I just finished The Four Winds, a novel by Kristen Hannah. My sister recommended the book to me because it's a dust bowl story, and she knows I've studied that period of history for many years and taught both history and English classes using materials, books, artifacts, and films of the period. This novel is important because it is from a woman's perspective. That's a criticism that Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath has long withstood. Were I still in the classroom today, there's no doubt I would pair these two novels for a richer and more accurate picture of the people and issues that have been so poignantly been portrayed in this culture.
Like the existing literature on the dust bowl, The Four Winds includes the bloody labor struggles of the period. So many of the things we take for granted, like weekends, minimum wage, and paid vacations, came from those labor wars. The author doesn't shy from the collusion between the big growers and the politicians and their enforcers aside from law enforcement.
In so many ways, these same issues are with us today. Any trip down the main thoroughfare in most big cities will show you the tent cities of people living on the margin. Like the 1930s, people are scrabbling together shelters from shopping carts, sheet metal, tarps, and pieces of cardboard. Some 85 years later and we still have differences of opinion about what constitutes minimum wage, who can live where, and how to find a meal when one has no resources. People still hop freight trains, they still hitchhike or walk, or bum rides to keep moving.
We're pretty good these days at hiding the downside of the American Dream. But these days it seems to be surfacing more and more. My local supermarkets all have families that stand outside the doors asking for money for food and housing. Finding a person asleep in a doorway or at a bus stop is also a daily occurrence. If dust bowl refugees were the norm back then, today it's climate refugees. As the wildfire season begins to gear up earlier and earlier each year, we're beginning to hear about the new migrants, the "climate refugees." This is primarily why Idaho is the fasting growing state in the union right now.
It's becoming clearer all the time that the big issue of our time is now water. Historic drought and global warming have given us record high temperatures and restrictions on water use. It's not coming, it's here. I hope I never see a book titled The Four Fires.
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