Cowboys Are My Weakness: A Blizzard Under Blue Sky

Included in Pam Houston’s “Cowboys Are My Weakness,” is a short story called A Blizzard under Blue Sky. In this short story, an unnamed narrator tells a time in her life when she was clinically depressed. The woman is overwhelmed by unfinished work and unpaid bills. To make things worse, she allowed a man into her life just so he could leave her heart broken into pieces. In order to cure her depression, her doctor suggests medication. Instead of utilizing drugs, she resorts to winter camping in an attempt to “fix the machine” that drives her. She brings her two best friends, Jackson and Hailey, whom she reveals to be her dogs. (Reading Literature and Writing Argument, p291)
A common mistake that some writers often make is spending a copious

amount of hours plotting and developing the characters of a story while completely ignoring the creation of the setting. The setting is crucial to the story since it provides how the drama and scenes will be portrayed. In order to have an effective setting, an author must appeal to as many of the human senses as possible. As we all know, these senses are sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch.
In her first paragraph, Houston introduces two settings to her readers. She uses words like “fresh snow” and “shining sun” to describe the world that goes on around her. In her world, however, her whole life is falling apart. By including two settings in the beginning of the story, she successfully stimulates how the reader would visualize two separate worlds to the audience. As a reader, I was able to envision a disheartened young woman standing still in a large city watching the world pass by. She also awakens our visual senses by acknowledging the fact that twenty below zero temperature transforms the landscape into a “crystal palace” comparing her vision to Superman’s. (Reading Literature and Writing Argument, p292) Moving along, however, she gives an unnecessary simile of the trees and mountains leaping out of the background like a 3-D movie. I viewed it as an excessive description of the setting because pretty much anything that has height, width, and depth is three dimensional. For example, the sleeping bag, her stove, and everything else she was already carrying.
The usage of the sense of hearing was difficult to find in the text.

This is mainly because the narrator is camping out in the frigid wilderness where it is silent for the most part. The sounds that she did hear came from her own materials like the squeaking of her bindings, the moving slashing sound of Jackson’s water pack, the whoosh of Nylon, and the rattle of dog tags. (Reading Literature and Writing Argument, p292) This may be the reason why the character has “conversations” with her dogs periodically, as a way to keep her sane. Though it is tough for an author to add more noises to a generally quiet location, Houston could have added sounds of people talking or laughing earlier in the story when she was examining the world before her. By doing so, it would have intensified the emotions that the character was feeling at the moment, increasing the effectiveness of the setting. Additionally, both senses of tasting and smelling were barely included in this narrative also. It was clear, however, that the characters did not starve in the wilderness since they had packed a variety of instant-made

food.
Houston’s use of the sense of touch was exemplary. On Saturday, Houston described the morning as having still air and cold sunshine with no wind and no clouds. Even the hair in the character’s nostrils froze instantly. Also, when she would inhale the air, her lungs were only able to be filled up halfway. It was as if I could almost feel how uncomfortably cold, she was, myself.
As irrational as it was for her to choose winter camping as a cure for her sorrow, it did in the end, help her to recuperate from the depression she was going through.

In the beginning, she was a woman who was constantly thinking about money, her job, and love issues. The continuous stress that these situations brought her started deteriorating her life, both emotionally and mentally. But when she spent the whole day fighting the unpleasant cold with her dogs, she realized in the near end of her journey what had happened. About five miles down the trail, she finally recognized that she was no longer thinking about any of the day to day problems which had been constantly plaguing her mind during her day to day life back in the city. She was finally able to escape from her “house of mirrors”, whereas before she could not even find her way out of a paper bag. This dramatic change just after a whole day of fighting thirty-two degrees below zero temperature proves how the natural world provides us what’s “good for us” even when we are unaware of it at the

time.
Though Houston didn’t provide enough taste and hearing senses, the setting still made a huge impact on the character’s turnabout. All in all, one of the reasons why Houston is able to draw readers in is by developing a setting that appeals to our human senses and saturates the story with thematic connotations, mood, and meaning. Houston chose a setting that reflects how the main character felt in her own world: cold, numb, and heartbroken. But by the end of her trip, she realized that even with all the snow and blizzard in her life under the blue sky, the simplicity of nature and the sun beaming gave her a new kind of hope.