collection of a promising young poet traces various experiences in his Illinois world-urban, suburban, and rural-in which he conveys some dramatic ironies that apply to the land and some of the people around him. His process of understanding by writing poetry is, he says, a significant aspect of the poetic process-the memorable experience 'recollected in tranquility'-out of which grows the utilitarian value for the writer and the themes perceived by the reader. The total experience of poetry, he explains, allows the closest contact with many simple and complex mysteries. The title, Northland, acknowledges the author's limited geographical experience within this country and emphasizes his growing exposure to the world of ideas. It also implies the Dantesque idea that good is up and down is intellectually and morally bad. Finally, the title suggests the effort of the mind's eye to look upward, as Plato did, to the world of forms.

This book has a chronological and a thematic progression. Its four parts correspond sequentially to the writer's chronological growth, but, more significantly, they reflect different points of view and different themes. As the title, Urban Awakening, suggests, the first part covers his introduction to the city. Rural Awakening conveys a deepened awareness of the forms of nature other than human. Quest deals with the city as seen by a person of some experience, and Affinitas projects a maturing artist's point of view.

Orderform