Unforgettable: A Deep Dive into The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

You know that feeling you get when you finish reading a book that grabbed you from the first chapter and wouldn't let go until you got to the end and beyond? I'm on that satisfying high right now after closing the back cover of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds. It's the book club selection for our July discussion and I didn't mean to do a reading marathon so soon after picking it up at the June discussion of Becoming Mrs. Lewis. Often when I finish a book so early in the month there's a good possibility I'll forget all but the broad brush strokes of the story---not a good thing when trying to contribute to a discussion. I doubt that will happen with this historical novel. For one, Kristin Hannah is fast becoming one of my favorite storytellers and two, this book is set in a time frame in American history that is as fascinating as it is horrible in terms of human suffering: The Dust Bowel of the 1930s and the Great Depression. 

Hannah's expert research and writing had me sitting right next to the characters as a dust storm turned the sky black and blew hundreds of centipedes inside the Martinelli farm house along with the dust, and left everything outside covered in dust so thick it drifted and changed the landscape. I felt the hopelessness of Elsa as she tried to milk a starving cow that bellowed in pain as dribbles of dirt-colored milk came out. I wondered how anyone could go on living out of a broken down car sitting in a migrate encampment where every day they had to walk for several miles looking for a job that paid as little as 40 cents for 10 hours of work. I was right there with Elsa as she'd cut a single hot dog into thirds to feed herself and her two kids and count out beans in a can for their dinner. 

Several reviewers called Hannah's style of writing in this book 'visceral' and I had to google it to find out exactly what that means. Artificial Intelligence defines it as "…to write in a way that evokes a strong, gut-level, emotional response in the reader. It's about tapping into the reader's deep feelings and instincts, rather than just their intellect." Say what you want about AI but that definition nailed how I felt reading this book. 

Most of us have probably read The Grapes of Wrath back in our distant past, being a popular reading assignment in high schools and colleges back in the day. Written in 1939, John Steinbeck captured the migration of the "Okies" from their bank-foreclosed farms but it didn't cover the environment crisis that caused the Dust Bowl to happen. Reviewers of The Four Winds are drawing parallels between what caused the Dust Bowl to what is going on now with climate change and in terms of the human suffering that will come in our near future if better angels among us don't find a way to turn things around. As I usually do, I don't read reviews before I read a book, I read them afterward to help me focus in on what I'll talk about in book club. I must admit I didn't see those parallels while reading the book, but I do see them now that they were pointed out. 

Farmers in our bread basket states back during WW1 were told they would help win the war if they produced more and more wheat. So they didn't rotate their crops and they took the wind barrier lines and native drought resistant grasses out between fields causing the top soil during the drought season to get blown as far as the ships in the New York harbor. With the top soil gone and and no rain, crops could no longer grow. It took a government program that eventually canceled their defaulted mortgages, paid the farmers to stay on their farms and work together for several years to restore the land so it could produce crops again. It will take that same kind of government investment, and a commitment in clean energy, to turn the temperature down on our climate. 

West with the Giraffes, one of my top five favorite books, is another well researched historical novel set in the same time frame and I thought I had a clear picture of what life was like during the dust storms, the droughts and the migration of homeless people going west. But The Four Winds took me to a new level of empathy and understanding…thanks to that visceral writing the reviewers talked about. The resilience of human beings to live through such hardships truly is amazing. 

My parents where born in 1911 and lived through the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918/19, World War I, The Dust Bowl years, the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. They both lost their mothers at ages eight or nine, my dad's mom was burying in a mass grave during the Flu Epidemic. But my grandfather went on to raise three kids on his own. He was a coal miner living under the same "company store" system that the many migrates did during the Dust Bowl when they reached California. He got paid in store credit and got laid off long enough to used up their credit before the mines opened up again---or in the case of the Dust Bowl migrates, when the fields were ready to be planted or picked. It was a system designed to keep the workers enslaved with no way to save money to find a better life. 

< rant on > Without the Labor Movement and help from the federal government we'd still have masses of people living in extreme poverty. And yet we have too many short-sighted people in our government right now who are willing to throw people back into that kind of hardship by taking basic health care and pubic assistance away. We can not get complacent with the state of country and its leadership. We must continue to make our voices heard. < rant off > 

One reviewer said that The Four Winds was about hope. After losing everything the people who make it through hardships beyond their control are the ones who could still hold on to hope for a better life in the future. In my own family history, I can document that kind of hope. To get out from under the company story system my grandfather grew potatoes and sold them to the only other grocery store in town and he saved that money up until he had enough to buy a train ticket north for his oldest son, 15 or 16 at the time. That boy, my uncle, got a job in a furniture factory here in Michigan, saved his money to help bring my dad up to join him in the furniture factory where Dad made twenty-five cents an hour as newly minted teen. My dad, uncle and grandfather next saved enough money up so my grandfather and aunt could leave the coal mining town. This all took several years but progress happened because hope for a better future endured. © 

Until Next Wednesday.